‘Yes, but we’ll leave around fourish. There are shuttle buses leaving from the hotel.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘It should be good.’
‘Yes and it’ll be a good place to take some photos for the article,’ he said. ‘I should’ve gotten one of you feeding the giraffe.’
‘It’s probably best the moment’s forever effaced,’ I said. ‘I had a moment of existential revelation and angst while feeding the giraffe: I was convinced of its existence, though unsure of mine.’
‘Yes, giant mammals will do that to you,’ he said.
Sveta was in the distance talking to an employee of the animal orphanage. She walked to the fire pit with the children and said, ‘There’re no lions. One’s sick and away, the other died.’
We took a different, circuitous route to the car and walked past another cage. Two monkeys sat on top of some rusty chain-link fencing, crudely layered to make a jungle gym.
Back at the hotel Boris and I split up in the lobby, agreeing to meet back downstairs in forty-five minutes. There were people everywhere but I ignored the crowd and returned to the quiet of my room. I would’ve loved to have lain down for an hour but there wasn’t time. I figured I could get away with lying down for fifteen minutes or so, however, so that’s what I did.
I put in my small white earphones, from my new iPod Mini, a recent birthday/Christmas gift from Stacey, my girlfriend. When she gave it to me, I was shocked and touched. The gift was expensive — more expensive than either of us could reasonably afford — and we’d been growing apart. When I opened the wrapping paper and saw the gift, it was obvious I was surprised.
‘See,’ she said, ‘I love you very much.’
‘You got me an iPod.’
‘I got you an iPod.’
I lay on the bed, with my eyes closed, listening to the first twenty minutes of Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way, then I got up to take another quick shower.
Down in the lobby, festivalgoers waited around for the shuttle buses. Eventually, three mid-sized buses showed up, very modern, air-conditioned, et cetera. I sat beside a poet, Caroline, from Massachusetts, who was writing a collection about Robert Oppenheimer. She’d recently won a prize for her work, she told me.
Caroline was very nice and we talked about Oppenheimer while we drove the ten minutes or so to the Alliance Française. But then Céline Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’ came on the bus’s stereo and it really hit me how internationally famous Dion in fact was; in Quebec, I took it for granted Céline’s music played from the clouds but I didn’t expect to hear her in Nairobi. ‘I love this song,’ said Caroline. ‘My mom and I belt it out together!’
The reading was out back, in a large beautiful sunlit courtyard. It was bright and I was glad to be wearing sunglasses. There was a stage at the back of the courtyard, with large leafy plants on either side of a podium, and a DJ spinning records while people milled about, sipping on drinks.
I bumped into Stanley at the bar, which was just inside the building, though the back was open-air, so you could still see the stage from the bar.
‘You’re drinking red wine,’ I said, while he sipped from a plastic-stemmed cup.
‘The wine’s free,’ he said.
‘Wine it is,’ I said, and picked up a pre-poured cup from the bar.
There were some introductory remarks given by Kenneth’s sister, May, who emceed the event, welcoming everyone, thanking the Alliance Française for hosting the event, and then the readings began. Stanley and I stood at the back but could see and hear everything; I took some notes.
The first reader was Doreen Baingana, a writer from Uganda, now studying in the U.S., who read a story from her collection, Tropical Fish, which had recently won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. The reading was excellent and moving and Stanley said, ‘You should read her book. It’s really very good.’
‘I’ll pick it up.’
The next quote-unquote reader was a truly dreadful spoken-word poet whose name I never bothered to write down. It was simply a bunch of shouting, et cetera, and strangely juvenile anti-Americanism; even though none of us were fans of the Bush administration, it was clear she was painting with a broad, sloppy brush. A few times, she punched her chest like Céline Dion, without the gifted voice.
While waiting out the spoken-word poet, who was onstage far longer than the first reader, Stanley took the opportunity to refresh our wine.
After the poet had mercifully stopped shouting and left the stage, Chimamanda Adichie read from her new novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, and she was wonderful.
‘That was great,’ I said to Stanley, when she’d finished.
‘Chima’s incredible,’ he said. ‘Did you read Purple Hibiscus?’
‘I did,’ I said. ‘I liked it a lot. Kenneth told me to read it.’
‘It’s a wonderful novel,’ he said. ‘Coetzee blurbed it!’
People ambled around the courtyard talking, drinking, laughing, while two young women set up some of their musical gear. One of them, DJ Flora, got behind the turntables and started spinning some records, and then she introduced MC Karen, a long-legged young woman in black jean short-shorts and a black crop-top, worn brown leather boots with a small heel, and close-cropped hair. Her almond-shaped eyes were large and both smoky and shining, her smile radiant, as she demanded the crowd’s attention. The large group, too, stopped all conversation to watch DJ Flora and MC Karen.
Like a prizefighter, MC Karen belted out her rhymes, in English and Kiswahili, from what I could tell, singing, too, beautifully, between her hard-hitting raps. Her confidence was astounding, and she mesmerized the courtyard full of people.
‘This is amazing,’ I said to Stanley, ‘like, truly amazing!’
‘MC Karen and DJ Flora are terrific.’
‘You know them?’
‘A little,’ he said. ‘They play around. They’re playing at the party after at Club Afrique.’
‘The music’s so good,’ I said. ‘They’re — wow!’
‘Moto Kama Pasi,’ he said. ‘Hot as passports … ’
DJ Flora and MC Karen only played three songs and then the music stopped, but people hung around for another hour before we went to the nightclub. The sun had started to set, but I kept my sunglasses on, as I felt extremely sensitive to the light. Stanley went off to talk to some friends and I hit the books table to pick up some things.
Two young people manned the table: a young man and a young woman, both enthusiastic.
I bought a green-and-yellow hardcover copy of Chimamanda Adichie’s new novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, a Kenyan edition, and I also bought a hardcover copy of Doreen Baingana’s Tropical Fish. The young woman at the books table gave me a complimentary copy of an anthology of East African short fiction and a tote bag for buying two hardcovers.
The nightclub was close by on Museum Hill, but it still took a while to get there because travelling on a shuttle with people is slow no matter what. We sat in the parking lot for approximately twenty minutes to drive five minutes. But I wasn’t complaining. We were all high on the music we’d just heard. It’s what everyone was talking about while we waited for the bus to fill up and on the short ride.
The bus pulled up to the club and we waited while a man opened a gate. We disembarked and lined up and were given tickets to present to a doorman down a hallway before entering the large nightclub.
The large room looked almost empty, though there were people there, many in fact, but the room was so big that it still appeared almost empty, and a band played on the stage: guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, a few horns, several singers, dancing and singing, women and men. There were very few people on the huge dance floor. But we were a large group, so the club started to feel a little fuller.