“I have been trying my whole adult life—”
“You would be far more generous to launch into Mathare with a machine-gun.”
“I don’t think that kind of joke is very funny.”
“It isn’t a joke.”
Eleanor folded her arms. “You have no business undermining my work just because you’ve fallen by the sidelines.”
“Women tend to interpret any argument as personal attack. There is such a thing as fact outside whatever petty professional bitterness I might still harbour. I will remind you that I singly have raised more funding for population programmes than any man on earth. Family planning? You are riding, Ms Merritt, with the father of family planning, so that if I tell you it is a waste of time, I at least expect you to listen.”
“Yes …” she drawled, balled up on the other side of the car. “I remember stories, all right. Of you walking into Julius Nyrere’s office and dumping a bag of multi-coloured condoms on his desk. ‘How many children do you have?’ you asked. Oh, that went the rounds, Mr. Diplomat.”
“Fine, that was a stunt, and I pulled a lot of them. Some worked, some didn’t. That one backfired.”
“I’ll say.”
They were driving down the long hill towards Lang’ata, where trailing through the scrub Kenyans filed six abreast and chest to back from town to outlying estates. With so many marching feet skittling into the distance in unbroken lines, it was hard to resist the image of ants streaming to their holes. Or it was now. Eleanor didn’t used to look at Africans and think insects.
“Demographically, the future has already occurred. That by 2100 we will have between eleven and fifteen billion people is now a certainty.”
“So the answer,” said Eleanor stiffly, “is despair.”
“A large bottle of brandy helps. But no. Not despair. Let’s see if they have Martell.” He swung into a duka, for Calvin did not suffer the same qualms as Eleanor, shelling out 1,200 shillings for imported liquor when everyone else in the queue was counting out ten for a pint of milk.
After another forty-five minutes behind Volkswagens being push-started, hand-drawn carts dropping melons on to the tarmac and a lorry with a broken axle that had spilled its load of reeking fish over both lanes, they retired to Calvin’s cottage. Even at his most insufferable, Calvin’s company was preferable to another evening of the brown chair. On the way home Calvin had picked up his mail at his Karen post box, and he opened a fat manila envelope of newspaper articles on to the table.
“My clipping service,” he explained. “Courtesy of Wallace Threadgill. One of the space travellers. That crew who think if it gets a bit crowded we can book ourselves to Venus and hold our breath. They are quite remarkable. I’ve never figured out what drugs they’re on, but I would love a bottle.”
“Why would he send you clippings?”
“It’s hate mail.”
She peered at the pile. “I thought you weren’t interested in AIDS.” For these were the headlines on top: “Confronting the Cruel Reality of Africa’s AIDS: A Continent’s Agony”; “AIDS Tears Lives of a Ugandan Family”; “My Daughter Won’t Live to Two, Mother Weeps”.
“I’m entirely interested. I just find the alarmist impact projections optimistic. One more virus: we’ve seen them come and go.”
“You find high infection rates optimistic?”
“Threadgill is browned off with me. HIV—he thinks I invented it.”
“That’s preposterous!”
“Not really. And I was honoured. The virus is ingenious. But from my provisional projections, AIDS will not stem population growth even in Africa. HIV has proved a great personal disappointment. Why, I rather resent it for getting my hopes up.”
Eleanor stood and picked up her briefcase. “Disappointment? I refuse to sit here and—”
He poured her a stout double. “Young lady, we are still working on your sense of humour.”
She paused, stayed standing, but finally put the briefcase down. “I think we need to work on yours. It’s ghoulish.”
He smiled. “I was the boy in seventh grade in the back of the class telling dead-baby jokes.”
“You’re still telling them.”
“Mmm.”
“That was quite a leg-pull. Touché.”
She ranged the room, taking a good belt of the brandy. It was an ordinary room, wasn’t it? But the light glowed with the off-yellow that precedes a cyclone, and she was unnerved by a persistent scrish-scrash at the edge of her ear that she couldn’t identify. When she looked at the photograph of the diver, the eyes no longer focused on Calvin but followed Eleanor’s uneasy pace before the elephant bone instead. Their expression was of the utmost entertainment.
Spiritual Pygmies at the Ski Chalet
Wallace didn’t attend social functions often any more, but an occasional descent into the world of the pale kaffir was charitable. As he glided over their heads in his airy comprehension of the Fulgent Whole, it was easy to forget that most of his people were still piddling in the dirt with their eyes closed. While Wallace had the loftiest of interior aspirations, he did not believe that individual enlightenment should be placed above your duties to the blind. Revelation came with its responsibilities, if sometimes tedious.
He set up camp on a stool by the fire, scanning the gnoshing, tittering, tinselly crowd as they tried to numb their agony with spirit of the wrong sort. Aside from the Luo domestic staff scurrying with platters, the entire gathering was white. The usual form, in Nairobi. The pallid, both on the continent and on the planet, were being phased out, so they huddled together through the siege in lamentable little wakes like these that they liked to call “parties”.
He glanced around the house, an A-frame with high varnished rafters, like a ski chalet: Aspen overlooking the Ngong Hills. Dotted around the CD player perched a predictable display of travel trophies—bone pipes and toothy masks—whose ceremonial purposes their looters wouldn’t comprehend, or care to.
The herd was mixed tonight. A larger than average colony of aid parasites, each of whom was convinced he and he alone really understood the Samburu. The clamour of authority was deafening: “The problem with schools for the pastoralist is they discourage a nomadic life …”
“And you have to wonder,” a proprietary voice chimed, “if teaching herders to read about Boston is in their interests. When you expose them to wider options, you educate them, in effect, to be dissatisfied …”
“Aldous Huxley,” a woman interrupted. “Brave New World argues that the freedom to be unhappy is a fundamental human right …”
From an opposite corner came the distinctive whine of the conservation clique, always indignant that their sensitive, sweet and uncannily clever pet elephants had been entrusted to brutish natives who didn’t appreciate complex pachyderm kinship structures and had the temerity to worry about their own survival instead. “It’s much too early to lift the ivory ban, much too early …”
“On the contrary, I thought Amboseli was bunged