I always try to reach back in my mind to define the moment when my child hood ended. For my friend Jeruto in rural Kenya, it was when she became strong enough to strap a baby sibling to her back. Her life could be divided into two phases of life: when she
was a baby strapped to someone’s back, and when she
had a baby strapped to her back. Another division occurs for Kenyan women when their body begins to grow into its maternal glory, with the round rump for dancing, balanced on strong legs for working. For young boys, there is the long awaited circumcision ceremony with its painful aspects being balanced by their first real taste of home brew and their father’s proud eyes.
There was no ceremony to mark my passing from that place of trust in the world; and no obvious signs that I had embarked on my own journey of understanding the currency that the world really deals in; My distrust of the world came creeping up on me, the way that the ants in our yard would invade your body if you mistook their mounds of dirt for a sandbox. Gradually, so that you didn’t even know they were there until they reached your shoulders, leaving no choice but to strip down and start slapping.
My mother says that I took the world upon my shoulders long before I should have; becoming a wispy, dreamy child with the eyes of a sad grandmother. Sad eyes that come from opening them up too wide in Africa, where it is impossible for a sad little granny in pigtails to go on believing that all is right with the world.
Francis, our gardener could never get anything done because I followed him around the yard asking him big questions about the universe with a vocabulary that far exceeded his understanding of English. My mom didn’t mind because she hated the thought of having servants anyway. She tried to let them all go the week after she arrived in Kenya to find that they had been hired for her.
Francis kindly explained to her that she would be looked down upon in the community if she didn’t provide wages for at least two people, when she was clearly wealthy enough to own a car. Washing missionary’s dishes was a coveted position. She agreed at the time, but was never entirely comfortable with the arrangement, always sending them home early, giving them breaks for sodas and chai, and teaching us to treat them as friends and equals.
My sister and I were forever making up games. Francis would let us parade him around the yard in paper handcuffs as our prisoner. We were top secret detectives. He raced in our very own Olympic games, complete with gold and silver medals, made from the lids of tomato cans. Francis pushed me on my bike, played hide and seek, helped me hunt for beatles, and took my discarded toys home to his beautiful daughter Vivian.
All of the white people in Kitale were invited to a dinner given by the ladies of the Indian Community. Femina Night; I repeated the words in my head in the days leading up to it. I had heard there was to be a fashion show (women in saris) and real Chinese food brought in from Nairobi. I laid out my black velveteen Christmas dress and thick white tights, stained on the heels with red dirt from the times when I couldn’t stand my shoes. The night before the big event, I saw fit to invite my best friend Francis, the Gardener, Prisoner, and Olympian. He stood in his Kelly green coveralls, and repeated back to me my new favorite words, Femina Night?
After running inside to tell my mom the good news (that Francis was able to attend), I learned a very hard lesson. Black people cannot come to Femina Night. This is for white people and Indian business owners only. My Poor Mother. How can you explain to a broken hearted eight year old the rules about colonial Africa, supposedly long forgotten? How do you explain why Mahindra at the grocery store yells at his black assistant and beats him for loading our groceries too slowly? I pondered the revolutionary thought for the rest of the afternoon, while mom (with tears in her eyes) called Francis inside for a soda to try to explain why Black People are Not Welcome at Femina Night. Black people cannot watch sari fashion shows or eat Chinese food from Nairobi.
Later that year we learned that we could no longer eat fish from Lake Victoria, which flows out of Rwanda. When my mom told me about this, I learned a new word. Genocide. Our Kenyan friends shook their heads and clicked their tongues in pity as we all gathered around the newspaper articles with pictures of the bodies. Thank God there is no tribalism in Kenya, they would say, rolling their eyes towards the sky.
Now I read on the news about the ancient tension between the Luo and Kikuyus who are now bent on killing each other in Kenya. Last year their children were going to school together, unaware of who was in each tribe. This year, they are being exploited by politicians who have found a way to cultivate hatred in order to get what they want. While the slums of Nairobi are being looted and burned, they sit in their mansions with body guards and wash their hands of the whole thing. Meanwhile, across the ocean, we watch yet another African country disintegrate into violence and hunger.
I am older now though; and long past the growing up point, though it’s hard to say when that actually happened. Little girls with sad eyes inevitably grow into women with their own burdens to bear and their own secret sadness. As I turned twenty-four this year, I couldn’t help grieving the child that I was before I learned about things like Femina Night and Genocide.
I miss that child because she still believed that there was a place for everyone in this world, and that no one would be left out in the cold; no one would be chosen above anyone else; loved because they are white. I guess it’s not a question of being able to hold onto to that naivety about the ways of the world; but that we still choose to believe in what
should be;
how it somehow
could be.
I honor both the child that I was, and the woman I have become with the extent to which I fight for those ideals held by the young and innocent...those who haven’t yet learned to differentiate between who
does and
does not deserve to be loved.
