Saitan! The Devil Takes The Wheel Of Car Rental in Harrisburg!

On Saturday, June 3rd, 2017, I decided to join my fellow Kenyans and friends of Kenya for a Madaraka (Self Rule) Day celebration in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, slightly more than 100 miles away from Philadelphia and an easy 2 hour drive. Nostalgic about Kenya and not to be outdone by the Kenyans in Kenya celebrating Madaraka Day on June 1, the Kenyans in Harrisburg host this Madaraka Day celebration on the first Saturday of June each year.
People dusted off their Kenyan t-shirts, hats, bracelets, Maasai belts and Safari Boots in an attempt to recreate and replicate the Kenyan experience thousands of miles away from home. I had donned my favorite rubber tire sandals, the ‘akala’ or ‘nginyîra’! During the day, there was a celebration at a local park that revolved around the ‘nyama choma’, roast meat. A Kenyan party isn’t a party without choice goat meat, beef and chicken skewered over hot coals on a grill. There was a lot of ‘finger-licking good’ Kenyan food that was prepared by the gracious Kenyan ladies, including ‘ugali’ (cornmeal) gîtheri/mûthokoi/nyoyo (corn and beans mixture) rice, chapati (similar to naan, or tortilla if you can even call it that) and other delicacies which you would find at a wedding or celebration hosted in Kenya. The Ugali was quite plentiful, a paradox especially considering the high ‘unga’ (cornmeal flour) prices in Kenya where ‘ugali’ has, almost overnight, changed from a staple food that is eaten by the hoi polloi, regular folks, the ma-sufferer, to a delicacy. Luckily, the price of cornmeal flour hasn’t shot through the roof here in the good old US.
The weather ‘cooperated’ and there was nary a cloud in the sky. For the first time, I saw some lads change into their Kenyan t-shirts immediately after their arrival at the park. After president Trump came into power, people are being cautious and trying to blend in by not wearing t-shirts that overtly scream ‘foreigner’ while driving on the roadways. As to whether this fear is misplaced, that is a story for another day.
The daytime celebrations continued without a hitch and as the sun settled in, people started inquiring about the ‘after party’ where the Kenyans would continue with the celebrations. Some tough decisions were being made then. A local Harrisburg lad, having reassured an out of town lad, months in advance, that he would act as host throughout the weekend, was seen and heard reneging on his promise by attempting to abruptly change plans and cruelly hand over his guest to another lad who obviously had no clue about the switch! Lads and lasses needed to shower and freshen up for the carousing later on. People needed to be at the right level of inebriation before going into the pricey after hours establishment.
After deals were struck, new hosts found, liquor stores visited for ‘mzinga’ aka hard liquor and everyone freshened up, lads and lasses were amped up and proceeded to the after party for round 2. The party was at a private club and once the Kenyans came in, the party started in earnest. I was requested to sign an iron-clad agreement not to reveal the goings on in that party failing which I was going to be fined a prized he-goat. At $200 per he-goat, their secrets are safe with me. What happens in Harrisburg stays in Harrisburg. Suffice it to say that, as usual, the preferred beer of choice for Kenyans, Heineken, promptly ran out. Club owners hosting Kenyans should be advised by the promoters to stock up their bar with copious amounts of Heineken to satisfy the demands of thirsty Kenyans! The party was ‘lit’ or ‘turnt up’, or as Rankaddah aka Ule Mukamba sings in his hit song ‘call on 999’, ‘ngoma ni mwaki mwaki, kiliviti!’ People were ‘kuya tu celemblate’ ing and ‘tukunde’ ing while taking ‘mboto’, celebrating and sipping while taking photos, with great fervor!
Once the party was ‘over’ or as is customary with Kenyan parties everywhere other than in Kenya, ‘abruptly cut short’ at 3.00 am, the MC warned the party goers of police traps similar to alco-blow checkpoints back in the 254 (Kenya) and lads and lasses reluctantly left the establishment and spilled over to the parking lot, all eyes and ears out for the next course of action. The night was still young and hadn’t even begun. Remember, these same lads and lasses had been awake for most of the day at the park and were still looking for more action. Kenyans can easily ace the ‘no sleep’ challenge held by the high and mighty US Navy Seals! These are the crème de la crème of naval officers! These tough naval officers sometimes stay for up to 36 hours without sleep while executing dangerous and secret military missions. In fact, the Seals would be no match for the Kenyans. If you want to know the temerity of Kenyans regarding sleeplessness, all you need to do is attend the International Rugby Sevens held annually in Las Vegas, Nevada where the Kenyan rugby team is almost always in contention! Some lads have been known to watch the early morning games, watch all afternoon games, go and shower in the evening and attend the customary parties on the Las Vegas strip, go to the after-party at Planet Hollywood aka PH and then leave PH for the early morning games. When do these sleep-deprived lads (and some lasses) sleep? Navy Seals, over to you!
Lads who were hosting after after parties were having their phones ring off the hook and addresses were being keyed into GPSs for the ‘mpaka che’, that is, ‘until dawn’ rendezvous! The art of negotiations came into play again where one lad, locked out of the after-after party activities, told the potential after-after party host, ‘mzito, acha zako, niko na chupa mbili za mzinga kwa ndae na wale wasupa ni mimi nimewaleta!’ (Boss, stop playing, I have 2 big bottles of the finest liquor in the car and those lasses over there are accompanying me’) Just like that, the operative words ‘open sesame’ were pronounced and the lad hosting the after-after party readily gave out his address. ‘Hao wasupa wasikose!’ (Those lasses had better turn up!’) the host lad chuckled!
As for me, that Saturday morning, I had ‘told myself’ that I would come to Harrisburg for the day, attend the night party, sleep for 2-3 hours, and after catching the conventional 2-3 hour power nap, drive back to Philadelphia. On Saturday morning, I had rented a car to go to Harrisburg so that I would have trouble-free driving. Or so I thought. I have coaxed and cajoled my jalopy to far flung states, from Maine to Georgia but I didn’t want to take a chance this time. It had given me some brake trouble the day before and I had a project that needed to be completed on Sunday. I would then snooze on Sunday afternoon before waking up just in time for game 2 of the rematch of the NBA finals between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State warriors. These finals were going to be explosive, ‘mwaki mwaki, kiliviti!’
The rental company was called ‘Rent a wreck of Philadelphia’! No, you didn’t hear that wrong! Maybe the ominous (and quirky) business name should have been a red flag, a harbinger of things to come! The rental was a ‘decent’ silver Ford Focus, supposedly. I later on learned that it was a 2012 model with ‘only’ 76,000 miles on it. That’s a seven year old car! Maybe too ‘old’ to be in a car rental fleet. ‘Philly rent a wreck’ had decent reviews on the Yelp website/app and since everything is completed online, I was attracted to the no-hassle booking which I like. As I painfully discovered later on, sometimes, human contact is necessary!
Some friends of mine, 2 lads and 1 lass, heard that I was going back to Philadelphia and asked me if they could hitch a ride to a place called Lebanon, PA on my way back. This is not the country Lebanon of the infamous Hezbollah militia! Unlike its dangerous namesake, Lebanon PA is a quaint idyllic town a half-hour away from Harrisburg. They assured me that they lived just off the highway. I didn’t mind the company and I agreed to be the designated driver.
I had driven the 114 miles from Philadelphia to Harrisburg with no problems and driven around Harrisburg with no problems. We drove to 2 houses which had promised ‘after-after parties’ but since the 2 hour journey to Philadelphia beckoned, we decided to start the journey just before 5.00 am. I figured that, I had enough time to drop the rental off, due at 8.30 am or thereabouts Sunday morning. I started the car for the long drive back and the car drove smoothly out of the housing development, like it had done since I picked it up in Philadelphia. However, just before I got onto the Highway (I-283) I heard a noise. When you have owned and driven jalopies your entire life, those rife with the old car smell, you know that car noises are not good, especially noisy, grinding ones. In fact, they are very bad and usually signify some greater misfortune that will befall you soon! The noise evoked an uncanny feeling of déjà vu where a jalopy quits on a highway in the middle of nowhere at an ungodly hour. A grinding noise makes you wonder how much money you have in your bank account as you will need to replace the jalopy soon! Have you ever noticed that when you are going through car (or any other) trouble, you never have any money in your account to solve the problem? This is usually a very tristful period! Masaibu ya (trials and tribulations of a) ma-sufferer! The car’s automatic transmission didn’t seem to be shifting right. I pulled over. The 2 lads were deep in la-la land but the one lass was wide awake and very worried by the awry turn of events. Seeing the predicament I was in, she started dishing out pieces of advice in rapid succession with a sliver of panic in her voice (“stop and start the car”, “are you sure the car is in ‘Drive’ and not 1-2?”, etc etc) I complied with all her requests, no questions asked but the car still sputtered and jerked the same!
As I was reminiscing about the whole experience, I remembered the fervent prayers that Kenyan people, both in Kenya and in the diaspora, would offer before a trip, for journey mercies. They would pray for the cars and the drivers and passengers and roads and ask that the cars be cloaked with the blood of the Lamb and have no mechanical issues whatsoever and deliver the passengers safely to their destination. In my hurry, I forgot to pray about the journey so as to be granted journey mercies by the Man Above! Was that the reason behind my fate?
After I started the car after two minutes of rest, hoping to ‘reset’ the car’s computer, I decided to go onto the highway, hoping for a change in fortunes. Alas, the car continued jerking, this time more furiously. The lass was now getting antsy and garrulous and from the rear view mirror I could see an unmistakable moue on her worrisome face! The lads, shaken out of deep slumber by the Ford Focus transmission, eased in and out of consciousness. The effects of the long night were getting to them. The rental car on the I-83 highway jounced uncontrollably and I decided to pull over at the closest rest area. I decided to call the rental company number. The company numbers all went to voice mail. It’s a small rental car company and it was early Sunday morning! I called their roadside assistance number and the roadside assistance representative told me that if I was not covered for roadside assistance, I would have to pay for it out of pocket. I had declined all extra charges, including the roadside assistance option, while signing the car rental agreement. Why would I need roadside assistance for a mechanically sound rental, I had asked myself before renting the car? The roadside assistance is for non-mechanical issues anyway and this issue was definitely mechanical, as mechanical as it gets! The fine print in these contracts is virulent like the Lernaean Hydra, the serpentine water monster in Greek mythology! When one head is cut off, two heads grow in its place!
If I was alone in the car, I wouldn’t have been worried one bit. I would have chalked the experience to bad luck and absorbed the accompanying results with no issues at all. As a ma-sufferer, I have been in numerous car predicaments and I have always managed to weasel myself out of the situation. However, I had additional passengers who made the issue more complicated than usual. Ford cars are notorious for their reliability issues and people have in the past coined words using ‘Ford’ as an acronym that describes their dodginess, such as ‘Found On Road Dead’ or ‘Fix Or Repair Daily’ and I painfully joined the bandwagon of drivers who had suffered this fate of ‘Found On Road Dead.’ Ford had supposedly improved on their dependability issues and claimed that their horrible reputation was a thing of the past. After this experience, I beg to differ! Any confidence I had of Ford cars was eviscerated from my mind after this incident! If you ever purchase any Ford car after reading this and it breaks down on you later, you’ll only have yourself to blame!
The car was moving, albeit slowly and in floundering motions that one would only experience in a scary roller-coaster. You are definitely familiar with the grinding, rattling noise I am talking about if you, a ghetto yute (youth) of yesteryear, ever had the unfortunate mishap of riding in a Ford (oh no, not Ford again!) ‘matatu’ (passenger van/minibus) to Lunga Lunga in Nairobi. How these ramshackle matatus even passed the supposedly rigorous Kenyan Public Service Vehicle (PSV) inspection baffles me! The driver always welded a long, heavy metal rod that he would use to knock the engine back to its senses if the matatu decided to stall on the road, much like a jockey’s leather whip! I decided that I had to get to Philadelphia but I would use the back roads, where the speed limits were lower and the rental car would be moving close to the posted speed limits instead of getting into the highway and being at the risk of inconveniencing or worse, coming too close for comfort to a 18 wheeler Mack truck or two! I also had to drop the hitchhikers to Lebanon. I changed my GPS map settings to ‘avoid highways and tolls’ and off I went, flashers on (driving on ‘d’ ‘drive’ but the car felt like it’s on ‘2’ or ‘S’ on the transmission) quickly exiting the highway at the next highway exit with a few 18 wheelers barreling hard behind me!
I dropped off the lass at her place in Lebanon at about 8.00 am, the same exact time the rental was supposed to be in Philadelphia. She was very relieved to be finally home and wished me all the best in resolving my predicament. I hobbled to the next address on my Ford Focus rental and dropped off the next lad. The other lad realized that he would be better off in Philadelphia as he was heading to a place called Easton, PA. (on the Pennsylvania -New Jersey border) He intended to save his friend a trip to Harrisburg from Lebanon later on in the day. I figured that, since I was in car trouble anyway, I might as well keep his company, as anything, like encountering excited members of the Aryan Brotherhood or the Ku Klux Klan, could happen in the rural back roads on Pennsylvania, where Trump voters voted for him 100%! These ‘Kaburus’ (colonialists) didn’t take any chances in the 2016 elections!

The ‘check engine’ light soon came on, as if I hadn’t realized that there was something wrong with the car all along prior to that. ‘No biggie’, I told myself. For many ma-sufferer, myself included, a permanent check engine light is a permanent fixture on the vehicles we own, ‘assuring’ you that things are not too bad, that at least the car has the same usual problems and no new ones! It’s like a allergy sufferer who knows that they have an allergy but go on with their normal lives as long as they avoid the causes of the allergy. In fact, when it goes off, then you become worried as you know that something other than the usual wear and tear is taking place! When the ‘check engine’ light blinks on your dashboard, then you know you have run out of luck! A few minutes later, the ‘transmission overheating’ light came on and warned me to stop. This pricked up my ears. I had never seen this light before! This Ford was truly a lemon, the kind of car only a sadistic and unscrupulous used car salesman would offload on you! I pulled over at a restaurant parking lot to allow the transmission to cool and in the meantime, decided to catch a 1 hour nap as I was now getting exhausted.
At 10.00 am, 1 hour later, I begrudgingly woke up. We got back into the rural roads and trudged along. We were now passing horse buggy country. We saw a number of horse buggies which were being used by Amish families. Dressed in their Sunday best, the Amish families were riding to their respective churches. Maybe I should have hired a horse for this trip, I mused. Horses don’t have transmission problems, do they? Just a bale of hay, dangling a juicy carrot in front of the horse and a bucket of water and off you trot to your destination!

