By Mwangi Mahugu
There are places in this city that time refuses to leave. Majengo is one of them.
It was around ten in the morning. Our matatu — a forward-traveller FH lorry converted into a bus — was grinding through traffic that moved in fits and starts, advancing a few metres and then freezing, as if the road itself kept changing its mind. On both sides of the street, black soot clung to the walls of kiosks like old bruises. Young men crouched beside small patches of smoke, machetes in their hands, preparing goats' heads balanced on top of jikos. The smell of charred bone and morning and diesel mixed in the air. Nairobi, in other words. Nairobi as it has always been.
The driver was watching all of it through the windscreen with the soft eyes of a man revisiting something he once knew well.
“This place is part of my youth,” he said. “We used to come here in the early eighties with only five shillings. Five shillings! Nowadays I don’t even know how much it costs.”
I looked out at the narrow alleys, at the rusted iron sheets and the washing lines and the unchanged geometry of the place, and I said what I was thinking.
“You want to tell me not a single person here has saved enough to build a storey mansion? Since I was young the buildings have looked exactly the same.”
The driver nodded slowly, the way men nod when they are about to tell you something they have been carrying for a long time.
“These women have been in these alleys for so many years,” he said. “You used to enter here and find them outside their small rooms, all in a straight line, like a military parade. A man would walk past and feel the pull — the passion, as we used to call it — and he’d pick his ripe passion fruit. In a few minutes he’d find himself inside a dim room and the world outside would cease to exist.”
The van bounced hard over a pothole. From the body of the bus behind us came a sound like a basketball dropped on a hard floor — the passengers absorbing the road.
* * *
The driver cleared his throat.
“I was told about a young man called Kariuki,” he began, and I knew from his tone that this was the real story, the one he had been warming up to. “This was in the early eighties. Kariuki had just received his first salary from his first job in Industrial Area. First pay. A young man with money in his pocket for the first time in his life. You know how that feels. He came to Majengo.”
I knew how that felt. I said nothing.
“He passed the usual parade, made his choice, and the woman took him into a dimly lit room. ‘Money first,’ she said. He paid. She blew out the candle — it was sitting on top of a metal clothes box — and the room went dark. Kariuki was sure he heard the door open and close somewhere in the darkness, but the adrenaline had him, the lust had him, and he jumped to the bed. After the quick session, he was feeling very good about himself, straightening up, ready to dress, when someone knocked at the door.”
The van went quiet. Even the engine seemed to lower its voice.
“He froze. A flashlight cut through the holes in the rusty corrugated iron sheets — those thin blades of light you get in a shanty room, like sunrays during the day — and it illuminated the face of the woman lying on the bed. Kariuki’s heart stopped. He was lying next to a grandmother. Not the young woman he had chosen ten minutes ago.”
I glanced at the girl sitting next to me. She was staring straight ahead, her face completely still.
“In a whisper Kariuki asked, ‘Who is knocking?’
“The old woman whispered back, ‘It is the owner of the house, young man.’
“Kariuki nearly dissolved. ‘My God. Now what is this?’
“The old woman hissed, ‘Better call your devil. You have brought me bad luck. That man pays my rent.’”
From outside the door came three heavy blows.
“Bang. Bang. Bang. ‘Fatuma! Fungua mlango!’”
The driver laughed quietly to himself at the memory of the telling.
“Kariuki dressed in the dark with both legs going into one side of the trousers. He could barely stand. A thin sweat covered his body. He was still fixing himself when the door flew open — kicked in by the man outside — and the door hit Kariuki directly in the groin. He screamed. Then came the rain: kicks, fists, the full menu.”
“‘Young man! What the hell are you doing with my wife?’
“Fatuma lit the candle. And Kariuki saw the man’s face — knife cuts all over it, a face that had survived things Kariuki had no experience of whatsoever. To make the story short: Kariuki lost his entire first salary as compensation for adultery. Every shilling of it. Gone.”
The driver paused.
“After that story, my friend, I have never entered Majengo. It is now twenty-seven years. And I can tell you — this place has not changed one bit.”
He finished. The van hit another pothole. I looked at the girl beside me and we both laughed — properly, from the stomach. Then I asked the driver, very carefully, whether his name happened to be Kariuki.
He laughed louder than both of us and said a very firm no.
