In My Dreams I Dance
To begin with I was very nervous in maths lessons, but once I learned to relax I began to do well. I even managed to bring about a change in our teacher’s approach to learning. He was extremely strict and caned us if we failed the tests he set us, even though the school policy was not to cane the children. When I failed one test I fell on the floor crying, asked to use the toilet and then locked myself in to avoid being caned. I refused to come out until the end of the lesson. When the Salvation Army bosses heard about this, they were furious with the teacher and made sure that he stopped caning children. He was unhappy about the ban and was scornful about the white people, who he said were ‘too soft’.
I started to do well in all my subjects and wondered if my dad’s prediction about my middle name Olympia really would come true one day. For the first time in my life, I started to feel successful.
I also made friends at Joyland. One was called Abigail. She was a few years older than me and was in one of the dormitories for the older girls. She was a lovely friendly girl who wanted to make sure that everyone was happy. She made me feel safe and protected.
I was also friendly with two girls called Monica and Grace. We would sit outside together playing with our dollies and giggling. We tried to do knitting with sticks and grass and fell about laughing at our rather poor attempts.
I still felt very homesick and sometimes I burst into tears when I thought about my mum and everyone else at home.
‘Don’t cry, Anne,’ said Monica. ‘You can have my dolly, that will make you feel better.’
‘And have my book too,’ said Grace, putting her arms around me and trying to wipe my tears away.
I still missed home, but my friends certainly made me feel more comfortable at school.
My best friend was a girl called Sarah. She had the luxury of one fully functioning leg and we all thought she was extremely able. Sometimes she stood up and danced for us or proudly walked for a short distance without the calliper that supported her bad leg. She was able to wear sandals and as I stared at my heavy polio boots I was very envious of her.
Generally, all the children got along well together. Of course we sometimes had disagreements and insulted each other, but like quick-drying showers these fallouts didn’t last for long. The emphasis on singing really bound us together as a group. We sometimes entered singing competitions, competing against able-bodied schools, and to our immense delight we always won.
One of the unexpected pleasures about Joyland was the library. I had learned my ABC from my family before going to school, but to begin with I couldn’t read. I started off using colouring books containing cut-out dolls and a cut-out range of outfits for them to wear. I also loved looking at books containing pictures of other countries.
The library was full of European books, along with a few Kenyan ones. Once I had learned to read, I read the children’s books over and over again. Jack and the Beanstalk was one of my favourites. We weren’t allowed to take the books home with us, but because I knew the stories so well I could recite them almost word for word to my sisters and brothers when I saw them in the holidays. However many times I reread the stories, I never tired of them.
My dad instilled a love of books into me and all my sisters and brothers from an early age. Other soldiers would go to the mess to drink when they’d finished working, but he would bring home books from the barracks library and read all kinds of enchanting children’s stories to us or listen to educational programmes on the radio with us. He really was a very devoted father.
I took off fast with my reading and writing. It was as enjoyable as playing for me. I also soon learned to join in with the tricks and games of the other children. If Mama Salome left her room after she’d cooked herself some tasty food, we sneaked in and licked out her pots. When she returned to wash up, she would see a trail of telltale finger marks around them.
‘Who’s been licking out my pots?’ she would ask, trying to sound cross. None of us ever wanted to own up.
There was a big organisation called Kindernottif, based in Europe, that raised some money for the school. The children also had individual sponsors and mine were members of a church in Germany. They sent me a beautiful doll that could blink with its eyelids and eyelashes. Not all of our dolls were so fancy—we used to try to make simple ones out of sticks. We were asked to write thank-you letters to our sponsors and sometimes they took photos of us holding the gifts they had sent us.
Along with our academic subjects, we girls were taught how to bathe properly. Health professionals came to talk to us about good hygiene—keeping our nails short and our hair combed. At first I struggled to comb my hair, but after a while I got to grips with it. My hair was longer than that of some of the other girls and the staff told my parents to cut it short to make it easier to manage.
My dad used to give me a soap called Fa that smelled of wild flowers and sometimes my friends asked me if they could use it. I loved the smell of their soap as well and sometimes got tired of my own. Giggling, we would agree to swap. We enjoyed smelling a little bit different from usual when we showered.
Although I adapted well to Joyland, I counted the days until I returned home for the first time a few months later. My mum came on the bus to pick me up and as soon as I saw her I flung my arms around her neck.
‘Oh, Anne, you’ve grown a lot,’ she said. ‘I can see that this place is treating you well. We’ve all missed you so much.’
On the long bus journey home I chattered all the way about the different things I was doing at Joyland. My mum listened patiently. ‘You’re certainly different on this journey than on the one when we took you there,’ she smiled.
My family were excited when I arrived home. We spent the first few days swapping stories. Excitedly, I told everyone about the running water, showers and flushing toilets at Joyland. They all seemed very impressed.
