When a king from the Congo gifted our mayor eleven gorillas, the mayor decided to chase us off the land and build a zoo in which he would keep them. He said so while shaking the king’s hand, speaking French that wasn’t our national language, and only because he had studied at Alliance. The king handed him a necklace made from blocks of gold and the mayor hung it on his neck as he spoke, a hideous new centre. A fellow citizen translated his statement on Twitter and made it trend. The city’s citizens picked the social media battle and harangued the mayor. He removed his profile photo and stopped tweeting. We had won, we believed. So it was a surprise to see his paving trucks outside our mabati-and-wattle houses at six in the morning. Police officers walked inside our homes with insectile fury and dragged out our mattresses, meko, stools, and water buckets, as if they were the innards of rodents they had devoured.
We roared back, our anger a fire. The government met us with jets of water, pummeling us so hard we splintered and smacked wet on the ground. We ran with what we could hold in our arms—for me, as many underpants as I could shove into my trousers’ pockets. That day I learned the word casualty meant not only those who had died, but those who’d disappeared: an elderly immobile man, a friendly yellow-spotted dog, two girls in class three who had already put on their socks. On TV, the mayor said gorillas were more attractive to tourists than our slum, better for the foreign exchange the city needed.
By the time a high fence rose around our minced homes, I had walked over to the next slum, the journey itself turning my fury into a clump smaller than my fist, a manageable size. I met my uncle Anungo and his new wife, and they gave me a corner of their one-bedroom to sleep in, a pair of jeans, and a handful of old t-shirts. Each morning, with nothing to do, I walked to the edge of the dirty river that marked the boundary of our lost land and looked down at the gorilla sanctuary being built, at the pickups and lorries that moved in and out, carrying building materials, at the men who stood about in orange reflective vests and helmets.
There’s no witchcraft better than money.
In a few weeks, all I could see was thick foliage from the bamboo, croton, and yellowwood trees that had been transplanted fully grown. The dailies slapped engrossing stats about gorillas on their front pages: each one needed 60 kilos of bamboo shoots a day, and in the evening, a sturdy branch to make its sleeping nest on. The mayor was determined to shelter and feed his gorillas. I yearned to be similarly cared for.
I applied for a position at the new gorilla sanctuary because I had a zoology degree. Working at the sanctuary meant free lunch, free bus rides, and free tuition for a master’s degree in gorillaology at the city’s best university. The six-figure salary was enough to get me a house in the better part of town, the “Goodlands” as they called it, where everyone was hip and happening. In Goodlands, I would be self-possessed enough to talk to the soap-soft girls I discovered at its malls, whose tongues could assemble surprising vowel forms in ordinary English words. I would go to work on the land I once called home in the comfort of Calvin Klein underpants.
I later learned over two thousand applicants showed up for the oral interview. The overwhelming bank of our humanity swayed and frothed in front of the hotel. Our sweaty, frustrated, unemployed bodies created such heat that the air stultified. Three people were on the panel: the mayor, an HR person and a gorillaologist. The mayor looked fatter than he did when he was shaking the hand of the king from the Congo. He leaned on his chair and rotated the narrow end of a Bic pen on his slightly bearded upper lip. His eyes bore a mischievous glint.
“How different is a gorilla from a man?” the gorillaologist asked after a series of those silly-ass questions they ask in every interview, such as “why did you apply for this position?” or “tell us about your weaknesses.”
“A two percent difference in our DNA,” I mumbled, “for most of us at least.”
The gorillaologist cupped her sunburnt hands and trailed the thin side of her thumb up her chin, stopping below a mole, which she rubbed slowly. A crumpled strand of her blond hair slipped off the tightness of her ponytail and blew limply.
“And what does that difference mean?” she asked.
I turned to the mayor.
“That they are not human.”
The mayor laughed.
“What she’s asking is if you acknowledge your shared heritage with these gorillas?”
The question burned me on the inside. I felt its hot ash on my organs and an urge to reach at the mayor with my hands and squeeze out his voice. It stopped mattering that I needed the job.
