The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [87]
The plans for Ndegwa are “hotting up,” as they say here. Will you be in Nairobi on the 5th? I will arrange an invitation all the same. There will be a cast of characters in attendance I would like you to meet, principally Mary Ndegwa, who has just published her first book of poems — trenchant and harsh and deeply rhythmic, which I like. It would not be fair to say she has benefited from all the publicity, but there it is. She seems a calm ship in a tempest, weathering the controversy magnificently. There is always the danger, when one makes a fuss over something the government has done, of poking at a nest of vipers with a stick. At this point, she risks her own freedom. I risk possible expulsion from the country (which before I met you, I wouldn’t have minded so much; now it would be a torture, and I would have to insist that you go home, too; but of course you couldn’t, could you? — not until your tour of duty is up; how strict are they about that?). Regina hates my involvement. She calls it insincere, which, though I have great admiration for Ndegwa and loathe what has happened to him, of course is true. I have no idea what I’m doing in this arena. I feel I’ve taken on this cause as one would the latest fashion, the fact that progress can only be made with gala parties enhancing this queasy realization. More to the point, Regina is afraid my involvement will get her kicked out of the country as well, or that someone in authority will take away her grant. (In a country without many precedents and subject to a certain lawlessness, one has to believe anything is possible.) Ndegwa, who languishes in an underground prison for having written Marxist poems in the Kikuyu vernacular (political prisoners are not treated well; and even being treated “well” in a Kenyan prison would be an experience from which you and I would not emerge intact), risks his life. I hope we know what we are doing.
My Marine at the embassy, of course, risks nothing.
Kennedy is due to arrive on the 5th. My Marine is all atwitter. There will be a special reception that afternoon, and that night the gala, after which Kennedy will go on safari (the point of his journey, I suspect). The next morning, he’ll have an audience with Mary Ndegwa (or is it the other way around?). I will be standing in the wings, trying to remain alert and useful, but all the while thinking only of you.
Amnesty International has written me. They have, as I suspected, already lodged a formal protest.
I would like someday to write of Ndegwa’s courage. Did I tell you that we were born on the same day in the same year, eight thousand miles apart from each other? Astonishing to think that while I was delivered to the sterile hands of my mother’s physician, Ndegwa was born on a sisal mat in a mud hut, delivered to the hands of his father’s first wife. I remember that when I met Ndegwa, I used to think of us as two parallel lines that had arrived by design in Nairobi. He grew up during Mau Mau and didn’t start school until he was ten because of the chaos of that era. When he was a child, he witnessed the execution of his father over a self-dug grave. By the time we’d met, he’d caught up to me in terms of schooling: indeed, he’d far surpassed me. At the university, I learned a great deal from him of a purely classical nature, which I hadn’t expected to do. I’d like to create a portrait of him, highlighting the contrasts between his past as a sheepherder and his current status at the university; his legal battles to avoid paying a dowry of sheep and goats to his father-in-law for his wife; his practice, though secretive, of polygamous marriages; his revelation to me that wife-swapping is a time-honored Kikuyu custom; and his pervasive malaise regarding the