I had also now seen white people for the first time. I discussed these strange creatures with my sisters. We concluded that they weren’t the same kind of humans as us. I believed that they never went to the toilet and could not die.
Although I’d got used to living away from home, I slotted back into family life straight away. I loved the pampering I received at home. My dad slaughtered a chicken in my honour, saying, ‘Now I have all my family together.’ Chicken was a luxury that wasn’t eaten too often in most families.
I taught my siblings the songs I’d learned at school. They were very different from the songs they were learning. I proudly showed off the pens and crayons I had been given at school and received admiring gasps from my brothers and sisters, who didn’t possess such luxuries. My school books were also better than my brothers’ and sisters’ books and I was wearing nice clothes that the Salvation Army had given me.
When the other children in the barracks saw the good things I’d returned home with, they suddenly wanted to be my friend. But their parents forbade them from playing with me. ‘Don’t touch her or you’ll get an infection,’ some of them said.
I could never understand why these parents thought that my toys were safe for their children to be in contact with when I wasn’t.
Many of my aunts and uncles visited me while I was at home and showered me with love and affection.
‘Anne, you’re doing so well, you look so strong and healthy,’ they exclaimed.
It was hard returning to Joyland after having such a lovely time at home, but I soon settled back into the school routine. I loved being at home but I also loved school, where I felt equal with the others. School also made me aware that some children were less able than me. School and home became my two heavens.
Christmases at the school were very special. A strange-looking man called Father Christmas would give us all a gift with our name on it. I hadn’t known anything about these western traditions before I started at Joyland and felt worried at first because Father Christmas was dressed from head to toe in red. Plain red is associated with lightning in the area where my family’s village is, so I was afraid to approach him in case he struck me with lightning. When the staff reassured me, I was brave enough to sit on his knee.
As part of the Christmas celebrations every class had to perform a nativity play. I was always given the part of an angel, but one year I became bored at the thought of doing the same thing again and refused point blank.
‘No, I want to be Mary this year,’ I said rather petulantly.
‘No, you are very good at being an angel. You must be an angel,’ my teacher replied.
‘But I want to be Mary. Angels don’t wear callipers and crutches,’ I protested.
The teacher slapped me for my impertinence and I went flying across the room. I wasn’t hurt, but I reported it to one of the Salvation Army staff and the teacher was reprimanded. Violence from staff was extremely rare at Joyland.
I had lost a lot of co-ordination through the polio, but the physiotherapy I received at Joyland helped me to regain some skills. Because I had so much love and positive reinforcement from my family and from the staff at the school, I rarely regarded my disability as a curse, but rather as an inconvenience that I had to work around. Some of the children, though, seemed very miserable about their disability because it had led to their families rejecting them. I always came back to school after the holidays looking immaculate because I had been well looked after, but some of the children came back with scabies because they had been neglected at home. I realised how lucky I was to have a family who loved me.
My years at school were very happy, but by the time I was eight I was more aware that I fitted in at school and at home, but I didn’t fit in with the rest of the world. I felt as if the wider community were shouting in my face, ‘You are so different, Anne!’ because they stared at me wherever I went.
One school holiday when my mum came to pick me up and we got on the bus to go back to Nairobi, the bus conductor said to my mum, ‘You have to hold your crippled daughter on your knee and cover her legs so that nobody sees her.’
I burst into tears at his harsh words but, wanting to avoid a fuss, my mum did as she was told.
I was beginning to understand that the world could be very cruel. Whenever we went out in Nairobi during that school holiday I felt that people’s eyes were burning through my clothes to stare at my withered polio legs. I was convinced that they dismissed me as an inferior cripple. The stares made me self-conscious and withdrawn in the company of strangers and I longed to return to Joyland where the staff worked hard to instil confidence and a strong sense of self-belief into us. As soon as I walked back through the school gates I came alive again.
Chapter Four A Terrible Loss
It was Saturday 30th June 1979, right in the middle of the rainy season. I was nine years old and had been at Joyland for four years. Saturday was the day we sat outside and styled each other’s hair after we had completed our chores. We wore our own clothes at weekends and were all in a happy mood.
The day started like any other. The more able girls weeded the flowerbeds, while the rest of us cleaned our dormitories. Then one of the teachers came in and said abruptly, ‘Oh, Anne Olympia, you need to go home.’
I started laughing and said. ‘I’m not a fool. It’s not closing day yet. I can’t go home until the end of term.’
‘Yes, you can. Get your things together. You have to go home because your mum wants you. Come with me to the office.’
I had no idea what the teacher was talking about, but we had been taught to obey our teachers, so I did as I was told.
When I got to the office I saw my big sister Alice there.
‘Hi, Alice,’ I said breezily. I wondered why she had come to my school. It was usually my mum who picked me up at the end of term and brought me back afterwards.
