Kenya, Will You Marry Me?

8. Mami’s curfew is endless

67 8 Mami’s curfew is endless N yanjiru must know, she wants to know what other trials Mami has endured. Nyanjiru says to redeem a nation you need people who never tire of suffering and pain. Mami’s two beautiful girl-angels, Cherita and Mut, were walking and pretty and now they are crawling. These are my two beautiful sisters. Polio struck their right legs weakening them both and simultaneously. Mut and Cherita, my adorable big sisters and my parents’ beautiful daughters take treatment but their legs remain dangling down and weak. With the third baby, a son, suddenly Mami has three babies crawling and none beginning to walk. Elekeingati is dead. Finally, once stronger, Mut and Cherita both get crutches and then caliper shoes for their weak legs. Mami’s throat is itching with the juices produced by the cynicism she has endured. She gets goitre. She is Baba’s only refuge. They laugh at Baba in the village he remembers. But he does not break, he wants change. His humor goes with him after every mass. He makes Latin hymns in local tongue and laughs. After detention, ridicule is what awaits him. He insists to those who ask him why he has no sons but only lame girls that they are his sons, his two girl angels. He holds them out proudly, the way I hold my dolls. In a weak moment he tries to hide them. Stigma is ugly. It makes us less human, stealing compassion. But Mami knows and heals his edge of despair. Let me say to those who aim for power that I will be proud of my country in her weakness, if I see that we intend to make her the best. When I see that her women stand out. I am proud. Someone call the world to compassion. For Gandhi gave you his soul, and the powerful refuse to kill racism, laughing at us for tribalism. I hold my country to my breast. I sing her lullabies. I sing her healing. 68 Kenya, will you marry me? Women know the pain, they must be part of the cure. To you who rules her with a heavy hand, if I see your heart in pain and your will steely in helping her survive, if you, who say you are my country’s fathers could hold us out like Baba held his daughters and say we are healing, I would take consolation. But you see, Baba loved his children to death and he loved Mami. You do not love Kenya, the Mother of your children, with all your heart? Do you in the end dislike some of her children? I am surprised that these children still love you. You are a father with a heart of death. When I hear they give you power like this from a far, in the mysterious West, I shudder. Who in the world insists on killing our freedom forever? May their gaze freeze on Kilimanjaro. If only I could see your eyes melt, when you hear even one person died because of a vote, when you look at those injured in my country because of a vote; the way Baba’s eyes used to when we were sick. When you look at those burnt to death, made homeless because of a vote, at thousands buried six feet under because of a vote, and continue, without justice, compassion or reparation, without singing about healing, I see darkness. If only I could console the many mothers whose children are gone, the way Elekeingati left. Mothers whose children are maimed by war, not even by an invisible virus, like Mut and Cherita. You sit comfortable in a castle you made with our money. You do not seem to feel the earthquake that started with tremors, you do not see the reddening and burning of the soil beneath our feet. Do you not sense fire within neighboring borders where you should be taking peace? You ask us to dance in glee for your one wife and family with our feet bare and burning in the hot dust! We can feel war coming. We are Mothers and our souls are alive to unpronounced curfews. Fathers of hard politics, do you not see the magma flowing in from afar? If you cannot feel the pain in the lining of the nostrils of our glue sniffing children you think then that they are breathing life? No. They die. But not before exploding petrol bombs...