V
Afterword by J. Roger Kurtz Historical Context by Jean Hay
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/isbn_9781558612495
COMING TO BIRTH
Women Writing Africa
A Project of The Feminist Press at The City University of New York Funded by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation
Women Writing Africa is a project of cultural reconstruction that aims to restore African women’s voices to the public sphere. Through the collection of written and oral narratives to be published in six regional anthologies, the project will document the history of self-conscious literary expression by African women throughout the continent. In bringing together women’s voices, Women Writing Africa will illuminate for a broad public the neglected history and culture of African women, who have shaped and been shaped by their families, societies, and nations.
The Women Writing Africa Series, which supports the publication of individual books, is part of the Women Writing Africa project.
The Women Writing Africa Series
ACROSS BOUNDARIES
NO SWEETNESS HERE And Other Stories by Ama Ata Aidoo
The Journey of a South African Woman Leader
A Memoir by Mamphela Ramphele
THE PRESENT MOMENT
AND THEY DIDN’T DIE
A Novel by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye
A Novel by Lauretta Ngcobo
A Love Story
A Novel by Ama Ata Aidoo
CHANGES
TEACHING AFRICAN LITERATURES IN A GLOBAL LITERARY ECONOMY Women’s Studies Quarterly 25, nos, 3 & 4 (fall/winter 1998)
Edited by Tuzyline Jita Allan
DAVID’S STORY
A Novel by Zoe Wicomb
YOU CAN’T GET LOST IN CAPE TOWN
A Novel by Zoe Wicomb
HAREM YEARS
The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, 1879-1924 by Hud a Shaarawi Translated and introduced by Margot Badran
The Life Story of Christina Sibiya by Rebecca Hourwich Reyher
ZULU WOMAN
CHAPTER
1
Martin Were pushed a ten cent piece into the slot and marched on to the platform to meet his wife. He was twenty-three and the world was all before him. Five feet ten, a hundred and fifty pounds, educated, employed, married, wearing khaki long with a discreetly striped blue and white shirt and a plain blue tie, socks and lace-up shoes, he had already become a person in the judgment of the community he belonged to. It was eight o’clock in the morning, one of those cool, bright Nairobi mornings with a strident blue and white sky like the best kind of airmail pad, promising heat later on, bougainvillaea dry and overpowering with a familiar papery rustle, the station desperately important, loudspeaker announcements, tickets and passes, hustle and bustle, the life-line of the country as he had been taught at school, and a hubbub of young soldiers coming and going in khaki, for this was 1956 and the Emergency an accepted fact.
Of course it was distasteful to have foreigners around - real foreigners as distinct from the permanent foreigners for whom one did errands and learned lessons - and one heard that in the camps they did unmentionable things, but around town they were too ignorant to do any serious harm, on or off duty, and Martin could feel older, superior, since for him things were on the upgrade. He had a job as a salesman in a small stationery shop from which a Kikuyu had dropped out three years before, soon after the fighting started. He had a room in Pumwani from which a tenant had been ‘swept’ in ‘Operation Anvil’ and which had since been occupied by one Luo worker or another. Two members of his tribe, Tom Mboya and Argwings- Kodhek, were leading political parties in Nairobi, and people were beginning to think that Kenya would be free of British rule in twenty years. He had a hundred and forty shillings a month, of which thirty paid his rent, he attended evening classes in English and book-
keeping, and Paulina was coming . . . coming.
The overnight train from Kisumu had not yet pulled in. It would be her first time on a train. She could probably count the number of times she had been in a motor vehicle, even. How Nairobi and his mastery of Nairobi would overwhelm her! She was sixteen and he had taken her at the Easter holiday, his father allowing two cattle and one he had bought from his savings, together with a food-safe for his mother-in- law and a watch for Paulina’s father. They had made no objection to his marrying her then, on the promise of five more cows to follow. He had built a square house for her in Gem - square was more fashionable than round - and bought her a pair of rubber shoes. He could not then have afforded the fare to Nairobi or the things to set up house with, but now she was coming and he would be a man indeed.
The train swept in, still blazing trails through society as it had been doing for fifty years. Passengers appeared in the windows of first-class coaches, white, brown and a few black, and porters hastened to attend to them. From the second-class coaches also, white, brown and black looked out, but not, of course, from the same window. The sleepers were for four or six and when you booked the clerk wrote down your race to avoid embarrassment. From the third-class coaches there emerged first the experienced Nairobi wives, hefty women with calf- length skirts and aggressively set sleeves, passing tin and wooden suitcases through windows, bunches of green bananas, squawky hens and passive children, teapots, thermos flasks and rolled-up blankets. Next in order of attack came the men, men like Martin himself but a little older, shabbier, more worried, back from leave maybe a day late and only a bag of beans between them and payday. After them the rearguard, the mothers-in-law and the young brides, not very pushing, not very much equipped. He could not see Paulina but was confident that in days to come she would be one of the first to emerge, stouter and more impressive then, masterful of chattels and babies, a woman in her own right.
At last Paulina came into sight, clutching a triangular bundle in a cloth that would not go on her head through the doorway, and a tin box with a handle. She looked thinner than he remembered - remembering with hands rather than sight - and pale, with deep shadows under the eyes. She was wearing a faded blue cotton dress
and a white headscarf. Her rubber shoes were scuffed and brown. She put the bundle down while he shook her hand discreetly. They exchanged the formal greetings that were expected and the formal answers that were also expected. He could see that she was not well and that the journey had frightened her, but would have been shocked if she had answered in any other than the approved ‘very well’ form. She could see that he was weary and came near to knowing that he had been doing without bus fares and midday tea to save the money for her journey and to get the house ready, but she said nothing.
‘Quickly,’ he whispered, ‘you must see where we are staying. It is all ready for you.’
He was ashamed to say that he must be back at work by half past nine, that his boss had been sarcastic at the idea of such a youngster being married, thought he was pitching a yarn. He helped her to set the tin box on her head and the bundle on top. There would be flour and vegetables in the bundle but not enough, by the look of it, to last them till the end of the month. They stood, jostled by the crowd, to give up their tickets, then he began to walk swiftly, Paulina following.
