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thousand shillings. A policeman does this twenty times a day and he has made enough for one child’s school fees for one term. That is what he must do. Even we, his victims, understand.’
    Now Dorothea hesitates. She glances at me, gauging my interest. Tom said witnesses often spoke to hear their own voices. They sought to confirm their existence, and speaking gave their thoughts weight, transformed the invisible into the tangible. I see, now, Dorothea’s need for definition. So I say, ‘Kessy was a good policeman,’ and she quickly takes up the thread.
    Kessy was working a particularly lucrative stretch of road in downtown Arusha. The police drew lots to get these spots, and had to pay off their superiors with their takings. After all, just because you had been promoted and sat behind a desk in an office, why should you lose out on bribes? Kessy was standing at the roadside, stopping cars, telling the drivers, ‘Oh, your side-view mirror is cracked’ or ‘You are missing a hubcap.’ He was building a small house for his wife. They planned to have children. Only one room of the house was finished, and they lived in this. The rest was still a cinderblock shell without a roof, and in the back, there was a wooden latrine. It was, Dorothea explains, a beginning.
    â€˜We are not like you,’ she says. ‘We know it is maybe years before we have a roof or a sofa or running water. White people want everything, they are used to their own way. Sorry for this, but it’s what I have seen. My mother was a house-girl for some British people in Dar es Salaam. It was in the eighties and there was no water in the town system. They couldn’t believe this, they couldn’t believe that if they turned on the tap nothing happened. They complained to the City Council. They wrote letters. Nobody wrote back. Nobody wrote to tell them, “There is no money to fix a broken pipe up the line.” Nobody told them, “You will wait twenty years for that pipe.” And anyway, small boys were stealing the letters. You would put your letter in the postbox and one minute later these boys come with wire and hook the letter. They look inside, perhaps there’s money? If not, they just take the stamp. Even this they could sell.
    â€˜In the end, my mother’s white people realized they were wasting their time with the officials, so they made my mother get water from the well down the street and carry it up onto the roof and fill the water tank so that they could take showers. She carried twenty buckets a day, along the street and up three flights of stairs.’
    Dorothea smiles at me. ‘But I don’t think you are severe like that. Only…’ she pauses, searches my face. ‘Only it’s difficult for you here because you have a white mind.’
    â€˜Kessy said the same thing. That I don’t understand.’
    â€˜Don’t worry,’ she pats my arm reassuringly. ‘When you understand this country, you know you cannot ever understand it.’ Returning to the story of Kessy, she reaches a certain day, when he was taking bribes on the roadside and a young boy ran across the street near him. A crowd surged after the boy, shouting, ‘
Mwizi! Mwizi
!’ Thief! Thief!
    Kessy knew well enough how these situations ended: the mob will catch the boy and the boy will be beaten to death. So Kessy grabbed the boy. The boy was not so strong. Tough but not strong, and anyway he saw he could be safer with Kessy. He went with Kessy to the car.
    But an old woman pushed through the crowd. At first, Kessy thought she was a madwoman, and he ignored her, but she would not go. She followed him, then pecked at him with her words. Something about a girl, a young girl.
    Why did Kessy go with her? He doesn’t know, even now. He was a good policeman and good policemen do not go into the slums. They ate their
chai
, they got fat. It was a good job, being a good policeman.