*Disclaimer. All names used in this dossier are fictional and do not depict any living or dead persons. Parental Advisory. Material may contain adult themes and abusive language.
My bratha from anatha matha! How’s London? That place rains cats and dogs man! Nonstop! Talking of dogs, did you read The Kenyan Daily Nation last week? Ngui*! Ngiti*! Guok*! These Chinese bwana! Now they are becoming too much! Were they coming to build the railway and highway or finish our dogs? Asi! No wonder there are no stray dogs in Nairobi! After they poached the rhinos and almost finished them, now they are coming for our inbwa*? Uhunye* said that we should face East but this was not the facing I envisaged! Don’t they have Viagra in China? Don’t they have those waganga (herbal medicine doctors) who treat ‘kushindwa kuamka’ (erectile dysfunction) or sell aphrodisiacs for ‘nguvu za kiume’? (Men’s strength in the bedroom) Why grind up the horn of the poor rhino? Like the former Kamukunji MP Norman Nyaga ‘mapengo’ used to say with his toothless grin, ‘ngoja nichemke kidogo’! (let me let off some steam!) Makachieth! (Sh*t!) The joke in Nairobi is that when you visit a restaurant and the waiter comes, he asks, ‘Boss, leo unataka nini? Alsatian boiro, Doberman fry ama sausage dog karanga? (Boss, what do you want today, boiled Alsatian, fried Doberman or stir fry sausage dog?) BudaBoss, rumor has it that, for the Chinese, as long as an animal shows its back to the sun, it is fair game and can be eaten! I’ll be extra careful when I see those Chinese. My gait must be straight and vertical! You might walk in a bent manner and show your back to the sun! Wee! You remember when donkey meat was being sold in Nairobi? All butcheries thereafter had to hang the whole cow from head to tail, skeleton included, to prove that it was indeed beef you were buying! I think we should restart that in Kenya. Now that the son of K’Ogelo is making his first visit to Kenya as the U.S president, that should be taken care of. Canine steak? I just can’t! Let me stick to my kuku porno*!
These Chinese are also taking our Kenyan women! Did you see that schoolgirl who was impregnated by a Chinese man when they were constructing The Thika Superhighway? She allegedly couldn’t even identify the bugger as they all looked the same! Good grief! What do these girls see in these foreign men? Look at the Kenyan women. When they see Nigerian men they go goo goo ga ga! These Nigerians con them into blissful oblivion! Didn’t you see a seemingly educated, independent and confident Laura Oyier allegedly get stuck with a Kshs 250,000 Hotel Intercontinental bill after her Nigerian lover was done with her and vanished into the thin Nairobi air? She thought she was ‘chopping’ his money kumbe* he was chopping her and her money. A Valentines’ weekend royal flush! The Nigerian had his cake and ate it too! The Oga at the top! Those Nigerians, wacha tu!* Total Wahala!* They have been in this game for a while. Don’t you recall in Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ where a man went to sell his goat in the market and realized that thieves had tethered a log onto his rope in place of the goat, when they pointed at him as if he was a madman, the same market where they could steal the cloth off your waist? Chineke! The allure of dating someone foreign is too much for some. I might be trying to remove the speck in the women’s eye and yet I have not addressed the log in mine.
You see, back in the day, we also were guilty of trying to ‘kuvuka border’ as Jaguar would croon. We wanted to cross the border and sample foreign cuisine. One of my best friends Oti, taught me to be ‘an ambassador’, as we used to call him! This guy was his Excellency The Ambassador! He was dealing with foreign ‘dignitaries’, had ‘diplomatic immunity’ and a ‘diplomatic passport’ to boot! If I wrote half of Oti’s escapades, I think I would have a New York Bestseller. Oti is from the community at the Lakeside but this man would lay down his life for me and I would lay down my life for him. We are tight like that. It is these politicians who drive wedges between us. When I laugh, he laughs; when I cry he cries! Darn politicians! You see, Oti the Luopean* used to specialize in extremely light-skinned lasses. The lighter, the better! He would jokingly say that when he got kids, the children would not be as dark as he was! ‘Lazima tubadilishe rangi kidogo!’ (We need to change the color a bit) In the beginning, he stayed local. Oti was a ‘Lando’ specialist. Lando is the name given by our Lakeside brothers to women who are fairer skinned! Oti even taught me how to lure and speak Dholuo to a Lando! He described these words to be the ‘maneno matamu ya kumtoa Nyako (not nyoka) pangoni’!* Tell her ‘Ikwar Kanyanya’, he would assert. He translated this to mean that you are telling the queen ‘you are red like a tomato’! If you recall those red ‘call boxes’ or public telephone booths that littered the city back in the day, you would assuage the Lando and confuse her; ‘Ikwar Ka Call Box!’ ‘You are red like a call box! ‘Iyom Ka Poi’ he told me. ‘You are soft like a pawpaw/papaya’. When you told a Lando those magic words, it was like you said ‘Open Sesame’! Her gait straightened, her ‘vijititi’ (or succulent breasts) stood up to 12 O’clock! Before you accuse me of being vulgar and shoot the messenger, you ought to check the female nominated Coastal Senator Emma Mbura who said that, the panacea to the tourism problems plaguing the Kenyan coast was to ‘go back to the roots’ and have young Mijikenda maidens dance topless, shake their pear-shaped upright mammary glands as they stood at 12 O’clock, ‘vijititi vilivyosimama’ as they are gyrating the assets that their collective mothers gave them, their ‘fundamendoz’, to lure back tourists! How a seemingly educated woman can say this infront of TV is befuddling to say the least! Would she personally shake her ‘vijititi’? The nerve!
