Black Star Nairobi Read Free Page A

now, her face had lost that innocence I had never known but imagined, and the hardness I had come to know now changed easily into a smile. She cared more about life, hers and the lives of those around her. When I’d first met her, she was trying to figure some things out and hence was more sure; now that she had figured them out she was less sure, like me and everyone else.
    There was a knock on the door. It was O, who, after a few puffs from Muddy’s joint, offered to make breakfast. We groaned, knowing it was going to be an omelette, the same one he had been making for years now, adjusting the ingredients to a degree only he knew. For years, he had been trying to perfect it. Still, it was food, and the seriousness with which he prepared his omelet made me feel better about my life.
    “How is your long-lost wife? After the show we should all go out, no?” Muddy asked. She had a performance coming up at the Carnivore Hotel for the Kenyan elite and the tourists who liked to go there to sample Kenya’s wildlife—crocodile, zebra, and, for the right price, a protected animal.
    Why did Muddy and Mary get along? I had asked myself that question many times. Mary had done everything right, except for marrying O, Muddy and I joked. There was some truth to that. But eventually I had come to understand that O was just the man she happened to fall in love with—and she had less control over that than over the choice to go a teachers’ college and dedicate her life to saving one pupil out of a hundred each year at Kangemi Primary School. I suppose, like Mary, I didn’t have much choice either—Muddy was the woman I loved.
    “Yeah, she’s almost done teaching … I can see the Promised Land—and Ishmael, we are going to paint it red,” O said, and laughed between puffs.
    “And Janet? Is she coming?” Muddy followed up. Janet was Mary’s unofficially adopted daughter, now a first-year at Nairobi University. Her real parents still lived in Mathare, still drank copious amounts of the illegal
changaa
. Rwandan refugees, they had found their salvation in self-destruction. Years ago, O and I had rescued Janet from a rapist and a life that would have spiraled down to hell. Muddy had given her hope, but it was Mary who became her surrogate mother.
    “She can’t make it, exams … so she says. I suspect she has other plans—your performance or having fun with her friends?” O answered.
    “My piece, I want it to carry some righteous anger and hope. What do you think, O? Can hope and anger co-exist?” Muddy asked. Now I knew they were both high. This was what they enjoyed the most—philosophizing over a joint—and O stopped chopping the red onions.
    “Yeah, they can. Hope in a time like this,” he waved his hands around, “hope alone has nothing to hold it to the ground … it has no anchor, and it has no action. You need some anger in there to keep hope burning. To give it some oomph …” He forgot about the onion and starting chopping some garlic.
    “This piece—I am angry that motherfuckers can’t see that Chinese machetes are not for farming—and the rhetoric, I know it too well,” Muddy was saying.
    “Muddy, you see Rwanda in fucking everything. This is Kenya. We know violence—remember, when other Africans were begging for independence, we were out in the forests fighting,” O responded.
    “Well, Castro Mao Guevara, I know the rhetoric—people were saying similar things in Rwanda—‘a little blood-letting,’ you Kenyans call it? There is no such thing as a little bloodletting,” she said, managing not to sound bitter.
    O started to say something but Muddy raised her arms to interrupt him.
    “Wait, wait … Each drop of blood is a flood,” she yelled, clapping her hands together in delight and jotting the line down.
    O was now cutting a tomato, the garlic left half-chopped.
    “What is missing from my motherfucking omelette?” he asked.
    I pointed to the mushrooms and the green and red