Leading the Night

Chopping distance

Leading the Night 179 for a ceremony. He did not tell her that they had hidden about 20 containers of the drink inside the water in the river bank below and deep in the valley, without anyone noticing. No one else was to know what the donkey was carrying. These things are for men only, according to the law of the gang. Perhaps he was conscious of his cruelty. He gazed at Wairi and felt a rough urge to grab her and draw her close to him but a voice in him shouted at once: ‘We are not the Mai Mai of Congo! We know these are not wives, they were never brides, they are our stepping stones until we liberate ourselves! Don’t rape them. Don’t go to them in bed, they will weaken your stamina for the struggle!’ It was the voice of the Leader ringing in his head. Chopping distance The loud spurting sounds filled the air. The wake turbulence was tremendous but it ceased as the chopper took off and gathered speed. Nig had called Rei mid-morning and Rika hurried back to town and she was ready in her safari suit. When the chopper took off from Wilson airport, both Rika and Rei were eager to see the landscape. A splash of rusty tin marked the many little brown patches that were the Kibera slums on the ground; Kenya’s Soweto. Hidden down there in Kibera were many possibilities, Rika thought. But it was not easy for most to see that. Politicians were exceptional, they knew how to hover and take aim too. Like eagles in the sky looking for food, they saw these opportunities in the slums and other parts of Kenya.The swooped down and snatched. Politics is lucrative almost everywhere but in Kenya, it mints money. No stranger could guess from up there that there were at least one million people on the ground wondering in the same instance, where they could throw away their plastic papers full of human waste. Rei certainly did not know that. 180 Leading the Night Wondering where to throw waste in a plastic bag? No. They just flung flying toilets through the holes in the wall that served as windows. And as for water, it was always so scarce for them. They had developed resistance to the worst of water parasites. Yet down Ngong’ road great water carrying trailers, painted blue sped down freely and at ease. Those went to the leafy suburbs for sale at 130 $ each. Young men in the slums and elsewhere in rural villages where rivers had disappeared were consumed with anger, but it was the women who had to find the water for cooking and washing clothes, wherever they could. Sometimes they washed their clothes in gutters. If you saw a man with water on a cart, he was selling it. When he arrived home, he would be expecting his wife to have worked out the magic of how to get water home to the family, for in his mind that would always be her role. Women here in the slums tried to hold onto crafting baskets but they had so much more to do. There was a girl Rika remembered from Kibera. She was named Jamlia. Jamlia had watched Sarafina the movie about South Africa’s struggle over one hundred times. Jamlia kept on saying that she knew she was neither the first nor the last warrior. She knew the warrior songs of her people the Nubians. She had gone back to her roots. She walked, sang and cried as if living in a dream, completely obsessed with the vision of redeeming her people. Now up in the air, the chopper took a neat turn over the Ngong’ Hills. A stretch of a few minutes of turbulence was followed by better stability. Still, it was a bumpy air ride but soon, it was smoother. The hills rolled green down there below them, the tip of the necklace of lakes in the Rift Valley was visible. They came into full view of Lake Naivasha and saw Lake Elementeita rather quickly just beyond. Lake Elementeita looked flat and as if its waters could overflow the lake’s edges. It’s name meaning ‘the dusty place’ in Maa language, is hardly a name for a lake but its name reflects the great dust found around the lake especially in some months of the year. Flamingos visited the lake often. [3.14.6...