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In 1995, my young parents moved our family from a village linked by a labyrinth of dusty footpaths, ineffectual Euphorbia fencing, a few grass-thatched roofs, loud neighbours, goat pens, paraffin lamps and barking dogs to a government staff quarters, a place of a softer and ordered silence, a benefit my mother accrued for working at the Marsabit District Hospital, which was next door. Our new house, clustered together with those of other hospital staffers, was an old black wooden cabin, the black was from its oil-soaked walls. The cabin, one in a line of three – there were many other lines with different kinds of houses, shared compounds And own compounds – stood in a tranquil quietness by the edge of a vast forest, surrounded by tall grevillea trees on which account a perpetual shade overhung our house.
From the main entrance of the hospital compound, a road skirted the offices and the wards, sticking closer to the hedge where old jacaranda trees leaned one way. This road passed behind the maternity ward, the hospital kitchen and the laundry where old machines hummed and hissed during the early morning. It left behind the physiotherapy hall and passed right in front of our house to the other houses clustered together in groups of twos, fours and then there was a line of twelve houses. The dirt road in the upper quarter had old telltale signs of a past tarmac, only the kerbstones remained. The yellow street lights didn’t work. The road encircled the quarters and the compounds with big houses then went back the other way to other hospital facilities. Past old vehicles parked under Grevillea shades. The hospital itself sprawled along a tapering landscape and had its facilities clustered together, the male and female wards, the outpatient dome. Everything was linked by a shaded corridor, its concrete pathways eased hospital orderlies pushing patients on gurneys and wheelchairs from one facility to another. This was the lay of the land in most district hospitals across Kenya.
My mother had been waiting for the wood cabin for some time, and her chance only came when her cousin and workmate, Aunt Sarah, was retrenched in the second wave of the Golden Handshake scheme, and as she departed government service, the house was her gift to my mum. It was a big win for my mum. Many of her colleagues weren’t as lucky to have cousins leaving a government house to them. Aunt Sarah had moved into the staff house in 1981, fully furnished, and as she moved out, only a handful of the old furniture remained; a clothes cabinet and a leather seat made from a rare hardwood.
In the house, telltale signs of our departing cousins remained in the room my brother and I took up. Symbolic, perhaps of their own departure, they had left behind on the wall separating the two bedrooms a chalk drawing of a massive lorry taking a turn around an imaginary bend. We became used to this picture as the momentousness of our move and the initial excitement faded gradually. The neighbours’ children made it clear that we were younger and far less adventurous than the cousins we had replaced.
Yet, the real allure for my family lay in the conveniences promised by the new neighbourhood. It was located within the larger administrative precinct of the then Marsabit district. It came in close proximity to my parents’ workplaces and schools for my brother and I. All round were other government-provided quarters; the Administrative Police camp – a collection of very old square rooms with whitewashed walls; the Police line – a precast rondavels, from above I imagined their canonical roofs looked like Thai hats in a green rice paddy; Kenya Wildlife Service offices and quarters; the GK prison whose quarters were a mix of straight-walled tiny rooms hidden amongst tall trees and lines of mud and wattle rooms. Owing to this concentration of government functionaries, the neighbourhood offered various comforts; a telephone booth, security, electricity, piped water.
Living in these quarters was a major upgrade from our village lifestyle. Immediately, the sacred routine of carefully rubbing the paraffin lamp’s glass case to remove the previous night’s soot was gone. Now, at the press of a button, we had an all-engulfing light, and at the press of yet another switch, an electric coil where my mum prepared the family’s meals started to glow. This too, like the instant lights, replaced the chopping of firewood, the clearing of ashes from the previous meal-prep, the cleaning of soot-black sufurias and my mum’s regular reminders to a young house help to “please check if the fire is running well”.
We made new friends. Fought new fights. We learnt to speak Kiswahili, not only as a cultural bridge to our neighbours but also as the language of formal education in Kenya. To this day, my brother and I laugh at the memory of those first few months, the newness of “Sawahili” on our tongue. The neighbourhood offered a unique diversity, it was like a small Kenya. We had Kikuyu and Luo neighbours. We transitioned well, having had other cousins living in a bigger compound up the neighbourhood.
The expansive, eternally present and mystical forest beyond the road behind our house held an enchanting allure for us boys coming of age. It served the role of, at once, a playfield, a private sanctuary and a store of endless mysteries. Some days elephants roamed between the houses. Some afternoon as you play in front of the house, a pair of beautiful antelopes emerge, calmly grazing to our door fronts. Some nights you could see the glaring eyes of some animal in the bush across the ditch.
