The Bones of Ndundi:
An Archaeology
Time is measured here by physical need. Asking “when is mealtime?” gets you an incredulous stare and: “Whenever you are hungry”; “When is bed time?” – an exasperated sigh and “When you are tired”. This does not, of course, betray any kind of “savage innocence,” as the colonial officials of the past would have called it – time is largely irrelevant in the camps. All things are provided: shelter, food, water, medical aid – though not at the same comfort level to which Westerners are accustomed. With these needs met, what need does one have for “last week” or “next month” or “at three o’clock”? Time as measured by watches and calendars is an indistinct smear in this part of Africa.
Eras, however, are not a foreign concept, imported from across the seas and imposed by governmental edict. Our mid-twentieth century is referred to as “The Time Before the Big Troubles” – not because “big troubles” (a euphemism for ethnic cleansing) were unknown, but because the space between these culturally traumatic events during that period was much greater than it is today.
I once asked an elder to tell me about the time before Nyanya Baruki bore children; when she and the elder were young. “Oh! That is ancient history – when the colonials were in charge.” The twenty years before the refugees fled to this camp was a cacophony of fear and blood sprinkled with short pauses of uneasy, near-paranoid “peace”. People refer to the era in which we now live as “The Time of Sadness”.
As events unfold these eras compress and expand in the minds of past participants like some chronological accordion, speeding up and slowing down the historical tempo. These fluctuations of collective memory cannot be caught on paper. Paper records are unknown among camp dwellers. Only the military keeps such records – or outsiders, such as I.
I am the nexus of catalogue and internal reflection. Two journals cover my desk: the thin, jittery hand of my personal diary – loose sheaves, tickets, knick knacks and souvenirs spilling from the pages; and the official tribunal evidence record: sharp, neat records painstakingly typed in a uniform font on a device entirely too modern for such a remote rural piece of Africa.
I knew the bones animate, speaking, laughing, drunk and playing. The catalogue knows numbers, diagnoses, the marks of evidence.
Rarely do the two works cite one another.
Sample NR201a:
Large pitting of female os coxae indicates possible ante-mortem parturition, though the weak correlation between pitting and pregancy leave a large margin for diagnostic error.
Nyanya Baruki is not, despite the Swahili title “nyanya,” a grandmother at all. While she had children of her own, the line seems to have been cursed with barren-ness. This curse, as it appears to some, combined with widow Baruki’s methuselanic age, has done much to spawn rumors of sorcery and black magic around her person. Pregnant women dutifully avoid her gaze, fearful of spontaneous abortion. Even those who distribute food from the rice trucks hand her portion to her next of kin to avoid any possibility of contamination by evil spirits.
I once interviewed Mzee Mangome about her youth:
“Her father was a carpenter?”
“Yes. Ndwele Baruki made the best plows for many villages around. He would take a cart full to market each week and come back jingling with money – real money, like the kind you could pay taxes with back then.”
“And her mother?”
“Grew tomatoes as big as your clenched hands. She also sold at market. Between the two of them, they were a rich family indeed.”
“What of her education?”
“Well, the Belgians only let her take four years of grammar, but she was very good at it. Of course the elders at the time were furious at her, though they could not express their anger around the
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