In rural Pennsylvania, drivers are very patient. I had my flashers on but no one other than the occasional impatient driver was passing me. We laughed at the long lines that were forming behind us. I think they understood that we are in car trouble. I knew this driver courtesy would end when we got to the mean streets of Philadelphia!
We stopped for gas at a gas station. An old white man with a long beard strode towards me. He was dressed in khakis, cowboy hat, suspenders and some well worn boots. Just like a leading villain character in a cowboy western movie. This ‘msakhulu’ (old man) looked like he had attended all Trump rallies within a 400 mile radius, belligerently chanting ‘lock her up’ and ‘build that wall’! He looked like he had pushed that election voting button twice! In these parts of Pennsylvania, Trump won by a landslide! You would have thought that the results represented rural Alabama! The map was completely red. They came out to vote for Trump almost to a man, like voters in Bondo for Raila Odinga (Kenya’s opposition leader, former prime minister and 2017 presidential candidate) or Gatundu for Uhuru Kenyatta! (Kenyan president) The tyranny of numbers was at play here! It was ‘kûrangîra ûthamaki’ (protecting the king/crown) US edition! The only song on heavy rotation here, similar to Onyi Jalamo’s song ‘NASA Tibim’ was ‘Trump Tibim, Trump tialala!’ The old man was either the owner or gas attendant, or both. He came to the driver’s side and asked me in a somewhat irritated voice, ‘what can I do for you?’ I answered him back and let him know that I needed gas. I gave him my bank card and my zip code and he ambled to the gas pump. ‘The card has been declined’, he sort of retorted. I knew I had money in my bank account but this day was turning into those kinds of days where everything goes wrong! Did he shoot me a dirty look? Fortunately, my friend and co-driver had some cash with him and salvaged the situation. ‘Darn Obama supporters’ he probably muttered under his breath!
Soon thereafter, we stopped over at a Dunkin’ Donuts shop for a much needed bathroom break and buy a soda in the process. As we exited the car, a Caucasian man we met at the parking lot asked me, ‘where are you from originally?’ This question puzzled me as he had not heard us speak prior to that. I said ‘Kenya’. ‘Jambo rafiki,’ (hello friend) he greeted us! I said ‘jambo’ to him too. He said, ‘najua kidogo tu, kwaheri!’ (I can only speak a few words, goodbye!) and he promptly drove off. How did he know we were Kenyan? He definitely had been to Kenya before and lived there, I surmised. I wondered whether it was my/our unique features that had stood out. Maybe it was time to lighten my skin, or ‘toa tint’ (‘remove’ the tint) as it is known in Kenya. I could probably blend in with a lighter skin tone! A few months back, a lad coming back from Kenya brought me some Kenyan made soaps which I have been using nostalgically. There is nothing like the manly smell of Lifebuoy body soap! Maybe I should have sent him to get me a bar of cake soap, which is talked about in hushed tones in ‘toa tint’ circles as the soap that will make you lighter than Michael Jackson, the 2000s Michael Jackson, not the 1960s one! However, I decided that ‘kutoa tint’ was not worth it. This was after I saw the disastrous results on one lad known as Khaligraph Jones! This lad, also known as Brian Ouko or ‘Ndugu Omolo’ decided to lighten his skin tone a shade or three. This JaKayole (man from Kayole) has a more American twang than a hardcore Brooklyn born and raised rap artist! He had unsuccessfully tried to get the light skin tone of ‘General Defao’, the Congolese maestro but he is instead looking like ‘Bozi Boziana’, another Congolese maestro, who is a tone or two darker than Defao! This lad had not been briefed well by experts in the skin complexion/tone change field and had lightened his face but forgot to lighten his hands too. His face has a Huddah Monroe (Kenyan socialite) tone but his hands look like Akothee’s hands! (Kenyan lady singer) His knuckles look like those of a seasoned coal miner! He attempted to explain it away on TV by claiming that his new skin tone was due to drinking mineral water, living and eating well and having facials. If this was the criteria for getting a lighter skin tone, how come people like Eddie Murphy, Wesley Snipes, Morris Chestnut, Idris Elba, Djimon Hounsou, Michael Jordan and other chocolate complexioned gentlemen didn’t have lighter skin complexions after having lived well and drank mineral water?
He should have got advice from Vera Sidika, the voluptuous Kenyan socialite cum video vixen! She clearly bleached every inch of her body, based on the salacious nudes that her Nigerian ex-boyfriend released and were (and still are) doing the rounds on Kenyan social media and WhatsApp! This cowardly ‘oga’ (Nigerian ‘master’) proved that hell hath no fury than a Naija (Nigerian) scorned! By the way, who ‘pulled it off’ better? Vera Sidika or Amber Rose? I am team Vera Sidika any day!
We then entered Dunkin’ Donuts, bought a soda each and the Indian lady asked us, ‘where are you from?’ It seemed like asking someone their national origin was the norm in rural Pennsylvania. They probably can spot a foreigner or outsider a mile away. I said ‘Kenya’ for the second time in a span of 2 minutes. ‘Where?’ she asked again, looking confused. I asked her, ‘Do you know where Barack Obama’s father is from? Kenya!’ She blushed and said ‘yes’ meekly. That has always been my ace card. If someone doesn’t know where I am from or doesn’t recognize Kenya, I name-drop the Obama name! It works every time! That Fanta orange felt so refreshing!
While driving through rural Pennsylvania at between 30-40 miles per hour, I saw a phone call at 11.43 am. Lately, I have been getting a lot of ‘bot calls’ from con artists claiming that ‘you owe the IRS thousands of dollars,’ so I don’t pick up unknown numbers anymore. The scam artists rarely leave voice messages. This caller called twice and left a voice message. And a text message.

At 12.00 noon, we approached the Philadelphia suburbs. The ‘transmission overheating’ light came back on and we decided to stop so that the car could cool down once again. During the ‘transmission cooling’ break, I decided to check my phone to find out who was calling and texting. It was

the ‘Philly rent a wreck’ owner! She wanted to know what was up with the rental. I called her back and told her of the predicament I was facing. She apologized for the inconvenience. She quickly asked me to open up the hood and look for the transmission oil dipstick. ‘It might need more transmission fluid’, she said. I almost laughed out loud but held my horses! This wasn’t a problem that would be solved by adding transmission fluid! This was a ‘replace transmission’ problem, if not worse! I had turned from car renter to auto mechanic. I looked for the dipstick for a while but couldn’t find any. She then quickly informed me that she had googled the engine of the particular rental we had and it has an electric transmission engine and has no dipstick! She informed me that that’s why they, as a company, were getting away from Ford cars for their fleets. A tad too late for this insightful information, I sighed!

The car rental company owner urged me to drive the car slowly and let her know when the car was back at the rental parking lot and wished me a safe ride. She promised to refund all the rental fees due to the inconvenience. I guess every cloud has a silver lining. I wondered if the car rental company owner was only (or should I say mostly) concerned about her car, and not my well being and safety…
It was past 1.00 pm and we were hungry, really hungry. We hadn’t eaten anything since the Kenyan Madaraka day feast the previous day and the hunger pangs were gnawing. After texting the person whose project I was undertaking and telling him that I was having some rental car trouble and would be way late for our meeting, we decided to go to an African restaurant at the request of my co-driver who had weathered the long jerky drive with me. After having fish and plantain, I dropped him off at the bus station for him to catch the bus. Once I dropped him off, I decided that the car rental return would have to wait and I needed to complete my overdue Sunday project. I decided to instead drive to the project venue using back roads and the rental car continued lurching, sometimes uncontrollably. A short trip that would have taken 20 minutes took an entire hour! Once I arrived at my project destination, the dashboard looked like a Christmas tree due to all the lights that were on! I shut the car off and went to complete my project.
About 4 or so hours later, I was finally and thankfully done with my project and it was time to return the rental. It was approaching 8.00 pm and the much awaited game 2 of the NBA finals between the Warriors and the Cavaliers was about to be televised live. I grated my teeth, knowing full well that the rental car would run slowly towards the car rental return offices. I went into the car and started it. ‘Chogiogiogio, vroom.’ I put the transmission in reverse, then put the transmission in drive and then got ready for the agonizing jerky journey back. I pulled out of the driveway, ready to get onto the road. Amazingly, there were no noises! The transmission was working perfectly. It was shifting gears smoothly like it was off the factory lot! It was as if the 12 hour nightmare that the rental car had taken me through was fictional! After the car had dragged me through all those trials and tribulations, the transmission had finally decided to stop acting up! I was however not sold by the new developments. I figured that the transmission would act up once the car was on the road. However the car continued driving perfectly! I was in shock and disbelief! No way! How? Why now? Did someone make a voodoo doll of my rental car and had finally stopped torturing and pricking the car doll with needles? I decided to gamble and take the car to the highway, the fastest route to the car rental return offices. The car drove normally at 60 miles per hour! It was gliding effortlessly over the tarmac, nyweeeeeee! The car had teased me with a broken transmission for most of my return trip and then this! Saitan! They say that the devil is a liar but he also has a wicked sense of humor. For those who come from Central Kenya, when the devil has decided to spend some time with you and put your life in turmoil, we say ‘daimono anjagagîtie ta mbîya îrî kînya!’ (The devil has decided to make my life tumultuous like a mouse in an African cooking pot!) I returned the car to the car rental place and got into their drop-off shuttle. LeBron and Cleveland was just about to battle Kevin Durant and Golden State. I started watching the game on my phone, grateful at least that the nightmare was finally over!
I wondered if there was any lesson/s to be learned from my mostly unfortunate car rental experience. Should I have gone with a reputable car rental company? Not rent from a company known as ‘Philadelphia rent a wreck.’ Insisted on a foreign car brand whose chances of leaving me on the road would be minimal as compared to the locally manufactured car? Purchased roadside assistance? Used my jalopy to go to Harrisburg? How was I to know that the transmission would act up and then stop acting up at the conclusion of the rental? Well, that folks, is what fate is all about!
I vowed to myself that I would never rent a Ford ever after this nightmare. Exactly 2 weeks later, I found myself in Seattle where I was slated to run a marathon. I got to the Avis car hire station and the gentleman greeted me warmly. “Mr ‘I can’t pronounce your name’, your car is at the parking lot down the elevator. It is a silver Ford Focus!!!” I said a quick prayer for journey mercies…

Matumbo Na Kafirifiri

*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.
The prolific Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong’o in one of his numerous critically acclaimed and award winning books astutely wrote that, ‘a man without food is like a radio without batteries’. Food is very important to a man. As an extrapolation, to a man, the best cooking is his mother’s cooking, no matter where he travels or how well traveled and/or exposed to the world he is. After furiously suckling on his mother’s breasts as a baby, the semi-solid and later on, solid food that his mother feeds him is the first real connection that he has of this world, the first thing that is etched on his mind. You have seen babies and toddlers use their mouths to taste everything on sight as they explore and discover their world. When you see some of these grown men, for example, amongst others, Donald Trump, Kabogo aka ‘Kafogothary’, Waititu, (instant justice styro hiyo hiyo) Sonko and Keter (of the Gilgil weigh station ‘matapaka’ fame) spitting fire and brimstone, you would never imagine that they were once helpless babies that suckled on their mother’s breasts. In ‘Things Fall Apart’, Chinua Achebe scribed that, ‘looking at the king’s mouth, one would think he never sucked at his mother’s breast’. Food signifies comfort, which signifies security. That is why people binge on food when they are feeling bad about something in an attempt to erase the bad feeling! Chocolate and a feel-good movie on Netflix anyone? So engraved in his brain (and DNA) is this cooking by his mother that nothing erases this taste or memory of food. Some may argue that it’s not the same thing but the Japanese have a name for it, a sixth sense of sorts, ‘umami’! 
Umami can be loosely translated as a ‘sweet savory taste’ that is different from and a fifth addition to the four tastes of food, sweetness, sourness, saltiness and bitterness. Umami is the taste that a millionaire ‘feels’ or experiences when he or she ravenously tears into a slice of platinum Kobe beef from Japan, where the spoiled cows are fed on the best grass, given bottled beer to relax, hand massaged by ninja-like Japanese farmers and even have classical music played to them to enable them eventually produce the best marbled beef! How one can give a cow expensive bottled beer instead of drinking it himself or herself is a concept a Kenyan would never understand, but these are the perfectionist Japanese! To add insult to injury, I hear these farmers from the Land Of The Rising Sun give these cows a true stout, Guinness! An Irishman would shudder at this very thought of his national pride and joy being quaffed mindlessly by a cow! The poor bovine, feeling good about drinking beer, listening to Beethoven, Mozart and Bach and getting massaged, happily skips away in the fields of the Hyōgo Prefecture, singing, or is it mooing ‘I’m so dirunk baiby’ like Kristoff and Gabu, as it fattens up only to be inevitably felled by the butcher’s cleaver! ‘Wembe ni ule ule!’ (The blade is always the same!) The same Japanese also hype up ‘umami’ by selling incredulously thin slices of raw fish wrapped in seaweed and a few grains of rice and put a 1000% markup on it by calling it ‘sushi’! Can you imagine a Kenyan farmer in Kieni, Nyeri county giving his cows prized ‘muratina’ to drink? Wasting alcohol on cows is sheer madness I tell you! The only time I have seen cows, or rather bulls being given alcohol is in Luhya-land where the bulls engaged in the bullfights in Kakamega are given an optimum amount of ‘busaa’ – a traditional fermented alcoholic drink- (and some whisper, maybe it is common knowledge, that the busaa is laced with bhang – marijuana) to give them the courage to fearlessly gore each other, as they are egged on by people dancing to the catchy and effusive sounds of the ‘isukuti’ drums! Now, that’s good use of alcohol! No wonder those bullfights are legendary! An already angry bull infused with busaa and bhang is menacingly feisty like Kakamega senator Bonny Khalwale! 
That ‘umami’ is what, as a lady searching for, or aiming to keep a man, you should be keenly concerned about! Let me explain…
 Many men in Kenya grew up in relatively modest surroundings. Most of them were ‘ma-sufferer’, the hoi polloi. Dirty little boys with patched shorts and torn shoes (if they were lucky enough to own a pair) that were ‘laughing’ (and badly needed to be sewn back by a cobbler) after being endlessly used to play football (soccer to my American folk) with a football/soccer ball made out of plastic bags (paper bags) and tied up with sisal or nylon strings. They happily raced each other up and down the hills and plains, carefree, with thick or runny mucus running down their noses and mouths. A sorry plight to see and behold, so you would think, but unbridled joy was in the air! They went to modest schools and their parents worked modest jobs and their earnings were modest. At the end of the day, the food brought to the table was not palatial but modest. A vegetable diet was cheaper than a carnivorous diet and many meals in Kenyan homes consisted of ugali (maize meal/cornmeal) and sukuma wiki. (Kale) This was interspersed with days where maize (corn) and beans dominated the dinner table. Eating beans everyday meant that you passed gas every day! That is why Kenyans are experts in passing gas; silently! Therefore, as ‘bad’ as those meals seemed to those young boys then and as much as they aspired to dig their milk teeth into well done sirloin steaks every evening, they subsisted on a mostly vegan diet by circumstance, not by choice. With the benefit of hindsight, a vegan diet was the best thing that could have happened to them as it staved off the various diseases caused by eating meat, if vegans are to be believed. Some of these vegetables these boys ate are now known as ‘superfoods’, for example ‘sukuma wiki’, (kale) sweet potatoes and onions.
After eating maize and beans all month, end month would draw nigh. The parents of the youngsters would get paid and for a few days, maybe a full week, meat, like a list A celebrity, would make a brief cameo appearance into the diet. The first day would consist of one or two small prime choice cuts but, as the rent, school fees, payments to the local shops and kiosks (‘mama mboga’ and ‘mama pima’) for debts incurred by goods taken on credit and other expenses gobbled up the little earnings, back to vegetables it was. Therefore, the parents got clever and creative. Just like the enslaved Black people in the Americas for centuries had cobbled together pieces of meat thrown away by their masters and made what is now known as soul food, adventurous Kenyans bought ‘matumbo’ or tripe to sneak in some sort of meat into the diet. Back in the day, some communities used the cow, goat or sheep intestines to make ‘mutura’ or ‘blood sausage’ and still do upto this day. Originally, I imagine that the butchers probably threw the innards of the cow away but decided to start selling them as they realized that the cow intestines were insanely popular! The cow intestines, green after holding the cow’s cud, found their way into Kenyan kitchens and kitchenettes and what was hitherto eaten secretly became popular and later even found its way into local and mainstream Kenyan restaurants. ‘Matumbo’ could be bought cheaper than regular meat and it was therefore used to bridge the gap between the end of the month when you could eat ‘real’ meat and the rest of the vegan days. So, ‘matumbo’ was a delicacy, not eaten daily but eaten often enough to be etched in memory as a delicacy. So, subconsciously, the love of ‘matumbo’ began. It was somehow within reach, like a down-to-earth pretty village girl who goes to a boarding school during the school term or semester and comes home for holidays every now and then who you could talk to. ‘Matumbo’ is tough and chewy in its raw and semi-cooked state and for some, has a bitter taste. Therefore, ingenious ways had to be sought out to make the ‘matumbo’ palatable, and/or even delicious, after it was cut into small pieces. This is where the chillies, or ‘kafirifiri’, come in. The ‘matumbo’ needed to be cooked well to lose some of its chewy and rubbery texture. Not all of it, just some. It also needed to be spiced up to mask some of its intense intestine or gamey flavor. So, young boys, from Mandera to Magadi, from Malaba to Malindi, from Mbita to Mtwapa craved and enjoyed this delicacy. It is the one true meal that crosses community lines and cannot be pinned to a particular community. ‘Uhunye’ and ‘Agwambo’ (Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga, Kenya’s current president and opposition leader respectively) can partake of ‘matumbo’ and ‘kafirifiri’ respectively without asking why they are not being served their indigenous food!
 If, as a man, you go to Mombasa in search of work, you may just be lovestruck and you shall be subjected to a dangerous trifecta of biriani, whippy lovemaking and jinn! This phenomenon is known as ‘Hadija hapendi’! As people are accusing you of being ensnared by the diabolical jinn, you’ll be filling your stomach with, in addition to the biriani, (Indian mixed rice dish with spices, rice and meat and/or vegetables) the lovely dishes of mahamri (African donuts cooked with coconut oil) na kitoweo cha mchuzi uliopikwa na kitunguu saumu, (and stew cooked with garlic) pilau or wali wa nazi (coconut rice) and fish slathered in coconut oil! These women ‘throw it down’! Envious and jittery women from upcountry, ‘wake wa bara’ retort that that is the work of evil, powerful, demonic jinn. It must be jinn that make their men rush home from work instead of going to bars straight into the hands of barmaids and women of the night, they ruefully muse. However, if they observed keenly, there are a couple of differences in the food presented to their respective husbands. There is also the small issue of being welcomed home with open arms and a smile after laboring hard, scorched by the hot sun and almost asphyxiated by the humid air at the Kenya Ports Authority warehouses, with the sweet relaxing words of ‘mume wangu, karibu nyumbani. Pole kwa kazi’ spoken in the rich alluring accent of ‘Kiswahili cha Mvita’ -Kiswahili from the place called Mvita- (My husband, welcome home and ‘sorry’ for working/being worked hard’) Another forgotten issue is the hot bucket of water, ‘Lifebuoy’ soap and pumice stone waiting for the man to clean himself off of the layer of cement dust of Bamburi Cement! One husband is arriving to the inviting aroma of pilau rice, rich brown in color with curried stew, whilst the other one is arriving home to rice as white as the sheets at Coast General Hospital or the Ku Klux Klan! The stew has been boiled and the one or two pieces of meat are swimming alone and uneasily amongst a litany of disintegrated potatoes (or what is left of them after hard boiling) like a black #blacklivesmatter protestor in a Trump political rally in Alabama! How can a lass complain that she needs her life spiced up and doesn’t have or add any single spice ingredient into the food she prepares for her darling?! In addition, the upcountry women are notorious for not minding matters of the bedroom and just laying down there, missionary style, also known as ‘kifo cha mende’. The Mombasa woman knows better and puts the moves seen in ‘Taarabu’ music to good use, bending and gyrating her ‘fundamendoz’ or ‘nyash’ or behind rhythmically, as if following the captivating beat of a Miji Kenda drummer! Chini kwa chini, juu kwa juu! (Down down, up, up!) Those two shall be inseparable, ‘kama chanda na pete! (Like a finger and ring!) So, upcountry women, it is not jinn that makes men stick to coastal women. The devil is in the details! 