The front of the station was full of taxis and cars meeting trains. People thronged together. Ahead of them lay a street of tall buildings and rushing traffic. She supposed it was normal for big cities to be like this, but still had difficulty in keeping up with Martin, as she wanted to leap away from the kerb each time a car came close and felt, being new and strange, that she must be the one to give way whenever she came face to face with someone hurrying in the opposite direction. She waved to two of the women who had sat near her on the train and was greeted by a woman from her father’s home carrying a big bunch of bananas to market, but Martin would not let her stop to talk. They turned down a wide road to the market and then passed shops and a church and school and a little mosque - Martin thought it more impressive than the other way between the public convenience and the factory wall, but for her it was only more confusing - until they were going down a hill with car and bicycle repair shops and little factories at the side and crossing the filthy little river at the bottom. Here she had to set down her burdens to go and retch at the side of the road, and Martin even offered to take the suitcase in his hand, but she was ashamed to be seen with him carrying it, and said she was better.
if only he could lift it up for her. And so, rather more slowly, they climbed to the top again, where more roads crossed, and passed a big arched gate with strange writing on it and figures carved and gaily painted. Martin told her it was where the Indians came to put their dead away, as they had no land round their houses. That struck her as a bad omen but she only looked and walked on.
They were crossing a piece of open ground to another road with houses of a kind to the right and a thick hedge on the left. Some chickens strayed on the road, which was smelly with piss and excrement lying in a ditch, and she looked with fear at the houses, of which she had seen the like in Kisumu, but not so many in one place or lying so close together and so dirty.
‘Well, nearly there,’ Martin said cheerfully, and led her across the gutter and into one of the doorways, past staring half-clothed children and a woman who was swilling glasses in an enamel basin and emptying the water in front of the house so that it left a narrow channel down to the gutter. She put the glasses down on a tray where the children making mud-pies in the wetted area could hardly fail to dirty them again.
The house was square, if it was right to speak of it so when it was not one house but many. The wooden door was open and the stale air struck her as they went in and Martin bent to undo a padlock on the third door on the right. ‘There,’ he said proudly, and she stumbled down a step and reached helplessly towards the bundle on her head which he gently laid down for her. The room was dark and airless and she sank back on the bed which he had made up neatly to please her. Bolting the door, he moved forward to embrace her, then, feeling her cheek hot and her breath sour, he threw open the wooden shutter, letting in a little more light from the space between their room and the next house.
The room was about eight feet by ten. The walls were painted and whitewashed - there had been a recent order, he told her, for landladies to do it - and the floor was of rough cement, of which he was very proud. The bed lay against one wall and the small wooden cupboard beyond it held cups and plates. A folding table stood under the window and there were three wooden chairs. In a corner by the table stood three suitcases in a pile with half a dozen books on top, and
behind the door a lamp, a charcoal burner with a couple of cooking pans and some charcoal in a cardboard box. There were even two pictures on the walls, with lines of figures underneath, an enamel basin, a teapot and a newly washed shirt and pair of trousers hanging over a string. Martin was always neat and clean.
T am exceedingly tired,’ she said, casting frightened eyes around. He poured water from the teapot into a mug and handed it to her to drink. Afraid to spit on the cement floor, she drank a little of it without the ritual and then held her mouth, feeling sick.
T hope you are pleased,’ he said. T got it ready just for you.’
Indeed, she knew he had; a cupboard, a basin, a lamp, a teapot, even a tablecloth. She was very lucky. She should offer thanks. But how could she tell him it was the noises she feared, coming into the room across the partition, floating through the bare rafters below the patched tin? At present there was only the drone of old ladies’ voices in the back and the clatter of pans, but at night she knew there would be high words and screams and giggles and cruel laughter set loose in the house that was not a house, and the words would be the more menacing in languages one did not know. And how could she complain of this when she did not know how she knew it?
T shall have to vomit,’ she said.
He took her outside then and showed her, not a patch of private ground, for there was none, but the stinking latrine blocks where you had to remember which side was for men and which for women and pick your way among the mess. He explained how to pull for the water but it did not seem that anyone else had bothered to do so, and in any case water often got finished early in the day, he said, because of the increase of people. She saw the taps up above the big cement washing blocks that someone put water in, somehow, and you got it out without paying; but if they did not put enough in, what were you to do? And where was she to cook and gather firewood and do her washing? Yes, she knew in fact that town people bought charcoal to cook on, but these were other people, not the likes of her who could not conceive of burning money, and who used charcoal only on special occasions like a funeral or a demonstration of cakes by the club women. And how could you leave your clothes outside with so many strangers going by and the children passing water and throwing things?
In her father’s dala there was no latrine - a dirty habit, people thought, to build one, and everyone knowing where you were going - but Martin, having been at school, had built one in his homestead which they used at least for long calls, but that was only for people who belonged, not strangers. The good brown earth would absorb the dirt and still smell leafy and familiar, at least in the dry season, not like this heavy black soil that held the water, or the slimy cement.
T must go,’ he said hastily, when she had brought up a little bile and washed her face. ‘You rest. I will be back about five o’clock.’
Five o’clock! Till nearly nightfall she would be alone.
‘Then you will get to know some other people. Bolt the door. You will be all right.’ He closed the door quietly. ‘Let me hear you bolt it.’
Shakily she drew the bolt and then lay back on the bed, after wiping her feet clean on a cloth from her bundle and putting the cloth beside her in case she should need to spit again, as it would be unthinkable to spoil the shiny new basin. She drew the blanket over her and shivered.
Later, she leaned to look under the bed. There was nothing there but a cardboard box with newspapers; no mat. So they would have to go on sharing a bed as he said they would, like Europeans. But if there was a baby, or other times if she was unwell? He hadn’t asked why she felt sick: of course it would not be right for him to ask. But it was three months now. Soon it would begin to show and then they would be able to speak about it.
She dozed, still shivering. A clang overhead jerked her awake but she soon realised, from the scolding woman’s voice that followed, that it was only a child throwing a stone on the roof. She supposed one would get used to it. Being married was, it seemed, a whole history of getting used to things. There was a dull ache in her belly and a bad taste right down her throat. She would have liked to make some gruel to warm herself but was frightened to light the charcoal inside the little closed room, and also she was tired, so tired. Although one or two of the women on the train had spoken civilly to her, everyone could see that it was her first journey alone, so that hawkers seemed to shout and stare longer in her direction than in others and she dared not go right off to sleep for fear of losing her luggage and the precious envelope inside her dress with her ticket in it and the five shillings her elder brother had given her when he saw her off at Kisumu. She had
brought maize and bananas to eat on the way but gave most of it to the children on the next seat, she felt so sick as well as shy.
She did not know how long she had been lying there - the light from the little window was not enough to tell the time of day by and she did not yet know that she would learn to tell the time school closed by the succession of cheeky faces peering through - when someone tapped at the door. Her throat blocked with terror. She knew no one, and people one knew did not in any case tap on doors.
Then a woman’s voice called in her own language, ‘May I come in?’
‘Who are you?’ she asked, trembling.
‘My name is Rachel Atieno. I live in the next house. I met Martin going to work and he said you had arrived, so I came to greet you.’