“Man is man and a gorilla is a gorilla,” I said. “Men built this city for themselves, not for gorillas. If those apes want to live in a city so much, they can build their own.”
The mayor looked at me with casual contempt but I kept on. “It is your duty as mayor to make this city livable for man, for us.”
I was told I was no longer a suitable candidate for the position and I saw myself out. On my way through the exit, I saw a lorry pull in. Men jumped out of its back and began taking out crates of vegetables. I angrily pushed a crate aside with my foot and picked it up when I saw no one was looking. I walked out of the gate with it, as if I was one of the men unloading. The security guard even lifted his cap at me, assuming I was at work. The crate overflowed with lush, dewy parsley. I only knew it was parsley because of the marker slapped on its side. I knew it was wrong to filch the parsley, but at the same time, it felt good. The mayor co-owned the hotel it was being delivered to; something that belonged to him, something his business needed, was in my hands.
“If you are to bring something, bring something we can eat at least, like mangoes,” Anungo told me when I got to his house.
Anungo had started to exhibit a worried look that failed to settle even after a third mug of busaa. I knew part of his worry was his new and now fully pregnant wife, how she nagged and reproached him for living in a one-bedroom, moving on his feet like an animal, and not owning a boda boda like his age-mates.
“It was all I could get,” I said.
He rubbed his hands nervously.
“A small person will soon join our family.”
I filled in the words he was reluctant to utter.
“I will find a place of my own.”
He laughed out of guilt and patted me on the shoulder.
“You are a bull, too, like me. You need your own pen and grass.”
I forced myself to smile back.
That evening, his house had this weird heavy energy. His new wife just sat there, eating silently, a hand on her enormous belly. Not once did she look in my direction. After supper, I walked out with the crate of parsley no one wanted, not even the women who had spread gunny sacks on the slum’s cabbro lanes, selling bundles of onions, tomatoes, and peeled, sunburnt arrowroots. I weaved through people: hawkers who had put on shuka, pretending to be Maasai, the poles straddled across their shoulders stacked with fake leather sandals; snot-nosed children who effortlessly played in each little space that revealed; and middle-aged ladies with resigned poses who hugged and held each other a little too long. I walked to the edge of the slope overlooking the zoo, my arms aching from carrying the crate of parsley.
The sanctuary was now a lush forest. I got curious about the wonders it hid and wished to get as close to it as possible. I spotted a ribbon-thin footpath that wound down to the river and followed it. I crossed an ungainly wooden bridge at the bottom and sidled up to the fence to a wide concrete pillar that held the wire netting taut. The air was suddenly light and sweet-smelling. Inside the enclosure, our former home, was thick bamboo, its leaves whistling an ancient sound. I sat down with the crate of parsley, soothed, unworried. My uncle didn’t want to host me anymore. I had fucked up an interview for a good job. I would soon be a penniless tramp. But I had spoken my truth to the mayor. “Truth to power” as they say, so I was just fine sitting there, waiting for nothing.
It took me a while to make sense of the thick black boulders wedged around my abdomen as actual gorilla arms. By then, its pudgy black fingers were picking parsley from the crate on my lap, one by one. I don’t know how I turned around but our eyes met. In the gorilla’s eyes was a familiar firestorm, as if in the forests of Congo, and now in this city, he had experienced a genre of my turmoil. I sensed in the hairy ape the same anxieties of a life uprooted, a desperation for tomorrows to make sense. The gorilla was sculpted with a power and magnificence my body lacked, all beautiful muscle and no spot of weakness. Evolution had clearly robbed us—men—of our dignity when it tricked us into walking upright. As I watched, the gorilla reared and pounded his chest, farting unrelentingly.
I kept looking long after he hurtled back into the thickets with the last handful of stolen parsley. I only walked away when a single thought settled in my mind: I had to get him more parsley!