Oti either ran out of local Kenyan Landos to chase or got bored. He needed a new challenge. By a chance encounter, we attended a Heartstrings Kenya play at the Goethe Institute in Nairobi. These Nairobi theaters are where the world acclaimed best supporting actress Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o honed her acting skills. Yes, Kenyan actors and actresses are good like that; the best! In between a break for refreshments, by pure happenstance he met a lady and quickly snuggled next to her and began laying down his ‘mistari’, lines and kufumba na kufumbua, in the twinkling of an eye, she looked engrossed in what he was telling her, even smitten! The rest, they say, is history! Oti had immersed himself into the Habesha world! Oti had met an Ethiopian! He had ‘vukad border’! Yes, an Ethiopian beauty who would profess her direct lineage to the regal Queen Of Sheba! This is the Queen who went to visit King Solomon. Since I am seeing a lot of bible verse challenges on Facebook, here is one. 2 Chronicles 9:12 says that “King Solomon gave the queen of Sheba all she desired and asked for.” and adds that he gave her more than she had brought to him. Hmmm… Scholars claim that Solomon and Makeda, Queen of Sheba had a son, Menelik, who was the first Ethiopian emperor.
Oti played his cards right and soon thereafter, he and the Ethiopian were inseparable! He would appear arm in arm with his prized trophy, the luscious ‘Antonwa’, which is what we would call Ethiopians back in Kenya. We used to say that the Ethiopian lasses ‘ni wa rangi ya pesa’, their color was the color of money, and if a lady was exceedingly beautiful, we used to say that the lass ‘ana rangi ya thao!’, has the color of a Kshs 1,000 note. The Kshs 1,000 note then was more powerful than it is now, in the days when there were no ‘weevils’ that had ‘eaten up’ the value of the money.
As I had alluded to you earlier, Oti was the Don Corleone of ‘tuning’ ‘katia-ing’ or courting women. His word was law to we minnows! You could only ignore it at your own risk. Since Oti was the master and we were apprentices, we hung onto his every word. Ignoring Oti’s sage advice was fatal. He regaled us with tales of his conquests and losses in equal measure. His antics always worked and you would be foolish to ignore them. Also, Oti’s words were cautionary in nature. He warned you about the various potholes and mines you would encounter in this exhilarating chase of the skirt. This game had its advantages but you could get mauled by the game. It was like controlling a lion in a circus. You needed to be in complete control, as a moment of laxity or indecision could prove deadly! He drew the chart of seduction. He was the Lothario, the Othello. He was like Shaft! He was a bad mutha shut your mouth! We would tease Oti that, just like the legendary Lwanda Magere, the hitherto infallible warrior who, like Samson in the Bible, was deceived and felled by a foreign maiden, the foreign maidens would lead to his downfall!
One peril of seducing a foreign species is that there was always the danger of being taught an unforgettable lesson by their male relatives or countrymen. You see, Ethiopian men loved Kenyan women and the Kenyan women loved them too; Kenyan men had no problem whatsoever with our Ethiopian men sharing injera* and more with our women. However, when they saw us come within arms length of their Habesha sisters, they would fyatuka! (get mad) An irate Ethiopian male is not easy to cool down! When their tempers flare, they overheat like a Ford Escort! Oti recounted how one of his friends snagged an Ethiopian damsel and instead of practicing caution, he threw this caution to the wind! He would walk with her openly in their enclaves of Adams Acarde and Hurlingham, Nairobi suburbs, where the majority of Ethiopians lived! Most of these Ethiopians used to live in ‘Babylon’, upper class suburbs. Unbeknownst to him, Ethiopian lads had sworn in Amharic that this man would abort his mission. They waylaid him close to the bus stop and reminiscent of the Battle Of Adowa, beat him up like a traditional drum! Oti emphasized that ‘alikung’utwa kung’u kung’u’, thoroughly beaten. After that scuffle, Kenyans learned to proceed with caution while courting these Addis ladies!