Paulina pulled herself to her feet and unbolted the door, still not sure whether she was doing right. But as soon as she saw the woman, plump and homely, carrying a teapot and a plate covered with paper, she thought how wrong she had been to give up hope. God has his angels everywhere to guard us. She gestured for the visitor to enter: the first guest in a new home: it was something of an occasion.
‘So you are Akelo?’ asked Rachel, shaking hands as soon as she had put her things down on the table. ‘So we are going to be neighbours. Good.’
‘I am happy to have a Luo neighbour,’ faltered Paulina. ‘I thought I should be all alone.’
‘Oh, in Nairobi you are never alone. There is a lot to do and to see,’ answered Rachel. ‘Have you had tea since you came from the train? No, I was afraid not, so I brought you some.’
Paulina fetched mugs from the cupboard and they drank hot sweet tea and ate brown, doughy mandasi, still warm.
‘I was afraid to light the 71 / 20 ,’ she whispered.
‘Yes, it is strange at first. And you know you must never light the charcoal here indoors without opening the window: it can send you into a faint.’
Paulina shivered again.
‘You are younger than I expected. Did you travel by yourselP’
‘Yes,’ said Paulina, astonished now at her own achievement. ‘I am sixteen.’
‘Sixteen? Yes, they are in a hurry to get you settled these days. And pregnant?’
Paulina blushed and nodded. ‘How did you know?’
‘You get to be able to tell. I have these myself’ - she showed a fist to indicate five. ‘Two are at school and one will be ready to start next year. My husband is a driver, so I get a rest sometimes when he is on long distance. But he has odd hours so he likes me to be here all the time with a pot of food on the go. And I make these mandasi every morning and sell them to the corner shop so as to help myself a bit. You’ll settle down too. But right now you be careful.’
‘Careful?’
‘Yes, indeed. So skinny you are and vomiting in the mornings, I can tell by your skin. And all the upset of the journey. Still, it’s the first time for him too. He doesn’t know better.’
‘He said he would take me out in the evening to meet people. I suppose in a town there are lights.’
‘Lights? Yes, plenty. But plenty of barbed wire too.’
‘Barbed wire? What for?’
‘Well, for emergency. Surely you know, child, that there is fighting going on. And though there is not a curfew for us’ - she stopped to explain what a curfew was: the day would come for Paulina to remember that talk and how innocent she had been - ‘there are times and places the Kikuyu cannot go without a special pass, and guards to see they don’t. So you see a woman on her own must be . . . careful. Now you know what kind of district this is?’
Paulina didn’t. She shuddered as she was told about the bars and the prostitutes and these old multiple houses owned often enough by people who had no other home, people who counted slaves among their forebears and sometimes did not know where their ancestors were born. And yet Martin thought himself so lucky to get this house because of something called ‘Anvil’ which happened when he was newly working in the town and staying with an uncle. She was amazed when she later went to see the uncle’s house - two good-sized rooms and a tap to themselves because he was working for the municipality. But still people had crowded in from home looking for work when they heard that so many jobs were going on account of the Kikuyus being taken away and locked up at ‘Anvil’ and even before, and so she
supposed it was right that Martin should move away on his own, even with the noises and the bad air floating over the shared rafters.
2
Rachel left so as to be ready with the children’s lunch and Paulina, comforted, slept a little, but the ache in her back from sitting hunched up all night seemed to grow worse whichever way she turned. However, she put her things away and changed her dress before Martin came home. He took her to be introduced to some of his friends along the road and they had tea there, and then he showed her how to get the charcoal alight outside the house and put just enough on not to cause waste when the ugali and greens were cooked.
He was in a hurry to get her to bed and she lay, bilious and sweating, in his arms but could not get to sleep long after he was snoring. There was music and shouting from a nearby house, but the traffic had grown quiet early because of the curfew. The night noises were unfamiliar - dogs snarling, women screeching in a language one did not know. She tried to massage her belly to ease the pain. There was no way of telling if it was near day, the ordinary house light being so dim and the glare in the street so strange. When men came marching by and talking loudly Martin also awoke and explained, when she asked, that they were bus drivers coming off duty at Eastleigh Garage and that they deliberately talked loudly in Swahili to show that they were on lawful business, with passes, and had nothing to hide.
Before he could go back to sleep she felt bound to tell him - for though it was against custom she felt outside the place where custom could help her.
‘My husband, I feel pain.’
‘You are tired with the journey and the strangeness. It will go off. I know you are a strong girl.’
‘Martin, I do not fear the pain but I fear for the baby.’
‘It is a long way off for us to speak of a baby.’
‘It is three months now, Martin, and I do not wish to soil anything.’
‘Lie still there now till it is light and I will try to get someone to take you to hospital. From this place it is not possible to do anything at night.’
All night she lay still and started to bleed, and brought her box so
that she could sort out cloths and bind herself, but as soon as a streak of light appeared in the sky he went out looking for a vehicle. Rachel’s husband was away but she persuaded a friend of his to let them use his van on a promise to pay twenty shillings on the fifteenth of the month, and as soon as the sky began to lighten they climbed in and rattled through the town and up the hill to King George Hospital.
It took them about half an hour explaining and writing things in Casualty before she was taken to a big room full of beds where Martin was not allowed to go with her. They put her into a kind of chair and wheeled her up and then dressed her in a stiff, cold gown and napkin and pulled screens round the bed and prodded and pummelled her. They gave her something to make her sleepy and the ladies said afterwards that she had been taken out of the ward on a trolley, but not for long. She woke up about midday feeling sore and intensely hungry, but the bleeding was less. They brought round great tin plates of ugali and beans but she could not bear to eat the stuff. Many women had food of their own and one gave her a banana. She could not understand much that was said, though a woman in the opposite bed addressed a few words to her in Luo, but an instinct told her that the talk in women’s wards, which in later years she came to know, was always much the same.
She managed to call a Luo girl among the trainee nurses and was told that although she would not get this baby she must be sensible: there was nothing to prevent her getting another but she must not strain herself, especially at the first and third month. Martin came at four o’clock, bringing her tea and bread, the tea in a tall flask that somehow kept it hot, and he said that he would see her next day and she must not upset herself: there would be plenty of time for a baby. Food was brought while it was still light, the electric lights were turned off early and she slept heavily, though aroused at intervals by the clanking of trays and trolleys or the cries of women in distress. She was not thinking forward or backward, except for disappointment that the child was gone and an underlying comfort that she was young yet, there was no hurry.
No one had explained to her when Martin could come again, but she could see for herself that there were fixed times for visitors and for different kinds of staff. The pain had receded but she was still very
tired. They brought gruel in the morning and ordered her to go and wash her face and made her sit out while the bed was tidied. Some women were crocheting or doing one another’s hair. Then the nurses started running about, straightening things and whispering ‘Doctor, doctor,’ until a silence fell on the ward as the visitors entered - a European doctor and a younger Asian doctor and a very special old white nurse in blue and white and some younger African nurses grouped round them. They went from bed to bed talking and pointing. VC^en it was her turn they called a young nurse to interpret and ask her about the pain and the bleeding, nodded to one another, made some marks on paper and passed on to the next bed. The Luo nurse whispered to her, ‘You can go home now,’ but no one moved until the group had left the ward.
