Our Man is old enough to be President of Kenya

Self Editor’s Note: How old is Our Man in America? It depends on who’s asking.

A young me

Look at my ID and you will see 1974 listed as my year of birth. Mama says that’s total BS.

OK let me explain: It’s May 2006 and I’m home in Makairo, my birthplace in the Gusii highlands, for the first time in nearly 12 years. Mama has been trying to get me to see where my Old Man, whose funeral I missed eight years earlier, was laid to rest.

I like to call Gusii “The Land Without Tombs,” as most people do not mark graves. We burry a guy in the yard and – if he was a good guy – name kids after him. If you are a thief, only one kid is likely to be named after you, and chances are that your mother named the poor kid, because, as my people would say, “Kebe nkia monyene.” (He was evil but he was my son).

Because I haven’t really resolved my issues with the Old Man, I politely refuse to be shown where he is. But my mother shows me pictures from his funeral. I reluctantly go through them. Next is an autobiographical flyer that was circulated to people at the funeral.

That arouses my interest.

I lived with my father under the same roof for most of my 20 years in Kenya, but I knew very little about the cowboy. Any normal child would have asked his father anything, but I was never a normal child. I was too terrified to ask my father anything because he was a man who believed that there was such a thing as a stupid question. (Don’t look at me like that. You too have relatives like him. What sets us apart is that I’m not in denial).

From the flyer I learn that my father was 53 at his death. He had dropped out of Nyansiongo High School – one of Gusii’s best – after only one year, but managed to get a job as an untrained primary schoolteacher.

In 1971, my Old Man met the Queen. OK, he didn’t meet her; the Queen’s father pulled her out of school because he didn’t believe there was a need to educate girls. How they met is sketchy and I can’t ask her because in our culture it’s taboo to discuss matters of romance with your mother – unless of course she is yapping about you being too old to be unmarried. I will, however, impose economic sanctions on her until she talks for my memoir. If an economic embargo fails, there is an old American interrogation trick I learned from an old American named WeEvil Cheney: waterboarding.

In 1973, their first child was born. 1973? Did I have an older sibling die before I was born? You mean I could have escaped all those years of my Old Man kicking my ass because I was the oldest and needed to set a good example? God, why did you take my brother away? That’s not fair? (If you haven’t figured it out, those were the questions running through my head).

But I did ask my mother to explain.

“That was you,” Mama said. “You were born in 1973.”

“Now that’s messed up,” is the first thing I want to say.

I live in America, where you always have to shave a couple of years off your age when people ask. Now this lady is telling me that I’m actually a year older than my government-issued IDs say? How dare is she!

The year 1974 gets into my documents in 1992, right after high school. I need a passport to leave the country, but like the births of many children born at home – probably on a banana leaf or a goatskin – mine wasn’t registered.

My father sends me to the nearest government office in Nyamira to get the birth certificate. I’m armed with only a letter from the local chief as testimony that I was born in the village. I get to Nyamira and the application form asks, “When were you born, boy?” I wanna write, “AT NIGHT,” but the Kenyan government officials of my time had no sense of humor.

I trek back home – about 10 miles – and find my father waiting. “Did you get it?” he asks.

“They want my birthday,” I say, careful not to look at him in the eye.

He writes, 28 OCTOBER 1974 on a piece of paper and sends me off.

I turn in the application form, pay the fee, pay a bribe and get my birth certificate. A few months later in Nairobi, I apply for a passport, pay the fee, but when I can’t come up with the market-rate bribe, the officer shaves two years off my passport’s expiration date. (When I went to renew it, the Kenyan Embassy officer in Washington, DC, thought I was crazy. “There is no such a thing as a three-year passport.”)

In America I get more IDs with 10/28/1974. (No bribes here, but the fees make the Kenyan bribe look like a coin).

So in 2006, armed with what I think is unimpeachable evidence – a Kenyan passport that to my relieve is now half the size of my old one; a California driver’s license that I have even though I don’t own a car; and a green card that isn’t green – I’m ready to bring the Queen down.

But before I reach into my arsenal, I decide to give the lady a chance to recant her insulting statement.

“Daddy told me it was 1974.”

She smiles and tells me that my father wasn’t there when she went to labor. (He wasn’t a deadbeat, Mr. & Mrs. Let’s Save the World’s Women. The women of my tribe demand that men stay as far a way as possible).

“It was 1973,” the Queen says. “Trust me. I will never forget that pain.”

Related Posts

A truce with my father

The day I became a man

Related posts:

1. A salute to President Barack Obama’s father