One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina

Author:Binyavanga Wainaina
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-034-5
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2011-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

I’ve got a part-­time job. Driving around Central and Eastern provinces and getting farmers to start growing cotton again. I have been provided with a car and a driver. Baba and some friends have invested money buying an old government cotton ginnery, which is being privatized. He asks me if I want to do some agricultural extension work for them. I say yes. They are starting to have confidence in me. I have been helping Mum in her shop and running errands. I promised myself that I would not read any novels while I was sitting behind the counter in her small florist shop. Sometimes I dash across to the club and sit on the toilet for half an hour with a book and a cigarette, but mostly I have been present in the world. Last week, at breakfast, I was going on and on about some theory or other, and Baba burst out, “I don’t understand, I don’t understand, you are so intelligent, I don’t understand why you are so…”

Mum sent a sharp warning to him across the table, and he stood up and left. It’s good I am no longer an egg. So much better than the silence.

My colleague Kariuki and I are on the way to Mwingi town in a new, zippy Nissan pickup. The road to Masinga Dam is monotonous, and my mind has been taken over by bubblegum music, chewing away, trying to digest a vacuum.

That terrible song: “I donever reallywanna killthedragon…”

It zips around my mind like a demented fly, always a bit too fast to catch and smash. I try to start a conversation, but Kariuki is not talka­tive. He sits hunched over the steering wheel, his body tense, his face twisted into a grimace. He is usually quite relaxed when he isn’t driving, but cars seem to bring out a demon in him.

To be honest, Mwingi is not a place I want to visit. It is a new district, semi­arid, and there is nothing there that I have heard is worth seeing or doing, except eating goat. Apparently, according to the unofficial national goat meat quality charts, Mwingi goat is second after Siakago goat in flavor. We Kenyans like our goat. I am told some enterprising fellow from Texas started a goat ranch to service the ten thousand Kenyans living there. He is making a killing.

South African goat tastes terrible. Over the years in South Africa, I have driven past goats that stared at me with arrogance, chewing nonchalantly, and daring me to wield my knife.

It is payback time.

This is why we set out at six in the morning, hoping that we would be through with all possible bureaucracies by midday, after which we could get down to drinking beer and eating lots and lots of goat.

I have invested in a few sachets of Andrews Liver Salts.

I doze, and the sun is shining by the time I wake up. We are thirty kilometers from Mwingi town. There is a sign on one

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