Ian McDonald - Chaga

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 biggest high of his career, leaned too far over a vat and fell in. Overcome by fumes he climbed out, lay down on the floor to recover and passed out. Next morning the staff found him stuck fast to the floor and had to cut him free with a power saw. This morning over breakfast she told me about a group of Christians returning from a rally by canoe across Lake Victoria. They encountered a boatload of rude boys out for a pleasure cruise with their girlfriends, who jeered at them and told them they were no good Christians, they had no faith, going in canoes, why, they should walk on the lake like their God. Valiantly responding to the challenge, fifteen leaped up and stepped over the side. ‘They sank like stones,’ Mrs K. said, rocking with laughter, which reminds you of a sailing ship in heavy weather. ‘They were pulling bodies out of the water for days. Six were never accounted for, but there are a lot of crocodiles in Lake Victoria.’ There seems to be no end to her supply of stories of the bizarre and wonderful. Which is a good thing, as I’ve just sold them to T.P. as an idea for a series of humorous (or just plain surreal) end-of-news fillers: ‘And Finally’ tales from the Nairobi Station. It may not be much, but it’s another step closer to the Chaga. Oops. Captain on the bridge. Better make as if I’m writing up these text overlays of Jake’s interview with UNECTA’s Chief of Operations.

‘It’s the hardest thing in the world to get a good picture of,’ said Tembo, passing the bowl of irio. As part of his Africanization lessons, he had invited Gaby to dinner with his family at their house out by Limuru. As extended Uncle to Sarah and Etambele, Tembo’s daughters, Faraway had of course been invited too.

It was a good house in a good neighbourhood. SkyNet paid its senior cameramen well. It had a verandah, this was where they ate. Moths fluttered around the tin candle-lanterns. The dark garden twittered with night insects. Screening trees muted the traffic; the air was warm and smelled of Africa, which is not one smell but many smells: woodsmoke and red earth and fruit and shit and night-blooming flowers, but is more than the sum of all the things that make it up, as the perfume of a woman is more than the perfume of the scent she puts on.

Faraway uncapped a beer and passed the bottle to Gaby.

‘I do not just mean the actual physical difficulties,’ Tembo continued.

‘Like bribing your way past the soldiers,’ Faraway said heathenly.

‘Like the way it attacks plastics, which means your camera breaking out in flowers if you do not wrap it up carefully. But that is only part of it. It is just a hard thing to get a good image of. For a start, under the canopy there is very little light; and then, what do you video? It looks the same wherever you point the camera. And there are things in there so different from what we understand as living that we find it hard to comprehend them. We cannot see them like we see a tree and know what it is and what it does, what the bits we cannot see will look like. Everything is different: what is it the people at Ol Tukai have worked out? They have catalogued over fifteen thousand different species in the Chaga. And of course, every time you go back, they have changed into something else.’

Mrs Kivebulaya’s ‘And Finally’ stories had won Gaby critical appreciation, grudging acknowledgement by T.P. Costello and a place at a table in the Thorn Tree Bar of the New Stanley Hotel, where the real journalists went to drink, but those were not the thing for which she had come to Africa. That thing was still denied her. She worked in the Chaga every day, in the gigabytes of images, documents, reports, simulations stored in archives. She knew all that was humanly knowable about the air-reefs, the pseudo-corals, the hand-trees, the things that looked like marine radiolaria for which no one had yet invented a name; except how they felt, how they smelled, how they tasted. She felt trapped beneath Nairobi’s smog layer while her star burned bright in the south. Tembo and Faraway could not understand her impatience. ‘It will wait,’ they said. ‘It is not going anywhere. Well, actually it is, and in the best direction, towards you.’