I knew I was unwelcome in many European friends’ homes. Elke’s mother’s stare would follow me coldly up and down the stairs of her two-storey flat as she sat, arms tightly folded on the mahogany sofa. Simon’s mother always seemed angry when I visited. She would talk to my European friends who visited Simon, but never to me. Although almost all our school friends and neighbours were European, our parents expected us to be as traditional as the African kids we hardly saw. With ‘white flight’ in our neighbourhood and schools, more Africans moved in. We were mocked for being too mzungu– too European – and not African enough, especially Eric and I, who could not speak Kiswahili and Luhya. We were not good enough for Africans, Asians, or Europeans. We didn’t belong anywhere. This never-ending rejection created an intense shyness in Eric and me and an explosive anger in all three of my older brothers. We brought these tensions home to our parents; arguments ensued. Occasionally, Eric would return home and wordlessly break windows or slam doors or shatter plates in an uncontrollable fury. Two of my brothers would eventually refuse to go back to school.

It didn’t kill our bodies at first.

I loved the feel of the sun’s rays on my skin. The striped brown and tan lizards loved the heat too, and they sun-bathed spread-eagled on the grass or murram, doing their high-speed scattering thing into bushes and up trees well in advance of any intrusion. The lizards were bold, bolder even, than the prickly hedgehogs that quietly travelled through the greenery near the wet, faded clothes which smelled of Omo. 

I was watching the goings-on in the hedge in the midday heat when I heard some unusual commotion coming from Malova’s room. Malova was in the hospital and my parents were throwing away his paintings and books and records. He said nothing on his return. Just grinned and joked with me. I thought this meant that everything was okay.

I’d forget this incident for twenty years, maybe more, until I came home to find Malova in an argument with my parents. I cannot remember what the conflict was about, but I vaguely recall hearing my younger siblings – who’d been born long after the colonial transition and had an easier upbringing for it –criticising Malova for being unreasonable. I remember thinking he was being unfair, but said nothing. He was already under enough fire. When everyone left, all he said to me was, “Margaret, they threw away my books.”

Somewhere in the twenty years before Malova said this, I would be told that Malova’s scribbling – from neatly written words carved into songs and poems to never-ending, illegible scattered thoughts – was a sign of sickness. And somewhere in those twenty years, that sickness would be given a name: Schizophrenia. Somewhere in those twenty years, I would learn that his love for those books he read to me – pages of poems we loved – was called hoarding, yet another symptom of his sickness.