From the autobiography of Zindzi Aswani: The Life of A Fighter. Lived from 2005 to 2100.
My mother was an activist, so I became one. Last night I dreamt she rescued me from a drunk woman whose hands were around my neck, as two men pulled my arms in different directions. My mother was an old lady dressed in a yellow hat and floral sundress, shouting at the trio, “Leave her alone. She is just a child.”
The drunk woman replied, “Well, she wouldn’t be the first to die.”
I spat in the woman’s face, and my saliva dissolved her bulging, bloodshot eyes as my mother chopped off the men’s arms. They ran away screaming, “How dare you!” Clutching their bleeding stumps like wimps.
My mother said to me, “You have to be a fucking rock, otherwise.”
The sky was bright blue with a scattering of cotton clouds. A beautiful day otherwise. With no food to eat because I would travel to Kisumu the following day, I went to the shops. The caretaker of our building hung like a monkey on the low wall barricading the night watchman’s shed. He had bundled into the compound, staggering, intoxicated from alcohol powder sold at two hundred shillings for a litre. Up the road, a man vomited in the bushes. Another Sunday in Ngong. The paths were dusty and rocky. Without much to do, the surbianness irked everyone, including the guard at the supermarket. He kicked a woman out, pulling her by the arms down the stairs leading to the exit because she had put the shopping basket in the wrong place.
“But everyone else was doing it,” she protested, resisting the eviction in a half-squat stance as if she was lowering herself into an invisible chair.
“Those are the rules,” the guard said and cackled when she demanded to speak to the manager. “There is no management here. Get out and never come back!”
Sundays were accursed days. The boredom, the heat, the lack of order — everyone drove wherever they pleased, respecting neither the sidewalk nor the road — got to you. I rarely left the house on Sundays.
My trip to Western was to see my aunt about my mother’s land, bequeathed to me with her dying breath. In my arms were fifty wilted roses, a parting gift from the woman I had been living with. I hadn’t been to Western in years. My aunt said when she saw me: Where are your children? Where is your husband? I told her I lost them all in a deep ocean I could not drain. The ocean being the abyss of the slums I’d spent the past years conducting political education. The appeal of romance decimated. The comrades were like any other men, and the rules of the game were similar. Play house and be a wife; an activist only in the streets.
I went to my bedroom after this odd greeting. Trailing rose petals on my aunt’s polished parquet floor. To my surprise, she did not complain. Perhaps she empathised with my grief and gave me space; perhaps she was accumulating my sins to use as ammunition later.
I was thirsty for redemption, so I pushed away the pile of dusty blankets and collapsed into the bed, rusty box springs creaking, stuck in time as this place with its portraits of three generations of my relatives, outdated calendars and plastic flowers. In the wardrobe, on the shelf uninhabited by my aunt’s utensils, were my books. From the row, I pulled out a copy of the first edition in the trilogy of the Ugly Bird, looking for clues of who I was before the dreadlocks, piercings and chanting down Babylon among strangers in indifferent streets. The memory of a policeman with his greedy, red-hot gun overwhelmed me to tears. There were many times I could have died.
In that room made up of concrete walls and a mercy of three small windows, a breeze flowing through the glass jalousies snapped me awake to discover dawn breaking to the whirr of a buzzsaw. A tree fell with a crack like a splintering bone. The mortuary attendant ushered me out of the waiting room, swarmed with families seeking information about their missing loved ones, into a long, dark, cream-walled corridor patched with public health posters on COVID and HIV prevention, into a comfortably cool room. On the slab lined with bodies covered in white sheets, she showed me Andere’s remains. A tag on her big toe announced the cause of death: motor accident. Despite the purple slit scar across her throat.
My aunt called me downstairs for lunch and asked about my intentions with the land.
“I don’t know,” I mumbled through a mouthful of plain githeri and rosemary-flavoured milk tea. “I am still figuring it out.”
“This is not a situation to be figured out. You either know what you want, or you don’t.”
“Is the area located in the municipality? The land rates might be costly.”