During daytime, as the mystery lasted, we ran carelessly in the bowels of the forest, “Tarzan-ing” from branch to branch. At night, the shadows were deep and baboon barks urgent. The baboons, as if in search of comfort, moved to the line of Grevillea Robusta trees at the end of the third wood cabin. You could smell their presence as you passed them.
The wood cabins brought both love and fear, and in-betweenness of experiencing the nearby forest’s peacefulness and the chaos of the hospital wards. We soon learnt that our house was referred to as ‘condemned’, a name that came to us in a slow, ebbing way, lapping on our own dreamscape. Synonymous with a word that could itself be a prison, the rumours milling around ‘condemned’ made our stay uncertain. It is up for demolition. It isn’t fit for human habitation. It is not up to standard for government quarters. My parents plugged their ears to these cries but couldn’t escape the uncertain night.
The neighbourhood transformed before my eyes into a chess board as I made comparisons between our cabin and the other houses. The place was a bounded space of class orientation with physical and socially established hierarchies. These were apportioned in the number of rooms per house or whether the houses were part of a line of houses or whether they were stand-alone homes, or whether they had their own compounds. One could see, starkly, the order of households as demarcated by its own hierarchies in its trash dump. Weetabix packets, Zeesta and Blue Band containers, and Quencher bottles spoke the unsaid.
And yet the condemned wood cabins were leagues ahead of houses in other government quarters, like say the prison quarters where my schoolmate Ben and his three beautiful older sisters lived. Their one-bedroom dwelling had not been designed for a family but for a transient bachelor. Yes they believed they were better off, because their neighbours lived in crumbling mud and a wattle one-room house. The prison had been established in 1930 when the town had not yet celebrated its 20th year. Its quarters hadn’t changed much in the 60-odd years it had sheltered the prison wardens.
In all the neighbourhoods, the bosses weren’t a distant or invisible force. They walked along the same roads. But they were taciturn as if privilege was always meant to be a world apart. They locked their doors and stayed indoors. When they were seen coming from the far end, we stopped our games, some women walked back into their houses. Everyone shared the same worries and were equally affected by the tanking economy and were subjects of the same experiments.
In our house, every evening, there was a renewed silence and a fear you couldn’t exactly put a finger on sprawled carelessly on our coffee table. The endless involutions of the public and private lives were transmuted to us children by the subtle silences of our parents. Even in a remote provincial town like Marsabit, International Monetary Fund (IMF) experimental policies such as Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) met real-life survival concerns.
From the outside, the place was desired. When we walked from school back home we were only a handful taking the straight and shaded road towards the quarters. Other children were envious of how we didn’t have to run at lunch break. The tranquil silence that embraced our return home was always comforting. But the neighbourhood’s ease was illusory, that comfort masked deep and private struggles, concealed under the heavy facade of this constructed privilege. It didn’t need one to be a keen observer to place the khat, church or the bottle as a coping mechanism.
There was in the initial years a careless childhood abandon. In our childish games, we compared our parents’ salaries and bridged Kenyan economic realities with fictional stories of parents who, in our wishful thinking and naivete, earned more than they actually did. But the realisation of all the quarter’s complexities, the processing of innocent memories, came to me later.
A veneer of normalcy draped the neighbourhood but beneath this there were brooding silences. There was always a love affair somewhere in the quarters, a new gossip, maids bathing children behind the houses, caning of some errant child, brief greetings and polite conversations along the roads, short inquiries about who had done what. A familiar, even nuanced camaraderie resided in the quarters, as the nurses referred to each other as ‘sister’ and clinical officers as ‘brother’ as they exchanged ward gossip in conspiratorial tones.
My father loved Kenny Rogers’ Gambler or Don Williams, or as he would say, “Rewind the cassette to the Coat of Many Colours.” Sentimental songs with unresolved scorn, most stories told were often an extension of this injustice. Tattered novels by Danielle Steel and Sydney Sheldon were passed around. We modelled our heroes along Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo and Chuck Norris’s Walker Texas Ranger personas.
We had a small red Great Wall TV with a snail-like antennae. Every day after the 9 p.m. news, our immediate neighbour came to watch The Bold and the Beautiful. The parental advisory became the cue for my brother and I to make our exit, begrudgingly. Somehow, the memory of The Bold and the Beautiful cleansed our small living room of the sad 9 p.m. news. Those who had escaped the Golden Handshake, as the IMF’s retrenchment scheme was known, enjoyed their stay. It offered escape from all the Daniel Arap Moi policy experiments.
