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

Mediterranean?”
    “Hmmm…” says Jim.
    “And the Mediterranean is where there are dolphins?”
    “Yeah,” he says.
    “And dolphins are the most intelligent animals?”
    “Yes,” he says.
    “And they like people, they are the only wild animals that like people?”
    “Yeah,” says Jim. He is not really listening.
    “And… and Atlantis drowned in the sea? And the people dis­appeared, and there are no skeletons to be found?”
    “A-­huh? So?”
    “So I know what happened! They evolved! The dolphins are the people from Atlantis!”
    He looks across lazily at me. He is listening to
Top of the Pops
on BBC shortwave. Boomtown Grunts and Stray Cats. “That is silly,” he says.
    “Why?” I ask.
    “When you drown, you drown.”
    I am quiet for a while, then I say, “But, but… they were an advanced civilization; they used science.”
    Wambui is fifteen, and she is our new nanny. She is round and hard, with round hard breasts. She comes from Dundori, where her parents got land after Independence and they grow potatoes. She likes killing chickens. She cuts their heads off and lets them run around and around and around. She laughs, and we laugh with her. We love her. She can carry all we throw at her, and she is much more than we have known. We are afraid of her.
    One of her front teeth is cracked, and is stained brown. Too much fluoride in Dundori water. We have a teacher we call Fluorosis, because all his teeth are brown. Wambui’s face is so angled and certain, her smile so crooked and mischievous, that she is the first nanny we have had whom we cannot control. It is clear she can go further than any of us, in any direction, good or bad, violent or funny. Her smile is a sharp lopsided V against a smooth black face—­no brown or red in her skin at all. She has two shocking interruptions: sharp conical bones on each cheek, pushing her face forward and sliding down to her jaw. These and the patches of darker skin that ring her wide round eyes sometimes give her face a feverish look. She likes to read Longman Pacesetter novelettes.
    One day, a few months ago, I was sitting on the veranda and I overheard Wambui on the phone. She was laughing breathily, and saying, “Ohhhh. I am mashure. I am not young. Ohhhh. I am very mashure.” Her voice sounded funny and nasal, and she kept laughing hah hah hah hah… laughing fake, like a woman on
Love Boat
or
Hart to Hart.
“Ohhhh,” her voice high and shrill like a TV and fake, “I am verry prrretty,” she said, in English. Her feet were drawing maps on the ground and she was looking uncommonly shy. I burst out laughing.
    She put down the phone and shouted, “Nitakuchinja kama jogoo.”
    I will slaughter you like a cockerel.
    One day President Moi drives past our school in his motorcade. He stops. He donates a whole small truck of Orbit chewing gum. We giggle at his accent.
    The morning after Moi’s visit, the whole school is repainted. We are still chewing his gum. Orbit chewing gum. Gum is banned in school, but Mrs. Gichiri says nothing. Andazi, the gardener, sulks the whole day, saying this sort of thing never happened when white people were in charge. We are told that the president owns the company.
    Starting today, our school is no longer Lena Moi Primary School; it is a newly painted Moi Primary School. All the old rubber stamps and exercise books are collected, all stationery, anything with the word
Lena
disappears.
    Many new kids start arriving in the school. Kalenjin kids, at every level, every class. Some of the richer families, the Kenyan Asian families, move their kids to the private schools abandoned by many of the white settler families ten years ago. Greensteds. St. Andrews Turi. They want to do British system exams, are worried.
    My father does not believe in private schools for Kenyan citizens. He believes it is up to us to make things work. I would not mind going to do GCEs. The local British-curriculum school has a swimming pool and horse riding,