Free Black Star Nairobi by Mukoma Wa Ngugi Page A

of blood, each drop today is a flood tomorrow …” and she went on and on until I thought she was losing the crowd. No one wanted to be told that tomorrow floods would come, especially when it had never happened. But she bravely continued until murmurs of open disapproval became grunts and yells of
Kenya Juu! Kenya Juu!
    “You can yell ‘Kenya Up’ standing on top of God knows what all you want. But someday soon, please remember my words,” she said and silence reigned once again. She let the silence sit there as the drummer increased his tempo until the sound became terror—and then they both left the stage. There was polite applause, and then the conversations and the eating of exotic meat continued.
    Muddy didn’t want to stay at the Carnivore and make a night of it, and so a slightly tipsy Mary invited us over. We liked to dissect, or rather listen to Muddy dissect, her performance the following morning over a long, lazy late breakfast.
    O and I had had too many Tuskers and Mary wouldn’t let either of us drive. She hiked up her long teacher’s skirt, hopped into the driver’s seat, and sped us home through the Nairobi night. We stopped at a gas station, got a case of Tuskers, and drank late into the night, discussing Muddy’s performance, listening to music, and talking about things that had nothing to do with politics or the case. Just like in the old days when we were getting to know each other, we talked about past loves, hopes for the future, told funny stories, and just enjoyed being with each other.

CHAPTER 4
COMING UNHINGED
    They had found us and I was pleading with Jamal. I was praying to him, in the name of our past friendship and all we had been through together, to let Muddy and Mary live.
    I could tell that whether they lived or died was not on him. It depended on the four white men who had quietly and methodically handcuffed our hands to the chairs at the dining table using those humane cuffs that I too had often used back in Madison. Both Muddy and Mary were gagged. Muddy was looking around her, calmly and dangerously, while Mary was screaming and struggling against her cuffs.
    Tall, dignified, charismatic, and violent when I first met him, Jamal was now fat enough to appear short—he resembled a mid-level Kenyan politician. He had saved Muddy, O, and me from certain death sometime back. En route to Jomo Kenyatta Airport on what we later called the Highway of Death, he had warned us of an ambush. Without him risking his life to engage one of the cars, we would have been outgunned, outnumbered, and dead.
    But to a man like Jamal the past had no business being in the present. We might as well have been strangers. Blood to him was like water, neutral. To his credit, he never pretended to be anything he wasn’t.
    The four white men were casually dressed in various shadesof khaki so that they looked every bit the tourist. They had that American carelessness of dress that suggests casual power. Their T-shirts were an amalgamation of African tourist stops—Mount Kilimanjaro, Serengeti National Park, Sahara Desert, and Tsavo National Park.
    Tall, with his hair cropped to hide the fact that he was balding in the front and back, Sahara had the kind of fitness that middle age ravages—but even though he was losing the battle of the bulge, it wasn’t for lack of going to the gym. His glasses magnified his small, intelligent eyes. He looked more like a hip anthropologist on vacation, or an Episcopalian priest trying to dress down.
    Serengeti and Tsavo were the musclemen, tall, hard, with a military look. Kilimanjaro was huge, with the appearance of a lazy football player. His snow-capped head, from which long, stringy hair ran, cast a shadow over his eyes. It was clear that he was the go- to guy for all things painful—he did the heavy lifting. In contrast to Jamal, they all had a certain kindness to them that I could not describe—like they did things out of necessity, as opposed to Jamal, who did