Everything flowed into each other; TV drama, the church, repression, escapism, domestic violence. In a dozen households the fathers were absent. They worked in other towns and never came home. Some fathers turned to alcohol, leaving their sons bitter and unable to connect with them as they grew older.
The other inescapable bit of the neighbourhood was the anxiety and impatient irritations that reigned every last half of the month. Dominated by enquiries about whether ‘‘the payroll had arrived’’, on the week the government released employee payslips; love returned, creased brows relaxed, excitement reigned, and fathers came home with wads of currency notes. One time, at a time like that, some people came with lorries laden with goods and dished out TVs, world space receivers, expensive sofa sets, utensils, stereo cassette players. There was new vocabulary too: Hire Purchase. We all knew everyone in the neighbourhood who had taken what and who had sold what a few weeks later at half the deposit price.
Whenever money was plentiful, even the haste with which I ran to the shops to get this or the other increased. The giddy freedom with which I ran from the tall grevillea trees was unmistakable, going past the line of old croton trees and the jacaranda, their welcome shade always turning into dreadful shadows at night, making it hard for my brother and I to walk home after nightfall.
Yet, one of the unforgivable transgressions on our way to discipline land was the usage of chalk and charcoal on the whitewashed walls. The hand could steal the heart’s deeper yearnings and on the wall, with our unsteady hand express the nascent transgressions of the silence. Maybe a succinct protest could be splashed across a wall. Everywhere else, an inchoate yearning was imposed on walls through sexual symbols and insults. Once, I saw on an imposingly white wall someone had hurriedly written ‘‘I will not write on this wall!’’
In 1997, it rained like it never had. There were pools of water everywhere, and frogs sang in a confused and rhymeless cacophony for months, and water tanks overflowed. Run-off water carved narrow channels along the roads. The undergrowth grew thick and lush and burst into a colourful field of tiny little flowers as if a rainbow had melted above and dropped its colours on the neighbourhood. The landscape was transformed. The underbrush hugged the pathways to the shops. Water pools lay along the road and we navigated with the familiarity of a thousand footsteps so that even without guiding lights, we were aware of where water pools lay. But the pain of being asked to wipe the mud off the adults’ shoes, a recurrent chore, and the impatience in the tone as I was scolded on the slightest whiff of protest in my voice remains etched in my memory.
“What did you say again?”
Yet, the 1997 El-Niño too, with its thick underbrush, the singing frogs and the water pools, a momentary event, gave way to the well familiar and trodden paths. In some inexplicable way, I understood the unspoken truth about the linear path my dream was meant to follow. From the primary school near the quarters, I was supposed to go to a good school at the national or provincial level, from where I was to proceed to a public university and into pensionable employment. This was never articulated. It was understood. One had to know. Otherwise, something was wrong with them.
In this way, we found a rhythmic cadence, became used to the choreographed domesticity where floors were swept then mopped, utensils meticulously washed and stored away and my mother’s colourful crochet patterns adorned the living room. My mother was always weaving new sets of new designs, for our sofa set or as gifts for family and friends. It offered her escape from this domesticity.
Yet, what we had moved into was a hangover from a different kind of highness. Our stay was only meant to be temporary. My parent’s true aspiration was to build their own house. An aspiration captured in how they used words like ‘self-contained’ and ‘permanent house’ to mark the contours of their borrowed desires. This dream, disappointing in its brittle form, was still in formation and hinted at disappointments yet to unfold. As the last year of the 20th century dawned in 1999, we had a comfortable rhythm. The worries of retrenchments and Golden Handshakes when we moved in were forgotten. We were all in school. My father had received a few promotions. I knew what salary arrears meant.
2
In the warm glow of a church service on New Year’s Eve in 1999, we celebrated the turn of the millennium. My mum was amongst the choir of women from our quarters and they sang “Who can say that they have completed the year with their own passions and energy and will? I ask you women, and I ask you men and I ask you young men and you children, who amongst you can say that?” On the TV, the fireworks for the euphoric reception of the 21st century went off for months but the colours were merely hues of black and white. But everywhere the glittering confetti ushering in this millennium was unmissable.
We waited for the millennium’s new promises and possibilities in the condemned house. A way station on my parent’s aspirational highway. The final destination had been impressed upon us through snippets of conversations about how ‘’Even so-and-so had built a bungalow’’, or “Have you seen the maisonette being built on whoever’s farm?”.