“Forget about that. Your uncle is taking care of it. What will you do about your hair? We saw you on TV getting arrested. You were so thin. Still smoking that tobacco. If you are planning to stay, you must stop those bad habits — look at your punctured face.”
“Uncle told me he found a tenant, and you are charging him fifteen thousand. How come I have never gotten my share?”
“You will get everything. I am not as entitled as you think I am. I could have stolen from you.”
“There is no way.”
“I could have,” she insisted.
“Who is the tenant?”
“Do I even know his name? We’ll receive a formal introduction after everything.”
“I hope you have your own will in place,” I said. “You have property everywhere.”
My aunt dated an older man who came for lunch every Wednesday at eleven in the morning with gifts of blue cheese, dark chocolate, and ginger beer. For me, he brought a cup of fermented millet and amaranth porridge. I gave them privacy by leaving for the waterfall, following the sound of the river as I walked, thinking about dragons. My horoscope had predicted a prosperous, transformative year for our kind; one of grace and new beginnings. I used a different route back home every time. Jumping over fences, trespassing into people’s farms in case assassins awaited me on the previous route.
It was on an afternoon such as this that I crossed the green fields of the valley to the settlement in the hills. The Underground Movement was an operation of colossal magnitude. The commune was set on acres of tree groves and farmland. My home for three months of the year. For the rest of the year, we organised the resistance from Andere’s bedsitter at Kimbo, opposite the decrepit flyover. It was a sterile happiness, untainted by economic reality. We always had food to eat and a place to sleep despite the lack of steady income. I had loved Andere ever since she kissed me on the cheek at a gala dinner in honour of outstanding acts of activism. She reminded me of my mother, exiled in Lusaka for most of her twenties and early thirties for involvement in the student protests of 1990.
What set off our uprising — the spark that lit the prairie fire was the suicide and infanticide by a young mother. She took a matatu to Kiserian after begging for fare all week, stuffed the kanga that carried the child on her back with rocks and flung herself into Kiserian dam, flooded by El Niño rains. Homeless since the evictions in Mukuru kwa Njenga in 2021 for a new road.
“History was bound to repeat itself,” Andere told me, leaning back into the chairs at Parkview Bar, as if trying to distance herself from the memory of the water-filled, darkened cells we had been tortured in for morsels of information about our political activities, breaking the strongest of us. Years later, I was unable to forgive myself. I felt it was our responsibility to protect each other, organise the uprising into a clear direction such as a workers’ party or a people’s president. The best of us took up jobs in non-profit and civic think tanks or victims’ compensation committees — awarded after post-mortems proving loved ones died from protest-related injuries.
I told the succession court clerk the same thing I told the administration chief: I didn’t know my father; it has always been my mother and I.
“You aren’t married,” she asked, a mischievous glint twinkling in her eye. “For such a smart young woman, it’s such a waste. My son is single, but I don’t know how he would respond to taking orders from an older woman. Right,” she slapped the table with her hands and started filling the blank form in front of her as she asked me my mother’s name and place of death —information that was in the chief’s letter I had given her. My irritation inflamed with each unnecessary question, hissing and sparking like hot grease. My responses became curt and repetitive.
“Why didn’t she remarry?”
“I don’t know.”
“How could she afford this land without steady employment?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe your father or another man paid for this asset without your knowledge. You were, after all, very young when she acquired the plot. There are cases where spouses try to disinherit their partners.”
I met her probing with stony, angry silence. In this little room overflowing with dusty files, who gave her the right to judge my mother’s life?
Handing me a slip of paper with the case number, she said, “Payment details are on e-citizen. Sixty days if nobody disputes your claim; smooth sailing after that. You might need a lawyer to file additional paperwork. Olwenya on the second floor at the decommissioned law courts building will assist you at an affordable rate. Tell her I said hi.” As I stood up to leave, she added with a cheeky smile, “What a waste of genetics; at least have children.” I made a point to slam the door behind me.