Dr. Noah Wekesa, a full-blooded Bukusu, a man from the community where an elder is buried sitting down, married a white woman of his stature and station in life. Their marriage brought forth Paul Wekesa, the former accomplished Kenyan tennis player. He lived in the leafy suburbs of Nairobi and was (and still is) an accomplished veterinary doctor and politician. To assist with the children, he brought a young damsel, not quite sixteen, from the outskirts of Webuye to assist with household chores. What better plan than to have a maid from ‘litala’ or ‘olukongo’, the village, one who understands the Bukusu customs. After a while, something happened. Maybe the hitherto disheveled girl who previously used to bathe in Nzoia River with bar soap, started showering in a marble tiled bathroom, lathering her ‘elidako’ or posterior with the lady of the house’s ‘Cussons Imperial Leather’ soap, maybe ‘Rexona’. She probably discovered the scintillating oils of ‘Lady Gay’ or probably learned how to ‘toa tint’ or lighten ones’ skin tone a shade or two or even ten by using ‘Clear Tone’, maybe ‘Ambi’. Maybe she started using the wife’s ‘Yolanda’ perfume, maybe started wearing some of her employer’s dresses when she wasn’t around. Maybe it is the pressure of an African man to have an African wife. The reasons remain moot. The doctor’s marriage was in disarray! The cause; he was having relations with his house girl! As Grammy winning crooner Seal scornfully and bluntly puts it with regard to his former flame/wife Heidi Klum, Dr Wekesa was fornicating with the help! Khandi! Wow! This is probably the ‘worst’ kind of betrayal by a philandering spouse. If a questionnaire existed of ranking the worst form of cheating, this would rank at the very bottom, (or is it the very top?) probably labeled ‘not at all satisfied’ or ‘disgusting’ with one star!!! Even Arnold Schwarzenegger fornicated with the help!Fornicate with someone else, not with the lowly help!!! His house girl was now the madam of the huge mansion! She was the Oga (or it it Oga-ress) at the top! Having come home to the sparse and occasional western cooking from his white wife, the house help had whipped him his favorite dishes that nostalgically reminded him of his youth as he ran up and down the Malakisi Falls and was called to lunch and supper by his mum! The simple but all important ritual of serving the man his favorite food had resulted in the unthinkable! The overthrowing by an African house help of a white wife! This is a feat that few mistresses are able to accomplish. ‘Clandes’ or clandestine lovers, dream of that day when they rise up from number 2 (or 3 or 4) to number 1! Okot p’Bitek in his well written, world famous narrative poem book, ‘Song Of Lawino’, describes how Lawino’s husband, Ocol, the son of the tribal leader of their Acoli (Acholi) community has taken another wife, Clementine, who is educated and acts European. Ocol shuns Lawino, his first wife, in favour of Clementine. Ocol is also said to be fascinated with the culture of the European colonialists and is enchanted by his ‘sophisticated’ wife who couldn’t work in the village. I think the Bukusu, just like Ocol, have a thing for these ‘sophisticated’ foreign women, or maybe the prowess of the Bukusu stands out. Remember the captivating love story of ‘My Bukusu darling’? Timothy Khamala did the unimaginable and wooed and seduced the kama sutra out of Sarika Patel, an Indian lady. It was one on one between him and the Indian seductress, ‘omundu khu mundu’! In the beginning, everything was blissful. The Luhya man ate roti, palak paneer and channa dal but after a while craved for mrenda, (jute leaves) obusuma (corn/maize meal) and ingokho! (chicken) Maybe the Indian lady was vegetarian and was asking the Bukusu man to turn vegan. Asking a Luhya man to abandon eating ‘ingokho’ is like asking the Pope to become Hindu! Namaste, Not! The Indian lady forgot the cardinal rule of a man! A man’s heart is through his stomach. Cooking spicy curry and naan was not the answer! Not long term anyway. After all, this food was foreign to him. The novelty wore off and he craved his ‘omushenye’, (a mixture of boiled beans and boiled sweet potatoes) ‘omunyobo’ (fine mashed roasted monkey nuts)  and ‘amabere amasatse’. (sour milk) Telling a full blooded man about filet mignon is an exercise in futility; you might as well be saying ‘fill me with minyoo’!
Remember the movie Ratatouille? It’s a cartoon/animated movie but as you know, these animated movies can afford to be brutally honest without being shackled by political correctness. The movie depicts France’s top restaurant critic, Anton Ego, eating ratatouille soup created by Remy the rat which brings back to the astonished Ego memories of his mother’s cooking as a young boy and rocked him to the core!
The Vietnamese eat various insects as a delicacy, including the feared hairy tarantula! During the Vietnam war, food was scarce and the locals turned to eating insects for sustenance and sometimes survival. The war has ended and has been over for decades but their tastes adjusted and they eat these insects as a delicacy. So, out of necessity and survival, a habit, a food ‘invention’ is born.

 If you are a sufferer who went to Gikambura primary school in Kiambu cownty, sorry, county or Onjiko in Kisumu county, there are certain meals you partook out of necessity. A Kikuyu man clad in a ‘Godfather’ cowboy hat, Savco brand jeans and cowboy boots can have numerous plots of land scattered countrywide in Lamu, Limuru, Lodwar and Lokichoggio but if he ate boiled beans, maize and potatoes as a naughty little rascal, the man shall want to sit down once in a while and eat the overcooked boiled beans, maize and potatoes, just like dear Mama made them. 