A plan had been hatched and the new millennium found pieces of quarry blocks for our planned bungalow accumulating outside the condemned house.
The impression that I got was, even though the house was some kind of retirement preparation, a final destination for my parents’ civil service journey, it would also magically be a salve to all our pains.
I had a mental picture of the planned house, I had seen a version of this glorious fantasy splashed on the glossy pages of the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary. I could picture the house drawings with their terraces, balustrades, bannisters, patios and gardens. I made comparisons between a bungalow and other house types; flats, duplexes, chalets, cabins, country houses and maisonettes.
Granted, there was a serious incentive to leave the staff quarters.
***
The texture of living conditions in such quarters had been fingered in numerous post colonial-novels across the continent as a backdrop cliché of a postcolonial condition; government quarters, staff quarters, reserved government area, servants’ quarters and boys’ quarters. Their generic form of gravel driveways, jacaranda trees and well-tended hedges was a recurring motif. The privileges of those housed in the government quarters were mocked. They drove cars, went to the staff club and their children attended the staff primary school. As for the servants’ quarters, the general attitude was that they were undesirable, as it seemed to poke the genteel sensibilities of the British and later those who took their place. Together with the boys’ quarters, the servants’ quarters were the forte of loud music, barking dogs and cocks crowing, acting as storage for chartel pilfered from the main house, or was a den for illicit sex sneaked in between the neighbour’s maid and the gardener. All of which we are told in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, “The British when they were here would not have stood for it. They had totally and completely ruled out the keeping of domestic animals in their reservation.’’
In his last book, his memoir, There Was A Country, Chinua Achebe reflects on how members of his generation stepped into jobs and houses of the former British quarters. One senses that a regret about how at independence, the order of living was never questioned and was inherited as it was. How the houses were glad “bequest” that “… often came with servants – chauffeurs, maids, cooks, gardeners, stewards – whom the British had organised meticulously to ”ease their colonial sojourn.” Now following the departure of the Europeans, many domestic staff stayed in the same positions and were only too grateful to continue their designated salaried roles in post-independence Nigeria. Their masters were no longer European but their own brothers and sisters.’’
The children of those privileged inheritors of the British quarters were taught, as a matter of class segregation, to avoid certain quarters. For instance, Binyavanga Wainaina, in his memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place, recounts how “Wambui takes us to visit Railway quarters one day. The good thing about Wambui is that she takes us to places our parents or school would not approve of. She has friends there, who live in a row of one-room houses with green doors.… The buildings are very old, some of the oldest in the country outside the coast, as old as the railway, the origin and spine of what we now call Kenya.”
To some extent, these stories captured the joyous early days of post-colonial government housing when the furniture was still new or in good condition, the white painting pristine, windows wood panelled and the taps still had running water. The government staff housing we lived in was a sorry evolution of this colonial and vacated dream. What remained were the hierarchical ideas with wide compounds at the top of the totem tree and cramped spaces for the junior staff. In the past, privilege manifested in the very landscape. In Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, the taxi driver taking his clients to an ‘’upper residential area’’ questions the significance of this name, to which he is answered:
‘’It means a place where people live.’’
The driver made a half turn and gave the man a swift look halfway between laughter and unbelief. Then he chuckled.
‘’What do you mean, people?’’ he asked.
‘’That is what it says. A place where people, human beings, have their houses.’’
‘’But then every area is like that. So what is the use of the name?’’
‘’Man, don’t ask me,’’ laughed the man.
We find the answer to this childlike directness in a subtle and uneasy form.
If there was an upper residential house, there was an unnamed lower one.
In Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes the residential quarters at the University in Nsukka thus: “The street gradually lost its tarred smoothness and its cultivated hedges, and the houses became low and narrow, their front doors so close together that you could stand at one, stretch out, and touch the next door. There was no pretence of hedges here, no pretence of separation or privacy, just low buildings side by side amid a scattering of stunted shrubs and cashew trees. These were the junior-staff quarters, where the secretaries and drivers lived … If they are lucky enough to get it.” In her short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda further observes how “Boys who had grown up watching Sesame Street, reading Enid Blyton, eating cornflakes for breakfast, attending the university staff primary school in smartly polished brown sandals, were now cutting through the mosquito netting of their neighbours’ windows, sliding out glass louvres, and climbing in to steal TVs and VCRs.”
But shadowing these stories were other details: decline, disuse and decay, and its residents’ stymied ambitions. As it turns out, and as the Nssuka boys fell from their parents’ pedestals into the abyss of hopelessness, the sense of safety emanating from privilege was not foolproof. Something clearly wasn’t working in those neighbourhoods. And this internal breakdown was a symptom of a much broader political and social disorder happening not just within the household but across the post-colony.