I fiddled with the locket key chain, turning it so that the copper frame caught the glint of late afternoon sunlight shafting through the trees at the edge of my aunt’s boma, where I sat in the shade. I ritually listened to jazz, replacing my habit of going to the waterfall, while my aunt hosted her boyfriend. Smells of frangipani and lemongrass scented the after-rain air.
Andere had been missing for three weeks before I mustered the courage to go to her house. Last seen in dingy basement bars at night; wandering downtown streets by day. I heard she had run out of money. Scattered on the floor of her bedsitter, as if in the trail of a rampage, were her books and documents. From the rubble I fished out the locket chain I now held. Inside was a picture of her, Ziggy and me, dressed in black T-shirts and red berets, taken during the gala dinner where Andere and I kissed.
“Liberation thunders in every heart,” she yelled at the full moon above an unfinished level of flat in Sukari at Ziggy’s place, where we convened for the after-party. “We will defeat him,” she whispered to me, “again and again. We will bloom like the rosebushes at City Garden.”
For four days the uprising blocked Harambee Avenue, trapping Hunde Bucha — the thieving president in his office. All over the country, citizens demanded better living conditions and dignity — to make a life they could be proud of.
“We won for a time, and then…Do you remember that play, ‘Hanging at Dawn?” Andere asked. How could I forget the national theatre festooned with balloons, the main hall decked with portraits of Hunde Bucha’s murderous generals.
“They died because of us,” I replied. I was suddenly annoyed by her earlier enthusiasm. “Thousands. Of what use then was all that effort? We could not protect them.”
Andere shook me manically. “Stop that despair. You bore me. Did we shoot unarmed people in the streets? Did we ever pick up weapons and harm anybody?”
“Nothing happened,” I said weakly.
“Don’t say that. What about the constitution? Don’t the courts work faster now? He knows we are watching. We the people are alert to his tricks. I am looking forward to supper,” she said and finished her beer. Tossed the can, which rolled on the gritty floor towards a sleeping cockerel tethered on one leg to metal spokes jutting out of a low cement pillar base.
Pilau and braised lamb medallions prepared by Ziggy. Their domesticity fascinated me. In the midst of all this, he and Andere were about to start a family. Ziggy had painted the spare bedroom cotton candy blue. His place had more space, so the child would live with him. I envied their ability to keep their personal lives uninterrupted by the disruptions of our political work. Andere baked vanilla cookies for her guests; Ziggy kept a bowl of marinated chicken wings to roast for drop-ins.
I was annoyed by the inconvenience of their approaching parenthood. “It’s always been politics first. The people first always,” I lashed out.
“The people have their own lives. We are not saviours,” she said, her back to me, while she looked at the city twinkling with lights. A beautiful night otherwise.
I dreamt it was I who slit Andere’s throat. Strong winds whiplashed loose sand and gravel from the unpaved path below my window, pelting the glass panel with debris. I swallowed gulpfuls of air, awake from that feverish nightmare and tried to calm down.
The sitting room light was on. My aunt, awake, flipped through a photo album. She told me she couldn’t sleep. I sat next to her on the couch in front of the TV, replaying news clips from different countries. She held my hand in rare affection and showed me a picture of my mother carrying their youngest sibling. “My sister was the fieriest of Khukhu’s children. Protective of people who might not have deserved it,” she laughed as she said this. “My first time in Nairobi to visit her, we boarded a bus that was speeding so much that the little children in the back seats wailed to their mothers to alight. Your mother admonished the driver at the top of her voice, demanding that he slow down. I tell you he drove at 60km/hr after that. Everyday acts of activism will get us there faster, she told me. It took one person to raise their voice. We were all suffering with that tyrannical driver, but nobody said anything. We just swallowed their fear. But didn’t they back her up? My sister was something else. Take care of what she has given you. Make good choices.”
“Our own country is on the cusp of an election, just thirty days away,” the news anchor said. The headline below their image read: Aspirant symbolises hope for a fresh start.
The plot ringed by a crumbling wall belonged to me, bequeathed with my mother’s dying breath. Perhaps I would find a buyer; perhaps I would stay.
****
Image: BP Miller on Unsplash