Fighter

When my father was a child, his mother, my Koko fought with the local rainmaker. The rainmaker had planted himself on her land and demanded pay for bringing the rain that would help her crops grow. Koko did not think this man had the power to call the rain or to protect the yet to be planted and yet to be harvested crop from damage caused by hailstones. Koko refused to pay and when the rainmaker refused to uproot himself from the front of her hut she used her fists.  Koko fought with him and she won. The bruised rainmaker cursed Koko but people say she refused to be cursed.    

Koko went on with her life. The rainmaker died long before Koko. I heard this story for the first time at Koko’s funeral. We estimated that she was in her late nineties, not yet one hundred years old. She had told us often that she remembered the time before the first world war.  She had lived for over twenty years after the cervical cancer diagnosis had given her less than a year to live.  She refused to die.

My grandfather, Kuka often ridiculed Koko because she could not read or write and did not know what year she was born. Koko was devastated when her only daughter died so young. She told me about her, “She was your age when she died.” I was never sure about how old this aunt had been.  Koko told me about her when I was ten, when I was thirteen, when I was eighteen. Kuka worried about where he would get a dowry for all his sons to marry since his only daughter had died and Koko had refused to give birth to daughters.

Koko fought to keep her eight sons in school. She once got into trouble for selling a cow without Kuka’s permission. She would tell us often that on the day she was summoned by the council of elders she put on her prettiest dress, a mini dress. She combed her hair and oiled it with coconut oil so that it would shine in the sun as she walked to the baraza. She said that as she walked to the meeting and people stopped to stare at her. When she got there she held her hands akimbo and asked what the elders wanted. She never told us what the outcome was but all her sons went to school.

On the day before we buried Koko the whole community gathered to share their memories about her. Neighbours, my uncles’ and father’s age mates, talked about how she had made it her business to catch truants and discipline them for skipping school.  At the burial we stood around her grave – husband, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, grand children, great- grand children. All of us sobbing, wailing and crying until we had no tears left inside to shed and then dancing sukuti and then laughing and then drinking tea, and then it rained as it often does in the afternoons in Ilala.

Weaving alongside Kuumira, Hearth Mother and Akitelek Mboya

Samahani Wanangu

Noise

There were two of us at the bus stop. 

Two women sharing a bench; two women sitting as far as possible from each other on the same wooden bench. A third lady joined us at the bus stop but she did not join us on the bench. She had earphones and was concentrating on the cell phone in her hand.  She stood with her back to us and started talking on the phone. She did not say hello to the person on the other end of the line. At least we had something to listen to instead of the strange silence on the cold bench.

She’d been talking for about five minutes when the bus arrived earlier than the expected arrival time. We got into the bus to wait for ten minutes until the scheduled departure time. Passengers trickled in. The lady on the cell phone sat within hearing distance from me so I could continue to pretend not to be listening to everything she was saying.

The person on the other end of the line was a man. I figured out that he had been dishonest, that he had been ignoring her calls and that she was convinced that he was cheating on her with another woman. She was outwardly calm, as if she was talking about the taste of plain noodles, flat.  If I had to say what she was saying, if I had that much rage inside me then I would be standing, my voice would be very loud and my hands would be flying in different directions.  She was contained.

The bus left, she paused to let him talk and then lashed out again with more accusations. She called him lazy, stupid, a waste of time, a loser... At some point he must have told her to stop calling him names and that’s when she said, “I can call you anything I want to call you.”  

The bus got to my stop before that conversation ended.

It’s three weeks later and I try to imagine how that fight ended. Did they reconcile, did she take back her words or did he take back his? What if she was wrong? What if she was right?

I need to get an mp3 player and headphones.