***
I woke up early the next day, and resisted a general feeling of emptiness by telling myself there was parsley somewhere for me to steal. On the matatu on the way to Goodlands (where I concluded all the parsley in the city was), I recited to myself that I was no ordinary vegetable thief but rather a Robin Hood of sorts. I was robbing the rich of my species to feed the dispossessed of every species. But Goodlands was a spread of mountainous slabs of shiny office buildings and clean streets with fenced-off mansions that had me wondering where exactly I could begin my quest for parsley. I kept to its narrow pebbly lanes, as if in a clumsy attempt to hide from its shine, and as I meandered around, I stumbled unaware to Goodlands Mall’s parking lot. I spotted a supermarket inside, and knowing it to be definitely stocked with parsley, immediately wondered how I could walk in, shove as much of it under my sweater and walk out without triggering the alarm. But I was distracted by a woman parked near me.
The trunk of her car was open. She had pulled a trolley with her groceries close and was now lifting them inside gently, unrushed. She was South Asian, smooth-skinned like Lupita, bald-shaven too. She looked neat and fragile, a persimmon coat slung over one shoulder. I became aware of her because of how she had looked at me, briefly, almost absent-mindedly, but in that fleeting moment, registering a hurt that was penetrating in its familiarity, as if she had walked on the same rough grounds I had, a sense of kinship forged from an unclarified yet shared pain. I walked to her, encouraged by this impulse, and my body stiffened against the waft of her orangey perfume. It made it hard for me to say what I had decided to tell her. I was terrified of terrifying her.
“I need you to go back to the supermarket and get me all the parsley you can.”
I held my face and felt sweat dribble into the grooves of my fingers. I waited for her face to disintegrate with panic; what showed was a longing in her eyes, ephemeral but aggressive enough to make me turn aside. My voice became soft.
“I can’t afford it.”
She wrinkled her forehead and I imagined she was struggling with the logic of my utterances. But she placed a hand on my shoulder and smiled.
“I will know if you touch any of my things.”
I sat pinned to the trunk of her car, wondering what she was going to do exactly as she walked towards the supermarket. I asked myself if I should flee, if she was going to call on the guards to ruffle me up. But I was still there when she returned with a huge bag of parsley and a food pack. Inside was a mug of hot peppermint mocha and two croissants.
“You look like you need to eat,” she said.
I did. I bit on the croissant and it melted on my tongue, warm and buttery.
“You are too kind.”
She smiled with only her eyes now, which scanned me up and down.
“I only need a hint of a reason to rob the mayor. He owns the supermarket you know!” She pointed the flat of her palm at her groceries. “I didn’t pay for any of these. And you, what’s your story with parsley?”
It is hard to lie to someone who has just fed you. I told her how we lost our land to the mayor and his gorillas, how I now stayed with an uncle who was already tired of hosting me. I told her how I walked to the gorilla sanctuary with a crate of stolen parsley, and as strange as it was, how enlivened I felt watching the gorilla feed from it.
“I need to feel that feeling again,” I said, my voice cracking.
She sat next to me, tears in her voice.
“I want to feel it too.”
***
Her name was Zohreen and she had rebelled against a quiet Goodlands upbringing by often sneaking to “Badlands”, our side of town, and by stealing from the mayor’s supermarket. Now she lived alone in an estate inherited from her grandmother.
“It is the goat-head soup and busaa that calls me,” she said, winking, referring to her visits to Badlands, “and its men of course. You are one of a kind. The originals.”
Still, I feared for her as she drove to our side of the city. She seemed to be a luscious berry that wasn’t meant to be too far from its tree and shade. I told her to shut the car window and she laughed.
“I can punch and put on lipstick,” she said, her lips pursed, her face looking small.
We drove through roads that served matatu, weathered lorries, children casually playing football, cattle grazing on grass blades forced through cracked tarmac, stray and often limping dogs, braying mad-eyed donkeys, until we were the only ones on the road. The stillness allowed me to look at Zohreen more, to acknowledge a lingering discomposure in her countenance.