Look at hayati (the late) Mutula Kilonzo. This ‘mutumia’, man, kept a whole range of carnivores and had two cheetahs called ‘Ocampo’ and ‘Mutula’ in his Kwa Kyelu ranch and three lions, ‘Mutula’, ‘Nduku’ and ‘Sis’! You know you’ve made it when you name a lion and cheetah after yourself! He fed them real meat and spent a fortune, (allegedly Kshs 700,000, about US$ 7,000 a month!) thus negating the act of ‘nyemelearing’, stealthy stalking of prey, by the lions. These lions were well fed. They did not need to escape their enclosure in search of food like the poor lions that were unfortunately roaming in the streets of Nairobi and were shot by Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) park rangers. Amongst the lions shot recently was a lion called ‘Mohawk’ who was an international attraction, not quite as famous as Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe but he had a black mane. So, a famously wealthy politician keeps lions in his farm/ranch and feeds them good meat. There is an ironic fateful twist; but alas, rumor has it that he was felled by a deadly concoction of ‘muthokoi’ (meal made from de-husked maize/corn) and viagra! His boyhood instincts had kicked in and he just needed a ‘muthokoi’ fix! This was to be his undoing! Had he eaten meat like fellow senior citizens do, or as his lions did, then he would not have succumbed. Note to all viagra users; don’t use viagra with ‘muthokoi’, ‘githeri’ and meals laden with lots of maize/corn and beans. I think there is a chemical in these beans and maize/corn that doesn’t work well with viagra!
A man from the Lakeside shall demand fish with the head and more importantly, the eye, intact. Serving a descendant of the Jok a Jok, Jok Awiny or Jok Amolo fish without a head is reasons for an urgent referendum! We have seen Luo men having got a bachelors degree from Makerere in Uganda, a Masters from Oxford in the UK and to crown it all, a PHD from Harvard University in the US, bellow out in impeccable Queen’s English as he requests, more like demands, for his favorite ‘mbuta’, (Nile Perch fish) ‘kuon bel’ (ugali, corn/maize meal made with brown millet) and ‘athola’, (roast beef) to be washed down with expensive tots of Hennessy or Jameson, those drinks which rappers and hip hop artists brag about in their songs and videos!  
 The Kenyan ladies who are getting coy with Nigerian men in a callous and brazen attempt to ‘chop’ their dubiously earned Naira and dollars, are learning quickly that an Igbo man needs to eat his fufu (cassava meal) and egusi soup. (yellowish soup based on melon seeds) Serving him exotic Kenyan cuisine works for a while but the man is more interested in eating fufu than he is in eating ugali! Even an expansive and callipygian derrière and the extraordinary bleaching of the skin shall not save the Kenyan ladies from the chopping block once the Naija man is done chopping them. If these foods keep missing from the menu, then the confused lady will eventually keep missing from his life! All that is needed is a clever replacement that can familiarize themselves with a Nigerian chopping board to cook these dishes! 
A certain Wambui Wamae Kamiru has struck a lottery jackpot by marrying her darling, aka ‘kihiki understanding’, Bob Collymore aka Bob Call Me More! (Or is it Bob Con Me More!) Ka-Ching! Imagine the hordes of dejected women in Nairobi, wondering how a ‘sponsor’ creme de la creme had escaped! ‘Aliponyoka’! Imagine a sponsor of Collymore’s magnitude, the top Kenyan corporate glad-hander! It had to be a ‘msapere’ lady, a woman from the slopes (srippery sropes) who could pull out such a heist! Heist of the century! From Kirinyaga to boot! Only a woman from (the former) Central Province could ensnare and snag the wealthiest and most eligible ‘bachelor’ in Kenya! These ladies ‘ni moto wa kuotea mbali’, ‘fire whose heat is enjoyed from afar and not close’! Even CORD principal and Bungoma Senator Wetang’ula can bear witness to these Wangu Wa Makeris! ‘Weta’ is the first Bukusu on record to be beaten by a woman! His wife, Ann Waceke Ngugi Wetang’ula ‘Nyerified’ him, that is pummeled him at their Karen home until he sought refuge in Lang’ata police station and recorded a police statement. Ali-nyekhwa! Luhyas take beatings very seriously! Wakoli wa Bwifoli, doyen of Luhya politics, has thundered that Wetang’ula had better kiss his dreams of living and governing in State House, Nairobi goodbye, as a Luhya man cannot be taken seriously and thus cannot lead the country as president after being beaten by a woman! Clearly, Wakoli wa Bwifoli hasn’t encountered a Nyeri woman! 
Back to the new Mrs. Collymore; that lady has done all the necessary mathematical, psychological and physiological calculations that pertain to that marriage! Collymore thought he had won her over but he had the ‘joker’ card, she had the ‘ace’ card. ‘Alikuwa amekachora!’ She has calculated that, despite what I assume is a tightly knit airtight pre-nup, hobnobbing as Mrs Collymore was well worth the effort! Apart from free airtime and unlimited ‘bundles’ of data, a cashload of Mpesa and a few differently colored Range Rover luxury SUVs to match her differently colored daily outfits, imagine the (sponsoring of, legally this time) mansions, condos, first class plane and yacht/cruise ship rides, shopping in the glamorous exquisite designer shops in Milan, Dubai and Los Angeles, wining and dining in the world’s finest restaurants and so on and so forth! There are many salacious and scandalous stories flying around concerning (former) Ms Kamiru’s first marriage, the alleged abandonment of her children, (Kikuyu women never abandon their children, so people are alleging that she doesn’t want to bring the little brats into her new home as baggage! Ahem!) an alleged abusive husband who was initially being spoiled by gifts allegedly bought by Collymore himself and the alleged ‘nyemelearing’ (stalking) by the CEO himself! Collymore was also married to a white woman in the UK and they have a daughter. As to whether both Kamiru and Collymore had ended their relationships to their respective spouses before tangoing with each other, no one really knows! Kumbe (so) Bob Collymore was a team ‘Mafisi’ member, (unashamed skirt-chaser) roaming freely without paying hefty roaming charges?! Please do tell, how can you, as an ordinary man, compete with probably Kenya’s wealthiest CEO? As Chinua Achebe wrote in ‘Things Fall Apart’ Okonkwo told a man who had no titles that ‘this is a meeting for men’. Unfortunately, Ms. Kamiru’s former husband, Joseph Kinyua cruelly realized that he was powerless against the behemoth Collymore! Poor him! The Swahili have a proverb that states ‘mwenye nguvu mpishe.’ (Pave way for the strong one.) 
This story deserves another blog by itself but I’ll stick to the issue at hand; food. This bourgeois CEO has proclaimed that he doesn’t like Kenyan food, much to the chagrin of Kenyans! So, Mrs Collymore, please don’t stress yourself ‘ukipiganisha masufuria’, clanking the pots and pans together cooking ‘mukimo’ (meal made from mashed potatoes with green vegetables) ‘irio’ (mashed dry beans and potatoes) and ‘njahi’ (black beans with potatoes) As you can see, no Kikuyu meal is complete without potatoes! He seems to like Indian food, spicy stuff that was made by his grandmother in his native Guyana and later on by his mother in London. If you don’t cook Indian and Asian cuisine bii (madam) Kamiru, Bobby Collymore shall go offline faster than you can say ‘mteja’ (customer) and all you shall hear is a busy signal! I wish the newlywed couple all the best and I hope none of them shall roam from now henceforth and shall stick to their home network! 
If you have seen Kenyans go back to Kenya for holidays in December, the ‘summer bunnies’, wearing the latest NFL, NBA, EPL and Baseball sports gear after having flipped burgers and washed dead bodies in the western world all year, need to feel good about themselves, momentarily run away from their sorrows and wipe off the dust of fast food joints, hospitals and morgues! You will realize that, despite their temporary opulence and the need to show off their dollars and Euros to all and sundry whilst boosting the Kenyan economy, they cannot resist to partake in the ritual that is ‘chips mwitu’ (street french fries) and ‘mayai gonga’!(street fried eggs) Back in the day, not too long ago, (it still happens up to today) after exiting the clubs in Kenya in the ungodly hours of 5, 6 or 7 am, especially Florida 2000, there were mobile/traveling chefs who whipped up a salacious and delicious meal of ‘chips mwitu’ and ‘mayai gonga’.These chips may or may not have been fried with oil pried or siphoned off a transformer! Maybe that’s why they tasted so electrifying! They had a certain zing to them! Finger-licking good! How one decides to steal oil from a live electric transformer transmitting thousands of volts is something I’ll never understand. It is a sure death warrant, similar to jumping out of a plane in the sky without a parachute! I would rather join the devilish illuminati than climb up there! There were no ‘Kanjo’ (Nairobi City Council) ‘askaris’ (guards/attendants) or inspectors to harass and scatter these mobile chefs. I suspect that someone in Nairobi City Hall had his or her hands greased to turn a blind eye to the ‘illegal’ cooking going on. Be that as it may, as a Kenyan living in Kenya, there were usually no side effects when you ate the ‘chips mwitu’ and ‘mayai gonga’. 
However, once you came to the ‘ndayathipora’ (diaspora) aka ‘majuu’ aka the West, the tough enzymes that prevented you from getting sick were cleaned out of your system and left you as vulnerable as a Nairobian face to face with a runaway lion! So, these ‘summer bunnies’ know that they shall get a serious bout of diarrhea when they eat the ‘chips mwitu’ and ‘mayai gonga’ but they do it nevertheless. It is the nostalgia they are after! The carefree days when you could go clubbing for days with no sleep and nary a headache! As long as you have ‘Eno’ fruit salt stomach relief medication with you, you are set. Talking of enzymes, for those Kenyans who live in the diaspora and are scared of biochemical warfare especially when the crazed terrorists release anthrax spores into the atmosphere, do not worry! If you have eaten meat in Kenya, you have probably eaten meat that has been affected by anthrax. Anthrax is a disease that is very common amongst cows in Kenya. The cow dies a painful death as it foams in the mouth. A cow is worth a lot of money, especially when alive, as it supplies a steady supply of milk to supplement the farmers’ income. So, a dead cow with anthrax is a nightmare. Veterinary standards demand that the cow be buried immediately in a deep hole to prevent the spreading of this contagious disease to other livestock. However, a farmer whose beloved ‘nyameni’ cow has died shall be desperate enough to collude with the local butcher named Kamau to collect the carcass late at night and have it skinned and presented as ‘nyama fresh’ the next day at the local butchery in Kiamaiko! The restaurants may also use it as a condiment for ‘boiro’, where meat and vegetables are boiled incessantly until they develop into a gooey like substance till the anthrax spores disappear. So, fellow immigrants, don’t worry. When anthrax is dispersed into the atmosphere as an attempt at chemical warfare, only the strong will survive. Strong immigrants, having been ‘vaccinated’ by eating a lot of anthrax infected meat, shall be walking proudly in the anthrax filled streets of New York, London and/or Sydney as locals succumb to the anthrax! Is that not how vaccines work? 
Don’t get me wrong. I know that, nowadays, everyone is busy and no one has time to do anything. Roles have also been reversed. Men are cooking more than ever, sometimes more than women themselves. However, just like you probably need to go to the gym to keep the stubborn pounds from permanently clinging onto your skeletal figure that previously survived on one large carb-free meal a day, you need to set some time to whip your man his favorite boyhood meal. Even though it is once a week or once a month, you have to keep the fire burning! 

How dare I write such a stupid, condescending article full of Muhammad Ali braggadocio? Don’t shoot the messenger! Let’s turn the tables around… As a lady, do you love receiving flowers from your significant other? What about a ring on that finger? Priceless, right? The more expensive, the better, sio, right? The larger the rock, the higher the carats, the louder the ululation! Flowers, chocolate and diamonds is a conspiracy theory I tell you! Out to fleece men of their hard-earned cash! Flowers, which have been grown in cool conditions or in green houses somewhere, in fertile land which could have been better used to grow food that can be eaten by humans and feed the ever-growing global human population, wilt and wither in a few days. Chocolate is an attempt by the poor to eat (or drink) stuff that was only previously accessible to the rich. The bourgeoisie used to call it the ‘nectar of the gods’ and drank the imported chocolate from imported china from China! Diamonds are a recent clever marketing ploy by a company called De Beers, which, after finding a huge reserve of diamonds and gold in South Africa a century or two ago, came up with this heinous idea that a man should use one month’s salary/wage or a four week paycheck (maybe 2 or more months) to buy a golden ring topped with a diamond for his beloved fiancée! This engagement ring fallacy didn’t exist 300 years ago. If a man wanted a woman, all he did was declare loudly and in some communities, plant a spear at the doorstep of the ‘manyatta’ (hut) to signify he was serious about marrying the lady! Talking of lions, the manly thing to do was to kill a lion and bring its skin and head as a trophy to the smitten lass who would accompany you to your ‘manyatta’! As a lady, would you spend one month’s salary/four week paycheck on a man? Your silence answers that question. (The exception is the lady who has, in the words of the sassy and controversial Nation newspaper writer Njoki Chege, been ‘d*ckmatized’ by a man, a sexual bewitchment of sorts!)
 The mining of diamonds by poor black African men in South Africa, whose proceeds are used to finance the social debauchery of the white upper class, in Africa, is one of the greatest con-jobs and ironies of mankind! Many of these men come from Lesotho and Swaziland (another irony or ironies, countries inside a country) where hordes of able bodied men leave their wives and children behind to mine diamonds, as their respective Kings enjoy their royal shenanigans by plucking (and sometimes forcefully abducting) virgin maidens in their respective annual reed dances. After tunneling deep in caves and shafts that even the proverbial canary cannot survive in, they dig and jackhammer their poor bodies into an early grave, their lungs full of soot, their bodies physically and psychologically broken beyond repair. If they are lucky to escape death in the mines, they are not usually lucky enough to escape death via lung failure. Remember the blood diamonds from West Africa, in both Sierra Leone and Liberia? The raping of Africa’s resources was done under the aegis of a civil war, with witty diamond peddlers exchanging diamonds for weapons. The people engaged in genocide as the diamonds were transported to jeweler shops in the western world to be adorned by unsuspecting maidens! I have even seen a stroke of genius, where they make chocolate-filled diamonds! It doesn’t even make sense. But men do it anyway. The rules have been set. Refuse to cater for your girl with chocolate, flowers or a 10 carat diamond and invoke the fury of the lady who is keeping up with the Joneses!
‘Matumbo’ and ‘kafirifiri’ is a relatively simple meal to make. Go to the store and buy tripe, ‘matumbo’. In the stores in the West, they have thoroughly cleaned the ‘matumbo’ and the matumbo is white in color, not the green the Kenyans are used to! A little ingenuity is needed to turn the white ‘matumbo’ green, just like the man was used to having. You can soak them in chopped kale (sukuma wiki) and a little water for 24 hours to give them that green look. Once they have turned green, then it’s time for the magic to begin. There are many recipes in the internet but this one from kaluhikitchens.com takes the cake and has been tried and tested by yours truly and successful lasses everywhere who gush about and are in awe of its man-retaining abilities!
 ⁃ Cut the ‘matumbo’/tripe into small pieces, add some water and put them to boil on a jiko or in a slow cooker/ crock pot. The longer they boil, the more tender they shall be. 

 ⁃ Once the water has reduced, add some more, together with 3/4 cup of milk (milk is optional) and fresh whole chillies. The milk absorbs some of the smell and makes them softer. You can even soak the matumbo in milk before boiling if you have the time. The chilli will add its flavor to the tripe and it will be mild. 

 ⁃ If you prefer more heat, chop up your chilli and then add it. Depending on how ‘hot’ or mild you like your chili, you can use jalapeño peppers for more heat or regular green or red peppers for very mild or no heat at all.

 ⁃ The second round boiling with the milk and the chilli is the the most important step in building a flavor profile for this dish.

 ⁃ cloves of garlic

 ⁃ 1/2 kg of boiled tripe

 ⁃ 4 tomatoes, roughly chopped

 ⁃ Fresh coriander, finely chopped

 ⁃ 1 1/2 tablespoon of ‘Royco’ brand or ‘Goya’ brand all spice mix

 ⁃ 1 large red onion, diced

 ⁃ Pound or grind your garlic cloves into a paste. Dice your onions and put these two in a ‘sufuria’ (pot) with some heated oil. Add some salt and let these saute until the are soft. 

 ⁃ Add your tomatoes and let this simmer for about 5 minutes until the are all soft. Then add your chilli infused boiled ‘matumbo’ and mix it in. Let them simmer for about 2 minutes then add your royco/Goya all spice mix. Mix this all up.  

 ⁃ Add 1/4 cup of water and cover this with a lid and let it simmer for about 3-4 minutes. Add your finely chopped coriander and mix it in then serve immediately!
There you have it ladies! Keep calm and prepare ‘Matumbo’ and ‘kafirifiri’! As my favorite Rapper Eric Gichobi aka ‘Kagumo Lapper’ would sign off, ‘Buyika makayaga’! 

Honey Let Me Upgrade You! The Chrysler Lemon That I’ll Never Forget! (Part I)

*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.
*Please read part I of the blog ‘The Thingamajigger Gets Into An Accident And Other Stories… (Part I) (choose from the menu) if you haven’t already done so that you may get the gist of the story.

 

