memories may seem almost fantastic to him now, distant and naive. He’s learned that the same people who controlled
the land before independence still control the same land, that he still cannot eat in the restaurants or stay in the hotels
that the white man has built. He sees the money of the city swirling above his head, and the technology that spits out
goods from its robot mouth. If he’s ambitious he will do his best to learn the white man’s language and use the white
man’s machines, trying to make ends meet the same way the computer repairman in Newark or the bus driver back in
Chicago does, with alternating spurts of enthusiasm or frustration but mostly with resignation. And if you say to him
that he’s serving the interests of neocolonialism or some other such thing, he will reply that yes, he will serve if that is
what’s required. It is the lucky ones who serve; the unlucky ones drift into the murky tide of hustles and odd jobs;
many will drown.
Then again, maybe that’s not all that the waiter is feeling. Maybe a part of him still clings to the stories of Mau-Mau,
the same part of him that remembers the hush of a village night or the sound of his mother grinding corn under a stone
pallet. Something in him still says that the white man’s ways are not his ways, that the objects he may use every day are
not of his making. He remembers a time, a way of imagining himself, that he leaves only at his peril. He can’t escape
the grip of his memories. And so he straddles two worlds, uncertain in each, always off balance, playing whichever
game staves off the bottomless poverty, careful to let his anger vent itself only on those in the same condition.
A voice says to him yes, changes have come, the old ways lie broken, and you must find a way as fast as you can to
feed your belly and stop the white man from laughing at you.
A voice says no, you will sooner burn the earth to the ground.
That evening, we drove east to Kariako, a sprawling apartment complex surrounded by dirt lots. The moon had
dropped behind thick clouds, and light drizzle had begun to fall. As we climbed the dark stairwell, a young man
bounded past us onto the broken pavement and into the night. At the top of three flights, Auma pushed against a door
that was slightly ajar.
“Barry! You’ve finally come!”
A short, stocky woman with a cheerful brown face gave me a tight squeeze around the waist. Behind her were fifteen
or so people, all of them smiling and waving like a crowd at a parade. The short woman looked up at me and frowned.
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
“I...”
“I’m your Aunt Jane. It is me that called you when your father died.” She smiled and took me by the hand. “Come.
You must meet everybody here. Zeituni you have already met. This...” she said, leading me to a handsome older
woman in a green patterned dress, “this is my sister, Kezia. She is mother to Auma and to Roy Obama.”
Kezia took my hand and said my name together with a few words of Swahili.
“She says her other son has finally come home,” Jane said.
“My son,” Kezia repeated in English, nodding and pulling me into a hug. “My son has come home.”
We continued around the room, shaking hands with aunts, cousins, nephews, and nieces. Everyone greeted me with
cheerful curiosity but very little awkwardness, as if meeting a relative for the first time was an everyday occurrence. I