Then the nurse came back to her and whispered urgently, ‘Come on, come on now. We have so many cases wanting beds. They say you are all right, now. We kept your clothes here, didn’t we, since it was an emergency?’
The clothes were fished out from the locker and Paulina was sent to put them on and hand back and check what had been issued to her, only they let her keep one of the soiled dressings. They gave her a card and some aspirin tablets and showed her the way to the main door.
At the door she still felt lost, but one of the Luo attendants came up to her: ‘You’d better wait till your people come,’ he said. ‘Have you got money for the bus? No. Have you got the key of the house? No. You see you can easily get lost here.’
But she had been told to go and trained to take orders, and it was always better to go from a place of death and danger than to stay. She had been in Kisumu several times and found her way round without knowing the names of places and had hardly noticed that Kisumu had grown bigger since she first visited it. How could she understand that Nairobi was a city or imagine that it would take a day to walk across from edge to edge and be impossible to remember all one had seen on the way? She had to get out.
3
The road out of the hospital lay through the quarters, completely closed houses of corrugated iron which must have been intolerable in
hot weather, so dark and noisy. Somehow she had the idea - she had been two years in primary school and had attended a few homecraft club meetings since her marriage - that medical people wanted lots of light and air. Even for a country girl it seemed odd for hospital staff to be given such houses, where children ran pot-bellied and with shirts at half-mast, failing to cover the strings of waist beads designed to ensure that their private organs developed properly. The side-road opened into a massive highway full of traffic, with barbed wire in some parts and residential buildings between tall trees. She remembered having come uphill to the hospital - did she really remember, did the heave of the trade van over tarmac mirror the still-unfamiliar jolting and panting of the country bus pulhng itself up a muddy hill, or had Martin told her? In any case she took the downward slope and so saved herself what might have been days of wandering amid the scanty and picturesque population of the old European quarter. Perhaps simply she remembered from Kisumu and from the conversation of many house servants on home leave that the official quarter is always up and the labouring down. To call them west and east would only be confusing but it still applied. She started to walk down. The sun was already high but it was not hot as at home you would call a day hot, only her head was still muzzy and she was not used to walking so far in shoes.
She went on walking down though other roads seemed to crisscross, and after a time she became conscious of clanking and rattling noises on her right. Of course, the railway. This was the one thing she was sure of. After some time she found someone who knew her language to direct her to the station. There she could sit down safely and maybe get a drink of water and from there she would know her way.
About two o’clock in the afternoon she reached the station, her feet fumbling on the pavement by that time, drank some water from the tap in her cupped hands and curled herself in a corner of the waiting hail. Perhaps she slept or perhaps she didn’t but to move seemed impossible. She shrank herself even smaller inside her wrapper, took off her shoes and carefully sat on them, then slipped from full consciousness. A couple of men tried to speak to her but they were answered only by a frightened stare and she fell back into a confused dream.
When she was jolted quite awake by someone banging petrol cans one after another on the floor she knew at once that it was time to move. She must get home before Martin came from work. She had not learned the town capacity for moving from one place to the next without returning home. Looking at the sky - thank God the sky is the same everywhere, that is why it has the same name as heaven - she realised it must be about four o’clock. She set off on the right road but was soon entangled with crowds of little khaki-clad boys coming out of school. Round the corner another school was discharging, great tall girls in blue tunics with yellow, gauzy scarves like butterflies, boys with yellow turbans. They were so pretty and so happy-looking compared with the bitterly intent and hungry faces of the black children that she could not help pausing to watch. She came nearly to the market and then hesitated. This was where she had begun to feel so bad only two days before and she remembered why and choked at the memory. By the time she had reviewed her experience of the baby, the house and the hospital, she had lost her longer recollection and took the wrong turning. Crossing the road by placing herself behind a large woman who looked at home and following on her heels, she found herself isolated by traffic on the station side of that seemingly endless road that followed the railway landhies.
People were pouring down the road on foot or by bicycle, the first section of that interminable crowd flowing out of shops and offices. This in itself made her think, though she recognised no landmarks, that she was on the right lines, going towards where people lived. The landhies consisted of good block houses with watertaps outside, all with letters and numbers: they were stoutly fenced from the road and each gate guarded by a railway poUceman. She walked on and on, recognising nothing but fearful of crossing against the current of men walking. Round a corner they came to Kaloleni and she thought for a moment they must be European houses, so new and neat, till she saw the faces of people going in and out, many of them Luos. Most of the Kikuyu people, had she known how to recognise them - only those with the yellowish skin and high cheekbones were easy to tell, but the powers that be always seemed to know - were going on to a place called Bahati, ‘Good Luck’. Funny name for a ghetto, but then she still did not know what that meant. Kaloleni with the football
stadium, then Makongeni and Mbotela, then the big new church, set like a small town church at the edge, just before the bush began. But of course they knew - one hoped they knew - that soon the houses would grow further and further on and the church be where it belonged, in the middle of the city. If they had not known that, how could they have borne to change it for the old St Stephen’s which had given way to LEGCO and later Parliament, but gave way only inch by inch, refusing to fall down, while week after week the blasting alarmed the faint-hearted and enlivened the bearers of wild rumours. Martin had seen it and told her about it.
She knew for certain now that she was on the wrong road. She was afraid to go on and almost too tired to turn back and she determined to consult the first Luo with a kindly face. By good fortune the first person she met at the gate of Makongeni Estate was an elderly lady who could only be a Luo, tall, long-skirted, carrying a Bible sticking out of the top of a plastic shopping bag.
‘Excuse me,’ said Paulina shyly, ‘but I am a stranger here and I am looking for the house of Martin Were from Siaya. Can you direct me?’
‘Were?’ said the lady thoughtfully. ‘I do not know one from Siaya. Does he work on the railway? And how is he related to you?’
‘No, he does not work on the railway. He sells envelopes in a shop, but I do not remember the name of the shop. He is my husband.’
‘He is your husband and you do not know where he lives? Now, child, tell me the truth. Is he a friend you are looking for? Have you run away? I cannot help you unless you tell me.’
Paulina felt suddenly too weary to bear any more. She held on to the gate but because of the barbed wire she could not lean against it. All Nairobi in those days was full of barbed wire. Everything was designed to keep you out. Breathlessly she explained about the miscarriage, the hospital, the long walk.
‘Granny, please help me,’ she implored.
