I would be in Kibera the majority of the afternoon, next to the railway line, watching women hawk their wares, shooting the breeze, the sun a slow, soft explosion in the sky. A sense of anticipated, if not invited, disaster.
We look like people who could be criminals, with our dreadlocks and black skin, and the fact that we are three, four adult-sized men sat together. Doing nothing, enjoying— some would say— abusing the freedom of assembly. Strangers passed by and must’ve seen us, and turned away, uncertain what they’d seen but knowing it was trouble; not wanting to know more.
I was here to see a cycling friend, street name Master. Here, they call him Master, a sobriquet he earned for all the Shaolin master movies he likes watching. They also call him master because when he’s on the bike, well, good luck catching him. Many a man has also complained about his schmoozing skills. Not me. I admire a shameless flirt.
In the horizon, a massive construction project transforming Soweto slums into modern estates with thousands of units; aiming to upgrade living standards with facilities like schools, clinics, and shops, using a Tenant Purchase Scheme (TPS) for residents. Various units, from studios to two-bedrooms, priced affordably, incorporating community empowerment through jobs and local amenities. This I’ve gleaned from Wikipedia, along with references to Boma Yangu, Kibera evictions, Kibera demolitions, and everything else I’d never known about affordable housing in Kibera.
An unknown businessman will probably buy up most of the units. And before that, a politician who is connected to his destiny will have been allocated most of them in this version of Kenyan kakistocracy. But this, like all the minor tragedies in the world, has stopped bothering us, the downwardly mobile.
Master has been spitballing about his trysts and run-ins with the law, and in each of those stories, he was the Shaolin Master capable of anything. The Makmende. Every day, he and his crew sit here, each contributing a block to the castles they build in the air, and moving only when the blinding gaze of the sun threatens to strike them with madness. He is not idle; but he would understand why someone might call them so, if we are being honest. Plus, he owns a kuku shop near Olympic Primary, where he also sells salad. Salad, ni mafuta ya kupima.
I’m naturally an antsy person; agitated by economy of movement. My a**, which has been stapled onto the wooden bench, demands constant movement. Sitting still has never been my calling card, which explains, partly, why I failed as a monk. The other part being they asked me to shave my head. Have you seen my forehead? I digress. Anywho, here I am. There had never seemed to be any hurry. Hours could go by; a person could lose a day. Or a life.
You watch anything long enough, and you can be an expert at it. I think of this line from a Junot Díaz book as Master moves on to painting the castles he has already built; what he could become if someone gave him 20 million. Or was it 20 billion? Things he could buy. Places he could go. Foods he’d eat. One of the boys said he would open an NGO, collecting discarded clothes and assembling them back together to create the internationally acclaimed Kibera Fundi Couture aesthetic, while providing children in slums with employment and a chance to earn a ‘decent living’—whatever the hell that is—and everyone said that was right, that we’d buy his clothes for sure.
Master says everything is written: where you will be born, when you will die, who you will marry. “Maktub”, he says, quoting Arabic. It occurs to me that when you ascribe everything to fate, it gives one the elusive sense that all choices are not your own, that you are guided by some unyielding force of the universe. What people say, kitu tu iliniambia. Yet we all choose our paths. Certainly I did, hanging out in libraries and lecture halls, reading a lot, and becoming whatever it is we were supposed to be.
Master, by the way, has a diploma in business finance or something like that. He is also a rapper; not a very good one, I must say. However, 34 subscribers on YouTube disagree with me. Intelligence and frustration make for a horrible cocktail. Still, in a sea of nobodies, he is a buoy of a somebody.
Yet he’s lived in Kibera all his life, had two or three children here, and plans on being a slumlord, not that he tells me. Some things you know. He is also thirty-three. Thirty-three! Otherwise known as the Jesus year: thirty-three being the very age Jesus Christ got his show on the road and became someone ‘important’ or ‘consequential’.
I ask him, (Master, not Jesus) now that he is thirty-three, whether it is time to vuka reli, cross over, and do more with his life? I mean, if it was good enough for the Son of God, surely it was good enough for him. Yet to be fair, it is prudent to understand the how of Jesus reaching his potential (death) and not so much the when. Luckily, living in Kibera means you are one stray bullet away from achieving your “potential”.
Without resorting to the hackneyed refrain of man cannot discover new oceans unless he loses sight of the shore, I tell him of the movie Coach Carter , played by Samuel L. Jackson, that mother----, and how he talks of our greatest fear being that we are scared of our limitless potential. It’s not that we can’t, it’s that we don’t; afraid of asking for more, demanding more, comfortable in our comforts, playing small.
Perhaps there will be pain, naturally, of dreaming too big and waking up to the humiliation of coming short, but humiliation does not kill a man. From the corner of our eye, we all see the other we’s we could have been: the one who does this, eats that, sleeps well, grabs opportunities by its balls.
Scripture is silent on whether this ever happened to Jesus, but since he participated in humanity in all its fullness, maybe it did.
“Master, vuka reli bana!” I say.
His eyes meet mine, and something inside me falls apart. “Tutaona,” he says.
Hatutona, I know this, it’s a no.