* * *
That’s what we call night.
It was broad daylight outside — a full, generous Nairobi sun, the kind that gave this city its name, the City in the Sun. The sky was that particular blue, clear and deep, the blue you get when the air is clean and the altitude is high and the morning has not yet been spent. Around eleven o’clock. But inside the van, the driver’s story had brought its own weather — shades of darkness, the temperature of a different kind of experience. Hell, I believe, is not a place. It is a situation. There are staircases that lead you down, and once you are down there, your game is down. I am not a preacher. I am a storyteller. But I know the difference between day and night, even when the sun is fully out.
I am not a preacher. I am a storyteller. But I know the difference between day and night even when the sun is fully out.
* * *
We were passing near Machakos Bus Station.
My people used to call it Marshako. Old Nairobi, the Nairobi of childhood, the Nairobi that exists now only in the body’s memory. This part of the city was overrun with revellers rushing to board buses heading upcountry — the great Friday migration, the weekly return to somewhere that still felt like home. The pavements were thick with bodies and cartons and noise.
Suddenly the lorry-bus pulled aside and stopped. I looked through the side mirror. Passengers were already jumping down.
The driver explained without being asked.
“This is our last stop. We are not entering town. The city council inspectors are waiting for us in there. Last trip they made us drop everyone at the Salvation Army Church zebra crossing. I am not walking into that trap again. Alight here and move quickly — traffic police will be here soon.”
The girl next to me opened the door and stepped down. I followed.
And then Marshako took me.
Not the present version of it — the man I am now, walking through with my bag and my years. The other version. The one I had not visited in a long time.
* * *
I was ten years old.
Our grandmother had given us a chicken to take to our father in the city. It was a live chicken, and it was my responsibility. We were at Machakos Bus Station — Marshako — that enormous, roaring, impossible place, where cartons towered over small boys and buses had names like the names of old friends. I knew all of them. Jungle. Guthera Coach. Magutu Success. Sunbird. Me and my brothers used to spend whole days at ‘Kwa Meja’ just to watch them pass. I could identify each bus by the sound of its engine before it came into view.
I knew that the first thing my father would ask when we arrived was: ‘Which bus did you take?’ It was a ritual. It was how he knew we had been paying attention.
But the chicken slipped.
I don’t know exactly how. One moment it was in my hands; the next it was gone, running into the chaos of the bus station, and I ran after it without thinking, without telling my brother, without telling anyone. I just ran. Into the tall men carrying cartons. Into the noise. Into the size of the place that suddenly felt enormous and hostile now that I was alone inside it.
A bus went past — one of the big ones, wide as a loaf of bread, loud as a verdict. It caught the chicken. The chicken stopped running.
Someone grabbed my shoulder.
“Where is your mother? Who are you with?”
I pointed in all directions. I did not know which direction was correct.
“Do you know that bus nearly hit you?”
I was pulled aside. Someone who resembled our mother appeared from the crowd — not our mother, just the shape of her, the general outline of safety. And then someone threw the dead chicken at my feet.
“Take it. That’s what you were chasing.”
And then the real daylight came back — because my actual mother was there, stepping through the crowd, taking my hand, looking at me with the face that mothers make when they have been frightened and are now relieved and are trying not to show either.
She picked up the dead chicken. We found my brother where he had stayed with the bags, bewildered and waiting. We did not speak much about what had happened.
That was night — a ten-year-old boy swallowed by Marshako, certain for a few terrible minutes that the city had taken him.
That was day — a mother who found him in a short time, in that vast and roaring place, the way mothers always find their children, by some navigation that has nothing to do with maps.
* * *
Year , 2013. I walk past the mali mali vendors outside Machakos Bus Station, their merchandise spread on the pavement: belts, phone cases, batteries, small plastic things the city needs every day. The buses are still there. Some of the names have changed. Most of the faces have changed.
But Marshako is still Marshako. The noise is the same. The size of it, to a child, would still be the same.
I know, because I feel it every time I come here — that brief flicker, that ghost of ten years old, looking for a chicken in a city that was too large for him. It comes back. It always comes back.
Day and night. Day and night. Sometimes in the same moment, in the same street, under the same generous Nairobi sun.
I am not a preacher. But I know that the distance between the two is not time.
It is a mother’s hand.
