if we-Auma, Roy, Bernard, and I-were all making it up as we went along. As if the map that might have once measured
the direction and force of our love, the code that would unlock our blessings, had been lost long ago, buried with the
ancestors beneath a silent earth.
Toward the end of my first week in Nairobi, Zeituni took me to visit our other aunt, Sarah. Auma had remained
unwilling to go, but because it turned out that her mechanic lived near Sarah, she offered to give us a ride to her garage;
from there, she said, we could travel by foot. On Saturday morning, Auma and I picked up Zeituni and headed east,
past cinder-block apartments and dry, garbage-strewn lots, until we finally came to the rim of a wide valley known as
Mathare. Auma pulled off to the shoulder and I looked out the window to see the shantytown below, miles and miles of
corrugated rooftops shimmering under the sun like wet lily pads, buckling and dipping in an unbroken sequence across
the valley floor.
“How many people live there?” I asked.
Auma shrugged and turned to our aunt. “What would you say, Auntie? Half a million, maybe?”
Zeituni shook her head. “That was last week. This week, it must be one million.”
Auma started the car back up. “Nobody knows for sure, Barack. The place is growing all the time. People come in
from the countryside looking for work and end up staying permanently. For a while, the city council tried to tear the
settlement down. They said it was a health hazard-an affront to Kenya’s image, you see. Bulldozers came, and people
lost what little they had. But of course, they had nowhere else to go. As soon as the bulldozers left, people rebuilt just
like before.”
We came to a stop in front of a slanting tin shed where a mechanic and several apprentices emerged to look Auma’s
car over. Promising to be back in an hour, Zeituni and I left Auma at the garage and began our walk down a wide,
unpaved road. It was already hot, the road bereft of shade; on either side were rows of small hovels, their walls a
patchwork of wattle, mud, pieces of cardboard, and scavenged plywood. They were neat, though, the packed earth in
front of each home cleanly swept, and everywhere we could see tailors and shoe repairers and furniture makers plying
their trades out of roadside stalls, and women and children selling vegetables from wobbly wood tables.
Eventually we came to one edge of Mathare, where a series of concrete buildings stood along a paved road. The
buildings were eight, maybe twelve stories tall, and yet curiously unfinished, the wood beams and rough cement
exposed to the elements, like they’d suffered an aerial bombardment. We entered one of them, climbed a narrow flight
of stairs, and emerged at the end of a long unlit hallway, at the other end of which we saw a teenage girl hanging out
clothes to dry on a small cement patio. Zeituni went to talk to the girl, who led us wordlessly to a low, scuffed door. We
knocked, and a dark, middle-aged woman appeared, short but sturdily built, with hard, glassy eyes set in a wide,
rawboned face. She took my hand and said something in Luo.
“She says she is ashamed to have her brother’s son see her in such a miserable place,” Zeituni translated.
We were shown into a small room, ten feet by twelve, large enough to fit a bed, a dresser, two chairs, and a sewing
machine. Zeituni and I each took one of the chairs, and the young woman who had shown us Sarah’s room returned
with two warm sodas. Sarah sat on the bed and leaned forward to study my face. Auma had said that Sarah knew some