“Men insist on being in your life,” she said, “even when you have made it clear you don’t want them.”
I informed her the road was about to dead-end. She veered off it, and drove up a rough incline where she eventually parked the car behind a bush.
“I cannot speak for all men,” I said.
She slowed down her breathing, as if the air was poison she had been forced to take.
“The mayor plans to steal more from me than I can ever steal from him,” she said. “He wants to make me his, take my life out of my hands and into his control.”
It was as if a vein ruptured in my head, but I knew it to be a burst of repressed anger. Zohreen looked at me as if waiting for something she had already seen in me to articulate itself. She giggled when I didn’t speak.
“Now for us to use our legs,” she said.
We tottered with the bag of parsley, then walked and walked until the soles of our feet burned. Finally, we came upon the river and scaled up the incline to the same spot next to the fence where I had been yesterday. Zohreen looked at the whistling bamboo inside with fascinated horror, as if not even noticing the high and forbidding wire fence.
“I am going in.”
She lay her persimmon coat on a stretch of wire, pushing it down as far as she could, before lifting her body parallel to it. As I mouthed a gasp of disbelief, she whirled like a dry leaf in a quick wind and tumbled inside. A minute later she was looking at me through the fence, her arms stretched.
“There’s a feel of freedom here.”
It was easier pushing the bag of parsley in, huge as it was, than it was for me to get in. I was clumsy and unfit, less flexible than Zohreen. The lines of wire trapped me in their midst and cut through my thighs and palms. Zohreen had to instruct me on how far to stretch my leg until it touched the ground inside. When I got through, I lay flat on the wet grass, smelled the dark soil; a land so different from the slum it had once been. I got the courage to hold my gaze against Zohreen’s; in her eyes was the same bitter emotion that was in me, a need to punish someone who had hurt you, and unlike me, she seemed comfortable with it.
“Let’s go and find the gorilla,” I said.
We thrust through the thickets of bamboo with the bag of parsley, and when we came upon a tall gnarled yellowwood tree, Zohreen told me to lie down. I crouched beside her, against a termite-riddled log of wood and looked where she was looking. Farther ahead, on a glade, the gorilla I had fed parsley was waving a blue cup at three female gorillas encircling a monstrous silverback. The silverback noticed what the gorilla I had fed was trying to do and thumped his chest. He roared and rushed after him, only stopping when the latter fled and hid behind the tree trunk in front of us, so close I only had to reach out a hand to touch him.
The blue metal cup the gorilla held was banded with tiny bouquets of purple and red flowers around the centre and had multiple chinks near its rim. It was a cup we held immeasurably when we lived in the slum, when we had our homes, when we would walk over to Mama Uji, whose city-documented name no one ever bothered to find out. She had handed the cup to us many times, filled with her hot flavourful porridge, a secret blend of sorghum, amaranth, millet, milk, groundnut, and something else, filling our bellies so richly it could be our only meal for the day. The gorilla looked at me with sad eyes.
“Hand him the parsley,” Zohreen blurted.
I stood and staggered forth, the hand holding the bag of parsley shaking. The gorilla towered over me, smelling of shadow and dank leaves, of something wet and long-drowned suddenly surprised with sunlight. The gorilla snatched the bag from me and the cup fell from his hand. I dropped to my knees and grabbed the cup before it hit the ground. I pressed it to my bosom as if it was my child.
***
A week later, I stood in front of the gate to Zohreen’s house with the blue cup in my hand, my eyes red and angry. A baby was now crying from Anungo’s house and I had lost my little corner in the room to its crib. I had nowhere else to go. Zohreen let me in, waiting for me on a pathway shadowed by silky oaks, looking radiant in a silvery Cinderella robe. I asked her to keep the cup for me.
“When I had my little house in the slum, I had a place to charge my phone, a space to be me, to do those things I wanted no one to ever see,” I said. “Now I have no place to dream in.”
She pressed my palms together over the cup.
“You’ve just walked in. At least have some tea before you tell me your many sorrows.”