That would add to the thrill of chasing these Ethiopians! Last minute changes of venue, meeting far from prying eyes and darting your hawkish eyes to and fro, spiced up the game! When the hoi polloi were going for ‘Floodies’, the Floodlit rugby tournament at the Impala club grounds, Oti would be nestled somewhere in Athi River covertly tearing apart juicy prime goat ribs with the excited Habesha lass. Oti was also a specialist in mind games. The art of reverse psychology. When courting girls from ‘Babylon’, he would not bother impressing them with dinners to expensive restaurants or showering them with expensive gifts. They were probably used to that, he would smirk! This tactic would be reserved for the ‘maanzi wa mtaa’, the girl from the local neighborhood. He was the Hannibal of the art of courtship. He would confidently take the ‘Babylonian’ girl to a hole in the wall kiosk and feed her some Kuon Bel, the brown millet ugali* meal together with athola* and a Fanta pineapple soda. The kind of eatery where a customer would occasionally bellow ‘waiter, there is a fly in my soup!’ He would avoid popular city eateries when in the company of the ‘mababi’, dwellers of Babylon. ‘K’Osewe’s* is overrated, too expensive and their portions are too small’, he quipped derisively. Once her fears had subsided from the shock of being away from Babylon, he would then take the giggly girl to a Gor Mahia soccer match at Nyayo Stadium, where Gor fans would wildly and loudly chant soccer and political slogans. ‘Gor Biro, Yawne Yo!’* After the game, the fans would then troop to the city center to celebrate their win or mourn their loss. Win or lose, a Gor Mahia match was a spectacle to behold! You could cut the tension with a knife, as Chinua Achebe says in ‘Things Fall Apart’. Sorry for quoting ‘Things Fall Apart’ every time. This book is a masterpiece!
Oti’s cavorting with the Ethiopian soon got us turning green with envy; we also wanted in on the action. We wanted to ‘vuka border’ too! Doesn’t she have sisters, we asked? Cousins, friends? Oti, under pressure requested his newfound catch to tell her friends, to get with his friends, so that they could be friends and do this every weekend. ‘Alright’, She answered. So, the Ethiopian ladies came; at first, a drop. Only one showed up and we wondered who was going to be first to approach her. Would we cast lots? The next time, a few more came; a trickle. They had heard of the charm offensive of the Kenyan lads and were eager to find out for themselves. Like vultures circling after a kill, we swarmed in for a share of the spoils.
During one of the subsequent hangouts at the Nairobi arboretum gardens, a meet and greet session between Kenyan lads and Ethiopian lasses that was masquerading as a picnic and had been hastily arranged, I saw a lady who quite did not fit the description of an Ethiopian. She was with them but not them. Or maybe she was; I was about to find out. I pretended to be engrossed in the hors d’oeuvres that were on offer but when our eyes locked, it was time to stop the pretense. After I boisterously introduced myself, the girl responded shyly. My heart went ‘faragacha’, it went ‘pungulu’, it was palpitating! By her accent, I could tell that she was not an Ethiopian, or if she was, she had lived in Kenya for a long time. We exchanged names and her name was not an Amharic sounding name. I made it known to her and she laughed. ‘Kwani you think it is only Ethiopians who can be irresistible! I’m Kenyan. I’m a Bajuni!’ I tried not to look confused but the quizzical expression on my face was a dead giveaway. I had heard of Bajunis and knew that they were a coastal community and were mostly domiciled at the Lamu archipelago. However, I had never personally met one.
