The Cocoa lady is talking loudly now, as if she is talking to the whole room, ” He! So they left Oyster Shell, and went to Amigos. I met them there; five minutes didn’t pass, and they were fighting again. Some American guy stopped them. He! The guy could box like Mohammed Ali. Mohammed Mohammed Ali, he floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee! So, me I decided to go with one of the American’s: bwana, he was light, like an Arab! Even his eyes were green like a mzungu’s: he had an afro just like Shaft’s. Haa! -bwana, and the muscles! I was just thinking, haki, me I can let him toboa me wide open – shaft me -just for a baby that looks like him. But si you know Kenyans? The way they talk nice-nicely when you are there, meanwhile, they are cut-cutting your blouse behind your back? Smiling at you, saying -you look so nice in your new blouse sist-ay? Eh! Anyway, there was this ka-silly Nigerian woman, that new Professor at the University. She kept talking with the American. Ma-intellectual things, as if those can catch a man, eh? And anywaaay, who wants a woman so black? So me, I started to Rhumba, you know, like a Ugandan, shaking iiiiit! Ai! Him he forgot that Black Professor. So we went. The Americans had comboa-ed a room upstairs. The man, he funua-ed a bottle of Johnny Walker. Ha! Then he started! You haven’t heard siasa like that! Ati ‘Black Power’; ati ‘black is beautiful’; ati -we are in a revalooshen! Me, I just wanted to tell him Mau Mau is over, and anywaaay, who is he to talk about Black power, the way he looks just like a half-caste? So I washa-ed some lingala music, you know, so we could groove a little. He starts to say this African music is beautiful ba-aby. Ati-Lingala! Ati-beautiful! It’s like he wanted to be us, and the way us we always just dream of being an Afro-American!”

Milka is getting impatient. The Cadbury Cocoa skinned lady’s last sentence lies undigested in her mind. She is too wired with waiting to give it enough attention, but it has that ah-so-that’s-it truth about it. The sort of truth that your forgotten mind swallows immediately; the sort of truth that the normal, day-to-day mind struggles to find use for.

Sometimes, Milka thinks, your normal mind throws the truth away in irritation. Maybe this truth sits on a highway in her mind, and just gets tossed right out by fast moving thoughts, like a soccer-player’s thoughts, which must be very fast and busy, but hardly deep. She giggles to herself , she has been thinking about thoughts, and the thought she tried to remember has escaped from her memory. She can’t retrieve it.

Then one day, some soccer player breathing hard, and covered in a sheen of muscle-gloss (that she would just die to touch). He’ll trot up to the sidelines, and ask the open air around him, but why is such-and-such the way it is? And Milka’s smug deep-inside mind will take over. She’ll breathe in, and smell the man in him without her legs turning into porridge. She’ll turn to him, a smile on her face, a sort-of I-can-take-you-or-leave-you smile; not a stammer or a doubt in her, she will tell him the answer, then think, hey! When did I get so clever?

The Cocoa lady is still talking, as they put rollers into her hair. “Argh! But to be black! Then I pay all this money for curls, and it rains, and I have to come back. Bwana, I wish I had hair like Donna Summer…do you think it is a wig? He! Gold, and brown and you can throw it back so men can start to shake-shake! And then when I’m dancing rhumba, I don’t have to worry that curls will just stick to my head, and the oil will drip. Ahh! I wish I had hair like Donna Summer!”

….

(c) Binyavanga Wainaina