Inside her house, seated next to each other, our legs on the sofa, she looked at me wide-eyed.
“The anger in you makes you look pretty.”
“What does that even mean?” I asked.
She had placed the blue cup on the high mantelpiece next to a black-and-white framed picture of her with her parents, whom, she said, were gallivanting through Europe, seeking medication the city could no longer provide. She stroked the lobe of her ear nervously.
“We, the rich of Goodlands, are in the same circles, you know. The mayor has always known my family. After my parents left the city, he invited me to this charity he presided over, and after his speech, as I was on my way to the bathroom, he appeared before me and blocked my path, placed his heavy hands on my shoulders and told me that if I was his woman, I would be safe. Otherwise I was a woman living alone in this city and that was not good.”
Zohreen looked up at me, her body tightened. I understood even better the pain in her eyes which I had first recognised and related to when we met, that feeling of hopelessness that only the mayor could induce.
“I tried to tell him no, that I’m okay, even if I am a woman, even if I am by myself. And he looked at me with these horrifying eyes, and said there were big people in the city who had already seen the property I lived on and were already wondering what a young unmarried woman without a child was to do with it all. He didn’t have to state it for me to know that if he could not have me, he would come after my estate.”
She shrugged and turned aside, mute.
“The mayor only knows how to empty lives,” I said.
I turned to look at the blue cup because my tongue had dried out of words. I looked at it as a point of focus, a thing of beauty in a life turned ugly, an object that could lift me up, somehow. My shoulders and hands started shaking. I bunched a fist and boxed the air.
“I want to hurt him so bad,” I said.
Zohreen lay her head on my shoulder in what I took to be gratitude, and for the first time, I was unafraid of her fragrance. Eventually, overwhelmed with our barely voiced fury, we reached for each other’s lips, and what was to be a simple kiss swept us into a high tide, ended with us fucking in her bedroom, and afterwards, she lay on my chest, scooped in my arms, both of us still disappointingly angry. Her room was bare-walled, aside from a large round mirror directly across us in which I saw another version of us, contained and protected.
“Injustice eats you up,” I said.
Zohreen’s eyes narrowed.
“I have a plan,” she said. “I’ll call the mayor and ask him to come here,” she winked it at me conspiratorially, “and I will tell him to come alone.”
I blew gently over her hair.
“He will think he is about to get the best fuck of his life.”
She looked at me and when she laughed, I understood what she meant by anger turning someone pretty.
***
I called a few people from the slum beforehand: the mother to the two girls who had disappeared after putting on their school socks; the watchman who had been kept company at night by the friendly yellow-spotted dog; a young doe-eyed widow who had tended to the needs of the immobile elderly man, secretly loving him. When we had all fed on the pancakes Zohreen made, and agreed on a plan, we hid behind the silky oaks along the pathway, ropes, masking tapes, and gunny sacks in hand. We waited.
The mayor strolled in like the slow and rotund man he was. Zohreen held her arms to him and he tottered hurriedly towards her like an excited puppy. We pounced on him before he reached her, first with blows and slaps for we were infuriated, and when we were tired enough to recall our plan, wrapping him in gunny sacks and binding him with rope. He flailed, trying to free himself, but fell instead, twisting on the ground like a fat maggot. He had to shout many times for me to make sense of his words.
“I know you. I know you. I remember you from the interview.”
“You have destroyed my life,” I said.
“Free my face please,” he said. “It is hard to breathe.”
Against my better judgement and the protests from the rest of the group, I knelt beside him and removed a layer of sack from his head. His head popped out, plump and round. He gasped and coughed. I noticed a gap in his teeth, a spot at which his tongue kept fluttering on like a pink moth. It took time for him to compose himself and acquire his usual contempt.
“We can talk about these things,” he said. “You are a badass and I like that. You remind me of me.”
He asked me to help him sit up and I did.
“This city needs your ferocity. I can show you how to get things done, how to make deals with kings, how to make this city bend to you, give you what you want.”