These books didn’t demonise the government staff housing without a reason. The writers intricately illustrated ideas of dependence, forms of youthful indolence, the ensuing poverty, and the entanglement of the children in petty theft and crime. Even now, similar novels keep dumping villagers into the city and giving them ambitions of owning a big house enclosed by perimeter fences. It keeps illustrating the pains of the cramped living conditions in overcrowded story buildings with shared bathroom facilities. Others made the quarters a place of great and unfinished pain. A resonance existed between the bitter colonial history of work passes and boys’ quarters, intertwining with Kenya’s contemporary government quarters. The servants’ quarters are still there, even where the economic dynamics have long ago made it redundant. They now provide extra income in rent to the owners.
Elsewhere, these discomforts had been turned into reggae hits.
In his song Tenement Yard, Jacob Miller sings of how “Dreadlocks can’t lick him pipe in peace/Too much informers and too much fears/. Of the gossip, he says “too much su su su su su.’’ Of the surveillance and the fear he says “too much watchie watchie watchie”.
***
But we were not inside a book or a song. In the hospital quarters where we lived, we navigated the dicey realm of experimental postcolonial subjects with its diverse pain points. I found no direct links between myself and the characters in all the novels I devoured. They weren’t people I thought about as possibly being my family or neighbours. The school which should have helped me see this wasn’t well equipped, its pet debating subject was rural-urban migration. The topic itself was viewed as the menace beguiling the country, a vice to be avoided. We debated in the school about its effects and were asked which was better: urban life or rural life. We didn’t ask which one ours was.
Even while we developed our own language early in life to draw a binary between our dreams and desired aspirations we had no tools to look at our immediate environments. The city was somewhere one went and came back with a lot of stories. I only made one trip in my teens to Mombasa. From one of those trips to the city, my neighbour Ricky came back with a new walking style, squaring his shoulders and twisting it at an angle. In younger holidays he used to come back with plastic eyeglasses and stories, but this teenage visit had altered something. He didn’t speak much. He was something else.
In my family’s evolving aspirations, we were ready to turn a new chapter. An architect’s drawing for our house had materialised and my Dad often took it out, spread it on our coffee table and examined it. I became familiar with the straight lines of the walls and quarter arcs of the doors.
3
The quarry blocks outside our wooden cabin, the architect’s plan and the general planning gaining momentum turned the dream into a shining jewel. Being tenants in the staff quarters where house allowances, salaries and government policy were discussed meant being lost in a bureaucratic web. My father showed incredible agency to escape. Those quarry blocks conveyed a defiance; a testament to the layered complexities of post-colonial aspirations for a low cadre civil servant in a provincial town. An uncharted territory yet to be explored.
If my own dreams had been long in evolution, they were kick-started as both my parents secured major loans and initiated the construction of a three-bedroom ‘self-contained’, ‘permanent’ concrete block house. The dreams remained within reach as men worked on the foundation floor, as the walls came up, as water was poured morning and evening to “cure” the cement. Then the money ran out before the roof was put on the lintel and the fully erected walls stood as a monument to a long-held dream. The three-bedroom house, less than a bungalow, and the construction site feel of it, like a battleground, no longer held any immediate redemption. It confirmed our extended sojourn in the staff quarters. For my father, the dream of his family house lay somewhere else, suspended between the slow monthly progress and the loan awaiting to be serviced.
Was this progress for my father?
On my grandfather’s farm, his father, there had been eight traditional huts, occupied by relatives. With education, new tastes had emerged and as early as the 1960s the huts were pulled down and a one-bedroom iron sheet house built. My father was setting his bar higher. Like his siblings, my father was part of a transitional generation. His education took him from his farming father who easily blended farmwork, catechist roles and elementary school teaching duties seamlessly and still proudly owned his traditional huts and was unsophisticated enough to appear in pictures donned in suits even on bare feet. I recognize there was another kind of being, there was freedom in that way of being, free dreams in mud walled houses like the hardworking women who came from all the villages around the town and disappeared into the belly of the vast forest and returned in the evening with a heap of well-arranged firewood on their backs, the harnessing ropes cutting into their shoulders. They all went back to mud-walled houses of their own. But what did that mean for the educated. For the working.