‘Where’s Mum?’ I asked. ‘The teacher says she wants me at home.’
I was beginning to feel uneasy. Something wasn’t right.
‘Oh, she asked me to collect you,’ said Alice, trying to sound casual but not quite managing it.
‘But where is Mum? And aren’t you supposed to be at school?’
‘Come, Anne, we need to return home,’ she said, without offering any further explanation. ‘There’s a taxi outside waiting to take us to the bus station.’
She had got a bus from Webuye to Kisumu town and from there had got a taxi to Joyland.
I hurriedly packed some things and anxiously followed Alice into the waiting taxi and then got the bus to my mum’s village. My cousins and uncles were gathered at the bus stop with a bicycle to transport me to the centre of the village. I couldn’t understand why we were there rather than in Nairobi and why there was such a large group of family members waiting for me.
As I was wheeled along the dusty track local women kept running up to me, wailing and crying, ‘Oh, Ruth, you have died and left this flower. Who is going to look after it now?’
What on earth were they talking about? Surely my lovely mum couldn’t be dead. The village women must have made a mistake.
I started screaming. ‘Where’s Mum? Where’s Mum?’ I cried.
Nobody answered. We arrived at the main part of the village and the terrible truth was confirmed: I could see that my mum was laid out on a bed outside her family’s home.
Nothing felt real. My mum had been a strong and healthy woman and she wasn’t old. Was I stuck in a horrible dream? I couldn’t take in what was going on.
One of my relatives carefully placed me next to my mum. I flung myself on top of her, willing her to start breathing again.
‘Mum, Mum, wake up! You promised to make me a jumper, where is it?’ I sobbed. I hoped that she would hear me and remember her promise and that would be enough to coax her back to life.
The shock was too much. I told myself that it was all a terrible mistake and that she’d wake up and give me a cuddle very soon. How could she leave me when I needed her so much?
‘I’m sorry, Anne,’ Alice said, with tears in her eyes. ‘We don’t know what happened to her, but she really has gone.’
At that time nobody had mobile phones and few Kenyans had landlines, so circulating good or bad tidings always took a long time. It had taken five days for the news of my mum’s death to reach my dad, who was working in Nairobi. One of his friends had travelled from the village to the district commissioner and asked him if he could get a message to my dad. The district commissioner had sent a telegram to the Department of Defence in Nairobi and only after that had my dad been informed of his wife’s death.
He couldn’t believe it. ‘She only left Nairobi a few days ago and there was nothing wrong with her then,’ he said over and over again.
My mum had been in her village attending a memorial service for her brother, who had recently died, and had collapsed at his graveside and died herself. In those days people were rarely rushed to hospital, nor did they have post-mortems, so the exact cause remained a mystery. As usual when people didn’t have a rational explanation they attributed it to witchcraft and said it was the result of a curse, although why my mum had been cursed nobody knew.
People said that her last words as she set off to pay her respects to her brother were that she hoped my youngest brother Geoffrey would be weaned by the time she returned. He was two and a half and she was struggling to get him off the breast. She hadn’t expected to be gone for long and hadn’t envisaged just how absolute the weaning process would be.
I couldn’t think straight. I had never thought that my mum might die. She had always been there for me and I had assumed that she always would be. I felt very lost and empty at the thought of continuing life without her and sobbed uncontrollably.
Alice tried her best to comfort me. ‘I promise I will look after you, Anne,’ she said, ‘just like our mum did.’
I was amazed at how strong she sounded.
A carpenter was enlisted to make a coffin to carry the body from my mum’s village to my dad’s village, half a day’s walk away. It was traditional for a wife to be buried in her husband’s village.
I was taken on a bicycle and spent the whole of the bumpy journey crying.
Finally we arrived in my dad’s village. I looked around at the place I had been born in but barely remembered. It was the first time I’d been back since we’d been forced out. I remembered the wild roses growing outside our front door. They were still there.
The village was full of people sitting and weeping. My mum had been a very popular figure and everybody was sharing their memories of her. There’s much to recommend the African system of mourning. People let their grief spill out freely and don’t hold back their emotions. This helps them to heal more quickly.
Nobody paid too much attention to me or asked whether I’d eaten or wanted to wash myself. I thought of how Mum had devoted herself to making sure I had everything I needed. The realisation washed over me in sickly waves that nothing would ever be the same again for me.
My dad was in such deep shock that he could barely comfort us. He looked as if he was in a trance. Although his head had absorbed the news, his heart had not. And he was left with eight children ranging from 16 to two and a half.
I clung onto Alice and during the whole of the mourning period I barely left her side. I took her at her word when she said she would be a replacement mum for me. Whenever she left the room I cried out, ‘Where are you going, Alice? Please don’t leave me.’ I was scared that if I let her out of my sight she would suddenly drop down dead too.
