Chaga

as role model, but they’re sound enough. Tom M’boya Street.’ They had walked a hundred metres and two right turns. Gaby could see the intersection where she had been picked up by the hustlers. It was less than half a block away.

‘Where abouts?’ asked the American.

‘Right here.’ They were at the door of SkyNet News. She put her card back in her bag and found her identity pass. When she looked up, the American in the Chinos and denim shirt had vanished as utterly as if he had never existed. Paul Newman as angel?

She did not even know his name.

Gaby McAslan fastened her identity to her shirt and trotted up the steps. She was only ten minutes late.

6

Videodiary entry: March 20 2008

Pan around a very large room filled with desks, workstations and people. The camera is stopped down for interior fluorescents: the windows blaze with light. If there was such a thing as smell-o-vision, there would be a strong aroma of coffee. Over the high level of ambient noise, Gaby McAslan’s voice can be heard.

Well, this is it, Pa. Top of the world. Well, seventh floor, SkyNet News Nairobi, English Language section. Germans are next to the window, Scandinavians are back against the wall, which is kind of glum but satisfies their national characteristic. That glassed in office-ette is where Great White Chief T.P. Costello presides over us all. He’s supposed to be lovable and hugable and everyone’s big daddy: can’t say I’ve found that yet. Maybe he’s still pissed at me for being late on my first day, but professional instincts tell me it’s something more, though I don’t know what I’ve done to offend him.

The camera moves to a tall, dark-haired white man in his middle years. He is thin, his face is all planes and angles, his hair is suspiciously less grey than it should be, but it may be due to the personal energy that shines out of him even when he is sitting on a desk drinking coffee. He is smartly dressed. On the window ledge behind him is a row of unattractive trophies and awards. He notices Gaby surreptitiously videoing him, visibly straightens, smartens and waggles his fingers: hello camera.

This man of course needs no introduction, being the one and only Jake Aarons, SkyNet’s chief East Africa correspondent and darling of a million late-evening news special reports. Please note that, video-evidence to the contrary, he does in fact exist from the waist down. Apparently there is a cute little Somali boy who can personally testify to this same fact, but one shouldn’t repeat office bitchery. Sexual peccadilloes aside, he gets the angles on the news that no one else gets: no one, however seems to get angles on him, which I suspect is how he likes it. Something of a man of mystery, our Jake, despite – or is it because of? – his very public persona. OK, Jake, you can stop posing for the camera now.

An olive-skinned woman in her late thirty somethings is leaning over a researcher’s desk. Her hair is Latin black, as are her eyes. There is something predatory in the way she dominates the researcher’s space. She is expensively and smartly dressed, too expensively and smartly for Nairobi. She wears perhaps too much silver.

Abigail Santini. On-line features editrix, and my boss. She does not like me. That’s all right, because I don’t like her, and it’s always refreshing to be mutual about these things. At least I have good reasons not to like her. One: she insists on being called ‘Abby’ and there is not room in this office for two names ending in ‘aby’. Two: she enjoys the power of executive authority with none of the creative responsibilities of those she lords it over. Three: she looks good, and damn well knows it, and has Mediterranean features that tan beautifully and never freckle, burn and then peel, and has a classic aquiline nose of the type that built the glory that was Rome and not the snub thing of a race whose idea of civilization was stealing each other’s cattle. Now you can see why I don’t like her. What I can’t understand is why she shouldn’t like me.

The eye of the lens comes to rest on two black men at a video editing suite drinking coffee. One is small, wiry, bearded; he is sitting on a chair. The other is so extraordinarily tall you can tell it even though he is sitting on the edge of the desk. It is quite obvious that they are of different tribes, different races, and are the closest of friends. The tall one sees Gaby’s lens on him and waggles his tongue and makes a phallic gesture with his fist.

My heroes. My buddies. My adopted family. Tembo and Faraway. Cameraman and communications engineer. SkyNet’s Number One team. They grew up within five miles of each other up in the north near Lake Victoria, but Tembo is Luhya and Faraway is Luo. This apparently is important. Something to do with Bantus as opposed to Nilo-Hamitics.

Faraway’s name is self-explanatory. Even among a race of basketball players he is exceptional. Tembo means ‘elephant’ in Swahili. Memory like an elephant? I ask. No, hung like an elephant, Faraway tells me with great delight. No wonder he’s never been able to steal Tembo’s wife away from him, he says. Faraway is a career flirt. He has turned sexual harassment into high art. His life is ruled by the politics of cool and, he says, his dick. He cannot meet a woman without trying to talk her into his bed. Neither they, or he, take him seriously. That he occasionally succeeds surprises him most of all. He tells me I am a demon- woman sent from hell to tempt him into unspeakable sin because of my red hair and green eyes. There is only one way he knows to exorcise the demon in me, he says, which involves pelvis-pumping and a lascivious grin. Dream on, Faraway.

On the other hand, Tembo is good livin’, as we say back home. He’s a born-again Christian. He directs the choir in St Stephen’s church. It’s good enough to make an atheist believe in God, Faraway says, with genuine pride in his friend. He has two wee girls so gorgeous you’d want to eat them; he shows his photographs at the drop of a hat. In his lunch-hour he’s always editing videos he’s shot of them.

For some reason they have decided to teach me to be African. Unlike most of the people here, they think I have the capacity. Maybe it’s because one of the first things I did here was put my name down for the SkyNet football team – only four whites and no women. Tembo is a useful left winger, and Faraway, by virtue of his height, is goalkeeper, which he might actually be good at if he stopped showing off and chatting up women spectators long enough to actually stop a ball. Problem is they can’t decide whether I should be a Luhya African or a Luo African.

I get my real lessons in how to be African at my new lodgings. The barman at the PanAfric recommended it: Mrs Kivebulaya, the proprietrix, is a cousin of a cousin of something of his, and likes Irish girls. And what’s more, it’s just up the hill on First N’Gong Avenue. I didn’t think I could settle in something that calls itself the Episcopalian Guesthouse, but Mrs Kivebulaya runs a trim ship. OK, so I rode up in the taxi with that night’s dinner – a goat – tied up in the back seat, but there’s a pool, the gardens are quiet and good to work in, though missionaries speak a completely different kind of English to mine, one full of bishops and rural deaneries and Theological Education by Extension.

It’s the little, trivial things that I miss most about home. Things like buying sanitary towels, or proper chocolate that hasn’t gone musty in old-fashioned purple foil wrappers. Diet Coke, in cans, not bottles where you pay more for the deposit on the bottle than its contents. Rock’n’roll. For the first ten minutes Kenyan radio sounds like the Greatest Thing You’ve Ever Heard, and then after that you’d kill to be able to sing along to the ‘Mama Mia, Let Me Go’ bit of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Late-night shopping. In a mall. I miss a horizon. I don’t like feeling I’m in the middle of a vast tract of high, flat land. I want terrain. Like the sea around the Watchhouse; even if you couldn’t see it, you always knew it was there. I want landmarks. Is this homesickness?

Mrs Kivebulaya does her best to make me feel at home -hospitality is her mission from God; I can agree with that – with cosy chats and the best coffee you have ever tasted at the table in the garden where I like to work. She worships with coffee and banana cake. Her most important contribution to my happy and successful integration into a new land, new culture and new job are the tales of the bizarre and wonderful that seem to be everyday life here in Kenya. Yesterday she told me about a friend of a relative of an acquaintance of hers who is a complete rude boy and a glue sniffer. Seems he broke into the Yellow Imp Glue Factory on Jogoo Road for the