Dreams from My Father (Adapted for Young Adults) Read online

  I hadn’t met many Masai people in Nairobi, although I’d read a lot about them. I knew that early in the 1900s the British had broken treaties with them, evicted them from their lands, and moved them onto reservations. At the same time, their connection to the land and fierceness in war had earned them a certain respect from the British, and so in Western minds they had become noble and romantic figures, like the Cherokee or Apache in the United States.

  Two hours later, we drove through the gate leading into the preserve. And there, on the other side of a rise, I saw as beautiful a land as I’d ever seen. It swept out forever, flat plains rolling into gentle hills, supple as a lion’s back, creased by forests and dotted with thorn trees. To our left, a huge herd of zebra harvested the wheat-colored grass; to our right, a troop of gazelle leaped into bush. And in the center, thousands of wildebeest, with mournful heads and humped shoulders that seemed too much for their delicate-looking legs to carry.

  Francis began to inch the van through the herd, and the animals parted before us, then merged in our wake like a school of fish, their hoofs beating against the earth like a wave against the shore.

  I looked over at Auma. She had her arm around Elizabeth, and the two of them were wearing the same wordless smile.

  We set up camp above the banks of a winding brown stream, beneath a big fig tree filled with noisy blue starlings. As we sat down to eat Rafael’s stew, Francis told us a bit about himself. He had a wife and six children living on his homestead in Kikuyuland. They tended coffee and corn, and on his days off, he did the heavier work of hoeing and planting. He enjoyed his work with the travel agency but disliked being away from his family.

  “If I could, I might prefer farming full-time,” he said, “but the KCU makes it impossible.”

  “What’s the KCU?” I asked.

  “The Kenyan Coffee Union. They are thieves. They control what we can plant and when we can plant it. I can only sell my coffee to them, and they sell it overseas. I know they get one hundred times what they pay to me.” Francis shook his head with disgust. “It’s a terrible thing when the government steals from its own people.”

  “You speak very freely,” Auma said.

  Francis shrugged. “If more people spoke up, perhaps things might change.”

  He looked into the fire, combing his mustache with his fingers. “I suppose it is not only the government’s fault,” he said after a while. “Even when things are done properly, we Kenyans don’t like to pay taxes. We don’t trust the idea of giving our money to someone. The poor man, he has good reason for this suspicion. But the big men who own the trucks that use the roads, they also refuse to pay their share and give up some of their profits.”

  I tossed a stick into the fire. “Attitudes aren’t so different in America,” I said.

  “You are probably right,” he replied. “But a rich country like America can afford to be stupid.”

  At that moment, two Masai men approached the fire. Francis welcomed them and explained to us that they would provide security during the night.

  They were quiet, handsome men, their spears stuck into the ground before them. They cast long shadows. One of them, who said his name was Wilson, spoke Swahili, and he told us that he lived in a boma, or camp, a few miles to the east. Auma asked if the camp had ever been attacked by animals. Wilson grinned.

  “Nothing serious,” he said. “But if you have to go to the bathroom at night, you should call one of us to go with you.”

  I drifted away from the fire to look at the stars. It had been years since I’d seen them like this; away from the lights of the city, they were thick and round and bright as jewels. I noticed a patch of haze in the otherwise clear sky.

  “I believe that’s the Milky Way,” Mr. Wilkerson said.

  He held up his hand and traced out the constellations for me. He was a slight, soft-spoken man with round glasses. At first I had assumed that he spent his life indoors, that he was an accountant or professor. But as the day passed, I noticed that he had all sorts of practical knowledge, the kinds of things I had never got around to knowing but wished that I had. He had his tent up before I drove in my first stake, and he knew the name of every bird and every tree we saw.

  I wasn’t surprised, then, when he told me that he had spent his childhood in Kenya, on a tea plantation. He didn’t want to talk much about the past; he said only that his family had sold the land after Kenyans had won independence and had moved back to England, where he had gone to medical school. After a few years, he had convinced his wife, a psychiatrist, to return with him to Africa. They had decided not to live in Kenya, where there was a surplus of doctors, and instead settled in Malawi, where they both had worked for the government for the past five years.

  “I oversee eight doctors for an area of half a million people,” he told me. “We never have enough supplies. So we can only focus on the basics, which in Africa is really what’s needed anyway. People die from all sorts of preventable disease—even chicken pox.” He told me how he spent many of his days—digging wells, training workers to inoculate children, giving out condoms to prevent AIDS.

  I asked him why he had come back to Africa.

  “It’s my home, I suppose. The people, the land…” He took off his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief. “It’s funny. Once you’ve lived here for a time, the life in England seems terribly cramped. The British have so much more, but seem to enjoy things less. I felt like a foreigner there.”

  He turned toward the campfire, and his voice began to waver. “Perhaps I can never call this place home,” he said. “My own people were responsible for too much injustice. The sins of the fathers…I’ve learned to accept that.” He paused for a moment, then looked at me.

