The Lady From Kibra

Zole stood up.

As her husband kept on rubbing the scarification on his face, Zole stood up from her seat. She walked slowly, to the tune of the jazz song playing in the background. She walked methodically, as if on a runway, careful not to bump her tummy on anything. As she approached the radio, she removed her phone from a pocket under her green hijab.

She stood in front of it, and a minute later, a Mandarin-accented female robotic voice blasted from the radio, in English:

‘Ze vluetooth zevice has succesfurry connected!’

“There!” , she thought, now she could play her playlist too. Whereas her husband liked rap, though she suspected he liked no music at all, Zole was drawn more toward Soul and Jazz.

It is not music that first connected them. It was a shared pain. And a shared past in the same university, even though they never met while they were both there.

What really connected them, on top of the pain, of course, was their shared multilingualism. He could play around with 7. She was comfortable with 5 or 6, depending on what you were talking about.

She taught him some Nubi and Luhya, sometimes Kikamba. Living in such a multicultural slum had taught her much.

He taught her some Nuer and Kirundi, sometimes Somali or Oromo. Growing up in a multinational refugee camp had taught him much.

They loved switching effortlessly from Kiswahili to Arabic. From English to Sheng, and back. They loved listening to songs in all these languages, it was beautiful.

She often wondered, which tounge will their baby speak first?

They, like an isiXhosa word, clicked the first time they met. She was glad to meet a convict who could match her intellect. Whereas at first she was dejected, She started looking forward to her rounds at the Kamiti Maximum Prison where she was doing her internship.

Psychology students, the dean said, must be able to confront the realities of prison life. And what that does to one’s mind. She always remembered the movies that time a lecturer played for them Shawshank Redemption.

This was a movie she had watched countless times before that day, alongside her grandmother no less. However, the memory of the sadness that engulfed the lecture hall when Brooks, that sweet old librarian, killed himself never left her. Institutionalized, they called it.

But this was not the time for such thoughts, the ones she had were more personal. Sambo knew too, that at such times no word in the multitude of languages he could muster would work magic, so he watched, silently.

She had to play that song which always uplifted her in such times.

“Bluetooth connected!”, the radio lady repeated.

Zole pressed play on her phone:

I was born by the river in a little tent
Oh and just like the river I’ve been running ev’r since
It’s been a long time, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will.

Sam Cooke’s long dead ghost breathed again through the speakers. Zole sat down, on the floor, right beside the book shelf on top of which the radio sat. This song, she knew, communicated the aspirations of her people, the Nubi.

From that position, looked at the portrait of her recently deceased grandmother. She missed her so much, she’d understand this pain tormenting her.

Zole was, in the year 1995, born by that open sewer cum flowing dumpsite that Kenyans like to call the Nairobi River. It was not always like this, her grandmother had told her oonce. It was once teeming with life, she said, they had learnt to swim in its waters in her younger days.

In reality, who Zole called her grandmother was actually her great grandmother. Like other Nubians living in the Makina B area of Kibra, they lived in a closely knit extended family set up. Their houses held up to 5 generations, ensuring that their collective culture, knowledge and history passed on unadulterated from one generation to the next.

A family of Nubians (Courtesy)

But Zole, like the river has been running ever since the day she was born. She has been running from not from the culture, no that is too beautiful to run from. She loved the cooking, what tastes better than Nubian biriani? And what of their gurusa, or lebere? Nothing competes with that, for sure.

She loved the dancing, and the singing, too. She loved the Sunni Islamic tradition passed learned in the local Madrassas. She loved the dressing, and the henna tattoos during the weddings. And all the stories her grandmother narrated to her and her cousin-siblings.

No, that was too beautiful to be washed away.

What she has been running away from is her history, at least some of it. The past one was glorious, for sure. After all, who doesn’t know of Amarineras, the one eyed queen who made the Roman Empire surrender on her terms after five years of war?

Who doesn’t know of she who wielded two battle swords and rode on elephants into battle? Who, I ask, doesn’t know that she fed Roman captives to her pet lions, and decapitated Emperor Augustus’ statue for good measure?

Courtesy

No, that was too glorious to ignore.

The painful history she was running from was fairly recent. Every time she saw a fellow Nubian denied of a national identity card, she saw the pain. It was cousins, and people she had schooled with, denied of an identity. People who had known no other home other than Kibra all their lives.

A people who, due to their apparent statelessness, could not access formal jobs. Even in the face of the high unemployment rate in the general population, Nubian youth were faced with a double tragedy. She counted herself lucky for being the few that got this right that was clothed as a privilege before their 2017 formal recognition by the Kenyan government.

Whenever she passed by that Askari Monument on Nairobi’s CBD on her way to the University of Nairobi, she felt this pain. The centerpiece of this statue is a Nubian soldier, who her grandmother always claimed was her long dead grand uncle. Zole thought she was just demented.

A Closeup of the Askari Monument.

But now, looking back, she did have a point.

BIt was a Nubian and it told the story of how her people ended up in colonial Kenya as part of the King’s African Rifles. Their history was tied to this country’s. A few generations back her people had been allocated this forested land that they named Kibra. But like the people themselves, this was being erased from the Kenyan psyche.

First, they renamed the place Kibera, a corruption which stole the original meaning. And value. That which was once a rich forested area and hence the name Kibra, became Kibera, the biggest slum in Africa.

A fluent Luo speaker, Zole understood her grandmother’s disgust when she spoke of how Lomle was renamed Ayany, a Luo word meaning “insult”. A slight Gikuyu speaker, Zole felt her grandmother’s pain when she spoke of how Kathirkher which meaning “plenty of blessings” was corrupted into Gatwikira, a Gikuyu word who’s meaning she was not interested in.

This is the history that Zole was running away from. She knew that a change would come someday. That her people would someday live freely in their land, but she did not know when. She chose to run away.

She often passed as a Luo due to her fluency in the language and fittingly dark complexion. She was never interested in answering the questions that came with being a Nubi in a society that was largely ignorant about them.

SShe, now, looked at her grandmother’s portrait. She remembered the last words she told her on the night before that fateful morning in May 2013:

“You can’t run away from your destiny, Zole”.

That dawn a fire broke out in a nearby household. This was a common occurrence in Kibra, and is still the case today. Though unburnt, her grandmother’s 110-year old lungs were too weak to recover from the bout of smoke that went into them. She died of smoke poisoning, and was buried the afternoon.

As she tearfully walked away from the Kibra Muslim cemetery, Zole remembered that time she and her grandmother watched the Shawshank Redemption together. She thought of what being institutionalized can do to a person. How it made Brooks hang himself.

Maybe, she thought, the Nubi were imprisoned in this state of statelessness. She wondered, what does this do to our collective psyche? Is it the reason why I am running away?

And, that is the day that she decided to pursue a degree program in psychology.

She had just completed her high school education at State House Girls school, largely funded by bursaries and well wishers. She had scored high marks, was among the top five at the institution and was as of that point still undecided on what to do in campus.

Now she knew. This was the destiny her grandmother had been talking about. She would dedicate her work for the mental health of the members of her community.

The last verse in the song, which had been playing all along, woke up Zole from her deep thoughts. She stood up, and walked towards Sambo, who was now readying himself to narrate his second agricultural agenda.

As she walked away, the song played on and on:

here have been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long
But now I think I’m able to carry on
It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will.

As she walked on, she remembered a quote from the movie, and knew that for sure, she had to be hopeful that the Nubians will reclaim that which is theirs. That, maybe, through her work, she will help address the mental health issues there in. She had hope for….