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Baba.
    Kings are in trouble. From presidents. The Buganda king is a waiter in London. Uganda is a picture on a map, shaped like the back of the bumpy head of somebody facing giant Congo stubbornly, his long
kimay
jaw swaying as it cuts into Rwanda. His face is full of lakes and rivers.
    Presidents are also in trouble from generals. Like Uganda, and Sudan to the north. Everybody is in trouble from communists. Like Mengistu Haile Mariam, whose hand I shook when he visited Baba’s factory with President Moi and our school choir sang for him. He was very short and had size five Bata shoes, exactly my size. Lord Baden-Powell was also a size five. He left his footprint at Rowallan campsite in Nairobi.
    In every classroom there is a map with a photo of the president’s head in the center of each African country. Kenya is an island of peace, it says on TV all the time. People should stop politicking, Moi says.
    Mum’s home in Uganda is near the border with Rwanda, near Congo. She can’t go to visit; the border is closed.
    I look up from my book, from the surety of flying flamingo secretaries, look up first at the sky, then at pink and blue Lake Nakuru below us. A first word and picture book, my own book, snaps into place in my mind. In it, clouds are the hair of God. He is old and balding. The radiant blue light leaks out of his head. We sit inside him, receiving rain and sun, thunder and lightning.
    I look up to watch the flamingos rise up from the lake, like leaves in the wind. Our dog, Juma, is grinning, mouth open and panting and harmless, and I have this feeling. It is a pink and blue feeling, as sharp as the clear highland sky. Goose bumps are thousands of feathers, a swarm of possible people waiting to be called out from the skin of the world, by faith, by the right words, the right breeze.
    The wind swoops down, God breathes, and across the lake a million flamingos rise, the edges of Lake Nakuru lift, like pink skirts swollen by petticoats, now showing bits of blue panties, and God gasps, the skirts blow higher, the whole lake is blue and the sky is full of circling flamingos.

Chapter Five
    Ciru and I are still in Lena Moi Primary School. Jimmy is now in form three in a boarding school called St. Patrick’s Iten. Chiqy is four, and looks a lot like me. I am eleven.
    Last night we had a storm, the biggest one anybody can remember. Two windows broke, and this morning we found a giant eucalyptus tree lying flat on the ground, its roots muddy and shivering with dew and earth. There are flat clouds where sky meets earth. Flat and clean and gray, like old suds. The light of the sun falls in soft shafts and everything gleams with God behind it. The air is fresh, and we are all quiet in the car on our way to school: fences, trees, and garbage are piled on every elbow of road and land.
    We drive into school but can’t see anybody. My father is irritated with me. He makes me tie my shoelaces. He redoes my tie. For years I will hide from him my inability to tie a tie, to tie my shoelaces, to tell the time, and, later on, my inability to do long multiplication. Friends will tie my tie for me, and I will keep it tied for a whole term.
    But today seems special. The soft mouth of God is blowing moist air at us; we run through dots and dashes of shadow into soft peeping light. We run onto the pavements; long bungalows of classrooms stretch. We run zigzag, swing off one pole and vault to the next. We break out to the back, past the drinking-­water tap, past the long line of caterpillar trees, which nobody will stand under for fear that the hairy green caterpillars will fall on their heads, to the field, where everybody is playing. The caterpillars cover the tree, like leaves.
    In one week, all of Nakuru will be covered by a million white butterflies with pink nostrils. The grass is still damp, still long from the rain, and we watch for knots. When the grass is long we all like to tie clumps into knots that people can trip on. People