  “I do love this place, though,” he said before walking back to his tent.

  * * *

  —

  DAWN. TO THE east, the sky lightens above a black grove of trees, first deep blue, then orange, then creamy yellow. The clouds lose their purple tint slowly, then disappear, leaving behind a single star. As we pull out of camp, we see a caravan of giraffe, their long necks like strange markings against an ancient sky.

  It was like that for the rest of the day. I felt as if I were seeing through a child’s eyes, the world a pop-up book. A pride of lions, yawning in the grass. Buffalo in the marshes, their horns like funny wigs, tick birds on their mud-crusted backs. Hippos in the shallow riverbeds, their pink eyes and nostrils like marbles bobbing on the water.

  And most of all I noticed the stillness. At twilight, we stumbled on a tribe of hyenas feeding on the carcass of a wildebeest. In the dying orange light they looked like demon dogs, their eyes like clumps of black coal, their chins dripping with blood. Beside them, a row of vultures waited with stern, patient gazes, hopping away like hunchbacks whenever one of the hyenas got too close. It was a savage scene, and we stayed there for a long time, watching life feed on itself, the silence interrupted only by the crack of bone or the rush of wind, or the hard thump of a vulture’s wings.

  And I thought: This is what Creation looked like. The same stillness, the same crunching of bone. There in the dusk, over that hill, I imagined the first human stepping forward, naked and rough-skinned, clumsily grasping a chunk of flint, not yet having any words for the feelings of fear and awe evoked by the sight of the vast sky. If only all of us could remember that first common step, that first common word—that time before the Biblical tower of Babel, when humans splintered apart—and be whole again.

  That night, after dinner, we spoke more with our Masai guardsmen. Wilson was part of a class of young warriors known as moran, who had each killed a lion to prove their manhood and had participated in many cattle raids. But he’d decided that being a moran was a waste of time. He had gone to Nairobi in search of work, but he had little schooling and had ended up as a security guard at a bank. The boredom drove him crazy,
and eventually he had returned to the valley to marry and tend cattle. Recently one of his cattle had been killed by a lion, and he and four others had hunted the lion into the preserve, even though that was now illegal.

  “How do you kill a lion?” I asked.

  “Five men surround it and throw their spears,” Wilson said. “The lion will choose one man to pounce on. That man, he curls under his shield while the other four finish the job.”

  “It sounds dangerous.”

  Wilson shrugged. “Usually there are only scratches. But sometimes only four men will come back.”

  He didn’t sound like he was boasting—more like a mechanic trying to explain a difficult repair.

  Maybe it was that casualness that caused Auma to ask him where the Masai thought people went after they died. At first, Wilson didn’t seem to understand the question, but eventually he smiled and began shaking his head.

  “This is not a Masai belief, this life after you die,” he said, almost laughing. “After you die, you are nothing. You return to the soil. That is all.”

  For some time, Francis had been reading a small, red-bound Bible, and Auma asked if he’d been raised a Christian.

  Francis nodded. “My parents converted to Christianity before I was born.”

  Mauro spoke, staring into the fire. “Me, I leave the Church. Too many rules. Don’t you think, Francis, that Christianity is not so good? It is a white religion, no?”

  Francis placed the Bible in his lap. “Such things troubled me when I was young. But the many mistakes the missionaries made were their own, not God’s. And even then, they fed people when there was a drought. Some taught children to read. In this, I believe they were doing God’s work. All we can do is aspire to live like God, though we will always fall short.”

  Francis returned to his Bible. Beside him, Auma read a story with Elizabeth. Dr. Wilkerson sat with his knees together, mending his pants while his wife stared at the fire. I looked at the Masai and wondered what they thought of us. Their courage, their hardness, made me question my own noisy spirit. And yet, as I looked around, I saw a courage I admired just as much in Francis, and in Auma, and in the Wilkersons. Maybe it was that kind of courage that Africa most desperately needed, the courage of honest, decent people with realistic ambitions, and the determination to see those ambitions through.

  The fire began to die, and one by one the others made their way to bed, until only Francis and I and the Masai remained. As I stood up, Francis began to sing a deep-voiced hymn in Kikuyu, with a melody that I vaguely recognized. I listened a while, lost in my own thoughts. Walking back to my tent, I felt I understood Francis’s sorrowful song, imagining it rising upward, through the clear black night, directly to God.

  CHAPTER 17

  At five-thirty in the evening, our train rumbled out of the old Nairobi station heading west, toward the village where many of my grandfather’s family still lived—including the last of his wives who was still alive, “Granny.” My stepmother Kezia, my Great-Aunt Zeituni, and my half sister Auma were in one compartment; my half brothers Roy and Bernard and I in another. While everyone stored their suitcases, I jiggled open a window and looked out at the curve of the tracks behind us.

