I was too young to understand where my mother came from. I can’t recall who introduced us, but I do remember someone saying that she was our mother. That she had been doing a secretarial course in England and that she would now be living with us. I remember the way she beamed at me. An aunt would later tell me that I didn’t return the smile. Soon after, I saw her clothes hanging in my father’s closet. Her favourite was the navy shiny sheath dress she wore with the matching hat. I liked her blue glitzy shoes with the pointed high heels. I tried them on my feet when I thought that she wasn’t looking. Carried that soft purse with those pink, little, sewn-on beads and strutted around and around their bed with oversized stilettos and bag. Feeling all grown up.

Malova and I always excelled at school. The pressure to do well was intense: education had lifted my father out of poverty and moved us into the middle class. Schools were segregated when I was born, and the substandard education given to Africans in colonial Kenya ensured that most Africans only had access to menial jobs. After independence from the British colonisers, my three older brothers and I – all born during the freedom struggle – were thrown into European environments so that we could reap the benefits and privileges of the ‘best’ education. This was to be found in the newly desegregated schools in independent Kenya. Even though we lived in Kenya, we hardly ever encountered other African kids in those early years. Instead, we lived among Europeans in a neighbourhood in Westlands. 

I have vague memories of that time. I recall getting my first bicycle – a red Raleigh – and the feeling of gladness it gave me, since I was finally able to tag along with the other kids in the neighbourhood’s ‘bicycle gang’. We donned gum boots and cycled to the swamp-like grasses outside St Mark’s Church in the rainy season to splash through the puddles and collect tadpoles. Unlike my European friends, I was singled out and followed around Asian stores. I’d have coins rudely thrown at me at the counter where, excited, I had taken my weekly pocket money to buy chewing gum, toffee or comics. The Asian woman at the cash register would place my European friends’ shopping in brown bags; she would refuse to bag mine. 

Aunt Lois was my mother’s stylish and beautiful younger sister. She worked as a secretary at a travel agency in town. I remember Aunt Lois making herself ‘prettier’ with skin-lightening Ambi, which burned her face to raw patches of pus-filled bubbles. As a young girl, my mother and aunt took the hot comb to my coarse, shoulder-length hair, pressing every kink out of it with the charcoal-heated, smoking metal. And even so, I remember the high-pitched cackles of European children, who pointed and snickered at my braided hair. Even worse: my hair wrapped in string.