We sat, many years ago watching Lady Di marry Charles. It would have been much better if the English royal family looked like I imagine colonial looters should look like: eagle-eyed, hooked noses, booming nasal voices. In Kenya, leaders were people you cowed to. It is hard to see a middle-aged lady with a perm and a handbag as the head of a colonialist empire that chewed up continents.
My late mother was several people to us: our intimate, our boss, and an exotic person. Ugandan. My father is Kikuyu, a Kenyan. I remember sitting next to my mother, aged about 10, and she was shelling peas. I sat behind her, undoing her plaits with a comb, and she told me how sweet the Queen Mother looked, and how shy Diana was, and how surely Charles should find a way to pin back his ears. And we laughed one of those on-cue family-joke laughs, and we all turned to my brother Jim, and called him Maskio Paw-paw: paw-paw ears. Of course we were told somewhere in the news clip how the Queen walked up to a hotel that was built on a tree as a princess, and walked back down a queen. I could never wrap myself around this idea because in the pictures Treetops Hotel always looked far too big to fit on a tree.
During times like this, when the TV is on showing one thing for hours, one thing that didn't need one's complete attention (we were waiting for the vows and the kiss), other things would come out in our languid coversations: how Kabaka Mutesa had an official taster, and how you had to crawl to see him. How one sang God Save the Queen at school. (Is she in trouble? I used to think.)
My mother had the first hairdressing salon in Nakuru town, in the Rift Valley, Kenya. I spent much time sitting under a table with a book, Ugandan exiles would gather loosely, and their voices were a sort of soundtrack.
Even without understanding Luganda or Kinyarwanda, it sounded so royal, words that grew inside the great-hall in their chests before coming out. The rituals of greeting were always elaborate, the conversation flowed into English, and Swahili and Luganda and Kinyarwanda - and was often about the crassness of Kenyans, the lack of grace. This was said with the subtlety that Africans use to say bad things about one another - making it seem like a compliment. My mother disliked many of them, but liked the sound of home around her, so mostly she just chose not to comment.
So this is the space the Commonwealth occupied in my mind. Where the files of royal pomp-laden things resided. We were probably the last generation of Kenyans who missed the colonial pomp - something we hate to admit. These days, people a year younger than me ask: "Diana who? Didn't she do R&B or something?"
In school the Commonwealth was gold script on dark wood, curving elegantly, looping imperiously. Forty-year-old copies of Just William. An old colonial school. The new parts - it was clear to us early on that these were our parts - were corrugated-iron roofs, shaking-hand signage on cheap wood, cheap paper textbooks, whippings from a stick cut out from a caterpillar tree, and music festivals where teachers made us sing with our mouths shaped like an O, and made us dance a peculiar "choir" way which made my stomach churn sickly. One step forward, one step back, stiff-stiff in line, one step forward, one step back. English, but we are Afrocentric now. Voices!!! Keep in line. I knew something was wrong with it, tried to make us gold script and dark wood, and just seemed wrong. Anglicanafrica.
There were two radio stations in Kenya. The general service, for forward-moving people, it was implied; and the national service in Swahili, for the masses, it was implied. Then the other music, the one we were not supposed to listen to, on National Radio. Congo music, offering anarchy: not a simple, eyebrow-raised, mouth-in-an-O tune. Thick flow like honey - suffocating and scary - but making you melt into it, forcing your stomach to announce itself, like those dreams where you fall and fall and fall and like it but are driven to dislike the liking because you know you can't stop. You postponed enjoying it, but knew it would catch you one day.
On the map: bewildering how small the place seems, England. Australia and Canada, these enormous brown things: dominions and dominoes - took a while before I could distinguish between those two words - they replaced each other often when I was older. One, a things-fall-apart game played in casino-type places; the other, we own you but you are now privatised.
We cringed. Proud and ashamed at the same time, watching the Commonwealth Games and seeing some Kip-somebody win something long-distancy and have to present themselves to the Queen - or the Grand Duke of Commonwealth - they would surely laugh at his accent (we did), he would surely say something immensely stupid, something mannerless, something local. Did they say dinner? Would he cope with the forks and knives - pleasethankyouwotnotpardon. We laughed in school hearing the teacher say that Oginga and co appeared in London for the Lancaster House Conference wearing skins - ai! Skins!
Apart from Mugabe-mania, I haven't had reason to think of the Commonwealth for years. I was very jealous of how blase the South Africans were when they were readmitted, when they considered not joining. Realising how little any of them cared, I wondered what the big deal was. We are now CNN people, Larry King people, MTV people - since Thatcher declared that foreign students pay fees, we run to America to seek cool, be seamless. "This is London" is not our every morning as much as it was.
The Commonwealth always seemed part of everything larger then - but we have no real awareness of ourselves as part of the Commonwealth any more. We are finally starting to be Kenyan.
· Binyavanga Wainaina is a Kenyan writer and winner of the Caine Prize for African writing 2002.