‘Come in first,’ said the older woman, and helped her across the compound to a two-roomed house where a couple of children were sitting at a table doing their homework.
‘Florence,’ said the mother, ‘greet the visitor and then go and make tea quickly. Use the primus, do not wait for the charcoal. This sister is sick and she will stay with us tonight. Peter, go and see if Brother
Samuel Obura is in, now before it is quite dark. He works at a printers’ and may be able to help.’
The children obeyed. The house was neat and clean. Paulina found herself sitting in a soft chair with crocheted cloths behind her head, giving her name and the rest of the story, while Susanna, from behind the door, prepared the vegetables and asked the right questions.
‘And when you say he is your husband,’ she persisted, ‘is he a husband that the Lord has given you? Were you married in church, or did you just go to him as girls go nowadays?’
Paulina began to cry again.
‘We are not married in church,’ she replied. ‘It is so expensive. But he has given my father three cows and some other presents, and my father will have no objection if we have the church ceremony after he has finished paying. But we both read. I was baptised as a baby and Martin has been confirmed also, but they said my reading was not good enough for the confirmation class. Surely God would not take away my baby just because I do not have the ring.’
‘No, I do not think God would take away the baby to punish you. It was a bad time to travel, that is all, and your people should have helped you on the way. But since it has happened there will be something for you to learn from it. And of course the hospital people should not have pushed you out without finding out where you lived. It was too soon anyway. I will ask Drusilia to have a look at you.’
At that point tea was brought, with fresh bananas, which revived Paulina greatly, and after tea Samuel, a huge, smiling man, praising the Lord in every second sentence, came to greet her, but though he worked in a printing shop he did not know Martin by name and she could not tell either the name of the place of work or what street it was in.
‘I thought all Luo people were brothers in a big town,’ she dared to say. ‘That you were sure to know one another.’
He laughed again.
‘Have you any idea how big Nairobi is?’ he said. ‘If you went to the big location of Alego and said to the first person you met, ‘My sister is married in Alego, probably you know her,’ it would be just the same. In the old days when there were frontier guards it was their business to know, but not without your telling them the name of the village and
the clan. But we have brothers indeed, brothers and sisters in Jesus. Ask us for those and we can hardly fail to know where to find them.’
He made her describe the house and said to Susanna that it would be the other side of the river, near the little church. Susanna was inclined to agree, but she reminded him that there were houses like that down below Eastleigh also and on the other side of the city at Kibera. But Martin would not have been so crazy as to expect his wife to walk all that way with her loads, so perhaps it would be Pumwani after all. But they could not make sure till morning. It was not safe to walk after dark without being able to explain exactly where you were going. And Paulina felt comfortable and content to wait, though she knew Martin would be worried when he did not find her.
Then someone brought Drusilla, a saved sister who was a midwife and had felt the call of God to remain single and work at her profession, helping and witnessing to other women. Paulina found it hard to understand how a woman who, though not very young, was still marriageable could make such a choice. In custom there was no place for the unmarried. She was led to the bedroom for a private examination and Drusilla pronounced her well enough, though she could have done with another twenty-four hours in bed, and again reassured her that she would be able to have other children. She also urged Paulina to repent and then all the hardships of the past two days would come to make sense.
Drusilla had to run back to a case nearby and Paulina was embarrassed to find the master of the house waiting to get into the bedroom to change out of his overalls and heavy boots. However, he greeted her in a fatherly fashion and talked to her while supper was cooking. It appeared that the other three children were grown up and away, so they had the house to the four of them, except for a sister-in- law who was visiting her sick husband in hospital in Nairobi and a niece who was trying to get training after finishing her primary school exams, but they were both out and would be escorted home later. He stressed over and over again the risks of Nairobi for a woman on her own. After supper and prayers Paulina slept on a mat with the daughter and the niece while the sister-in-law occupied the spare bed and Peter somehow fitted himself into the kitchen.
In the morning everyone was in a bustle. Susanna had a market
stall, so she was up and ready even before the school children. Their father was getting ready for work. Only the sister-in-law was minding the house, so the niece was detailed to show Paulina the way across the railway line and down through Shauri Moyo. This she curtly did but then disappeared into the flurry of new buildings. Even Paulina began to wonder what kind of job-hunting she had in mind.
From the railway line she came to an open space which was the site for the Baptist Centre and from there a line of solid brick houses bordered the road down the valley and up again, with the more ragged outline of Pumwani beyond. In the gentle morning sunshine, the eight o’clock rush to school and work already beginning to subside, Paulina walked gratefully. The houses looked respectable and she came upon a little Koranic school where curly-headed boys in white robes and caps sat reciting round their maalam and rubber tyres lay about for recreation. At the top of the hill the other side looked more familiar, not like homes exactly, the buildings were too big and close together for that, but like a market in the country with a petrol pump, a shoe repairer, a grocery shop with a sewing-machine on the pavement, but further along the barbed wire reappeared and the notices on which one could always make out the big letters, KEM, KEM.
Coming to the top, however, she was back at the old problem. All the houses looked to her exactly alike. The first one she approached with a polite enquiry, ‘Do you know a Mr Martin Were? Does he live here?’ was full of the smell of beer. Dirty glasses were lying all around the big room that was opened to her and a woman came out, tousled and red-eyed, who did not answer but sent her away with a foreigner’s galling imitation of her accent - 'ok awinji, ok awinjV - and screamed with laughter. At several houses it was the same. At one a young boy tried to grab her and she started away, crying. She came round to the big hospital - since there was a hospital here why did they take her so far away? She did not realise that it was for women who had real babies. And she tried to speak to the barefoot girls in pink starched uniforms behind the barbed wire but they turned away, and she thought they were afraid of being punished if they spoke to people outside. She did not yet know how much there was to be frightened of in Nairobi, and that in the mission house a few doors away women
with difficult pregnancies were given a room to stay in in case they should be caught by curfew if their pains came on in the night.
She came round again and started up a side road where a flock of doves rose suddenly from a house where they were kept and startled her, and she drew back because this road was not paved and she remembered the made road and the chickens and the foul-smelling ditches.
It was noon again and she started from house to house along the paved road past the church.
‘Excuse me. Do you know a Mr Martin Were? Does he live here?’ But most people did not understand her and all shrugged her away, and she stood for a while in the shade to watch the Kamba people so deftly fashioning with adze and hammer little giraffes and zebras and lions out of wood as they sat on logs outside the house, and the women polishing them till they shone. She had never herself seen a giraffe or a zebra or a lion, though Martin had once seen a number of giraffes from the train and one of her grandfathers had been famous for killing an elephant, but her school-fellows found it hard to believe nowadays.