My Hyundai Accent needed repairs that I could not afford. I remembered the ‘wise’ words of the black yoga pants lady who had assuaged me into suing the owners of ‘Sheila’, the bitch that had crossed the road without a leash, causing the accident. Before suing, I wrote a demand letter to the dog owner for $1,700, the cost of repairing the car according to the quote I had received from the auto body repair shop. He ignored the demand letter and exactly 32 days later, I went to the district court and paid about $70 and wrote out a complaint and sued the dog owner. I attached a copy of the quote. I was very broke and $70 was a lot of money for me at the time but I was desperate enough to try. A few people dissuaded me from suing and wondered if I could even get a penny from the dog owner.
A week or so later, I received a call from someone who introduced himself as a representative of the dog owner’s home insurance company. He let me know that he had been assigned to my case. He needed to take pictures of the car so as to assess the damage that I had claimed had happened. We met a day later and he took pictures of the car. There was a dent from a previous accident from the previous owner but I did not see the need to point that out. Once he had taken enough pictures, he told me that he would submit the pictures to the claims department and see ‘what they could do’.
A week or so later, the representative called. He gave me some good news. The insurance company had agreed to settle the issue out of court and had written me a check for $1,648! I could not believe it! Just like that! I thanked him profusely for his efforts and he promised me that the check would be mailed to my address in 3 to 5 business days. Once I hung up the phone, I danced a happy dance. I needed to be patient as being a Kenyan had made me wary of insurance agents, especially when paying out claims! Every day in the news, there were stories of those buggers sending checks (cheques back in the 254) that bounced or they never sent them at all! Two days later, I got an envelope in the mail. It was the check all right. All $1,648 of it! I could not believe my eyes. I dashed to the bank to ascertain its authenticity and once the check went through, I was elated. My bank account was probably startled by the huge amount as it had been teetering on the brink of the world of overdrafts since I got to the U.S. Essentially, I was merely acting as a conduit between my employer and my usual creditors, my landlord and my school accountant. I never got to ‘touch’ the money or enjoy it. The ‘standing orders’ I had between me and my creditors saw to it. I had never been the recipient of such a large amount in my life. I had to plan carefully. This was a lot of money and I had heard of stories of lads who had ‘made it rain’ by visiting brothels of ill repute and tucking a few crispy notes into the ng*thas of dancers and/or strippers and I was not about to fall into that trap. I also had arrears in school to pay ( I always had school fees arrears) and I decided to fix the car just to get it back on the road and use the rest to pay off the always mounting school arrears.
The Hyundai was back on the road. Some patchwork was done to it to legalize it via the state inspection and I decided to buff off some of the most visible scratches myself. However, it did not quite feel right after the accident. One of the CV joints was slightly bent after the accident and it prematurely wore out the tires. This forced me to become bosom buddies with used tire salesmen as I could not afford new tires at that time. However, there was something wretched about buying the used tires. They never lasted. They always went flat after four or so months. ‘It’s because these are old tires. They suffer from winter rot. The microscopic cracks slowly release the air in the tire. You are better off buying a new tire’, my roommate informed me. A new tire cost $80 or more and a used one cost $25. So, I decided to gamble with the used tire but I kept on losing.
In addition, the thingamajigger had another problem. Whenever it rained, some of the water seeped into the car, leaving the car carpet wet. If not mopped and shampooed immediately, it would leave a putrid, moldy smell. Despite these quirks that I had learnt to easily overlook, I had no problem with the car. It was my daily driver and never failed me. When I showed the car off to people, or rather, when people spotted me driving, or parking the car far away from shinier, newer cars, they tried hard not to laugh or snicker and told me that everyone buys a ‘junk car’ when they first land in the land of Abraham Lincoln. The thingamajigger was no junk car, I defended the Hyundai. It went wherever I went to, hardly got stuck in the snow and seeped gas like a well mannered socialite sipping expensive wine. I loved it!
One day, I was getting off class and a lass with an ass asked me how I managed to get back and forth. I told her that I had a compact car. She asked if I could give her a ride home, or a ‘lift’ as we called it in Kenya. When she saw my beloved thingamajigger, she was crestfallen. The dents, scratches and faded paint did not make for an ideal looking car. Like the gentleman I am, I held the squeaky passenger door open and she entered the car like a condemned woman walking towards the guillotine! She sat in the car as if the car itself held her hostage. I overlooked her facial expression and body language nuances and cranked the car to life. We started moving and she decided to roll the window down. However, once the window was rolled down, it did not go up unless extreme pressure and patience was applied. And just like I thought would happen, the lass wanted to roll the window up after our speed increased slightly. ‘You mean this window does not go up?’ she asked? ‘Yes, I need to stop the car so that I can push it back up.’ My reply drew a sneer from the now discombobulated belle, who seemed to want out but did not know how. I stopped the car and rolled the window up. I grunted as I pushed the window up but this got her more disgruntled. ‘We’ll use my window as ventilation’, I helpfully added. The car drove fine but this lass was like the princess in the fairy tale ‘The princess and the pea’ by Hans Christian Andersen, who felt the pea right through the 20 mattresses and 20 featherbeds. She felt everything that was wrong with the car and complained about everything. ‘How many miles does the car have?’ the diva inquired. ‘Around 102,000 miles. The car drives well. It looks like the engine is just being broken in…’ I joked. ‘It’s time for the car to go to the car graveyard, too many miles’, she interjected, ignoring my appalling attempt at a joke. She had to be kidding. This car ran like a champ. ‘What’s that noise, I feel like I can hear the road beneath me!’ This statement from her confused me. Maybe the car did not have the best sound deadening material out there. As long as you did not see the road beneath you, you would be alright, I figured. As fate would have it, it started drizzling. I needed to use the air conditioner to defog the car for clear visibility. The car’s air conditioner didn’t work. It blew hot air towards us. Maybe the hot air was ruining her makeup (and mood) as she looked flustered. Her face was twisted into a rictus of pure revulsion! This cleared up the foggy windows but prompted yet another question from the sassy lass. ‘The a/c doesn’t work?’ she asked the obvious. ‘No, I probably need to add some freon soon…’ I started to explain. ‘This car is something!’ she retorted nonchalantly. Luckily, we arrived at her destination and immediately we stopped, she tried to open the passenger door latch so that she would disembark, more like flee. ‘I need to open it from the outside, something is wrong with the latch’, I sheepishly explained. I ran over to the other side and opened the door from the outside. She half jumped out half ran and said a heartless thank you as she fled from the evil thingamajigger! I wondered how someone who did not even own a vehicle herself could be so critical. Suffice it to say that she never asked for a ‘lift’ again!
The spring semester was done and school was out. The weather got hotter and I realized why a working air conditioner in the car was a good thing. I had always heard of ‘summer’ but no one had told me that it gets this hot in the U.S. I had arrived in the country the previous year at the end of summer, so I did not experience the ‘proper’ intense summer heat. ‘Summer heat, summer rain’, sang JT Taylor in his song ‘Long Hot Summer Night’. There was hardly any ‘summer breeze’ that the Isley Brothers sang about, to cool down the Sahara-like temperatures. You could fry an egg in a minute on a hot day. It wasn’t the heat so much as the humidity! The Americans say ‘it’s the humidity stupid!’ I used to think that Mombasa, a Kenyan coastal city was humid but the humidity in the U.S was something else. You would take a shower and start sweating as you were shutting the shower faucets off! As soon as you got outside the house, you were drenched in sweat, wondering why you even bothered to take a shower in the first place! I had to buy one or two wife-beaters and a towel to wipe the sweat off the brow of my face, amongst other places. I was working like a maniac to make as much money as possible for the next semester, desperately trying to make hay while the sun literally shone.
I picked up another job to help me amass the requisite funds for the school accounts office. Boy did I work. My other ‘summer job’ consisted of assembling carnival equipment. Slides, swings, Ferris wheels, bumper cars, that sort of thing. This job was hard! I may have had acrophobia before starting the job but my fear of heights was cured when, on the first day, as a tenderfoot, I was forced to climb up a tall Ferris wheel and latch up the metal pieces. These pieces were heavy, greasy, had sharp corners and needed to be installed quickly. Despite wearing gloves, my hands were singed by the scorching metal pieces made hot by the sun! These carnivals travelled from town to town, city to city and they were in a city for a week at a time. They therefore had to be assembled quickly in readiness for the start of the carnival and disassembled quickly for transportation to the next carnival. Once the carnival commenced, we were at the gate checking the tickets. At the end of the carnival, usually on Saturday or Sunday night, it was ‘tear down’ time! Huge Ferris wheels were taken apart in hours and packed into trailers, ready for the next stop. Once the trailers arrived at the next town, it was time to set the equipment up again! In Kenya, this menial job was disparagingly referred to as ‘kazi ya mkono’, ‘work using one’s hands’ or ‘kazi ya mjengo’, ‘construction work’ I was a ‘mtu wa mjengo’, ‘construction worker’. As I toiled in 90 plus degree heat and 100% humidity, I recalled the unfortunate workers who used to walk from their homes to work in Nairobi, usually to the Industrial Area factories or construction sites in the suburbs and back every day and work backbreaking jobs! I now understood what these chaps were going through! I juggled the jobs with dexterity and what you may consider to be madness! I was working 7 days a week. I reminisced about the good old days in Nairobi when the weekend would start on an exhilarating Friday evening and end on a high note on Sunday evening/night. I saw why Kenyans in America rarely went out. They were chasing the elusive dollar! I was rushing from one job to another, assembling equipment, rushing home for a 3-5 hour nap and doing it all over again! I remember driving home one day and sort of dozing behind the wheel. The small rumble strips on the edge of the highway promptly woke me up. I was surviving on coffee, lots of Chinese takeout and prayers! All summer long, I traversed various towns assembling equipment and letting eager teenagers and families and children into the carnival rides. It was a brutal way of life but I had to adopt a Panglossian way of thinking to survive and dredge through the rocky terrain that was my life. When things were ‘thick’ or ‘elephant’, not going well, I always reminded myself of the song ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ by Bobby McFerrin.
The carnival continued its way to upstate New York and I could not follow them there due to distance. Despite the backbreaking work, I had saved enough money to pay for some school, buy books and keep afloat. School fees gobbled up all my summer earnings.
As time went by, I felt that it was time to upgrade the car. I had put in more money into the car and it was running great. However, it seemed like everyone around me had a better car! I tried not to think about keeping up with the Joneses but when a friend of mine gave me a ride in his air conditioned car, It felt good and I wondered if I could ever drive a car that did not feel like an oven inside! I had asked a mechanic for a quote to fix the air conditioner and he had alerted me that as a failsafe measure, older cars usually required the whole replacement of the entire air conditioning system, which would be $1,900 for my car! A co-worker of mine had seen how I meticulously maintained the car and wanted to buy a car for her mother so that she could get around, as her mother’s car had been grounded due to too many mechanical problems. We discussed the price and the lady offered me $US 1,000, which was the Kelly Blue Book value of the Hyundai! I was thrilled as I had paid only $500! It was time to start shopping for another car, I told myself.
Once again, just like the time I was shopping for a car the first time round, I was short of money. The cars I wanted simply cost too much money. The cars that were within my budget were similar in style to the thingamajigger and my heart was set for an upgrade. A friend of mine warned me about selling a car that had no major problems and I listened to him for a while. ‘A car with no mechanical problems is like a good wife or girlfriend. Never get rid of it!’ he advised. However, the desire to upgrade outweighed the desire to live within my means. Another American friend suggested a car auction. He persuaded me to try and visit the auction in Philadelphia. ‘Man, you can get a good ride for cheap. Just got a Jeep from there!’ He truly had a Jeep SUV and this piqued my interest. ‘If you have 2 to 3 thousand, you can get a good ride bro!’ I wanted to believe him but I was wary of cars from the auction. I had heard of horror stories from people who had bought cars from the car auction and lived to regret the purchase. The auctioneers were unscrupulous snake oil salesmen who sold cars that were past their ‘drive’ date to vulnerable, unsuspecting and desperate individuals! Some of these cars were in such bad shape that they could not run off the auction ramp and had to be pushed away. I had also been warned about buying an American made car. ‘These cars don’t last. They are always breaking down. In fact, Ford means found on road daily or found on road dead!’, my friend quipped. He recommended that I buy a foreign car, preferably a Japanese car. ‘Japanese cars never break down. Remember, limit yourself to a Toyota, Nissan or Honda, nothing else!’ I assured him that I would not buy an American car.
However, like a moth drawn to a flame, I decided to attend the auction ‘just to see’. I had also seen a chap purchase a car for about $500, fix a small problem and then have a trouble free car for a while. Buying a car at the auction was like rolling dice at the casino. Sometimes you won but as the truism always asserts, the house always wins.
If you can recall the Moi days in Kenya, former president Moi would attend an annual goat auction in Baringo county where goats and other animals would be auctioned, usually on Christmas Eve, to commemorate the festive Christmas season. Usually, the president won most, if not all of the auctions, leading some to silently wonder whether it was a real auction or a public relations exercise. But then again, it would be foolhardy to bid against a powerful and monied president. The auctioneer was none other than a boisterous funnyman called Ezekiel Bargetuny. The late Bargetuny was a farceur who spoke fast and usually ended his auction with the words with ‘na hiyo imeenda na mtukufu rais, makofi kwake!’ ‘and that (group of animals) has been bought by his excellency the president, let’s give him a round of applause!’
The auctioneers in the auctions in the U.S spoke twice as fast as Ezekiel Bargetuny, as if they had inadvertently swallowed some hot gruel and they were trying to get it out of their mouths! ‘Prraaap prraap prraap a 2002 Ford Expedition prraap 89,000 miles prraap good condition prraap one owner prraap won’t last!’ You had to strain your ears and tune them properly to catch anything he or she was saying! ‘Prraap prraap sold to the gentleman in prraap prraap for $5,000!’ He would hit the gavel like a judge bellowing for order to be restored in the courtroom!
So, I stood there, eyeing the cars that passed by. Suddenly, I caught a glimpse of a reddish Chrysler. This Chrysler was fully loaded! It had a moonroof, excellent radio and CD system with a disc changer, leatherette seats, power windows and doors and all those things that make a car salesman drool as they explain to a potential car buyer about the extra options that serve to inflate his or her markup and thus, commissions and profits. I had quite a few reservations about the buying an American car. I had been warned by my friend of the horror stories. However, the Japanese cars that were on auction were simply outside my budget. People vigorously bid on them and the prices escaped my short financial tentacles.
‘$2,000. Perfect Chrysler prraaap prraaap prraaap fully loaded. Ride in style prraaap prraaap made in Detriot!’ I saw a chap raise his hand. ‘Okay, let’s do this, $2,100 prraaap prraaap…’ I could not tell who was bidding or at what price the bid was currently on in the cacophony of noises. The car driver opened the hood and revved the engine. I inched closer to the engine and saw a good looking engine that purred like a well fed Persian cat. No noises at all. ‘Engine is great, no issues, shall go for another 100,000 miles these Chryslers prraaap prraaap…’ Once the engine was revved, folks who were not interested in the car suddenly seemed interested. ‘$2,500 for the beauty, don’t let anyone else take it home prraaap prraaap can’t get it anywhere for this price prraaap prraaap!’
My adrenaline kicked in. This car was good. It was an American car but it was not a Ford. Chryslers were not bad, or were they? The engine sounded perfect and it was in relatively decent interior shape. With such a car, I would not park it far away from the entrance in shame. Lasses would hop in with no reservations. It would mingle with the shinier newer cars. ‘Does the air conditioner work?’ I asked the driver. ‘Ice cold air prraaap prraaap colder than the Alaskan winter prraaap prraaap!’ It was as if the auctioneer had heard my question. The driver turned the air conditioner on and I put my fingers next to the vent. The car blew ice cold air! I needed this car and I needed it now! I raised my hand, not too certain if I was making the right decision.
‘Sold for $2,600 to the gentleman in the red t-shirt!’ the auctioneer gleefully shouted and banged his gavel. I was the proud owner of a fully loaded Chrysler…

The Thingamajigger Gets Into An Accident And Other Stories… (Part II)

*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.
*Please read part I of the blog (choose from the menu) if you haven’t already done so that you may get the gist of the story.

