The Mzungu Boy by Meja Mwangi

Author:Meja Mwangi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Groundwood Books Ltd.
Published: 2011-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

Seven

THEY COULD NOT keep Nigel away from my compound. I was his only friend, but I never gave him ugali again.

He came by every chance he got and pleaded with me to take him hunting. He could not understand how I wasn’t even supposed to be with him.

We sat in the yard and played marbles as I thought of a dozen things to keep our minds occupied and away from his first and only love, hunting. Whenever he brought up the subject I had to invent good excuses like the jimis were sick or Jimi had gone off to Nanyuki with Hari. Sometimes his grandfather took him on a different kind of hunt. They went far out into the plains in the roofless Land Rover to where the game was plentiful. There was no running, not even walking. They drove up, stopped the vehicle and, while the animals watched and wondered, Bwana Ruin stood on the seat and shot them dead. Then he loaded them on the vehicle and brought them back for his dogs.

“You don’t eat the meat?” I asked Nigel.

“Grandma can’t stand the smell of game,” he told me.

My mother couldn’t stand the smell of fish.

“Crocodile?” he asked.

I told him we didn’t bother with any animals we could not eat.

“Zebra?”

I had never heard of anyone who ate zebras. But Nigel had read about it in a book. Some people even ate snakes.

“Tastes like rabbit,” he said.

“I have eaten rabbit.”

“Buffalo?”

“Tastes like beef,” I said.

“I have never eaten buffalo,” he said.

Bwana Ruin killed buffalo all the time, I informed him. We ate buffalo often.

“Have you ever eaten warthog?” I asked.

“How does it taste?”

All I could remember was the smell.

We were sitting by the chicken run next to Hari’s hut, on buckets with holes in them and brown with rust. I wanted to go swimming, but Nigel wanted to hunt.

“Bwana Ruin does not want you to go with me,” I told him. “My father told me that.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “He didn’t say not to go hunting. He told me not to come to the village.”

“Bwana Ruin will be angry,” I said.

“I have no one at the house,” he told me. “Only my grandma, and she doesn’t let me touch anything. She thinks I’ll hurt myself. It’s so boring.”

“Does she beat you?”

“Never.”

“My father beats me sometimes,” I informed him. “I have to be very careful what I do or say around him.”

“Dad would never touch me,” he told me.

“What about your mother?”

“Never, ever.”

My mother never touched me either. But her bark was much worse than her bite.

“Grandma’s like that,” Nigel said.

“Do you like her?”

He thought hard about it, shrugged and said, “I don’t know. She’s nice and all but…”

“What about your father?” I asked.

“He’s the greatest.”

It was quite a revelation. I never expected to find a boy, even a mzungu one, who liked his father. I had been led to believe boys weren’t supposed to understand, let alone like their fathers. Just to fear them and keep out of their way.

“I like my brother Hari,” I told him.

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