She forced her way forward and the houses seemed to multiply as she went from one to the other, and she stumbled, and did not observe a woman in the uniform of the Prisons Department (as she later found it was) watching her closely from the main road. The woman had been dropped from an official vehicle and it looked as though she were visiting relations in the village (as Pumwani likes to call itself) while off duty.
‘Hey, you, come here,’ she shouted loudly in Swahili.
Paulina did not understand but she knew where the message was directed all right.
‘What are you doing, going from house to house like that? Distributing leaflets? Begging? Don’t you think we’ve got enough prostitutes round here without a kid like you? W’here did you go to school? Who is your father?’
Paulina understood more of this, by instinct rather than reason, than she would have thought possible a day or two before, but she still had no answer to it. In fact there were no passes, other than school identity cards for non-Kikuyu women, and it was not hard to recognise those who had for any effective period attended school, so
she replied with her usual, ‘Excuse me, do you know Mr Martin Were from Siaya? I am looking for his house.’
‘Oh-ho, an ang^eyo MISTER MARTIN WERE,^ answered the lady loudly in bad Luo. ‘In fact I know everybody you might want to see round here. You just come with me, old dear.’
And muttering under her breath she dragged Paulina along, inwardly protesting at this rough treatment but outwardly quiescent, since any lead to Martin seemed better than none. They cut along some unmade back paths which seemed vaguely familiar to Paulina and then out beside the little white-washed mosque which she had certainly seen on her first evening stroll in Nairobi.
^Chiegini ka, near here,’ she burst out.
‘Oh yes, no doubt, very near, chiegini ah-i-i-i-nya,* mimicked her captor, dragging her past the white-washed stones that marked out the territory of the Police Post and pushing her against the counter.
‘Complaint? Charge? Question?’ asked the duty officer rapidly, and the uniformed woman poured out such a stream of accusations in Swahili that even a local Swahili speaker might have had difficulty in keeping up with it. The general tenor was that the stranger was behaving suspiciously at a time when a search for escaped prisoners had created a tense security situation, that she refused to answer questions and that she pretended to be a halfwit for evasive purposes.
Having asked Paulina her name, father’s name - he did not credit her with a husband - and residence, without listening to her tremulous story but writing firmly ‘no fixed address,’ he shoved her into a cell, turned the key in the lock and returned to his records after passing the time of day with the prison officer. (She actually had a cousin holed up in Pumwani evading an abduction charge, and this was one of her reasons for resenting all strangers and any show of weakness.) Paulina curled herself into the corner of the cage furthest from the door, crying quietly, and was soon asleep.
At nightfall the European inspector took over. Curfew area - unrest over escaped prisoners - tribal mixtures - new workers replacing those in detention - political activity - all these factors required a firm colonial hand. No one seemed surprised by it at the time, not even the young white men who found themselves patrolling five acres of seething rumour with bush telegraph wires to every corner of the
colony and beyond (for the richest witch-doctor was the Tanzanian with snakes drawn on his house, and an up-and-coming young Ugandan called Obote was active in political meetings at Pumwani Memorial Hall). Some of the young white men were well-intentioned and some were also clear-sighted, so this particular officer was very disturbed to find a girl asleep in the cell and nothing that looked like a charge in the rigmarole handed over by the duty officer.
‘Protective custody, sir,’ said the sergeant, seeing how the land lay. ‘Doesn’t seem able to look after herself.’
‘What girl can, with you lot around and her under lock and key,’ growled the inspector. ‘All right, I admit you know the area better than I do, but interference with female suspects is one thing I won’t have. Get her into the car . . .’
The man’s eyebrows lifted: he dared not ask the question that came to mind.
‘Get her in the car, I said. Driver and myself. No hanky panky. Get on.’
The sergeant unlocked the cell, prodded the girl awake, enjoyed her moment of terror as he gestured towards the European and the car. Wearily she allowed them to put her in the back. The inspector sat in front with the driver and explained carefully in good Swahih, but it was lost on her.
‘Now, don’t be frightened. I can’t have you left alone at the station, so I’m taking you to the house of a lady who’ll take good care of you. You don’t have to come back to the station unless you want to and I shouldn’t advise you to. Come on now.’
It was not far, retracing part of the way she had followed that afternoon. They got out and hammered at a heavy wooden door. An elderly European lady looked out of the balcony overhead asking what was the matter.
‘Police, ma’am,’ the inspector answered respectfully. ‘We’ve got a young girl who appears to be lost. Wondered if you could possibly put her up for the night. She’d be safer here.’
‘Of course, of course.’ They came down, the grey-haired one with twinkling eyes and the younger one with glasses and thanked the inspector for his concern and then led her up the long staircase and into a room that was simple enough not to be alarming. The older lady
- Ahoya she was called - talked to her in Luo at once and found out the whole story, translating it bit by bit for the younger one, and they fussed about because she was alone and had lost the baby and brought her rice and meat to eat, showed her how to use the bathroom and made her up a soft bed on the floor with blankets and pillows. They prayed that next day she might find her home and then switched off the magic light and left her to sleep.
In the morning, while the young one made ready to go to work by bicycle, Ahoya brought the car out and said they would look around before it was time for the men to start work.
Tt is not very far from the mosque, I have seen the mosque,’ Paulina insisted, ‘and they would not let me go that way.’ Ahoya quietened her, saying they would start the search there, and within a couple of minutes she recognised the house and Martin just leaving it.
4
Martin was thunderstruck. Ahoya introduced herself, reminded him that Paulina was badly shocked and needed to rest but had been kept safe, repeated to her the church and meeting times and drove away. Martin had not said a single word. He took the key out of his pocket and pointed towards the house.
‘Oh, I’m so glad you are here,’ cried Paulina. ‘I was so frightened. But they wouldn’t let me stay in the hospital. I walked and walked.’
The key was in the padlock. As the door opened he gave her a hard push over towards the bed so that she fell to the floor, grazing her knees and knocking her forehead on the wooden frame.
‘Slut! Whore! Is that what you came to Nairobi for?’
‘But they would not let me . . .’
‘Too busy about the city, are you, to sit at the gate like anyone else waiting for me to come? If you had bothered to find the way you would have found the house locked, wouldn’t you, wouldn’t you? And spent the rest of the day wandering about Pumwani making enquiries as you call it - wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you?’
His hand slapped across her cheek and again across her shoulders.
‘Want to come and live in Nairobi as somebody’s wife, do you - do you?’
His fist was pummelling into the small of her back and he began
pulling at the bed as though to overturn it on top of her.
‘Two nights. Where did you spend those two nights?’
‘With Susanna and her husband in a place called Makongeni - I’ll take you there . . . ’
‘And that is how the white woman came to bring you?’
‘No, no. The first night Susanna found me. She is a saved sister. I can take you to the church. You will see. And the second . . .’
