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Nearly everyone peddles the idea that theirs was the best childhood, an argument attended with the proclamation that ‘kids nowadays know nothing about life’. It’s an utterly defeatist, even conceited idea.
Yet there’s something comforting about that belief, because no matter how narrow it allows for something wired tight within human beings: a longing for what will never again play out in the motion picture of life, days of innocence and discovery are waters touched once.
Nostalgia is the art of throwing haymakers at adulthood and its demands; it’s a winding road that often ends up with the open pages of picture album. Photographs are the place we travel back to; to the continuum of our happenings, to rivers, to our teenage crushes, to toys. In my dreams, in the cameos of my boyhood are toys, toy cars that featured in the pages of newspapers, jumping later onto the black of tarmac of a speeding road.
They carried — or rather, were carried — commanded by names distant and near; difficult and easy: Björn, Kirkland, Preston Jr, Biason, and Njiru. My generation came to with the roar of the Safari Rally circuit, in the ancient years when car rallying wove narratives all across the country. At first the devilry played out in the turbo-charged echo of exhaust pipes, distant and close, and we longed to reach out and touch the magic and madness.
“Too young for you to go see,” parents cautioned.
It couldn’t have happened at a better time, and looking back if the leash hadn’t been loosed, I would have lived only with the ghosts of horsepower tearing across the land and the pictures in the sports section of the papers. Had I missed it, I would have lived in a room with its roof yanked off in a driving rain.
When permission came, it came with a caveat: An essay chronicling the happening. It was the voice of God, my father’s. He was an English teacher straight out of Charles Dickens.
It was the year I turned 13, that age of new frontiers and new voices and weaning. No, car racing did not end that year; it would never end of course, it simply found other routes, other towns. We did not know this as we went to bed to wait out the dawn.
There was a time — what seems like a lifetime away — when car racing in Kenya was pencilled in granite; it was not an event, it was a happening. The names of the drivers were superheroes and we appropriated them. If I was Mike Kirkland, my desk mate was Patrick Njiru.
On the day our route was scrapped off the rally calendar, we woke up at 5am. That is not entirely correct; one can only wake up if he slept. I had only slept fitfully. Sleep and wakefulness collided as echoes of past rallying seasons flooded back. All night, the sound of speeding cars wheeled like crows in my mind.
For a kid growing up in the country, the Safari Rally season in April was unquestionably the most thrilling, maybe even the most anticipated event of the year, if you left out Christmas. The treacherous adventure drew legendary names from the region and outside the continent such as Björn Waldegård and Shekhar Mehta, Miki Biason and favourite son, Patrick Njiru.
The cars, as reported in the itinerary and also over the radio would be flagged off at the Kenyatta International Conference (now Convention) Centre (KICC) in faraway Nairobi City. The other stops along the race track meant little; the only stretch of consequence for us was our route.
We set out before first light. The viewing point was at Tambaya, a tiny shopping centre across the river in neighbouring Mukurwe-ini Division. We had to cross the river, swollen in April, over a slippery log bridge, ascend a steep slope and join the tarmac.
The adrenalin, the promise of those tiny cars was fuel enough, food enough to last a whole day.
We arrived at 5.40am and already people had lined up along the road. It was a stunning sight. All these people, had they slept at all? We must have met in our revelries in the night; they too must have sat up late in their beds, their own hearts, like mine beating against the cage of their ribs. Men, fathers, sons, brothers, even a few schoolgirls.
It must be said that nearly everyone standing along the road — and even those who stayed behind in bed — was rooting for home-grown hero Patrick Njiru of Subaru. He was in the papers: Handsome, hair trimmed to a box and most importantly, the rich melanin of his pelt. For a long time, car racing’s top dogs were either white or Indian. True, Ian Duncan was Kenyan, but oh well….
Presently, the frightening roar of the first car broke the dawn, rearing down the valley, louder and louder as the car flew across the bridge, blinding lights picking out the cheering throng.
“Here he is!” our minder shouted. “Björn!”
Then another and another, and then this: “Patrick. Patrick Njiru!” the people knew it was him. He was the only driver who slowed down his car a fraction of a second to wave, and even look out the window. That was him, and that was it.
Later, I sat late in the night, the brilliance of the morning vivid yet. The instruction had been to pen an essay, but now as pencil touched paper and the words came to me, the story took on the character of a love letter. Then the pencil moved on to a white drawing paper, crayons filling out the doors, the bumper, Mike Kirkland’s car coming alive with each stroke.
It was all there: the rapid-fire staccato of exaggerated exhaust pipes, the exchange of gears, the glove-hand acknowledgment of the spectators by Patrick Njiru, the devilry of it all. Facebook, Instagram and the magic of Real Time and YouTube and blogs were ideas — apparitions yet to roam the earth; so far away as to be considered blasphemous.
There’s no picture of us kerbside, no picture of us waving and cheerleading; at least not the kind that can be slipped into the pocket of a photo album. But they exist, yet. Everyone remembers the first time. My first also happened to be the last.
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