One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina

facilities, the best teachers taken out of other schools. For Moi’s people. Moi Forces Academy, and Kabarak High School, and Sacho High School. After one term, a stroke of luck. Ciru gets a place in Kenya High School, a posh old national school that Moi wanted to turn into a teachers’ college. He changed his mind, and Mum heard, from the new secret networks, they were doing a recall. Rumor has it Moi has a schoolteacher girlfriend there. He likes to date schoolteachers, we hear. He gives their husbands diplomatic postings.
    It is January, 1984. I am thirteen. I was circumcised in December.
    I am a man.

Chapter Eight
    The lights are off in my dorm in Njoro High School. I have one huge pimple on my forehead. I have decided to run away from school tonight. I am worried because our head boy is a homosexual. It is broadcast on every toilet wall in the school. I am not sure what a homosexual is.
    It is midnight. Before I went to bed, at around eleven, I made tea for our house prefect and collected water for the second former who sleeps in the bunk bed below me. This is the first full day here that I have avoided being beaten.
    I usually get a slap every morning when I try to jump from my top bunk to the ground without touching the marked section of floor immediately below me. Johnson’s territory has been marked with white chalk. He is short and looks like a rodent, with sharp pointy teeth and jerky movements. He is stronger than he looks, and his slaps leave an imprint on my face. This morning I woke up before he did, jumped as far as I could, and managed to land past the line of chalk, tearing a bit of flesh from my waist on my metal suitcase, which sits on top of a locker at the side of the bed, well inside his chalk line. To access my suitcase I had to lean in from the back of the locker on tiptoe, and I felt for my towel and soap and toothbrush with my fingers. I told Peter the whole story. I told him I planned to run away from school tonight.
    I have set my alarm for 2:00 a.m. I am packed. I am sleeping when my bedding is torn off the bed. They stand around my bed, a group of seniors in blazers, carrying mugs of cocoa and torches. One of them carries a cane. They tell me to get out of bed. Peter is standing with them. He winks at me, to say everything will be fine. I get up, in my pajamas. The grass outside is wet with dew and I am in my rubber
patipatis.
I follow, afraid. It is cold. Njoro is eight thousand feet above sea level.
    We are in Mobair and Kibet’s small cubicle. They are our dorm prefects. They have become my protectors. In return, I provide biscuits, jam, and peanut butter, goodies from a home that is richer than most of the students’. I make tea. The room is full of people, some in pajamas like me, and some in full uniform. Those in uniform are all senior prefects. I join the juniors in pajamas. There are seven or eight of us.
    All of us sit on one bed, heads hanging. One tiny boy is crying.
    George, a third former, is testifying, “He took me to the volleyball court. Every Sunday night.”
    “He promised he would make me a prefect.”
    “He sexed me.”
    “He told me to kneel down and suck his Jomo.”
    “After prep. He told me not to wear underwear.”
    “Before prep.”
    “Inside the food store. He gave me free margarine afterward.”
    Jomo
is Njoro High School slang for
cock.
Named after our dearly departed president, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta. For their sexual Jomo efforts, some boys got a special diet in the dining hall, a few extra precious potatoes. An extra slice of bread in the morning. Tea with milk.
    Jomo Kenyatta, assisted by Israel, built the tallest building in Kenya, Kenyatta Conference Centre, round and ribbed, like Rough Rider condoms. At the top of the building, where the flared crown sits, there is a revolving restaurant, a podium, where you can sit and spy on the whole city. Two cooperating boys became school prefects. The young guy who was crying was taken to Nakuru town for