There was something about this dream, conceived in provincial Marsabit by my parents on their volition, found in that Trinidadian tragedy in V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas. Similar Biswasy theatrics were manifest in Marsabit. We find Mr Biswas ill but reeling from the realisation of his lifelong quest; “…he was struck again and again by the wonder of being in his own house, the audacity of it: to walk in through his own front gate, to bar entry to whoever he wished, to close his doors and windows every night, to hear no noises except those of his family, to wander freely from room to room and about his yard, instead of being condemned, as before, to retire the moment he got home….”. Follow the possessive pronouns. “And now at the end, he found himself in his own house, on his own half-lot of land, his own portion of the earth. That he should have been responsible for this seemed to him, in these last months, stupendous.”
For my parents, who weren’t psychologically prepared, the attempt at having their own house on their own half-lot of land, their own portion of the earth wasn’t triumphant. It was stained by its tense emotional residue and the incomplete house bore witness to my parents aspirations and for a few months after construction stopped, a tension lurked in the wake of this unrealized dream. Many years later, I gave my father a tattered copy of A House for Mr. Biswas, two years before his retirement to the three-bedroom house. He read the book with fascination, but I cannot recall his specific thoughts on it. He had been a reader of many books. He must have appreciated Mr. Biswas’s entrapment. Whether he drew parallels between his own life, those of his friends and that piteous Mr Biswas I can’t say.
He waited for the storm of that 2002 blunder out, completed his house and retired to his own house.
***
Amidst all of this, Kenya itself had gone through its loan-filled blunders. In high school, I encountered a couple like my parents in my high school literature class as we poured over Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye’s Coming to Birth, an ode to the birth of Kenyan dreams. For my parents, 2002 was a major blunder as they struggled with their unrealized dream, Kenya itself going through an uneasy birth. President Daniel Arap Moi was retiring after twenty-four years in power. The country unfurled in hope.
In our house, sleepless nights, silences and sighs reigned. Payslip’s arrival didn’t carry the old hope. The old happy salary routine was replaced by a haunting echo of loan repayments. When it arrived, the salary, on which my parent’s emotional stability rested, could no longer carry the weight of the family. As Kenya cast its votes. As the country echoed Gidi Gidi Maji Majis Unbwogable. As I rapped along to E-sir’s songs. A knot tightened somewhere. On election day. As people sang “yote yawezekana bila Moi”. The illusory ease fell and my parents’ marriage, a collateral for the dream of a house, failed and their sad separation twinned with Kenya’s new hope. A family and a country, each on a turning point in their individual and collective journeys.
4
Many years after moving out of the wooden cabin by the edge of the forest, many years after everything in Kenya had moved upwards and each of my parents lived in their own three bedroom houses, I visited the hospital staff quarters in the old neighbourhood. Prior to my visit, I did an aerial scan of the entire neighbourhood on Google Maps. Everything was reduced in size. Upclose, I was welcomed by cliché government progress; grand new gates, perhaps too grand for the status of the quarters. As I walked through, the orderliness I saw from Google’s perspective had masked the on-the-ground decay. The place had aged. The new occupants had built iron sheet appendages to some of the main houses.
The old layout remained, the same brick walls, glass doors, and asbestos roofs. Now, they were older, the former pristine whitewashed walls now unkempt, the roofs rusty, with the new iron sheet appendages, more than anything, being the defiant show of a country’s old ambition. The trees, mute witnesses to the silent collective struggles below them, looked older and wiser. It was hard to be nostalgic about something so familiar yet so remote. As I walked about the quarters, I remembered the people who had, through these houses, lived a life on the periphery of a system of patronage, tugging at the seams, nibbling endlessly at its edges until retirement came and took them out.
In the prison quarters, I went in search of the house Ben and his beautiful sisters lived in. The place had been altered; new concrete block houses had come up, there were iron sheet structures, the houses squeezed tightly together. Ben’s house, part of the old colonial houses, stood out with their white washed paint. Each bore the affliction of time. I stood at a corner and wondered what psychological damages were induced by these claustrophobic rooms.
Outside the quarters, the transformation of the villages was more dramatic. Bungalows and maisonettes had sprouted. Fuelled by fantasy rather than necessity, most were out of scale with the compound sizes. Old fruit trees were now replaced by exotic trees. Concrete fences replaced Euphorbia hedges. Fluid and organic villages were gentrified, farms morphed into uniform rectilinear plots. Looking at the neighbourhood with the eyes of someone who had seen houses with ante rooms, spacious parlours, unused dining rooms, ensuite office spaces, patios; the staff quarters looked quaint, like a place that had been left behind by time.
