nothing really to do. They live in a mixed-up world. It’s just as well, I suppose. In the end, I’m less interested in a
daughter who’s authentically African than one who is authentically herself.”
It was getting late; we thanked Rukia for her hospitality and went on our way. But her words would stay with me,
bringing into focus my own memories, my own lingering questions. On the last weekend of my stay, Auma and I took
the train to the coast and stayed at an old beachfront hotel in Mombasa that had once been a favorite of the Old Man’s.
It was a modest, clean place, in August filled mostly with German tourists and American sailors on shore leave. We
didn’t do much, just read and swam and walked along the beach, watching pale crabs scurry like ghosts into their sandy
holes. The following day we visited Mombasa’s Old Town and climbed the worn stairs of Fort Jesus, first built by the
Portuguese to consolidate control of trade routes along the Indian Ocean, later overrun by the swift Omani fleets, later
still a beachhead for the British as they moved inland in search of ivory and gold, now an empty casing of stone, its
massive walls peeling like papier-mâché in strips of pale orange and green and rose, its dormant cannons
pointing out to a tranquil sea where a lone fisherman cast out his net.
On the way back to Nairobi, Auma and I decided to splurge, buying tickets on a bus line that actually assigned seats.
The feeling of luxury was short-lived; my knees were pinched by a passenger who wanted his money’s worth from the
reclining seats, and a sudden rainstorm sent water streaming through leaks in the roof, which we tried-unsuccessfully-to
plug up with tissue.
Eventually, the rain stopped, and we found ourselves looking on a barren landscape of gravel and shrub and the
occasional baobab tree, its naked, searching branches decorated with the weaver bird’s spherical nests. I remembered
reading somewhere that the baobab could go for years without flowering, surviving on the sparsest of rainfall; and
seeing the trees there in the hazy afternoon light, I understood why men believed they possessed a special power-that
they housed ancestral spirits and demons, that humankind first appeared under such a tree. It wasn’t merely the oddness
of their shape, their almost prehistoric outline against the stripped-down sky. “They look as if each one could tell a
story,” Auma said, and it was true, each tree seemed to possess a character, a character neither benevolent nor cruel but
simply enduring, with secrets whose depths I would never plumb, a wisdom I would never pierce. They both disturbed
and comforted me, those trees that looked as if they might uproot themselves and simply walk away, were it not for the
knowledge that on this earth one place is not so different from another-the knowledge that one moment carries within it
all that’s gone on before.
It’s been six years since that first trip to Kenya, and much in the world has changed.
For me, it’s been a relatively quiet period, less a time of discovery than of consolidation, of doing the things that we
tell ourselves we finally must do to grow up. I went to Harvard Law School, spending most of three years in poorly lit
libraries, poring through cases and statutes. The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow
rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs
of those who have power-and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness
of their condition.
But that’s not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation
arguing with its conscience.