I didn’t fully understand the traditional death rituals of our village, but Alice tried to explain them as best she could. My mum’s body was placed under a tree facing in a particular direction to symbolise the fact that she had been a married woman. Then everyone gathered around to hear the telling of her life story.
The digging of the grave traditionally begins at midnight. I was exhausted by this time and drifted off to sleep in Alice’s arms. Mum’s grave was in the homestead, because that was where married women were buried. We didn’t have a system of cemeteries and people were generally buried close to where they lived.
At least one cow is slaughtered to mark someone’s passing. But first it has to spend the night dancing by the grave. It is hypnotised by people in the village who know how to do such things and then the singing and dancing starts. People sing to send the spirit of the dead person away so that they’re not annoyed with the living and come back and haunt them. When the dancing of humans and cow is complete, the cow is slaughtered and then cooked in a stew to be shared by all the mourners. Different parts of it are given to different families.
Funerals sometimes attract hangers-on because it is the duty of the mourners to provide food for those who come to mourn with them. A death means that poor people can not only come and pay their respects but also feed their children for a few days.
On the third day after the funeral we were taken to the river and had our heads shaved.
‘They say that your hair dies with your mother and you have to start anew with fresh hair,’ Alice explained to me. ‘Don’t look round,’ she urged as we made our way back home. ‘They say the spirit of the dead person is there.’
To me, the mourning period seemed to go on forever. Every day new people appeared and they were still coming a month later. They all wailed and threw themselves on my mum’s grave.
When the mourning period did finally end, I refused to go back to school. I continued to cling to Alice, who tried her best to hide her own grief and be a surrogate mum to me. I was scared that if I became separated from my family again it would only be a matter of time before another person I loved died. And I didn’t want to risk that.
We stayed with my mum’s sister in the village. Nobody said anything to my face, but some people muttered that it should have been me who died, not my mum. Others cried for me and worried who would look after a vulnerable girl like me and the younger children. It was a struggle for a family of eight to be without a mother.
I found it very hard being back in the village after the comfort and support of Joyland. I spent most of my time in the bedroom, seeing only close family members. My world had completely crumbled. Here I was back in the environment where people had been scornful of me, and the one person who had always protected me had gone and wasn’t going to come back. I felt as if I had died with her.
Pure physical survival was difficult because the village wasn’t geared up for people with disabilities. My sisters Jane and Alice brought me water from the river. They tried their best to make me feel better, but they were still young, they too were grieving and it wasn’t the same as having my mum around.
I started looking at the world through different eyes. I realised that it was very difficult to survive without maternal support.
There was some discussion amongst our relatives about who should take in the motherless girls and boys. Only my grandmother wanted me; all the others said I would be a heavy burden. My grandmother really loved me and had often helped my mum to look after me during school holidays. But my dad refused to share his children out. ‘The older ones will help the younger ones and I will do the rest,’ he said firmly.
I missed more than one school term, but eventually my family managed to persuade me to return. My dad told me repeatedly how important it was for me to continue with my studies.
‘You will do your mum proud if you go back,’ he coaxed. ‘Now your mum has died, I’ll try to be both a mum and a dad to you. You must return to school to please both of us.’
Not wanting to do anything that might upset my mum in case she was watching over me, I agreed. My dad took me back on the bus, a journey I had always made with my mum. I was tearful, but my dad urged me to be strong.
The school had regular visiting days when parents could come to see their children.
‘Mum always used to come for visiting days. Will you come instead, Dad?’
‘I promise you that I’ll come and visit you as often as I can, Anne, but sometimes when I’m doing training exercises it will be hard for me to visit,’ he said.
I had to be satisfied with that.
I settled back into the school routine, although I often longed to have my mum back near me.
At first my dad came to visit me often, bringing gifts of army food like corned beef, dried biscuits and sweets, which were big treats for me and the other children in my dormitory. When visiting days came around I would peer out of the gate, anxiously hoping that he would appear. But his visits became less and less frequent.
It was traditional for parents to bring gifts of bananas and bread and for children who received them to share them out with others in the dormitory. One visiting day my dad didn’t come but the girl in the bed next to me had received lots of bananas. How my mouth watered for one of them. In the end I couldn’t contain myself. I pretended to be sick so that I could stay in the dormitory and stole one of her bananas and some of her bread.
She cried when she saw that one of her juicy bananas was missing and I was accused of stealing it. I squashed the banana peel in my hand, but didn’t manage to conceal it very well—I wasn’t a very good liar or thief.
‘Anne, you must apologise to your friend for stealing from her and you must also apologise to God,’ I was told. ‘Your punishment will be to sit alone in the dormitory for half an hour.’
I knew I’d done something wrong. I felt so guilty and vowed never to do anything like that again.