distinguishable from their counterparts in Singapore or Atlanta. It was an intoxicating, elusive mixture, a contrast that
seemed to repeat itself wherever we went: in front of the Mercedes-Benz dealership, where a train of Masai women
passed by on the way to market, their heads shaven clean, their slender bodies wrapped in red shukas, their earlobes
elongated and ringed with bright beads; or at the entrance to an open-air mosque, where we watched a group of bank
officers carefully remove their wing-tipped shoes and bathe their feet before joining farmers and ditchdiggers in
afternoon prayer. It was as if Nairobi’s history refused to settle in orderly layers, as if what was then and what was now
fell in constant, noisy collision.
We wandered into the old marketplace, a cavernous building that smelled of ripe fruit and a nearby butchery. A
passage to the rear of the building led into a maze of open-air stalls where merchants hawked fabrics, baskets, brass
jewelry, and other curios. I stopped in front of one of them, where a set of small wooden carvings was set out for
display. I recognized the figures as my father’s long-ago gift to me: elephants, lions, drummers in tribal headdress.
They are only small things, the Old Man had said....
“Come, mister,” the young man who was minding the stall said to me. “A beautiful necklace for your wife.”
“This is my sister.”
“She is a very beautiful sister. Come, this is nice for her.”
“How much?”
“Only five hundred shillings. Beautiful.”
Auma frowned and said something to the man in Swahili. “He’s giving you the wazungu price,” she explained. “The
white man’s price.”
The young man smiled. “I’m very sorry, sister,” he said. “For a Kenyan, the price is three hundred only.”
Inside the stall, an old woman who was stringing glass beads together pointed at me and said something that made
Auma smile.
“What’d she say?”
“She says that you look like an American to her.”
“Tell her I’m Luo,” I said, beating my chest.
The old woman laughed and asked Auma my name. The answer made the old woman laugh even harder, and she
called for me to stand beside her, taking my hand. “She says you don’t look much like a Luo,” Auma said, “but you
have a kind face. She says she has a daughter you should meet and that, if you buy her a soda, you can have two
carvings and the necklace she’s making for five hundred shillings.”
The young man went to buy sodas for all of us, and we sat on wooden stools that the old woman pulled out from
behind a large chest. She told us about her business, the rent she had to pay the government for the use of her stall, how
her other son joined the army because there was no land left to work in their village. Across from us, another woman
wove colored straw into baskets; beside her, a man cut a hide into long strips to be used for some purse straps.
I watched these nimble hands stitch and cut and weave, and listened to the old woman’s voice roll over the sounds of
work and barter, and for a moment the world seemed entirely transparent. I began to imagine an unchanging rhythm of
days, lived on firm soil where you could wake up each morning and know that all was how it had been yesterday,
where you saw how the things that you used had been made and could recite the lives of those who had made them and
barré
(Barré)
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