“We hunted men,” Nyipir adds.
The addiction.
“This kind of thing does not end right.”
Silence. Yet in Nyipir’s mind, turbulence. Scarred memories of a patriot with a wire around his scrotum that would be pulled at another man’s whim, for the sake of the nation. Rotting in state dungeons. Losing faith, in God, in men, in country.
He finally told Hugh, “I’ve lost her.” Defeat.
No, he had never imagined intimate casualties, had never thought his only son would die before him in these nameless wars.
The cairn is completed before midnight. It is straight on all angles at the base, and the stones chosen to create the ramparts are perfect. When it is done, Galgalu brings Nyipir a calabash of liquid. Honey wine had medicinal and purgative values.
Nyipir had lost his Kenya on July 5, 1969, in Nairobi, when Tom Mboya was assassinated. The murder was the culmination of fears, swirling rumors, the meaning of clandestine oaths that made the rest of the country enemy territory to be owned. It was the purpose of the silences that had started before.
Nyipir and a colleague, Mzomba, had been looking across the Jeevanjee Gardens and had paused when the report of something punched the air. Then silence. They started to walk in the direction of the noise. Twenty minutes later, a woman in a green dress, barefoot, carrying white shoes, raced past them. She was crying, a horrible sound that seemed to come from all around her, and from within her.
Ka-Sehmi. Mayieee! Gi-neeeee-go Mboya.
Mboya!
Nyipir’s body temperature had dropped.
Tom. Mboya.
His heart had slowed down, and he collapsed with his disintegrating national dreams.
Then.
It is a lie. Nobody would kill Tom. Nobody would dare kill Tom, because it means they would be willing to kill Kenya.
He started to stutter something.
Later, Mzomba lit a cigarette and offered it to Nyipir, who was on his knees and clinging to a telephone pillar.
This death created a fissure in the nation, as if it had split apart its own soul. The funeral cortège was more than two kilometers long. A wailing nation lined up on three hundred kilometers of road to touch the passing hearse. In the silence of everything else, in the farce of a trial, a man named Njenga, who had fired the gun, cried, Why pick on me? Why don’t you ask the big man? Before he could suggest much more, Njenga was hanged.
After Mboya, everything that could die in Kenya did, even schoolchildren standing in front of a hospital that the Leader of the Nation had come to open. A central province was emptied of a people who were renamed cockroaches and “beasts from the west.” But nobody would acknowledge the exiles or citizens who did not make it out of the province before they were destroyed. Oaths of profound silences — secret shots in a slithering civil war.
In time.
A train would stop at a lakeside town and offload men, women, and children. Displaced ghosts, now-in-between people. No words. Then one night a government man drove into town from Nairobi. He carried petri dishes of vibrio cholerae. He washed these in a water-supplying dam. Days later cholera danced violently across the landscape, dragging souls from that earth, pressing dessicated bodies deep under the earth.
No words.
Under the trance of fear, a nation hid from the world. Inside its doors ten thousand able-bodied citizens died in secret. Some were buried in prison sites, and others’ bones were dissolved in acid.
Nyipir knew.
He saw.
He did not speak.
He hoped it would end soon.
Just like the others who had also seen, he told no one.
A hundred, and then a hundred more, herded into holding houses.
Picked up — taken from homes, offloaded from saloon cars, hustled from offices, stopped on their way to somewhere else — prosecuted, and judged at night. Guilty, they were loaded onto the backs of lorries. And afterward, lime-sprinkled corpses were heaped in large holes dug into the grounds of appropriated farms. Washed in acid, covered with soil that became even more crimson, upon which new forests were planted.
After Mboya, Kenya’s official languages: English, Kiswahili, and Silence. There was also memory.
Nyipir’s mind had collected phrases shouted out to those who were within hearing range:
Tell my wife.
My brother.
Daughter.
Son.
My friend.
Someone.
Tell my people.
That I am here.
Tell them you saw me.
Because there was silence, he tried to memorize names, never speaking them aloud.
Some he wrote out in a child’s notebook.
In case one day a stranger might ask if so-and-so had existed.
Patrick Celestine Abungu. University professor of history, returned from Russia, bearded and bespectacled. Broad-chested and terrified. He shouted, Tell my wife and children.…
Onesmus Wekesa. Musician, composer of songs with double-meaning lyrics. A song that mocked an oafish, greedy hyena that ate up its own body had brought him to the police cells. He wept when they dragged him away. He clung to everything. He shouted, Tell my brother.…
Cedric Odaga Ochola. Engineer. Former major. Dragged out the door, he had screamed, “How can you do this?” He glimpsed a figure and shouted, Tell my daughter.…
Odd.
No one would emerge to ask after men who had been erased.
It was as if they had never been born.
Kenya’s official languages: English, Kiswahili, and Silence.
But there was also memory.
Nyipir knew.
He saw.
He did not speak.
He hoped it would end soon.
Till one afternoon.
A jeering colleague.
Nyipir was braiding his horse’s tail when the man sneaked up to him, spitting displaced rage: “Nyinyi! Heee! Mambo bado. Mtaona! Mnacheza na Mzee?”
Nyinyi. You the other. Not us.
Two weeks later, three men in camouflage gear, berets, and shoulder lapels watched an Ajua game in progress. In the camp near Kapedo Falls, to the south of Turkana District, the sound of the Suguta River. Clack-clack-clack of seed on wood. Fixed gaze of two squatting men. Two rows of rough, curved hollows on the board where stones collected. A two-hour Ajua game. Slam on board.
Nyipir collected all but four of Corporal Gakui’s seed “cows.” He had gloated, “Mia dhako!” Give me a woman!
The corporal spat, “Kihee!”
Silence that precedes an ambush.
Three jumpy men watched.
Kihee. Uncircumcised.
Nyipir dropped a seed into the grooved slot before turning to the man. He asked, “How does a mutilated penis make a man more of a man? Msenje,” he said, “I’ve buried your testicles before, I can bury them again.”
It was only when a locust whirred over a pale-brown anthill that Nyipir realized that in in this epoch of silence, he had spoken, and by speaking he had made himself a sacrifice.