8

‘Love and God — they are the same thing, no?’

I returned from The Corporal to find Miriam still at the bar looking like she had never been up on that stage. And so I followed her lead and ordered my two beers, not sure how I would survive them, and stood by the counter and surveyed my fellow Tizita listeners all in different stages of extreme drunkenness.

‘Jesus, go ahead and ask, and I will say yes,’ Miriam finally said.

‘Babe, so you sing?’ I asked her, feeling my question was the understatement of the year.

‘Try again,’ she said.

‘I mean…I feel bad. I’ve known you for a long time, but I did not know you could move…sing…the world,’ I said.

‘Much better,’ she said.

She looked in the direction of Mr. Selassie. He was still holding court, so she pulled a bottle of Black Label Scotch from the top shelf and poured both of us two shots.

‘Fuck. I will never get out of this club alive,’ I said, as I toasted to her.

‘As my people used to say, no one gets out of this world alive,’ she laughed.

Miriam, in some ways, always made me feel young. She somehow made me conscious of how little I knew and how little I had done with my life, like my older conscience. Like me a few or many years from now, talking to a younger me.

‘I know why I am here — in this place. But you, why are you here?’ Miriam my bartender liked to ask me late into a drinking night. Coming from the epicentre of Kenyan wealth and privilege, I must have appeared to her to be spoilt, a trust fund baby just whiling away time at a tabloid.

It was not just her; my family was connected enough to get me a job at one of the major newspapers owned by His Highness the Aga Khan and could never understand why I was throwing away my life working at The National Inquisitor. Especially my mother, a politician who, at some point in the ever-revolving doors of who was in and out with the dictatorship, had been the minister of information, then a minister of something more obscure, then less obscure. Each of her appointments found the whole family at the State House with a small sack of money (collected from the church and other functions in the spirit of harambee), which we would give over to the dictator. Without fail, he in turn would give us sweets, Big G’s, Tropical and Orbit and some cookies with orange juice before the doors were closed and the adults conversed.

My father was a retired criminal lawyer whose client list grew in tandem with my mother’s rise up the shaky political ladder. When democracy came calling in the early 2000s, they were out in the cold, but they had made enough money to ensure we could live comfortably for several generations. They were not the kind to brag about their wealth by living in a mansion manned by servants dressed in colonial era outfits, as I saw time after time in rich homes. They owned a four-bedroom ranch house in Nakuru, two cars, a Datsun Pickup and a Pajero, and a farm in which they grew flowers, mostly carnations, for export. Not opulent, considering what we could easily afford.

And then there was my brother Jack, a corporate lawyer for a major firm in the United States. He was wealthy, had two homes, one a condo in New York City and the other a mansion somewhere in Mombasa. We were more strangers than brothers; we lived in different worlds. He never failed to register his disappointment with my career path and me, especially when our parents were within earshot. And my parents never failed to talk about his accomplishments whenever we were both around, like how he had played rugby in high school, or how he was mistaken for the younger brother at family gatherings, or how he learned to save money from a young age and so on.

There was something else. Rumours. I used to hear them often — whispered in bars around Nakuru — that my mother was at some point the dictator’s mistress. Someone would say that my beautiful, light-skinned mother had married a dark-skinned frog that did not turn into a prince. And when someone would point out that my father was better looking than the president and relatively leaner and fitter, a corrupted proverb about how a presidential fart by presidential fiat does not stink would be unleashed. It was not true, I liked to think, but figuratively, my mother was in bed with the dictator and, by extension, so were we all. But then again, so were thousands of other families. Far more wounding than that was seeing my parents prostrate themselves, not before God or an executioner, but before the dictator, another portly human being.

‘What I am doing here?’ I would repeat Miriam’s question.

And then I would tell her how one weekend in 1982, my brother and I wandered out of the Intercontinental Hotel where we stayed whenever we accompanied my parents to Nairobi for one of those State House visits. We did not know what was happening exactly, but there was a lot of excitement out in the streets. Someone was shooting a movie. There were green branches from fig trees laid out on the streets, soldiers and kiosk women and men moaning in pain, some even pretending to be dead. It took us a minute to snap out of our childhood innocence and realise we were not on a movie set, and we ran all the way back to the hotel. My parents’ visit to the State House had just coincided with a military coup attempt, and they were hunkered in a bunker, plotting a way out for the dictator. How naïve and protected were we?

‘You are just a rich spoilt boy — the world is not a movie,’ she would reply, and I would wonder what it was that connected us.

If it was guilt, I had plenty of it.

And now here I was asking Miriam to be part of my story — to let me behind the counter and into her life. I explained how I would go to Ethiopia and follow The Diva, The Taliban Man and The Corporal around.

‘And then I will do you last, right here in Nairobi, at the ABC,’ I said to her.

She smiled and pretended to poke me in the eyes.

‘Not that easy. There is one person I want you to talk to when you are over there — my cousin. She has some things of mine that I would like back. We will talk when you get back,’ she said, her voice breaking with emotion.

‘Can I ask you just one little question?’ I asked her. ‘The Tizita, where does it come from? Someone a long time ago told me the Tizita was first sung by wandering poet musicians, like griots.’ I thought back to the CRP.

‘Yes, there is that — but I think it comes from the Bible. When life is really hard and you sing the psalms, when you sing to God. You cannot scream at him. You kneel down and make yourself small, and then you pray your piece,’ she explained.

‘But I thought the Tizita is about love?’ I countered.

‘Love and God — they are the same thing, no?’ she asked. ‘Let me make it simple, okay? Do you know when God was born?’

‘No.’

‘Do you have a birthday for love?’

‘No. I don’t understand. I need to understand.’ My brain was roiling.

‘You don’t understand the Tizita, you feel it. Go to Ethiopia, and then we shall talk,’ she said firmly.

I stood up to leave.

‘Oh yeah, one other thing, babe. I have been invited to an Ethiopian-Kenyan wedding, a few weeks from now. If you want my story, you have to be my date,’ she said, coming back to her usual self.

‘Free food and booze and you? Sounds good to me.’ I grinned. ‘Why do you think the others came on stage?’ I asked her, ducking as she made a go at my ear.

‘Come back from Ethiopia, then we will talk,’ she repeated.

I called a taxi and filed out with a small army of the slummers, gamblers and drunks, all of them singing one song or the other that had been awoken by the Tizita musicians.