Zeituni shook her head. “I don’t know the truth. At least not all of it. I know that even growing up, Sarah was always
closer to her real mum, Akumu. Barack, he cared only for my mum, Granny, the one who raised them after Akumu
left.”
“Why did Akumu leave?”
“I’m not sure. You will have to ask Granny about that.”
Zeituni signaled for us to cross the street, then resumed talking. “You know, your father and Sarah were actually very
similar, even though they did not always get along. She was smart like him. And independent. She used to tell me,
when we were children, that she wanted to get an education so that she would not have to depend on any man. That’s
why she ended up married to four different husbands. None of them lasted. The first one died, but the others she left,
because they were lazy, or tried to abuse her. I admire her for this. Most women in Kenya put up with anything. I did,
for a long time. But Sarah also paid a price for her independence.”
Zeituni wiped the sweat on her forehead with the back of her hand. “Anyway, after Sarah’s first husband died, she
decided that your father should support her and her child, since he had received all the education. That’s why she
disliked Kezia and her children. She thought Kezia was just a pretty girl who wanted to take everything. You must
understand, Barry-in Luo custom, the male child inherits everything. Sarah feared that once your grandfather died,
everything would belong to Barack and his wives, and she would be left with nothing.”
I shook my head. “That’s no excuse for lying about who the Old Man’s children are.”
“You’re right. But...”
“But what?”
Zeituni stopped walking and turned to me. She said, “After your father went off to live with his American wife,
Ruth...well, he would go to Kezia sometimes. You must understand that traditionally she was still his wife. It was
during such a visit that Kezia became pregnant with Abo, the brother you haven’t met. The thing was, Kezia also lived
with another man briefly during this time. So when she became pregnant again, with Bernard, no one was sure who-”
Zeituni stopped, letting the thought finish itself.
“Does Bernard know about this?”
“Yes, he knows by now. You understand, such things made no difference to your father. He would say that they were
all his children. He drove this other man away, and would give Kezia money for the children whenever he could. But
once he died, there was nothing to prove that he’d accepted them in this way.”
We turned a corner onto a busier road. In front of us, a pregnant goat bleated as it scuttered out of the path of an
oncoming matatu. Across the way, two little girls in dusty red school uniforms, their round heads shaven almost clean,
held hands and sang as they skipped across a gutter. An old woman with her head under a faded shawl motioned to us
to look at her wares: two margarine tins of dried beans, a neat stack of tomatoes, dried fish hanging from a wire like a
chain of silver coins. I looked into the old woman’s face, drawn beneath the shadows. Who was this woman? I
wondered. My grandmother? A stranger? And what about Bernard-should my feelings for him somehow be different
now? I looked over at a bus stop, where a crowd of young men were streaming out into the road, all of them tall and
black and slender, their bones pressing against their shirts. I suddenly imagined Bernard’s face on all of them,
multiplied across the landscape, across continents. Hungry, striving, desperate men, all of them my brothers....
barré
(Barré)
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