  The railway had been the single largest engineering effort in the history of the British Empire at the time it was built—six hundred miles long, from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean to the eastern shores of Lake Victoria. The project began in 1895, the year my grandfather was born, took five years to complete, and cost the lives of several hundred Indian workers. I tried to imagine a Kenyan watching this snake of steel and black smoke passing his village for the first time. Did he look at the train with envy, imagining himself one day sitting in the car where the Englishman sat? Or did he shudder with visions of ruin and war?

  “How long will it take to get to Home Square?” I asked.

  “All night to Kisumu,” Auma said. “We’ll take a bus or matatu from there—another five hours, maybe.”

  “By the way,” Roy said to me, “it’s not Home Square. It’s Home Squared.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s something the kids in Nairobi used to say,” Auma explained. “There’s your ordinary house in Nairobi. And then there’s your house in the country, where your people come from: your ancestral home. Even the biggest minister or businessman thinks this way. He may have a mansion in Nairobi and only a small hut in the country. But if you ask him where he is from, he will tell you that hut is his true home. So, when we were at school and wanted to tell somebody we were going to Alego, it was home twice over. Home Squared.”

  “For you, Barack,” said Roy, “we can call it Home Cubed.”

  Auma smiled and leaned back in her seat, listening to the rhythm of the train. “This train brings back so many memories. You remember, Roy, how much we used to look forward to going home? It is so beautiful, Barack! Not at all like Nairobi. And Granny—she’s so much fun! Oh, you will like her, Barack. She has such a good sense of humor.”

  “She had to have a good sense of humor,” Roy said, “living with the Terror for so long.”

  “Who’s the Terror?”

  Auma said, “That’s what we used to call our grandfather. Because he was so mean.”

  Roy laughed. “Wow, that guy was mean! He would make you sit at the table for dinner, and he’d serve the food on china, like an Englishman. If you said one wrong thing, or used the wrong fork—pow! He would hit you with his stick. Sometimes when he hit you, you wouldn’t even know why until the next day.”

  Zeituni wasn’t impressed by Roy’s tales. “Ah, you children knew him only when he was old and weak. When he was younger, aay! I was his favorite, you know. But still, if I did something wrong, I would hide from him all day, I would be so scared! He was strict even with his guests. If they came to his house, he would kill many chickens in their honor. But if they broke custom, like washing their hands before someone who was older, he would have no hesitation in hitting them, even the adults.”

  “Doesn’t sound like he was real popular,” I said.

  Zeituni shook her head. “Actually, he was well respected because he was such a good farmer. His compound in Alego was one of the biggest in the area. He could make anything grow. He had studied these techniques from the British when he worked for them as a cook.”

  “I didn’t know he was a cook.”

  “He had his lands, but for a long time he was a cook for white men in Nairobi. He worked for some very important people. During the World War he served a captain in the British army.”

  “Maybe that’s what made him so mean,” said Roy, now drinking his second beer.

  “I don’t know,” Zeituni said. “I think my father was always that way. Very strict. But fair. One day, when I was a young girl, a man came to the edge of our compound with a goat on a leash. He wanted to pass through our land, because he lived on the other side, and he didn’t want to walk around. So your grandfather told this man, ‘When you are alone, you are always free to pass through my land. But today you cannot pass, because your goat will eat my plants.’ Well, this man would not listen. He argued for a long time with your grandfather, saying that he would be careful and that the goat would do no harm. Finally, your grandfather called me over and told me to bring his machete. He had two that he kept very, very sharp. He would rub them on a stone all day. And now your grandfather tells this man, ‘I will make a bargain with you. You can pass with your goat. But if even one leaf is harmed—if even one half of one leaf of my plants is harmed—then I will cut down your goat.’

  “Well, even though I was very young at the time, I knew that this man must be stupid, because he accepted my father’s offer. We began to walk, the man and his goat in front, me and the old man following closely behind. We had walked maybe twenty steps when the goat stuck out its neck and started nibbling at a leaf. Then—Whoosh! My dad cu
t one side of the goat’s head clean through. The goat owner was shocked, and started to cry out. ‘Aaiieey! Aaiieey! What have you done now, Hussein Onyango?’ And your grandfather just wiped off his machete and said, ‘If I say I will do something, I must do it. Otherwise how will people know that my word is true?’ ”

  Auma shook her head. “Can you imagine, Barack?” she said. “I swear, sometimes I think that the problems in this family all started with him. He is the only person whose opinion I think the Old Man really worried about. The only person he feared.”

  That night I stayed up late, thinking about our grandfather. It had all started with him, Auma had said. If I could just piece together his story, then maybe everything else would fall into place.

  * * *

  —

  WE ARRIVED IN Kisumu at daybreak and walked the half mile to the bus depot. It was crowded with buses and matatus honking and jockeying for space. Auma boarded a sad-looking vehicle with cracked tires, then stepped back out, looking morose.

  “There are no seats,” she said.

  “Don’t worry,” Roy said as our bags were hoisted up by a series of hands to the roof of the bus. “This is Africa, Auma…not Europe.” He turned and smiled down at the young man who was collecting fares. “You can find us some seats, eh, brother?”