My rooms were in the small staff accommodation compound on the edge of the school playing-fields. It was owned by the school, but managed by a fierce Luo lady who called memzungu, a term used for all white people. She told me to call her Madam as she laughed off my comments about cockroaches the size of mice living behind my bread bin.
There were a few staff houses around the school, but this sixteen-unit compound was where all new staff started out. There were six rooms on the ground floor and ten smaller ones up a flight of concrete steps on the floor above. My rooms were on the first floor, and I was able to sit in my doorway and peer over the high, spiked wall that surrounded the compound.
Security guards, known asaskaris, dozed at the locked gate, a large, deaf Dobermann padlocked to their chair with a short chain. I learnt quickly to make a lot of noise as I approached theaskaris, to be sure they were awake, so they could hold back the snarling beast when I left the compound. As they got to know me the guards and the dog became friendlier, but from the start I realised the sign reading ‘Mbwa Kali’ – ‘Angry Dog’ – on the wall outside was no exaggeration. The dog was hit and killed by amatatu a few weeks later, but the sign stayed, and theaskaris protected the housing compound alone.
Ouraskaris were Somalis from up near the northern Kenyan border. The school’s priest, Father Marcus, found them work at Greenfields, and they took turns to go back north to their home-places with him during school vacation. Madam brought them a bowl of maize-flour dough calledugali at the start of their shifts, and we in the apartments took weekly turns to fill their battered Thermoses with sweet tea each evening.
Being on good terms with youraskaris was vital, Donald told me, and ours, being Somalis, were harder to become close to than many. Donald was from the lighter-skinned Kikuyu tribe, who considered themselves the chosen ones – the Children of God. They, and the much darker Luo people, were the largest tribes in Kenya, and they looked down on each other and everyone else, but particularly the Somali, and Donald was very wary of theaskaris.
Outside the compound a row ofduka stalls sold newspapers, bananas, bread, pints of milk in thin, plastic bags, single hard-boiled eggs and chocolate bars that for some reason didn’t melt in the heat.
I spent my first morning sitting on a towel on the concrete step outside my door flicking through theDaily Nation newspaper, trying to make out what I could abo
