One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina Read Free Book Online

gardener, is getting old; he has been in this school since white people were here, and he says we have spoiled it.
    I grew two inches this term, and my voice just broke, and I got kicked out of the choir because I squeak a lot. There are informal kiosks sprouting everywhere, selling everything from batteries to fresh vegetables, between the thorny hedges that are starting to grow wild in English-­speaking Nakuru. There are a lot of things coming from Tawian, and fewer things coming from Britain. Baba says the British make good things but never learned how to market them, because the colonials had to buy what they made. There are hawkers now, walking the streets selling Tawian things, and more shops are closing.
    Look! Look at Michael Jackson move, as if he cannot break. We try to dance like him.
    Baba wakes us up this morning and tells us that there has been a coup d’état led by junior soldiers in the air force. There is shooting all over Kenya. We stay home the whole day. The government was taken over by an air force private. There is shooting in Nairobi all day, and rumors that the streets are piled high with bodies. Indian shops are looted. Many women are raped. There are curfews, for months, and arrests. Some of the Gujarati-­speaking kids from school have left for London and Toronto. Nobody really can keep the holes in the hedges sealed.
    Kenya is not Uganda. Kenya has big roads and railways and tall buildings, science and technology, research and big planes and thousands of troops and machine guns and missiles. With only a few guns and some ragtag soldiers, air force Private Ochuka is, for six hours, the president of Kenya. In the afternoon, the coup is put down, and thousands are killed. Nairobi has corpses everywhere.

Chapter Six
    Cleophas works at home for us, as a gardener and cook. He used to be a caddy and dreams of becoming a pro golfer. He is cool and has a big Afro. Once he took me to watch
ABBA: The Movie.
During Kenyatta’s time, he was always getting arrested because he looks like a Ugandan. He comes from Kakamega, in Western Province.
    One day, after school, I am bored and do not have anything to read. I am twelve. Mum won’t let me go to the library because they found out that I had managed to spend the whole year avoiding math homework and reading novels in class. We are writing national exams this year, Ciru and I, and Mum and Baba are being strict. Ciru is getting all girly girly lately and does not like to play or talk. She locks her room a lot and says things like “But Michael Jackson is so sensitive.”
    I go to visit Cleophas in the servants’ quarters, hoping he has time to talk, or play music, or maybe he will take me to the kiosk to buy sweets. The door is only partly closed. There is somebody else in his room. A woman.
    Their voices are floating on wet parachutes. Sometimes a sharp squeal or a groan breaks out of the breath-­coated chat. She giggles, and he says something gruffly back. My neck is hot. Their laughter steams, puffs. She cries out. The metal safari bed keeps banging against the wall. I can’t move. This room was once a stable for horses, during colonial days. It is dark and hot and has a green wooden window. They put in a cement floor after it was converted into rooms for servants in the sixties, before we moved here. I want to leave but can’t. The lumps wriggle under the blankets. Cleophas moans, loudly; his head leans up and back. I jump up and shout something incoherent. She screams and sits up, her face ripe and wild. “Get out,” he shouts. “Out!” Cleophas leaps out of the bed, covers his crotch with a thin gray blanket, still shouting, and slams the door.
    One day Mum fires Cleophas. She refuses to say why.
    Jimmy is home on half term, and I have found science. It is round and perfect, like a circle. One day I am reading Erich von Däniken in our bedroom. Jimmy lies on his bed next to me.
    “Jim,” I say, “if Atlantis was in the