BELONGING

by Vivian Chilumo (Kenya)

Making a local connection Kenya

BELONGING Where I come from you belong to your father’s people. Those are your people. Whenever anyone asked me what tribe I belonged to I would mention two different ones. “Yeah, but which of those is your father’s?” “Chonyi” “Well then you are Chonyi.” I was five when a dusty white pickup truck parked at the front of our house. My mother’s belongings were put in the cargo bed, and my mother got in and left. Years later I get to meet my mother’s people at Mariakani. My grandmother leads the way on the narrow path, my mother behind her, then me. They are both balancing the mtungi of water on their heads effortlessly, with their hands hanging at a slight angle from their sides. I am carrying a smaller one in my hand. The tall green grass on both sides slaps across our legs and it feel as if we are parting the red sea with our limbs, only that this sea stings the skin, and droplets of dew splash up as high as the neck. Mum and grandma, however, seem to glide through smoothly while I struggle to keep up, fighting the need to scratch the itch in my lower legs. “When your mother was younger the weather was better. We had good rain and we used to plant rice,” my grandmother says, adjusting the leso around her waist, on it a flowery pattern of yellow and blue; and as all lesos do, it has a saying on it. Hata kidogo chatosha kwa wapendanao Even a little is enough for those who love each other “And then my siblings and I would sit outside during the day and keep birds away from the plantation while we roasted maize cobs,” my mother says. I see something move next to my leg from the corner of my eye and I let out a yelp, sure that with all this grass, it must be a snake. I look and find it is a small toad, orange with black spots. It had jumped out of my mtungi. It hops into the grass, maybe to find its way back to the clear waters we have just come from. My mother has turned back to face me and is now laughing at her urbanite daughter. Her body shakes as she laughs and I think she is going to spill the water but she, an expert at the art of this balance, just turns and keeps walking - not touching the container even once. I can tell my grandmother is smiling. Her rounded left cheek is visible even from behind her because of her lean face. I can picture her dimple, a dimple that I have only seen once since I arrived yesterday. I greeted her and she smiled, and I saw a slight depression on her cheek that was akin to mine. At the house my mother grew up in, we sit outside. My uncle tells me, that as far as my eye can see, the land belonged to Birya, my mother’s great grandfather. “All these houses are the houses of his people. He came here, a young boy, not older than fourteen. He was a slave taken from Mozambique and escaped Frere town where the slaves would be kept, awaiting the ships. He came here to a people that were not his and they took him in as their own. A man who had no children adopted him. They gave him a Giriama name and later when he was ready to marry, gave him land - land that goes all the way to where River Kombeni is.” A song starts to play on the small Sony radio on the stool. My grandmother sings along, then gets up to dance, adjusting the leso and moving her waist in a way that can only be described as the way planets rotate and revolve simultaneously. It is the way her people dance. Her arms are stretched out, fingers apart. Mum gets up and follows suit. They both turn and look at me smiling. To make sure that I am seeing. My people, people I belong to, and how they do.