At the police line it was even sadder seeing the stoicism of the officers watching as their provisional tent and iron sheet arrangements became permanent. As I walked in the AP camp, I saw the canteen where patrons were drunk by 10 a.m. Roads worked as soccer fields for the children.
In my old neighbourhood, all that past was still present.
The fancy pathways of our childhood were now broken debris. It was indicative of the remaining order of control, a stark reminder that even the benefits of the new Kenyan affluence, fuelled by Euro bonds and IMF loans will never uplift this forgotten corner. The houses looked impersonal as always, nothing about them even remotely hinted at the inhabitants’ personalities. The only attempts in the 1990s were the accessorization of walls with newspaper pinups for boys’ bedrooms, or the kitsch art of dogs by billiard tables or cheap wall tapestry with muscular horses in full gallop, corporate calendars, the sacred heart of Jesus enthroned with thorns. They were now quaint in this age of shiny Chinese decor where MDF board cabinets or gypsum ceilings were the desired form.
The condemned houses still stood defiant, beneath the tall Grevillea Robusta and the tallest jacaranda trees. The rusting of the roofs, that had been a mere hint when we were here, was now complete. New paint sought to conceal the decaying wood. I stood there, took a few pictures and remembered how carefree we had been. Now I saw how trapped we had been in this crumbling wooden cabin. How had a house that had even by the late 1990s been declared as condemned still there in 2024? Maybe it wasn’t the house that was condemned.
In 1968, Ayi Kwei Armah had been pessimistic about such a place. Saying what has been going on and “was going on now and would go on and on through all the years ahead was a species of war carried on in the silence of long ages, a struggle in which only the keen, uncanny eyes and ears of lunatic seers could detect the deceiving, easy breathing of the strugglers. The wood underneath would win and win till the end of time. Of that there was no doubt possible, only the pain of hope perennially doomed to disappointment.” Did Bob Marley, who had captured the memory and the pains of the government yard in Trenchtown in his iconic No Woman, No Cry, visit his old home and let the surge of feelings write itself into music? “Said Said, Said I remember when we used to sit in the government yard in trenchtown town/ oba Observing the hypocrites/Yeah as they mingle with the good people we meet yeah/.
5
One memory came to me as I walked in that neighbourhood as a man. After sitting for my Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) exams in standard eight and having the results released, one of the boys in the next wooden cabin had curled up in a foetal position and cried so badly for scoring marks that couldn’t take him to a reputable national school, away from the squalid living quarters and eventually lead him to a secure future in a big house and big car in Nairobi or someplace similar.
We stood by and watched him as he lay on the upper bed of the double-decker, wondering why he was beating himself up so hard, saddened by his dramatic show of emotion which had now sucked all festivity out of his home, rendering obsolete the chicken his mother had prepared in anticipation of good grades. The boy’s seeming failure wasn’t ours, but there we were, being collectively subjected to one of the scariest experiences we all dreaded, that of getting the sorts of grades the neighbourhood had always warned against. It was the first case we’d witnessed of a child falling through the cracks of the neoliberal order taking root.
About seven of us from the government quarters had sat for the exam that year.
One of us, Davido, had aced everything. Two or more boys were made to resit the exam the following year since their parents weren’t satisfied with their grades, and this made it apparent that our crying friend’s tears followed the staff quarter logic; a haven for social experiments where parents measured their own and their children’s progress against their neighbour’s. You were either a bad example to be avoided or a model to be emulated.
Good home training was seen as an ethic, manifest in the muted disapproval or the public thrashing for minor infractions. But all this was useless if it didn’t lead to a good grade. Our crying friend’s mother stood by, with a creased brow, as we consoled her son. Our other friend Innocent, who had scored way less marks than the crying boy, was nonchalant. We used his positivity as consolation for our crying friend. Where did our crying friend acquire this open self-expression, and why and how had he made this a personal loss?
For eight years, we had used either the anxiety-filled quick raps of the prison bell or the leisurely and reassuring church bell that rang through the town as markers of our early morning school routine. All the good things our working-class parents accorded us; extra evening tuition, textbooks, even the public caning and an insistence on discipline had all come down to this one moment. Be that as it may, my own celebration gave my now separated parents mixed feelings; elated that I had passed my exams, anxious that this meant an even messier financial situation considering the immodest bill that is high school fees.