The reason I can assertively say that Ali Badawy* is the only known Bajuni in the U.S is because Bajunis were (and probably still are) a rare occurrence. Even in Nairobi, the green city in the sun, spotting a Bajuni was like spotting a white-tail deer in these hills of Pennsylvania, or a white rhino in the Maasai Mara National Park. They were rare! So, when I met this light-skinned lady, I was intrigued. My initial disappointment at not adding an Ethiopian to my repertoire was replaced by the mellow feeling of meeting an unassuming confident lady. Suddenly, snagging a foreigner was not important. Snagging the lass in front of me was the mission I would set out to accomplish. I would finally be able to compete with Oti in the light-skin department by adorning my own trophy whilst in the company of men. Chinua Achebe once said that if a child washed his hands he could eat with Kings! Men shall tell you that we men are visual. When I met this kidosho, (beauty) I couldn’t help but remark at her figure. It was shapely like that of a Coca Cola bottle. It was like she had worn a Victorian bodice! This belle was the epitome of perfection, she was pluperfect, from head to toe! She was a ‘laptop’, which is what we called gals of a certain size; portable, easy to fold. Her ample derrière showed through her dress. The bodacious Bajuni was irresistible! As the Kenyan artist The Bugz, featuring Cuttah C, rap in their song, ‘Kamoja Tu’, ‘hizo wezere zako ni za uziza’*, baby had back. She was not as voluptuous as the feuding callipygian queens from Southern California but that was her right there. ‘Alikuwa amejibeba’* as the Kenyan artist Flex would say. She also had the seductive smile that would make you withdraw all the money out of your bank account, give it to her and meekly ask for bus fare! If you are Team Mafisi and you glean through the photos of Kenyan socialites, her body closely resembled that of Vanessa Chettle! Weuwe! A laptop indeed. This Bajuni also seemed to like me. We got to talk some more and I decided to pull out my ‘mistari’! I tried to ‘kumuingiza box’, that is get her to be the queen in my domain.
We made a point of meeting whenever we had a chance and those meetings became daily meetings. I was smitten! In ‘sheng’ (Swahili English slang) ‘Huyu dame alikuwa ameniroga’. (The girl had me bewitched!) ‘Alikuwa amenichanganyisha vile Sonko alikuwa amechanganyishwa na Shebesh! (She had bewitched me the same way Sonko had been bewitched by Shebesh) When she said jump, I asked how high! I was definitely under the effects of the love-philter! In fact, my posse or ‘crew’ was worried that I was under the powerful spell of the Mombasa or Coastal Jinn! These evil spirits can make you eat grass like the biblical King Nebuchadnezzar! These Jinn from Mombasa can be used for various purposes; for example, if your amorous husband or wife is philandering, you need not cause a scene or involve his or her in-laws and therapists or marriage counselors. You need not call Ciku Muiruri on Classic 105 to ‘burst’ or unveil your disloyal partner’s indiscretions. That’s too much work. All you do is consult a commissary of these Jinn and all will be taken care of. As your wife or husband is engaging in ‘da nasty’ as the American rappers call it, his manhood shall be locked into her womanhood and they shall be unable to untangle their conjoined nether regions, which shall be fused together like Siamese twins, come what may. Only the person who ‘authorized the lock’ can authorize the unlocking! Usually, this is done after the payment of a lot of money, as the husband and wife needs to recoup the monies spent to arouse the Jinn! Balaa tupu hii! (what a disgrace!)
(Part II coming next week. See you then!)
* Ngui- Dog in the Kikuyu/Gikuyu language
*Ngiti- Dog in the Kamba language
*Guok- Dog in the Luo/Dholuo language
*inbwa- Dog in the Luhya language
* Uhunye- President Uhuru Kenyatta, Kenya’s President
* Kuku porno- Rotisserie (naked) chicken
*kumbe – But instead
*Wacha tu – leave (them) alone
*Wahala – Trouble in Nigerian Pidgin
*Luopean – Luo European. A combination of the two names showing a sophisticated Luo, sophisticated like a European.
* Maneno matamu humtoa Nyako pangoni. Nyako is a Luo word for ‘Woman or girl’ and the proper Kiswahili proverb is Maneno matamu humtoa nyoka pangoni. Sweet words shall draw a snake from its hole. Oti switched the word ‘nyoka’, snake in Kiswahili with nyako.
* injera – An Ethiopian meal
* Ugali – A Kenyan staple meal made out of maize/corn flour.
* Athola – dried meat steak with pepper and onions
* K’Osewe – Also known as Ranalo foods, an eatery in Nairobi specializing in mostly Dholuo dishes.
* Gor Biro, Yawne Yo – A chant by Fans of the Gor Mahia Football club. It means, ‘here comes Gor, clear the way!’
* Ali Badawy – A presenter and panelist at the OneMic show, on air on Friday from 8pm Eastern.
*Hizo wezere ni za uziza – Sheng (Kenyan Kiswahili slang) for you have a nice behind.
*Amejibeba – She is ‘carrying’, voluptuous, curvaceous.
kanyiwest 