I must admit, I was a little convinced. I was swept by a familiar and robust vision of me living in Goodlands, in a house like Zohreen’s, driving a four-wheel to the mall, drinking overpriced cocktails: a life better than Anungo’s, safe and comfortable. But it was the mayor’s eyes, the look in them, which snuffed out that persuasion. They were hasty, dashing side to side like a pair of terrified lizards. They were the eyes of a homeless person, of a man without clarity or a purpose to life, a thing of beauty to look up to. I covered his head with the sack as he screamed and bound him back with rope.
“We are taking you to a place where you can know what it means to belong.”
***
On our way to the zoo, a policeman stopped us. He needed to know where we were going.
“Just a family outing,” Zohreen, who was driving, said.
“On a Thursday, at noon?”
“This life you live only once,” she said.
I blurted the truth.
“We’ve kidnapped the mayor.”
The policeman laughed so hard he had to lean on the car. He thrust his hand inside to fist-bump me for the good joke. That was when he saw the person at the back, bound with sacks, squeezed between three other people. He looked back at me, his face frozen. I wondered if he had been among the policemen who had chased us off our land. I kept looking at him because I needed him to acknowledge that I was telling the truth, that I had found my power. He stood up and slapped the roof of the car, instructing us to go.
“I am just a policeman,” he said. “I only see what I am paid to see.”
When we reached the sanctuary, we hauled the mayor across the river to the fence. Zohreen had come prepared with gloves, pliers and bolt cutters. Her face hardened as she tore through a section of the fence, the wires snapping loose like whips, freeing the wind and the sound of the bamboo inside. We carried the mayor to where the gnarled, yellowwood tree was and peeled off the sack binding together with his clothes, then stood back from his naked form. I was consumed by triumph, having shamed and subdued my tormentor. I looked around, hoping the gorilla I had fed would emerge from the shadows, and I would see in his face the swell of the same excitement that had taken hold over me. I ached for the bliss of us meeting again, now that we had found our might. But I sensed, as a gorilla, he was more grounded than me, and was probably on a lush edge of the sanctuary, quietly feeding on bamboo, invested in having a full belly over any act of revenge.
“Why are you doing this to me?” the naked mayor shouted.
“We want you to know what it means to have a home,” I said.
“You know I will find you,” he was bruised, he was crying. He pointed a finger at each one of us. “You! You! You! Everyone you love—you will pay for this!”
We didn’t answer him but moved farther back, crouching against the termite-riddled log of wood.
The monstrous silverback had suddenly torn through the underbrush to look closer and make sense of our commotion. He bore a forbidding sense of majesty, as if the entire forest was part of his being, under his command. We felt him in our bones, everyone other than the mayor, who shouted he was going to get all the guns in the city and kill us all. He stumbled. The mayor rushed inside the bamboo thickets, the gorilla after him. Soon enough the screams of their quick encounter mixed and rose, filling the air. We hurried out as fast as we could.
We mended the tear in the fence back to the parallel lines of wire it had been. We were bleeding when we were done, but felt satiated that a semblance of justice had been achieved. We were in no hurry to rush back to the chaos of our lives. We sat down on the slope, aware that life would only go downhill from here, but for now, in this rare moment, we were together and reposeful.
“We didn’t get to see our gorilla,” I told Zohreen, a little sad.
She smiled and pointed.
On the other side of the river, I was stunned to see the gorilla I had fed strolling up the path we had walked on.
Perhaps he was heading out to Goodlands to look for more parsley.
Maybe he was trying to find his way back to the forests of the Congo. Eager to be free. Like us.
Kiprop Kimutai is a Kenyan writer and winner of the 2023 Graywolf African Fiction Prize for his manuscript The Freedom of Birds, which is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2026. His fiction has appeared in No Tokens, The Johannesburg Review of Books, Kwani?, Evergreen Review, and Jalada Africa. He is a 2023 Miles Morland scholar and was a finalist for the 2018 Gerald Kraak award.