The neighbourhood and our parents’ place in it were meant to give us a head start. But in that one moment of reckoning, our friend saw himself as a failure. He hadn’t failed in his grades. He had failed to meet a private and constructed expectation. Our neighbourhood was an enclave that guaranteed safety in a direct physical sense. Gates, security personnel, sonorous sirens; sirens which sounded when a fire gutted an office block or when a prisoner escaped, never inspiring confidence but terrible fear.
As we stood around our friend, no stern uncles showed up, no cousins came. We were his only social protection; competitors in Kenya’s 8-4-4 curriculum, competitors in a new Kenyan dream, boys who were glad that it wasn’t them curled up, crying. Here was a hint of the danger with humiliating inconsistencies dished out on a Kenyan platter, signalled by these hidden tears. No sirens sounded.
We went our separate ways for high school.
Our crying friend repeated the year in primary school. He sat the exam, outdid himself, and was admitted to a reputable national school. Two years later, he complained that the school was too competitive and he wasn’t outshining enough of his classmates. Another transfer, steps down the ladder of progress, another year repeated. When he completed high school, our friend had converted from Christianity to Islam. His grades were dismal. Intimations of future entrapment had started to manifest. He later moved from one small college to another. More confusion in his choices, choice of colleges varied, his courses varied; first law, then commerce, finally community development. Our other friend D hovered longer in his twenties and got his degree finally when he was almost 30. The police and disciplined forces harvested some of the other boys.
Even as some moved out of their parents’ loan-constructed houses, fifteen years after that exam, a second movement – first out of the government quarters and now out of their parents’ houses – our crying friend still resided with his mother in the government quarters. His family had since moved from the wooden cabin to a concrete-built house with the asbestos roof, one rung up the staff quarters’ ladder. As I moved from one house to the other, I remembered my friend Innocent, we had been inseparable. I now didn’t know what he was up to. He had refused to join the Kenya Prisons Service and hadn’t joined anything formal. He was a dozer operator once, a pump attendant another time, and ran a small bakery business in his father’s village later. He had married and had a child.
I have heard children who grew up in government houses, military barracks, police lines, prison housing systems calling themselves watoto wa kambi, and I know why. They didn’t know how to behave outside a regulated environment. The world, outside, was rough, fluid and didn’t care about boundaries. Their entitlement had been ascribed within a constructed reality. I have watched friends, who in another life had been polymaths who fired off government programming acronyms with such rapid mastery, graduate into indolent cynics. They would sink into nostalgic reminiscences of the old neighbourhood despite being aware of the existential shiftiness of the ground below their feet.
As I stood in front of my formerly crying friend’s house in my old neighbourhood and called out his name, I took stock of where each one of us had gone; there was a dozer operator, an engineer, a prison officer who had been sacked for avoidable misdeeds – now he was a boda boda operator and sometimes the betting king back in his father’s village. There was a military man, a doctor, a teacher, a carpenter, an accountant, a few drivers and a few other general factotums for those who hadn’t completed school. We were better educated, even better paid in our uncertain employment arrangements, but we were, on average, both better off and worse off than our parents.
***
It was my uncle’s old orange John Deere farm tractor that moved us into the wooden cabin, but I have no idea how eighteen years later, we moved out of the stone house my mother had since moved into within the quarters. All I remember was that it was a hurried exit, at the behest of the new hospital authorities. My brother had built a house for my mother with proceeds from military deployment in Somalia. Some other senior officer in the hospital had wanted the house my mother occupied, but my mum had a coup de grace up her sleeve. As we moved out, my mother made my cousin’s takeover and our exit a blur. But maybe there was no moving out of that neighbourhood, the belief systems will always remain in us in some form or other. My only recurring nightmare always featured the wooden cabin by the edge of the forest. Some nights, always at night as I returned to the house, I saw a pride of lions in front of the house. Sometimes we are standing at the window watching the lions circling the house and I realise with utter horror that the door had not been locked.
And as I stood in front of my friend’s house calling to him in their new house. And as I wrote down these thoughts I wondered if his tears were for himself or his single mother. The scorn of a son whose father was elsewhere with another family.
Time and age make me think of how the confusion of transition was a tight noose around the neck of a man like my father. The clash of the transformative potential of choice and actions and the trap of routine and simple comfort could not be reconciled. One day, out of the frustrating realisation of the entrapment of small-town ambitions, I had asked him over lunch, “How have you survived here for all these years without running mad?” He looked at me with a surprised look, as if he wondered where I had drawn the courage or the stupidity to ask such an impetuous question. He then spoke about choice and choicelessness. About how some chose to stay and those who had the option of leaving, left. He was vague about his own choice, that is if he had a choice at all.