After Kilonzi’s funeral, his still shell-shocked relatives had to act as hosts of numerous mechanics and other visiting mourners from Nairobi. The pastor took the opportunity to conduct a mini-harambee. (funds drive) ‘Toa ndugu, toa dada, kile ulicho nacho, bwana anakuona mpaka rohoni mwako.’ ‘Give (generously) brother, give (generously) sister, what you have, God is seeing you (in body) and is seeing what is in your heart.’ A ‘chondo’ or sisal basket was passed along and everyone generously dug into their pockets to donate funds to Kilonzi’s widow and young children.
It got dark and the mechanics who had come for the funeral wanted to explore the nightlife of Kithyoko after giving their brother a memorable send off. Locals told them that people of means such as them would usually go to the town of Matuu, where there was quite a bit of nightlife, unlike Kithyoko which was a rather small town. So, a local ‘matatu’, minivan a Peugeot 404, was quickly hired to ferry the mourners turned merrymakers! This matatu was the kind where the passengers faced each other during the trip. They were commonly referred to as ‘seven a side’ or ‘where have I seen you before?’ This ‘matatu’ had many stickers on it that summarized life’s trials and tribulations, mocking life and celebrating it at the same time. One of the stickers had a funny message. ‘Unajifanya ng’ombe ukamuliwe na nani?’ ‘Why are you acting cow-like, who is going to milk you?’ I watched in amazement as the 404 pickup, packed to capacity, sped off to Ndallas hotel, Matuu!
The rest of us who were either underage or not willing to participate in the debauchery that Matuu had to offer, remained behind and we were served a meal of ‘muthokoi’, maize/corn and beans. Some ‘lessos’, large pieces of cloth that have printed beautiful sayings in Kiswahili, were laid on the ground of one of the houses, whose furniture had been removed to make way for the visiting multitude of people.
At around 5.00 am, we heard shouts emanating from outside. The inebriated mechanics, or rather, most of them, had just been dropped off by the Peugeot 404 pickup. Someone made the mistake of asking them to hush as there were many people already asleep but this only amped up the drunk mechanics, who started shouting loudly. They staggered and crawled into the already overfilled house and dropped themselves on any unoccupied space on the ground they could find. The furore lasted for a while as one or two of the revelers were singing Kamba songs which could only be labeled as ‘vile and dirty’! Half asleep, I could hear the word ‘ngiti’, dog, interspersed in between choruses.
In the early morning, everyone was woken up by the family members. Breakfast was being served and ‘strungi’, black tea (without sugar or milk) and a slice of bread was offered to the mourners. Many of the adults who had stayed behind shot dirty looks at the mechanics, who had interrupted and disrupted everyone else from their sleep during their loud reentry. ‘Pombe ni shetani!’ ‘Alcohol is the devil!’, one lady brazenly remarked! The drunk mechanics looked too disappointed at the minuscule amount of breakfast being offered, especially since they had been imbibing for the better part of the night and needed a solid meal to take care of their hunger pangs.
After breakfast, everyone spoke in hushed tones about the events of yesternight. The mechanics were regaling us with tales of just how wonderful the night was at Ndallas hotel, Matuu and how their arrival caused a near-stampede at Ndallas. When they got to Ndallas hotel, they wanted to know if there were any lovely Kamba maidens that could join them for company. The ‘matatu’ driver asked for a couple of minutes. He could go get some lasses but needed more money for petrol/gas. ‘The driver was very annoying, asking for money at every opportunity and yet he had seen us contributing money at the funeral!’ complained one mechanic. Anyway, since the place was reminiscent of a ‘bull dance’ with only males present, the mechanics obliged.
About 45 minutes later, according to the mechanics, the ‘matatu’ came back full of Kamba maidens. The near-stampede commenced! The mechanics and lasses to jostled and angled for the best man or woman they fancied and once everyone was paired up, the games begun! Copious amounts of alcohol flowed freely, despite the fact that the prices in Ndallas hotel were slightly higher than those in other bars in Matuu. ‘Nyama choma’, roast meat was also in abundant supply as the mechanics temporarily forgot the grease and oil that they were accustomed to. The music of the late Kakai Kilonzo was on heavy rotation, thumping out of the speakers! The mechanics danced vigorously to ‘kilunda’ music, which felt better with a sexy lass close to you! Since they were immaculately dressed, the maidens had a hard time believing that they were mere lowly mechanics. As long as they were from Nairobi, where earnings were high, that was all that mattered!
There comes a time when there is a certain itch that needs to be scratched and the time had drawn nigh. As the night wore on, some mechanics had decided to spend the night with some of the maidens and the thin line between maidens out to have a good time and twilight girls trying to make a killing, was getting blurry every time a bottle of beer was opened. However, some of the revelers had run into a small problem, of the monetary kind. The activities of the day had drained many of them of money and the partaking of drinks and meats was lowering the already depleted amounts that the mechanics had brought with them from Nairobi. There was intense haggling as some people bargained for the pleasures of the flesh. The mechanics who had brought extra cash were the winners in Ndallas; not only were they commandeering the lasses, they were actually surreptitiously lending money to their mates with a promise to pay with interest!
Some mechanics disappeared with some maidens into the streets of Matuu. They gave strict instructions to the other mechanics to tell the driver of one of the minivans that were to transport the visiting mourners back to Nairobi the next day, actually, in a few hours time, to pass by Matuu on their way back to Nairobi. They gave an exact time for them to be picked up.
After breakfast, the minivans from Nairobi came to ferry the mourners. The mechanics bid farewell to Kilonzi’s widow, who looked hopelessly out of place in the environs of Kithyoko, like a fish out of water. Fate had dealt her a cruel card and she seemed destined to her fate as a small scale farmer in Kithyoko. Her children looked dazed and confused, especially the young one who cried uncontrollably despite being soothed by his sobbing mother. It was a melancholic sight to behold.
The minivan I was traveling in passed by Matuu to pick up the libidinous men who had spent the night with the wanton women. The mechanics in the minivan were full of mirth upon the entrance of the lecherous men for their successful exploits in this the land of Syokimau. ‘Ndume!’, ‘bull’, they applauded their counterparts. One of the chaps who got onto the minivan had a rather sordid tale. He enthralled everyone by telling them that he had been taught an unforgettable lesson in Matuu. When he went to copulate with the damsel who he had met at Ndallas, all was well until the damsel demanded consideration, compensation for the Matuu romp. The chap naturally reached for his trousers to complete the transaction but alas, there was nothing in his wallet. It was as empty as a bird’s nest in December. With a scowl on his face, he said that he immediately sobered up as he had foolishly carried most of his monthly pay ‘in case of an emergency’. He told the now irritated lady that he did not have any money and must have dropped the money somewhere, maybe, no, most likely in the hotel. He requested that they go to the hotel and ask the attendants there. ‘Wewe, unataka kutoroka na pesa yangu, hebu wacha mchezo!’ ‘You want to run away with my money, quit playing!’ He reassured her that there must have been some mistake as he indeed did have money with him when he had left Ndallas hotel. ‘Unanichukulia kama mimi ni mtoto! Ngoja niite marafiki zangu ndiyo utajua mimi sio mtoto wa kuchezewa!’ ‘You are taking me for a little child? Let me call my friends so that you can know that I am not a child to be played around with!’ He tried to dissuade her to no avail. She let out a scream and yelled out ‘huyu ameniibia!”He has stolen from me!’ No sooner had she yelled than help arrived in the form of two mean looking hefty women and one man who carried a simi sword. ‘Wewe mshezi, umetoka Nairobi na hutaki kulipa?’ ‘You fool, you have come from Nairobi and you don’t want to pay?’ At that time, he was too disoriented to ask himself how three total strangers knew that he was from Nairobi. He tried to explain to the crowd of four that he had somehow lost his money in Ndallas hotel and if they wanted to, they could accompany him to the hotel so that they could see if a Good Samaritan had collected the wallet. The crew were having none of it. ‘Tumewazoea nyinyi! Mnakuja kuharibu wasichana wetu na hata hamwezi sema asante baada ya kujiburudisha! Kwenda huko!’ ‘We are used to people like you! You are spoiling our girls and you can’t even say thank you to her after enjoying yourself! Go away!’ He then winced as he explained how the women rained slaps on him as the man watched, with his hand in close proximity to the handle of the simi sword, just in case he felt the need to escape! ‘I have not been beaten by any woman since my mother spanked me as a young boy!’, he reminisced! ‘Umekula vya bwerere! Toka hapa na usirudi. Tusikuone hapa tena!’, You have ‘eaten’ free things! Get out of here and don’t come back. Let’s not see you here again!’ the 2 women roared! He put on his pair of trousers and bolted like a gazelle being chased by a predatory lion. He went back to Ndallas hotel, Matuu and explained his situation to the hotel receptionist. She curtly told him that she was working the day shift and had nothing to do with last night’s shift. She coldly added that no one had left anything in their lost and found section, let alone money. He waited impatiently for the ‘matatu’ to arrive.
He narrated his story and before he could finish, a fellow mechanic cut him short. ‘Those were conmen and con women. They were in the ruse together!’ He stated. People looked at him in shock. ‘But how could the money have disappeared? I was in the room the entire time. I did not leave and she was with me the entire time’, he added. ‘Those people are clever! When you take off your trousers, did the girl ask you to hang them on the bathroom door?’ The mechanic asked. The randy mechanic answered in the affirmative. ‘That’s where they get you. They either have someone under the bed who waits until you go to the bathroom and then they take your wallet or they fish the trouser from the bathroom hanger, remove the money and return the pair of trousers at the exact spot you hanged it at. The receptionists and workers in those lodgings are in on the act too and act as lookouts and witnesses for the crooks!’ the other mechanic added. He rued the night he had come to Matuu and said that he had been alert the whole time. ‘Hiyo lazima ilikuwa ni kamuti’ ‘that must be ‘kamuti’, witchcraft’, he shook his head in dismay. ‘Wewe, wacha kuharibia WaKamba jina, kwani kila kitu ni kamuti? Hawa ni matapeli. Kila mahali kuna matapeli bwana!’ ‘You, stop spoiling the name of we the Kamba people. Does everything have to be attributed to witchcraft? Those were conmen and women. There are con artists everywhere!’ another mechanic castigated him. He agreed and realized that he had fallen to one of the intricate con games practiced by men and women. ‘Sikujua hii miujiza imefika Matuu’, ‘I didn’t know this trickery had reached Matuu’, he admitted. All this time, the storytelling had been going on in my presence. Someone then realized that I was a young boy in the presence of men and this information was not appropriate for my youthful consumption. This was one of the exceptions to the proverb laid out in Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’, if a child washed his hands, he could eat with kings. ‘Nyinyi watu mnaharibu tabia za huyu mvulana hapa. Pimeni maneno yenu!’ ‘You fellows are teaching the small boy bad habits. Limit your words!’ a mechanic scolded the others. As a boy, I was eagerly absorbing the mechanic’s misfortunes like a sponge, ready to tell my peers in school about my trip to Machakos, the funeral and the accompanying shenanigans! So, naturally, I was not pleased when the mechanics started censoring the juicy tidbits. The minivans sped towards Nairobi and this time, they seemed to be moving faster than they had been the previous trip. They were driving neck to neck with the ‘miraa’, khat pickup truck drivers who were ferrying the coveted shrub to the airports in Nairobi.
I remember a mechanic asking why the khat was ferried by road, instead of getting airplanes to fly to various airstrips in Meru, where most of the khat was grown and transport it via air from Meru to Nairobi or Mombasa or anywhere where the khat was in demand. One of the passengers had a ready answer. The process involved in landing a small plane, loading it and clearing it for take-off was too time consuming. He said that the airplane option had been tried in Meru before. The Meru khat farmers were initially excited at the thought of ferrying their perishable khat by airplane. They thought that it would cut into the traveling time from Meru to Nairobi. They waited with enthusiasm as the plane showed up in the horizon. Ululations rent the air! The plane did not land immediately. It circled the airstrip like a vulture trying to circle a carcass. After circling the airstrip in what seemed to be an eternity, it was cleared for landing. When it landed, there was an airport employee who was marshaling the plane in order to safely direct it to the hanger. He waved his hands with items that looked like table-tennis rackets and marshaled the plane for another agonizing couple of minutes. Once he was done with the marshaling, it was time to load the miraa, khat. One major difference between the airplane and pickup truck is that the pickup truck could be overloaded with bales of khat to the brim. In fact, khat pickup trucks had an empty tire tied to the bottom of the lowest rear bumper to cushion it from bumpy rides due to overloading as they sped to Nairobi. With airplanes, it was different. There were strict guidelines as to how many pounds and kilograms that the airplane could safely carry and these rules couldn’t be bent, as overloading a plane could cause it to crash. The Meru farmers watched in disbelief as the airport workers stringently measured each and every bale loaded into the plane and declined to allow any extra bales. There was no exception to this rule. After the time consuming measuring and loading, the air traffic control employee was back again, marshaling the plane as it taxied, ready for takeoff. The now exasperated Meru farmers had seen enough. They figured that, by the time the plane landed, was loaded with as few bales of khat as possible and then cleared for takeoff, a pickup truck would be almost in Nairobi. It seemed that the traffic policemen never stopped ‘miraa’ laden pickups despite their devilish speeds. Maybe they understood that the perishable khat needed to be at Wilson airport or Jomo Kenyatta international airport by early afternoon. Another explanation would be that their palms were already greased with the proceeds of khat, thereby necessitating the turning of a blind eye to the over-speeding pickups. The airplane option has never been revisited. The mechanics all agreed that the khat pickup drivers would beat, hands down any Safari Rally driver. You never heard of khat pickup truck getting into an accident despite them negotiating the numerous black spots towards Meru at neck-breaking speeds! These were professionals. It reminded me of how NASCAR was started, by moonshine drivers speeding past law enforcement!
The harrowing journey came to an end as we disembarked at Machakos ‘airport’ bus station in Nairobi, aptly named because I guess all buses to Machakos departed from there.
I would be back in Kithyoko a few years later. This time, I was a young lad in high school and it was during the August school holidays. My (other) uncle had ‘booked’ my services for the weekend as a KYM, ‘Kaada ya moko’ ‘kazi ya mkono’ or a helper. I was only too happy to oblige. He was going for a ‘crusade’ in Kithyoko and asked me to be his cameraman helper and help him carry a myriad of equipment. He owned a Volkswagen Beetle, the original bug kind and had just dropped it in Industrial area during the week for major servicing before the long journey to Masaku. The old Volkswagen Beetles are air cooled (not water cooled) and that is a good thing or a bad thing depending on your circumstances. So, that Friday morning, we went to ‘Indaa’, Industrial area to pick the Bug up. The mechanic had not finished with the servicing and asked us to come back in the afternoon. My uncle was not happy as he had instructed the mechanic to have the car ready by Thursday as he had a long journey ahead on the weekend. The mechanic was probably hurrying to have the car ready and probably missed one or two steps or misdiagnosed one or two problems due to the rush. By late afternoon, he told us that he was done. He bragged about the way he had serviced the car and it would be problem free for a while. ‘This car can even drive to South Africa!’ he extrapolated. Confident that the Bug would drive to Kithyoko and back, we packed the Bug to the brim with camera equipment and set off to Kithyoko.
The Friday late afternoon traffic jam in Nairobi ensured that we were crawling at a snail’s pace and got to the Pangani junction at about 6.30 pm. We were running seriously late and we had more than 100 miles to cover. By the time we got to Ruaraka, close to the East African Breweries headquarters, it was already 7.30 pm. The traffic jam then ended and the Volkswagen Beetle ambled towards Thika with equipment on board. Once we got to Thika, we stopped by a kiosk and got a soda each. We then got onto the Mwingi Garissa road. Our journey was uneventful but about 50 miles from Kithyoko, the Volkswagen started sputtering and slowing down! It was pitch dark and the road was desolate. The Volkswagen stopped and could not start. My uncle tried to fiddle with the wires but his efforts came to naught. We decided to wave down any car that came along. However, all cars sped past us. My uncle theorized that it was because of the fact that there were two men and drivers were probably mistaking us for highway robbers. My uncle suggested that I hide myself in the thickets a couple of yards away so that any passers by could feel comfortable. True to his word, a ‘matatu’ that was done with its day’s trips came along and stopped. My uncle explained the situation to the matatu driver, who also happened to be the owner. The matatu driver agreed to tow the car to a place near Kithyoko where a garage owner had an auto repair shop. He grabbed a strong sisal rope and tied the inoperable Volkswagen to his matatu. My uncle then told the matatu owner that, indeed, he had another passenger who had hidden to improve our chances at road assistance. ‘Come out’, he said. I popped out of the thicket and the matatu driver froze. However, my uncle assured him that I was indeed his nephew. The matatu driver’s blood pressure went down after that. He said that it was probably the best thing to do as many people would have been wary of two men flagging down cars.
Our car was towed via rope to the auto shop close to Kithyoko. The matatu driver advised us to go there first thing in the morning. He also referred us to a lodging a stones throw away that we could lay our weary and heavy laden bodies for the night. Once at the lodging, we were served some delicious food by the waitress. No sooner had we started eating than two lascivious maidens spotted us and joined us. My uncle was very uncomfortable and I wondered why. ‘Sir, how are you doing? You look tired. You need some rest and you need to relax.’ Despite my uncle being extremely tired and in dire need of relaxation, he rebuffed the maidens’ advances. They politely but repeatedly asked him if they could join us but he said no. Then, one of them pointed at me and smiled. ‘Then if you don’t want to relax, what about the young man? He looks like he needs to relax!’ My supposed naïveté notwithstanding, I somehow knew what she was alluding to. That would explain why my uncle wanted to distance himself from the two maidens as much as possible. ‘We have a Christian crusade tomorrow morning in Kithyoko, at the primary school grounds. Sisters, you are both welcome to attend.’ The two lasses looked at each other and momentarily stepped away. However, one of them stated something. ‘Pia ma pastor huja ku-relax hapa, kwani kuna ubaya gani?’ ‘Pastors also come to relax here, so, what is the problem?’ I almost burst out laughing but I needed to keep my composure. ‘Please sisters, we have a busy schedule tomorrow. God bless you and I ask you to come for the crusade’, he said, this time with finality. When they realized that we were not interested, they went away to look for other people who were willing to ‘relax’ with them.
We were extremely tired and despite a hard mattress and a creaky bed, I quickly fell asleep. However, all through the night, my, and I suspect my uncle’s, sleep was interrupted by grunts, moans and groans from licentious couples who were having sexual escapades! In the morning, I saw people sheepishly leaving their rooms and not making eye contact, probably aware that they were under the scrutiny of other customers. We had a quick breakfast and quickly walked to the garage. The garage owner had not come in yet and my uncle decided to fiddle with the wires and try his luck. He did it and when he attempted to start it, the Bug roared into life! We then set out for Kithyoko. When we got there, we met a group of Christians setting up their equipment for the rally, the ‘crusade’, out to win hearts over. There was jumping and shouting all day on Saturday and Sunday. I wondered what had happened to Kilonzi’s widow. Had she remarried, remained single or left Kithyoko for another place?
On Sunday evening, we packed our gear and bought a good sisal rope just in case our Volkswagen Bug decided to stall. We were sandwiched in between cars that belonged to the other preachers and singers who had come to preach the Gospel. ‘I shall never buy a Volkswagen again. It is a car that is too finicky’, my uncle stated. ‘Promise me that you shall never buy a Volkswagen!’ I wondered if buying a car was even a possibility. I could never have imagined buying a bicycle. However, I felt that Volkswagens were bad cars that left you on the road for no reason, so I agreed with him. ‘I’ll never buy a Volkswagen!’
A few years later, the harrowing experience brought about by a car called Chrysler made me buy a Volkswagen…

