Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama [200]
“So how should we adapt?” Auma said.
Rukia shrugged. “I leave such answers up to policy makers. I’m only a historian. But I suspect that we can’t pretend that the contradictions of our situation don’t exist. All we can do is choose. For example, female circumcision is an important Kikuyu custom. With the Masai also. To a modern sensibility, it is barbaric. Perhaps we could arrange to have all these operations performed in hospitals and cut down on the death rate. Keep the bleeding to a minimum. But you cannot really have half a circumcision. This leaves no one satisfied. So we must choose. The same is true of the rule of law, the notion of independent inquiry—these things may conflict with tribal loyalties. You cannot have rule of law and then exempt certain members of your clan. What to do? Again you choose. If you make the wrong choice, then you learn from your mistakes. You see what works.”
I licked my fingers and washed my hands. “But isn’t there anything left that is truly African?”
“Ah, that’s the thing, isn’t it?” Rukia said. “There does seem to be something different about this place. I don’t know what it is. Perhaps the African, having traveled so far so fast, has a unique perspective on time. Or maybe it is that we have known more suffering than most. Maybe it’s just the land. I don’t know. Maybe I am also the romantic. I know that I cannot stay away from here too long. People still talk to each other here. When I visit the States, it seems a very lonely place—”
Suddenly, all the lights in the house went out. Rukia sighed—blackouts were becoming more common, she said—and I handed her my lighter to light the candles she kept on the mantelpiece. Sitting in the darkness, I remembered the stories Zeituni had told us, and remarked that the night runners must be out. Rukia lit the candles, their glow shaping her face into a mask of laughter.
“You know about the night runners, then! Yes, they are very powerful in the darkness. There used to be many in our area, back home. It was said they walked with the hippos at night. I remember once—”
As suddenly as they had died, the light bulbs popped back on. Rukia blew out the candles and shook her head. “Alas, in the city the lights do come on eventually. My daughter, she has no use for night runners. You know, her first language is not Luo. Not even Swahili. It is English. When I listen to her talk with her friends, it sounds like gibberish to me. They take bits and pieces of everything—English, Swahili, German, Luo. Sometimes, I get fed up with this. Learn to speak one language properly, I tell them.” Rukia laughed to herself. “But I am beginning to resign myself—there’s nothing really to do. They live in a mixed-up world. It’s just as well, I suppose. In the end, I’m less interested in a daughter who’s authentically African than one who is authentically herself.”
It was getting late; we thanked Rukia for her hospitality and went on our way. But her words would stay with me, bringing into focus my own memories, my own lingering questions. On the last weekend of my stay, Auma and I took the train to the coast and stayed at an old beachfront hotel in Mombasa that had once been a favorite of the Old Man’s. It was a modest, clean place, in August filled mostly with German tourists and American sailors on shore leave. We didn’t do much, just read and swam and walked along the beach, watching pale crabs scurry like ghosts into their sandy holes. The following day we visited Mombasa’s Old Town and climbed the worn stairs of Fort Jesus, first built by the Portuguese to consolidate control of trade routes along the Indian Ocean, later overrun by the swift Omani fleets, later still a beachhead for the British as they moved inland in search of ivory and gold, now an empty casing of stone, its massive walls peeling like papier-mâché in strips of pale orange