‘The second day you couldn’t get any of those great friends of yours to come to Shah & Sons, Printers, Reatta Road, to find me? You couldn’t get anyone to telephone? You can’t bloody well remember five numbers.’
He kicked her buttocks.
‘Martin, you never told me. The name, the number, you never told me at all. Oh-oh. And there is still bleeding.’
‘Bleeding there may be. Can’t even keep a baby for me. Can’t even be sure it was mine, can I? - Whore! - Bitch! - How did you get here with that white woman?’
‘I recognised the mosque, but then instead she pushed me into the police station and they locked me up and the officer took me to the white woman . . .’
‘Police station - you went to the police station!’
She screamed as he came flailing towards her but in Pumwani people are accustomed to screaming. She was discoloured with bruises now and dragged herself to lie face downwards on the bed to protect her face and belly from the rain of blows.
‘But did you not look for me? Did you not tell other Luo people to look?’
Look! He had spent two evenings till midnight wandering in search of her, but he would not demean himself to say so. Ask his friends? Let them know she had not come home? He would rather leave her to die than do that.
‘Ignorant bitch! And you don’t know I have to go to work, keeping me arguing like this?’
He slammed the door behind him, padlocked it and pocketed the key. He was already sweating profusely and there was blood on the sleeve of his shirt.
She continued to lie there sobbing. Then she thought she should
bathe the sore places and wash the torn dress but there was only an inch of water in the bottom of the pail. She poured a cupful for drinking and dabbed at her wounds with the rest. She put on an old faded dress, did her best to tidy the bed that was now her prison and slipped under the blanket for warmth.
Would he send her home? She supposed so. Would her parents consider her disgraced enough that they must take her back? How would she ever get the child again if he did not come to her? Or would she die of his beatings here where there was no tribunal to appeal to? Would they have to move? She had heard that in town people might be afraid to face their landlord after fights and quarrels. ^
Indeed, she was almost as ignorant as Martin called her, for he certainly could not afford to send her home or the risk of sending her unaccompanied.
She lay there, more dazed than dozing, she did not know for how long. No water. No charcoal. There was a little hand mirror in the cupboard and she looked at the dark bruises on her cheeks, but they were less swollen than her back and shoulders. She had opened the window a crack to see in the mirror, then closed it again, but now there was a tapping on the shutter.
‘Who is it?’ she called, fearful that he might be testing her by sending visitors.
‘It is Ahoya. Don’t be afraid,’ came the welcome voice in Luo. ‘Are you all right, Paulina?’
‘I am all right but not very,’ said Paulina shamefacedly, pushing at the shutter, ‘and I cannot open the door.’
‘Yes, I thought so,’ replied the matter-of-fact voice. ‘He has locked you in. Did he beat you also?’
‘Yes, he beat me also.’
‘And that is the first time?’
‘The first time. He used to love me.’
Ahoya laughed gently. ‘Well, he does love you. I could see it in his face as he caught sight of you. But I thought also he would beat you, for it is a shame to him to have you lost, though you did not mean it so. Have you anything to eat?’
‘No. I do not need anything, thank you.’
‘Or any medicine?’
‘No, I shall be all right.’
‘Be sensible, child. Every wife who comes to Nairobi from the country has problems. Do not think it is the end of the world. Every young man has problems too. Probably all his friends and workmates have been telling him he is too young to marry and now he begins to wonder how he will manage. Don’t you know that if you had been married in the old way your husband would have given you a token beating while the guests were still there? They say that is so that if you are widowed and inherited you will not be able to say that your new husband was the first person ever to beat you. So don’t start to wish backwards. You praise God that He has given you a husband to love you just as I have been able to do without one.’
‘You too?’ asked Paulina, wondering. ‘You too, like Drusilla, you are not married and yet you seem to understand so much?’
‘You have met Drusilla, have you? Well, she is a very great friend of mine. And Miriam, who hves quite near here, is another. And we all know that God can look after us in all that is needful. But you, who have a husband, also need food and medicines, and I will bring it myself so that no one can accuse you of having men visitors, but you can give the tray to Amina in the front room and I will get it collected. ’
She rushed away and Paulina at once felt comforted . After half an hour Ahoya came back in the car. She handed through the window a tube of ointment and a tray with thick slices of bread and jam and a cold orange drink on it.
‘Now if he smells the ointment, tell him I brought it and he can come and ask me any questions he likes. But now I must hurry. I have a meeting on the other side of town.’
Paulina heard the car start. She ate carefully, forcing herself to finish, and when Amina tapped at the window to take the tray away they exchanged such small courtesies as can be managed without a com mon language. Paulina slept until the stiffness softened into a small ache all over her body, and Amina gathered her cronies to tell them:
‘That Martin, soft he may have looked and spoken but my goodness, did he go for her! And the mother’s milk hardly dried on her lips, poor young thing. We’ll see that she learns to give him something to think about, won’t we just.’
Martin was late for work, was cautioned for being untidy and made
several mistakes in calculation. By the time he got home at 5.25 p.m. he was ravenously hungry, wearied by two sleepless nights and spoiling for a row. As he opened the door Paulina raised herself cautiously from the pillow and sat up.
‘Lying in bed till now?’ he roared. ‘And no food ready!’
‘There is no water and no charcoal,’ she replied meekly.
‘No . . .You employ me as a bloody coolie to bring you water?’ he shouted. ‘Don’t you know where the water is?’
‘But you had the key, Martin. I couldn’t get out.’
‘Carry my own key, fetch my own water, cook my own food! What the devil am I married for?’
She began to make for the pail to fetch the water, leaning a little crookedly where her back hurt most.
‘And another thing,’ he shouted. ‘What about the thermos?’
‘The what?’
‘The thermos. The jug I brought you tea in at the hospital. That was borrowed. I suppose you left it at the bloody police station?’
‘No, no. I never had it. It was at the hospital. I didn’t know it was ours.’
‘Ours? Damn all is ours. It’s got to be paid for, do you hear? What are you going to do about it?’
He lifted his hand to strike again, but Amina and her friends started making a lot of noise in the front room and he let his hand fall. The bruises showed even in the dim light and he had not remembered hitting her so hard in the morning.
‘Maybe I could learn to sell vegetables in the market like Susanna.’
‘You - market - that’s a good one. You’d get yourself marched off to police again or to mission again or to bloody holy brothers and sisters again before you learn to get ten cents for a twenty-five cent bunch of carrots. You don’t get out of my eye-range again, that’s all.’
‘As you say, Martin,’ she replied gently and dodged out to get the water.
When she returned he was stretched on the bed, eyes ostentatiously closed. She made her first domestic decision as a city woman and made her way to Rachel’s kitchen to borrow some charcoal. Rachel took one look at her and handed over a little tinful.
‘We’ll talk tomorrow,’ she said.
