Echoes From a Distant Land by Frank Coates

Author:Frank Coates [Coates, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780730497721
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Jelani sometimes wished he wasn’t an aregi. It placed him at odds with Beth’s family. It also placed him among the minority of Kikuyu. All his life he’d felt out of place. Being aregi didn’t help.

As a child he’d been taunted about his light skin. The older boys called him dukawallah, saying his skin was more the colour of the Indian man who owned the store on the Nairobi road than of a real Kikuyu.

They also ridiculed him because of his eyes, which were brown with flecks of green. His mother called them lion’s eyes, but the older boys said they were like those of the wildebeest — the buffoon of the grasslands.

When he was much younger, it was such taunts that led him to ask his mother why he was so light while she and his father had normal skin. She evaded the question.

One day he overheard a group of elders discussing the Ugandan woman who had brought Mama Karura’s child to the village. They called that child Zesiro, but Jelani knew he was his mother’s only child, and ran home fighting back the tears welling in his eyes.

In a breathless torrent he told his mother what he’d heard. She calmed him and admitted he was not a child born of her body, but the child given to her by a Ugandan woman, a distant in-law of a man in the village. The woman had come to Kobogi because she knew there was a woman here who could have no children of her own and who desperately wanted one. It was, she said, how she and his father had come to have Jelani, or Zesiro, as he was then called, for their son — a child chosen ahead of all the other children in the world without parents.

‘What does this Zesiro name mean?’ he asked her.

‘I don’t know, and because of that your father and I decided to name you Jelani instead.’

He felt as though he was not one, but two boys; two boys with different names. Two boys from two different worlds. It made him feel even more unusual than before; and he turned his attention to the second troubling matter.

‘Then is the one who brought me here my mother?’ he asked.

His mother said she thought not, because she could see no resemblance, but the woman couldn’t say who his real mother was because she was sworn to secrecy.

‘And who is my father?’

Again she said she didn’t know. ‘But I think, maybe he was a white man in an important position,’ she said. ‘Maybe he loved your mother but couldn’t keep you because he was ashamed that people would not respect him because he fell in love with a black woman.’

Jelani became very anxious at this. He already felt different, and for his whole young life his difference had caused him trouble. It was bad enough that he was the child of another woman — a stranger. But to be the child of a white man would make the taunts much worse.

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