The Thingamajjiger Gets Into An Accident And Other Stories (Part I)

Call me Caitlyn! Caitlyn Jenner! That has been the buzzword! She is the most famous person with gender dysphoria. I can only imagine the mental anguish of being trapped in a man’s body for 60 plus years. A few questions; when the pouty lipped Kylie Jenner gets married to Tyga, who shall walk her down the aisle? Caitlyn? Shall the Jenner lasses and lad still call her ‘dad’? Caitlyn has disclosed that she shall date women and she is not interested in men. However, she has undergone facial-feminization surgery and her ‘twins’ are very visible! I guess that she is quite the looker, with some people even commenting that she looks better than her ex-wife Kriss Jenner. She has a reality show debuting in July, ‘Call Me Cait!’ on the E network. That’s a multi-million dollar contract right there! Dennis Rodman, former NBA bad boy has even offered to date Caitlyn! I tried to pick one of my neighbor’s brain about the whole episode. Staunchly Christian, let’s just say the word ‘daimono’, devil, was featuring heavily! Now, back to regularly scheduled programming…
I was driving from school one day when a small dog darted seemingly out of nowhere and ran right in front of me. I swerved to try and avoid running over the dog but it was too late. I saw my car hurtling into a small bush. Bang! I had hit a small thicket! I was exceedingly lucky as I was wearing a seat belt. I felt the seat belt restrain me and prevent me from crushing my ribs into the steering wheel or even worse, going through the windshield as a human projectile! I stepped out to inspect the damage. Some parts of the bumper had been ripped off and had scratches but surprisingly, my Hyundai Accent, my thingamajigger, was still working. The engine was running and the damage, although serious looking, was superficial (by Kenyan standards) and the car looked okay to drive off the scene of the accident.
I then diverted my attention to see what had just happened. The ‘small’ dog that I had inadvertently run over was actually an adult basset hound dog, a breed which has big droopy ears, short legs and a phenomenal sense of smell. It is commonly referred to as the ‘hush puppy dog’. The poor bitch had darted across the road, probably detracted by the smell of a nearby squirrel or hare and unfortunately, her untimely decision cost her as the mammoth weight of my compact car crushed her. When I saw her, the bitch was still alive but was whimpering and in great pain. She was in her death throes. The young lad who had carelessly and recklessly removed the leash from the bitch was in hysterics, comforting the bitch and telling her that she would be okay. He knew that he had messed up and wore a woebegone look. ‘Call 911!’ someone barked. A small crowd of onlookers was quickly gathering to decipher what was going on. ‘That dog should have been on leash, mmhh, yeah, he’s been letting poor Sheila run all over the place with no leash on, breaking the damn law,’ I heard a middle aged lady rant. The middle aged lady had some tight black yoga pants and looked like she was trying too hard to bring sexy back. Her bosom was as ample as Caitlyn Jenner’s. ‘She ain’t gonna make it, she done!’ shrieked a young lass. I had learnt to accept many forms of English and Ebonics and despite the fact that the young lass should probably have said ‘she is done’ or ‘she is gone’, I was in a mild state of panic due to the minor road accident I had just been involved in. In the next few minutes, I witnessed, first hand, the efficiency that is the American system. About 5 minutes later, or maybe even less, I heard the blaring sirens of an ambulance. The ambulance came and stopped right next to the dying bitch. I then looked closely at the ambulance and I realized that it was an animal rescue ambulance! It was slightly smaller than a regular ambulance. It reminded me of the pickup trucks in Kenya that carried meat in them that had a picture of a white-robed chef but slightly larger in size. Two portly gentlemen hopped out and wrapped the bitch onto a splinter stretcher and then rushed her to the animal hospital, sirens blaring. I had never seen an animal ambulance before. Maybe they are there in Kenya but I just have never seen one. I have seen tranquilized wildlife at the back of Kenya Wildlife Service (KWF) Land Cruisers but that’s it. There is a dire shortage of regular human ambulances. Would an animal ambulance be a priority? I had never seen anyone stop after running over any animal, let alone a dog. The animal’s size is what forces you to stop after running into an animal. A large Kudu antelope shall disable your car, stopping it dead on its tracks. No one stops for roadkill in Kenya. People in Kenya are paranoid but rightly so. Thugs could use a poor dog as ‘bait’ to stop you and carjack or rob you of your valuables!
As they were wrapping ‘Sheila’ (as I heard her owner and neighbors calling her) onto the splinter, a regular ambulance sped into the scene. A few emergency medical technicians (EMTs) jumped out of the ambulance and one lady came with car chocks and put them next to my car’s tires to immobilize it. They pulled out a stretcher and brought it towards me. ‘Are you injured in any way? Do you want medical attention? Do you want to go to the hospital?’ As I answered ‘no’ to all those questions, a police car sped towards me, lights and siren blaring and quickly stopped a few yards from my car. The policeman got out. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked? ‘Yes’, I answered. He then talked into his radio and confirmed that I, the driver of the vehicle, was okay. ‘No need for the fire truck’, he added. I later found out that when an accident occurs, the dispatcher alerts all three emergency units, the ambulance, fire truck and police. The EMTs took away their wheel chocks and then got into the ambulance and left. The policeman asked me for my ID card, insurance and registration documents and I handed them over to him. He ran my information in the police car computer and handed the documents back to me. ‘He’s checked out, he is okay’, the policeman confirmed on his radio. The policeman had actually checked my ID to scan for any warrants of arrest or problems with the legal system. I remembered my friends warning me about unnecessary encounters with the law. The police could access your information right from their police cars! The policeman took down some information relating to the accident and told me that, since I was not at fault, he would not write me a traffic ticket and if I needed a police report for insurance purposes, I could get one at the police station where he was located.
‘You’ll need that police report, you gotta sue them in small claims court, the dog should’ve been on a leash’, the middle aged lady with black yoga pants, enlightened me. ‘Shut the F*ck up!’, the young lad cursed! He had just been traumatized by my car running over his beloved bitch and was now suffering the ignominy of being publicly dressed down by the curmudgeonly lady! ‘Keep running your mouth, you ain’t sh*t!’ she smirked. Ms. yoga pants was getting hyped up. There is a cartoon TV program called ‘Family Guy’. This lady was sounding just like the African American lady cartoon depicted in ‘Family Guy’. She was talking like a black woman in hindsight! ‘I told you, what did I tell you, mmhhh, didn’t I tell you!’ She was twirling her head and snapping her well manicured nails as she spoke to the young lad and anyone within earshot. I was taken aback by the crassitude of both of them; the young lad for speaking to an older lady in such a condescending manner and the middle aged lady for stooping to the young lad’s immature level. I would have never spoken back to an older lady when I was a ghetto yute! That would have been grounds for a communal bashing. However, we were in America and both incessantly ran their mouths like a typewriter! The lady turned her attention to me. ‘Hey youngin’, make sure you sue their sorry ass! Small claims court is your next stop!’ I almost blushed but I stopped myself. She was opening my eyes. Sue? Why? It was only an animal I had run over. The lady continued singing like a canary, ‘They’ve got homeowners insurance, you could get US$ 1,000, even $2,000, you better believe dat, your car looking bad!’ Wow, I felt like a scientist after discovering a new element or even planet. I could tell that there was some bad blood between her and the young lad and his family but for the first time, her foul mouth did not irritate me. She pointed at the house of the family that owned the dog. ‘They live there. See that porch, that’s them right there!’ The young lad, sensing that things were getting out of control, disappeared from sight. I thanked the lady and promised to pass by the dog owner’s house that evening. I then drove my slightly disheveled Hyundai to my insurance company’s office and reported the accident. The insurance agent told me that I only had ‘liability’ or ‘third party’ insurance and was therefore ineligible for any compensation. I went home and zip tied the falling bumper parts part to the car’s body. I met my roommate and told him about the accident. ‘I hope you did not get into the ambulance’, he stated. ‘If you don’t have health insurance, the ambulance companies bill you personally and the bill is usually in the thousands. Never get into an ambulance unless you are in really bad shape or you have health insurance’, he reiterated. I told him that I had contacted my vehicle insurance company. ‘You guy, why did you go there? You only have liability insurance. Your rates are going to go up’, he sulked. He was right. My rates actually did go up despite the fact that the accident was not my fault. That evening, I went back to the family of the now deceased bitch. The man of the house did not want to see me but we exchanged personal information and I was on my merry way. I had exactly what I needed. His name and address. A day or so later, I took the car to a body shop for a claims assessment and the owner, without batting an eyelid, quoted me a ludicrous sum of US $1,700! I was in disbelief! I had purchased the car for $500!
The Hyundai was due for the annual state inspection. The mechanic hooked the car up to a computer and waited for the computer to diagnose the car. ‘The ride is rough, cylinder 3 and 4 are misfiring. You need new spark plugs and wires.’ I was in awe. The computer disclosed the car’s ailments. Due to the accident, it had a few flaws that prevented it from passing inspection; one of the taillights was broken, the front light was dangling ever so slightly to the right and the parking brake (hand brake) was not working. When the garage shop gave me the quote that would enable the car pass inspection, I was crestfallen. I simply did not have the $300 needed to superficially repair the damages. The $300 was in addition to the $1,700 I needed to repair the damaged body.
The labor charges in the U.S were astronomical! The car parts were affordable and fairly manageable but the same could not be said for labor. No wonder people drove late model cars. No wonder people took out huge loans to finance new or slightly used cars, the very thing I had been warned against by my family members at my farewell party. I now understood. Paying for car repairs, especially on older cars was too expensive! It was more out of necessity rather than choice. In Kenya, the reverse was true; parts were expensive but labor charges were cheap. There were many mechanics, probably too many, seeking ways of eking out a living and the oversupply brought labor charges down. Kenyan mechanics came in various shades and colors. There were the established car dealerships like CMC (for Land Rover), Toyota Kenya, Marshalls (for Peugeot) and DT Dobie. (For Mercedes Benz) This is where well heeled individuals and private developers took their cars for repairs. There were also independent auto repair shops. The vast majority however were tree shade mechanics. These operated in informal garages or open air sheds and they were basically hit or miss. If you got a good mechanic, you were lucky. Many were con artists masquerading as mechanics, fleecing unsuspecting car owners. There is also another category of mechanics known as ‘flying doctors’. These chaps were usually seen plying their trade on Uhuru Highway, Mombasa road, Jogoo road and major Nairobi road arteries. They usually catered for those people who, at the beginning of the month, after getting paid, would unilaterally decide to revive their jalopies and bring them out to the mean streets of Nairobi to mingle with newer cars. Once money to fuel the car had run out, from the 4th of the month until the 28th, the owners would park the jalopies till the next month pay period. These jalopies, in addition to having little or no gasoline in them, also suffered numerous problems. They would always ‘die’ on Uhuru Highway on a busy Monday morning or Friday afternoon, jamming up traffic. This is when the ‘flying doctors’, cheekily named after the AMREF flying doctor rescue service, would swing into action! They would get up from the road embankment where they were hitherto waiting like vultures and would start by pushing the car to what remained of the road shoulder. They would then attempt to ‘rescue’ the car from its mechanical woes. They had spanners, screwdrivers and other tools they used to coax the jalopies back to life. Sometimes they succeeded but majority of them were snake oil salesmen type mechanics. They would charge you a fee for their services after much haggling. They mostly employed bandaid measures to get your car to a more reliable mechanic, or off the highway, where it would crawl to a halt. These mechanics were good natured chaps but thugs and carjackers discovered that they could pose as ‘flying doctor’ mechanics and rob and carjack stranded motorists on the highways. How you rob or carjack someone whose car is not running is a mystery but they would do so. They specialized in stripping the stranded motorists buck naked and would steal everything that they had. It was not unusual to see a man or woman buck naked desperately flailing their arms in the air to attract the attention of passing motorists, most of whom stepped on the gas pedal; carjackers had used this ploy before with deadly precision where they used one of their own as a decoy, usually a woman. The woman would wave her hands on the side of the road, as if in distress and the driver, usually male, would foolishly (or randily) stop. When he got out to rescue the supposed damsel in distress, he would feel the cold steel muzzle of a treinta y ocho, a .38 caliber pistol placed on his temple! ‘Ukicheza tutapasua bongo!’ ‘If you play, we shall splatter your brains!’ the gangsters would ominously warn the poor trapped chap. Strict compliance was the only option available. He would then be tied up like a cockerel on the rooftop of a country bus and roughly bundled into the trunk of the car and driven all over the city as the gangsters cleaned the abductee’s bank account by visiting various ATMs. This was usually after forcing the abductee to give them their PIN number to their bank account. Once they were done, they would unceremoniously kick you out of the car onto a nearby cemetery, buck naked of course. There is nothing like the sight of a naked person running out of a cemetery seeking for help. The superstitious would bolt away, believing that the person was involved in some ritualistic or hedonistic activity!
There was one mechanic who was excellent. My grandfather had a Toyota Hilux pickup that he used to take to a mechanic called Kilonzi. My grandfather used to call him ‘Kironji’. Kilonzi was a self-taught mechanic who was a genius in fixing cars. He had a garage that he had rented in River Road and was renowned for his prowess in fixing cars once and for all without the need for repeat visits to fix the same problem. Unlike the American mechanics who hook the car to a diagnostics computer, Kilonzi would listen to the car’s engine and like a doctor listening to a patient’s heartbeat using a stethoscope, its humming would disclose its mechanical ailment. ‘Hiyo ni kabiureta mzee’ ‘the problem is the carburetor old man’, he would advise my grandfather. Those old cars back in the day had carburetors, which continuously malfunctioned. When the car rattled, he would inform you of leaf springs that needed to be replaced. Kilonzi would get upset when people called him ‘Kilonzo’ or ‘Kalonzo’. It’s Kilonzi, he insisted. Kilonzi’s business was improving and he had decided to deny himself all of the worldly pleasures and pool all his resources to build a stone house in his native Kithyoko in Machakos county. Building a stone house in the ‘reserve’ or one’s birthplace or place where one grew up in the countryside, was and still is every Kenyan man’s (and woman’s) dream. They feel that, once they retire (or are abruptly laid off) from their city jobs, they’ll have a cushy place to live in and spend their twilight years at a slower pace of life. Every time my grandfather would take his car for repairs, Kilonzi would excitedly tell him about the progress of the stone house. ‘The foundation is almost done!’ he would smile proudly. My grandfather would congratulate him on a job well done.
One day, I accompanied my grandfather to Kilonzi’s garage for a diagnosis. The brakes were squeaking and squealing. However, the ever dependable Kilonzi was not there. Where was he, inquired my grandfather? No one knew. This was unlike Kilonzi. He was the first to show up and last to leave. My grandfather did not trust Kilonzi’s apprentice to work on his prized Toyota pickup truck and he told him that he would be back the next day. When we went back there the next day, the garage was open but there was no activity. The mechanics were huddled together with melancholic expressions on their faces. ‘Kilonzi alimalizwa na majambazi karibu kwake Mathare North.’ ‘Kilonzi was finished (murdered) by gangsters close to his place in Mathare North.’ a mechanic disclosed. My grandfather was shocked. The mechanic went on to explain that Kilonzi, whilst walking home from work at around 8 pm, was bludgeoned to death with a crude weapon by gangsters, who had waylaid him. His body was found sprawled on the ground in the early morning by school children going to school. My grandfather wanted to know more about Kilonzi and whether any relatives were involved in the funeral arrangements. Kilonzi’s body lay in City mortuary. A funeral meeting was hurriedly convened by Kilonzi’s uncle on behalf of the deceased’s family. Kilonzi’s body needed to be taken to Kithyoko quickly as the mortuary bill was mounting for each day the body lay there. It was also decided that, 4 minivans were to be hired to transport the immediate family members and body to Kithyoko. Apart from immediate family members, each person would contribute a certain amount to be assured of a seat in one of the minibuses. His co-workers had felt that 2 minibuses were too few and they wanted to give their fellow mechanic a warm sendoff, considering the cruel and sudden way he had died. They chose that following Saturday as the burial date. My grandfather could not make it due to previous commitments but my uncle and I accompanied the cortège from City mortuary to Kilonzi’s final resting place.
The events that unfolded were permanently etched in my young memory. Kilonzi had left a young widow. She had two young boys. One was about 3 years old and the other was a suckling baby, about 6 months old. Kilonzi’s widow’s world was turned upside down in an instant. She had unimaginably found herself in a morass after Kilonzi’s sudden death and it had clearly overwhelmed her. She was a hairdresser who supplemented her late husband’s income but it seemed that she would not be able to survive in Nairobi. There were no life insurance policies and burial and funeral insurance policies to cushion her from the devastating financial catastrophe that would beset her for the foreseeable future. A decision was quickly made to relocate her and her children to Kithyoko. So, the main hearse had Kilonzi’s coffin strapped to its rooftop and his widow and her children were seated on the seats right below together with other close relatives. Quick prayers were said before Kilonzi’s final journey. When people bowed their heads in prayer, a street urchin snatched a chain from a lady’s neck and quickly ran across the busy adjacent Ngong’ road, weaving through busy vehicle traffic, melting into the crowd of passers by. ‘Saitan’, I heard a woman scream. ‘Let the street kid go, all will be well’, a mourner reassured everyone. The mortuary attendants then wheeled the body and loaded it to the top of the minivan and strapped it tightly with sisal ropes. I looked into the eyes of one of the mortuary attendants and I froze. They were as red as blood! His breath reeked of distilled spirits and you could smell the breath a mile away. Years later, someone explained to me that the mortuary attendants needed to partake in strong alcoholic drinks and smoke the best herb of marijuana so as to be able to duel the spirits of the recently departed, some of whom were not too thrilled about the unannounced separation from their bodies. In addition, the bodies brought to the mortuaries needed to be ‘straightened out’ so that they would stay straight in the casket. Therefore, some of the duties of the mortuary attendants in Kenya consisted of whacking into place the shoulders, heads and legs of the deceased after the onset of rigor mortis! ‘Kaa square!”Stay properly and in place!’, it was rumored that they spoke to the bodies as if it was normal! Once the minivans were loaded to capacity, Kilonzi’s final journey began.

