could believe that it would all hang together without computer terminals or fax machines. And all of this while a steady
procession of black faces passed before your eyes, the round faces of babies and the chipped, worn faces of the old;
beautiful faces that made me understand the transformation that Asante and other black Americans claimed to have
undergone after their first visit to Africa. For a span of weeks or months, you could experience the freedom that comes
from not feeling watched, the freedom of believing that your hair grows as it’s supposed to grow and that your rump
sways the way a rump is supposed to sway. You could see a man talking to himself as just plain crazy, or read about the
criminal on the front page of the daily paper and ponder the corruption of the human heart, without having to think
about whether the criminal or lunatic said something about your own fate. Here the world was black, and so you were
just you; you could discover all those things that were unique to your life without living a lie or committing betrayal.
How tempting, I thought, to fly away with this moment intact. To have this feeling of ease wrapped up as neatly as the
young man was now wrapping Auma’s necklace, and take it back with me to America to slip on whenever my spirits
flagged.
But of course that wasn’t possible. We finished our sodas. Money changed hands. We left the marketplace. The
moment slipped away.
We turned onto Kimathi Street, named after one of the leaders of the Mau-Mau rebellion. I had read a book about
Kimathi before leaving Chicago and remembered a photograph of him: one in a group of dreadlocked men who lived in
the forest and spread secret oaths among the native population-the prototype guerrilla fighter. It was a clever costume
he had chosen for himself (Kimathi and the other Mau-Mau leaders had served in British regiments in their previous
lives), an image that played on all the fears of the colonial West, the same sort of fear that Nat Turner had once evoked
in the antebellum South and coke-crazed muggers now evoked in the minds of whites in Chicago.
Of course, the Mau-Mau lay in Kenya’s past. Kimathi had been captured and executed. Kenyatta had been released
from prison and inaugurated Kenya’s first president. He had immediately assured whites who were busy packing their
bags that businesses would not be nationalized, that landholdings would be kept intact, so long as the black man
controlled the apparatus of government. Kenya became the West’s most stalwart pupil in Africa, a model of stability, a
useful contrast to the chaos of Uganda, the failed socialism of Tanzania. Former freedom fighters returned to their
villages or joined the civil service or ran for a seat in Parliament. Kimathi became a name on a street sign, thoroughly
tamed for the tourists.
I took the opportunity to study these tourists as Auma and I sat down for lunch in the outdoor café of the New
Stanley Hotel. They were everywhere-Germans, Japanese, British, Americans-taking pictures, hailing taxis, fending off
street peddlers, many of them dressed in safari suits like extras on a movie set. In Hawaii, when we were still kids, my
friends and I had laughed at tourists like these, with their sunburns and their pale, skinny legs, basking in the glow of
our obvious superiority. Here in Africa, though, the tourists didn’t seem so funny. I felt them as an encroachment,
somehow; I found their innocence vaguely insulting. It occurred to me that in their utter lack of self-consciousness,
they were expressing a freedom that neither Auma nor I could ever experience, a bedrock confidence in their own
parochialism, a confidence reserved for those born into imperial cultures.
Just then I noticed an American family sit down a few tables away from us. Two of the African waiters immediately
sprang into action, both of them smiling from one ear to the other. Since Auma and I hadn’t yet been served, I began to
barré
(Barré)
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