By the time she had cooked the vegetables and ugali Martin was fast asleep and snoring. She shouted , and tugged his shoulder, then covered the food on the table. She used the last glow of the charcoal to heat a little black tea and then sat down to wait. After some minutes Martin opened his eyes, washed his hands in the basin she had set ready and sat down to eat without a word. Then, after vanishing for a brief moment which could hardly have been sufficient for a trip to the latrine he padlocked the door, put the key under the pillow, pulled off his top clothes and retired to bed. She ate sparingly and piled the dishes in the corner, then put out the lamp and, pulling her wrapper closer round her, squatted on the floor. After some drowsy time he called to her.
‘You will catch cold there. Better come to bed . . . Get those cold feet off me,’ he grumbled. Then, ‘Don’t worry. If you’re a good girl we’ll get another baby next year.’ A few minutes later he was snoring again.
5
In Nairobi Paulina thought herself a woman but she might well have been a standard eight schoolgirl of middling ability - she did not even know that there were already two schools in the country where African girls might be educated beyond that unimagined height. She was not slow to learn, considering how little time had been allowed her for learning up till now. She soon began to get used to it.
She had one advantage - a mixed one - over many Nairobi wives in that Martin came home every evening and never slept out. He was hungry enough to want to come home every day unless there was an evening class or a trade union or political meeting after work, and that never went on till dark. He was hardly more than a boy himself, a hearty eater, and for a couple of months after meeting the expenses of her journey, the hospital fee, car hire and the replacement of the flask, he had to do without the midday bun and cup of tea which he sometimes allowed himself in the first half of the month.
He stayed close to her because he still desired her, was proud of her and yet had a lingering doubt about the time of the miscarriage which made him afraid to leave her alone. He could not, of course, bear to lose face by checking her story with Susanna or Ahoya. He was too
cautious to venture out much after dark, although the curfew did not strictly cover non-KEM. Primary school did not teach you much about Kenya tribes. Everyone knew Kikuyu, but Embu and Meru did not mean much to outsiders. Yet now ‘KEM’ was becoming a kind of entity, not embodied in the old lady who collected the rents next door but omnipresent and threatening. Still, a curfew meant guards patrolling, looking, perhaps hoping, for trouble. It meant, at times, workers walking to work between cordons of armed European boys lining the road - so young and helpless the boys looked, you wondered how they could possibly know who to shoot at if occasion arose - and it meant that the person being searched for was someone whose language you didn’t know, whose motives you didn’t fully understand and whose aims, though they might be partly good in trying to change the way things were, you had not been invited to share in.
And trouble there could easily be in Pumwani, leaving aside the struggle between the powerful and the apparently powerless. One Sunday morning a Luo man was found knifed after a dance at the Pumwani Memorial Hall. He lived in the corner house and Martin had often chatted with him on his way to work. The investigation was never brought to a conclusion. Another time one of the old Kikuyu ladies was taken away for questioning. It was rumoured that they were going to hang her, but just in time the person they thought she was was actually captured and she was allowed home, not much less loudmouthed and demanding of her family than before, so that people of other tribes shrank back.
A woman must not go into a country bus alone, Paulina was warned, or a reason would be found for ‘questioning’ her privately. She ceased to wonder about these things, but kept strictly to time, sought from day to day the food that was needful, made the best of the narrowness of her room with no chickens or goats or fields to tend. And then there was Ahoya encouraging her to attend Luo meetings in the little church of St John, with those other women who did not understand the Sunday Swahili services very well, and to look forward to joining the sewing class when she could afford the simple materials.
Little by little she was coming to know Swahili. Martin encouraged her and bought her a New Testament which she could compare with the Luo Muma word by word, though her reading was so slow that she
still could not think of keeping up with the book in church. But by passing the time of day with her neighbours and accompanying them to the shops and vegetable market she became daily more fluent. She also got to know several of the Brethren women through Susanna’s introduction and observed intently how they managed their housekeeping. They all spoke beautiful Swahili and it was one of the measures of unity of the intertribal group. They encouraged her to do the same ‘so that she would be able to witness when the Lord called her’. She laughed, but tried to please them.
At first Martin gave her money every two or three days and told her what to buy, but she was learning from the older women what to do - not to waste twenty cents on salad oil for cooking, which ended up sticking to the sides of a long bottle, but to keep a bottle in store and use it sparingly, only taking care to put it away so that she would not be forced to lend. She learned not to rush to the market straight after payday but to wait till the price had died down, and she found that in Nairobi people expected meat once a week and toilet paper and soap for dish-washing, since even the air was gritty and pubhc. She found a patch over behind the old racecourse where she could raise a few vegetables. They were not so secure as at home - if people wanted to take them how could you prevent it? - but they helped out on lean days. She learned where to go to meet people from home who might be bringing a bag of maize or flour or at least a message on the bus.
She learned, too, that not all Nairobi women were like herself. Not all of them had husbands, to start with, or they had husbands who were away, they claimed, because of the Emergency. But even those who had husbands often received visitors at odd hours - for the men without women far outnumbered the women without men - or sometimes went trading at the market without telling their husbands what they earned. They bought clothes or cigarettes or perfumes, for they said in Majengo a woman could not keep her man against all the professional competition if she did not use means to keep herself beautiful.
One woman Paulina knew paid over everything she earned to a medicine man who promised to bring her a baby, but they got transferred to Machakos and moved away before Paulina could ever find out whether the medicine worked. In any case in Machakos,
people said, there were even more powerful medicines. She had not thought of buying any herself. After all they loved one another and she had nearly persuaded Martin to confirm their marriage in church, so she had no doubt that it would be fruitful.
The only thing she asked Martin for in those first months was a brassiere, and he laughed very much and asked what a country girl would want such a thing for, but when she bore his laughter patiently he was sorry and bought her one for six shillings at the end of the month. As she became more confident and he caught up slowly on his expenditure, he began to take her out more. They went to the museum on a Sunday afternoon and saw real leopards and giraffes, only dead and standing up, and birds and butterflies and implements from different tribes. She enjoyed it and begged to go again. They also strolled through the town gazing into the windows of the big shops, where a dress could cost more than a month’s wages and a man’s suit half a year’s. They went out to Ruaraka by bus to visit a friend who lived at the Breweries, and she got a feel of a country district different from their own. They walked in City Park and out among the big houses where people like Martin’s employers lived and ladies strolled in soft tissues scandalously bare at the waist.
But in spite of all the beautiful things in the city there were scandals and quarrels among the elders, the City Council, Martin said. And in Uganda there was trouble too about the King and Parliament. And trouble over Suez where the big ships used to come bringing the things for Martin to sell in the shop. There seemed to be no end to what one was supposed to learn and to be interested in.
CHAPTER