Our house in Nairobi was on the other side of a gate, manned by armed security guards. I hate to write “gated community” because that suggests a modern construction of cluster housing surrounded by a uniform wall; this, on the other hand, was a collection of old colonial houses connected by a rambling series of lanes. Once open bi-ways, these were now controlled by armed guards at sturdy gates. All the short-cuts and pathways working-class Kenyans once took to get to their jobs and their buses and their homes had been barricaded by high-voltage fencing.
Racism had given way to classism. A decade ago, as long as you were white, the guards would raise the gate. If you were black, you had to answer questions. If you were black—even if you were driving a late-model Mercedes, the guards would write down your license plate and name. By the time we had moved in, the guards stopped any car that didn’t have tinted windows and government plates. Kenya had, at last, become a post post-colonial country.
I’m certain—now—that it was this equal-opportunity deterrence of the less well-off that allowed Michael and I to stomach living there. We excused ourselves because so many of our neighbors were wealthy black Kenyans, far wealthier than us. Others were Somalis, rich from piracy. Or bankers from Lagos, investors from Johannesburg. We excused ourselves because we wanted to sleep well at night—who doesn’t? We wanted our child to play safely in our large manicured gardens. And in the very back of my mind, I had the idea that being a journalist was a civic duty, I was doing a service. These were the calibrations, the calculations I made, as a white person, living safely, warmly, sybaritically. They were my justifications.
Which isn’t to say that reportage isn’t important, that I was never brave: it is, I was. The world must know the truth, must be given the details, and I took the trouble to do my job with care. As for the civic impact of what I wrote, well, it’s an individual choice—one of the few we genuinely have—whether or not you turn away, or if or how you incorporate the suffering and violence of others, often others who are far away, into your own life.
It’s easy to conclude that mere awareness of suffering does absolutely nothing to change it. And therefore, what’s the point of making anyone aware of it? Suffering is everywhere, every day; what is gained by knowing how people are dying in Palestine or the torment of starving zoo animals in Aleppo?
Michael and I were surely among the most aware in the world, and yet we were not prepared to surrender our comfort. We didn’t encourage poor families, refugees, desperate single mothers, teenage prostitutes to live with us, to camp on our lawn. We kept them on the other side of an electric fence; in fact, further: on the other side of town. I argue now that our knowledge perhaps made us more complicit in suffering because we could switch it on and off; we knew, and we turned away when sushi was served, when a dusky French cabernet was opened. We were complicit because our professions had sheen, we weren’t accountants or plumbers. We were journalist and filmmaker, we were glamorous. I liked that glamour, it was important to me.
Recently, in London, I met a young woman who had never given a thought to the life of a woman her age in South Sudan or rural Tanzania. She lacked the imagination—let alone the empathy—to not only see her cohorts’ wretchedness, but their blamelessness. Surely, their own bad decisions had led to their living in a refugee camp, this young woman seemed to insist in her argument about free will: “It’s all a choice.” She couldn’t comprehend being pregnant from rape at 14. Couldn’t these women, these girls just go to the doctor for their STDs, their fistula, get some therapy, go to school? I exaggerate, but not much. Her ignorance was stunning, made insurmountable by the self-help jargon she’d stuffed in her head instead of actual knowledge. I told her stories, dealt out statistics, maternal mortality, infant mortality, she was unmoved. By the end of our conversation, she had not changed at all; but I—oh, I felt infinitely superior because I knew—I knew—the real world.
That night in Nairobi, we had friends over, cocktails on the veranda—this would have been daringly colonial if our guests hadn’t been a mixture of races and sexual persuasions, a gay Nigerian couple, a Maasai businessman from Tanzania and his Venezuelan wife. Ice cubes clinked in our glasses. The evening light flashed on the bright feathers of the sunbirds feeding on hibiscus and lily. The Venezualan was an artist, she took found objects and turned them into masks, humorous and terrifying. She preferred to scour the slums for her materials.
And Freya was playing with their children, a posse of varying color. She was barefoot, as always, sun-browned, her hair a tangle of blond. Freya was a happy child. I am aware of that now. I took her happiness for granted with my coming and going—she loved her nanny, she went to daycare, she was self-sufficient, a natural loner. I wonder what it was like for her to lose that, as suddenly as she did. A month later, you see, we moved to London.
Unusually, both Michael and I were home from our wars. I was pregnant with Tom, my third trimester. The sun was slipping behind the Ngongs, our cook was serving around some canapés he was particularly proud of, and I noticed one of our night watchmen—Josiah—hovering on the edge of the scene like an uncertain stage hand. When he caught my eye, he beckoned.
“There is a man here for you.”
“Let him in.”
“No,” Josiah said. “He is not a guest.”
“What sort of a man?”
“From another country.”
“What does he want?”
Josiah didn’t know; but he was unsettled. The man was “not regular, not a regular man.”
I excused myself from our guests and went to see this irregular man.
He was very dark, and I guessed immediately that he was from South Sudan. He stared at me through the gates, the whites of his eyes flaring in contrast to the dark of his face and the cloaking dark falling around us. He shifted into a deeper shadow and all I could see of him was those whites. I stepped through the gate, into the street.
“Can I help you?”
In Africa, you get used to people asking you for help—total strangers requesting that you send their children to school or buy them a cow or give them your shoes. And you become accustomed to stares—you are a minor celebrity merely because of your skin; in far-flung towns children gather to watch you walk across the street, you hear them narrating your every move. “Look, the whitey is taking out her phone, now she is dialing it.”
But this man regarded me blankly. “I have a missive for Kay Ward.”
“A missive?”
“Are you Kay Ward?”
“I am Kay Ward.”
He removed a cheap pay-as-you-go phone from his shirt pocket, handed it to me. “The General requests you, Kay Ward.”
“I know several generals.” But I knew which one, there was really only one.
“Instructions will follow.”
Then he turned, slipped into the darkness between the security lights. Only then did I wonder how he had gotten past guards at the gates.
General Christmas wanted an interview, an exclusive. If I got myself to Obo in the Central African Republic, he would make arrangements to get me to Gol, which was otherwise inaccessible. Even MSF couldn’t get there.
“Who even cares?” Michael responded when I told him.
“This is a major scoop!” I retorted.
“You’re just giving him what he wants.”
“And you’re certain you know where the line is between covering a story and creating one?”
“Jesus, babe, you’re seven months pregnant. The airlines won’t let you travel.”
“The airlines? I’m going to take an airline?”
He looked at me. He rolled his eyes. “Forget it. You’re not going.”
I began to put some clothes into my travel bag.
“If anything happens,” he said, “I’ll never forgive you.”