Kenya
Aidan Hartley has narrated this article for you to listen to.
In my dream my father is sitting next to me in the car as we drive around our hometown of Malindi, in Kenya. I realise it must be odd for him, because so much has changed in the decades since he died.
He keeps shaking his head in disbelief at the thronging crowds of modern Africa and all the buildings, the vanished forests, the once-empty bush and all the other things that have changed. I say I’m pleased to see him but ask why he has returned here after all these years and he just says: ‘Take care of Michael’.
I first learned about Michael at the age of 13 when I found my mother in the kitchen weeping over her Cinzano. She revealed that my father, working far away in Ethiopia for months and years on end, had taken a mistress and fathered a son there. I learned he was called Michael.
I began to hate my father for what he had done. I wanted to protect my mother, but did not know what I could do. I feared we would lose our home and that everything in my life would collapse.
My mother took to writing her and my father’s names in all of our books and on all of the things we possessed in the Malindi house. I figured my carefree adolescence had been hijacked. For a long time I did not want to ever see my father again. He had vanished in Ethiopia. At the same time I became terrified it might become true forever.
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