The minibus my uncle and I hopped into was the ‘mechanics’ minibus. It was filled with Kilonzi’s co-workers, who almost looked unrecognizable in their Sunday best, ill-fitting and mismatched varieties of shirts, suits and ties. The minibus drivers probably forgot that they were ferrying mourners whose hearts were heavy with sorrow. Part of the problem is that they needed to quickly drop the mourners in Kithyoko and do their usual scheduled routes before bringing back the remaining mourners to Nairobi the next day. They were also running behind schedule and Kithyoko was far. The drivers were driving those minibuses like they were formula one race drivers. They would compete amongst one another and overtake each other with wide grins on their faces, despite oncoming traffic! I know understood why there were so many road casualties on Kenyan roads. In the beginning, mourners were heartily singing gospel songs. ‘Cha kutumaini sina, kwake Yesu nasimama, ndiye mwamba ni salama, ndiye mwamba ni salama.’ ‘I have no hope, through Jesus I shall stand, for he is the solid rock, for he is the solid rock.’ However, the drivers drove faster and in a few minutes, only one or two hardcore singers were left singing. The rest of the passengers were getting antsy, wondering perhaps if the driver was driving a tad too fast. Soon thereafter, there was no one singing. The drivers momentarily drove slowly but we realized that it was because a police checkpoint in Thika was slowing them down a bit. Once they were past the checkpoint, they resumed their fast and furious quest to reach Kithyoko in record time. Only the pickup trucks that transport ‘miraa’, khat, were being driven faster. They drive at insane speeds to transport the perishable khat to international markets. After being flung like a sack of potatoes for a while, one of the passengers in our minivan decided to say something. ‘Tafadhali dereva, mwendo wako ni wa kasi sana. Punguza.’ ‘Driver, please, you are driving too fast, reduce your speed.’ The driver snickered and retorted, ‘Wewe, unataka huyu mtu wenu azikwe leo au kesho?’ ‘You, do you want this person of yours to be buried today or tomorrow?’ The cruelty of this response, bearing in mind the gravity of the situation, took everyone by surprise. As if to reinforce his statement, he stepped his speed up a notch! We were flying past the Del Monte pineapple farms and the fact that the 4 minibuses had their flashers on and a coffin was strapped on top made most drivers pave way for the cortège. We were hurtling like comets towards Kithyoko on the Thika Garissa road with our hearts in our mouths, praying that our journey would come to an end safely. The minibus we were in made a loud banging noise that sounded like gunfire. People instinctively ducked and moved their bodies downwards as if seeking cover. This particular highway was notorious for highway robbers, carjackers and gangsters who plied the highways with impunity. ‘Msijali, ni mbakifayaling.’ ‘Don’t worry, it’s the car backfiring.’ ‘Sasa ata mkijificha chini, mtajisaidiaje? Siku yako ikifika imefika. Si ata huyu mtu wenu siku yake ilifika?’ ‘Now, even if you hide for cover, how shall you have helped yourself? If your day has come it has come. As for your person, didn’t his day come?’ This driver was being overly insensitive and cared less about the feelings of the panic stricken mourners. ‘Huyo dereva, ni bhangi ndiyo ilikuwa inamsumbua!’ ‘That driver was probably under the influence of marijuana!’ a fellow mourner surmised once our journey was done. After a five minute bathroom break, we were back on our way to Kithyoko.

We arrived in Kithyoko at about 4.00 pm. You could see that people were relieved to be done with the perilous journey. After Kilonzi’s coffin was hurriedly pulled down from the rooftop, the 4 minibuses quickly left. The mood was somber and you could not help but feel that everyone’s eyes were on the newly widowed lady. Only the persistent loud barking of the family dog, who probably sensed that all was not well, broke the silence. Her eyes were sunken and she looked like she had aged overnight. She could hardly compose herself and her 6 month old baby cried loudly, probably due to the fact that his mother was crying. The older 3 year old stood next to the coffin, oblivious of what was happening. An older aunt held her and the pastor performed a graveside funeral service. He urged them to treat Kilonzi’s widow and children with love, just as Jesus had done. In the meantime, my eyes were roving and they locked onto Kilonzi’s unfinished stone house. It lay there, unmoving, like a relic, like the ruins of the pyramids or the Coliseum, a stark reminder of what happens when life is interrupted and snatched away by the cruel hand of death. The foundation was finished and the first two levels of stones had been cemented onto the foundation. But it was just a shell and I could tell that this shell would take a while before anyone resumed building. Where would Kilonzi’s widow and her young children stay? The homestead was sparsely populated and there were two houses. She would probably be housed in one.
Kilonzi’s body was lowered at about 5.30 pm. ‘Dust to dust, ashes to ashes’ the pastor conducting the epilogue reminded everyone. Kilonzi’s widow stared into the 6 foot grave that housed her now soulless husband as if it was an abyss and she waved her final goodbye to her soulmate. ‘God be with you till we meet again,’ people sang. Mounds of dust were poured onto the grave and once they were done, Kilonzi’s widow and small children were asked to pose next to his grave. 5 days prior, Kilonzi had been playing with his 3 year old son, one of the eulogizers had explained. A Kamba traditional dirge was performed for a few minutes to bless the soul of the deceased and this performance, sad as it was, brought life into the people who had attended the ceremony.

At about 6.30 pm, a slight drizzle scattered everyone and stopped the din of voices discussing Kilonzi and his fate. It seemed that the gods were assuring everyone that everything would be alright…

Trials And Tribulations Of A New Immigrant! (Part II)

I finally got around to speaking ‘regularly’ so that Americans ‘could understand me’. I started speaking like a poor man’s Jeff Koinange. (Kenyan newscaster, former Africa CNN correspondent) Oh my! I was almost sounding like the Kenyan singer/rapper Wyre who sings in Jamaican patois! Maybe I was paying for my past sins of making fun of the accent of my high school geography teacher. The gentleman was one of my favorite teachers and he made the dreary subject of ‘jongorofey’ exciting! This teacher from a town called Mugoiri in Murang’a county had more problems than pronouncing parallelogram! We were used to him mixing his ‘r’s and ‘l’s. However, one day, he was teaching us about an oxbow lake. An oxbow lake is horse-shoe shaped. This chap just could not pronounce it right. ‘Horse sue sape’, he tried the first time. ‘Ho chu chaped’, he retried. When he did it the second time, a cheeky lad, the unofficial class clown, slyly remarked ‘onyuro 2’, which is sheng (Swahili English Kenyan slang) for ‘second try’ or ‘second chance’. ‘Hoch shoe shaped’ he did it again, getting closer but not quite there. ‘Onyuro 3!’, the cheeky lad muttered under his breath. ‘Horse sue chaped’. He gave up on the tongue twister after uncontrollable laughter from his mean students, myself included. Karma was in full effect. Years later, I was paying for laughing at everyone not able to pronounce words in the ‘correct’ accent.
Living in the United States was hard! There was school to go to and some of these books that needed to be bought cost an arm and a leg! The money spent on books could buy a small island in the Caribbean. At least it seemed that way for a greenhorn from Nairobi. I had to buy used books just to survive and even those were not cheap! I realized that I needed a job. Fast! Anything. I searched far and wide and couldn’t get a job. I now knew what people went through when they took that country bus and set off to Nairobi, the green city in the sun! When some prospects came about, the potential job schedules clashed with my rigorous school schedule! Chineke! My Goodness! How would I survive the perilous and tempestuous seas in this good Ol USA? After a few weeks of searching for any job I could get, I finally and thankfully got a job. A minimum wage job. It was one of those jobs that people from Kenya and Kenyans domiciled in Saudi Arabia laugh at and refer to when they want to put someone who lives and works in the USA down! A lowly paying job at the very bottom of the economic and social ladder, a slippery ladder I hoped to climb up soon and fast! Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate used to be a bricklayer in the grimy and poverty stricken streets of London. As Americans say, ‘there is no shame in your game’ and as Jay Z, husband to the callipygous Beyoncé in one of his songs raps, ‘you can’t knock the hustle’. I had to start from the bottom. When I got paid, I almost had a heart attack! When in Kenya, we would hear of the Benjamin Franklin truism that was carved in stone. It went something like this. ‘Nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes’. It painfully dawned on me that the renowned American founding father was right when he had written those words more than 200 years ago! The words rang true in the 21st century! I completely understood what the portly chap meant! The federal government, social security, city, borough, I mean everyone who had the legal means to do so dipped their hands into the pot of American honey that was running dangerously low, leaving me high and dry! The taxes whittled down the already meager amount I was receiving! As a ghetto yute in Nairobi, I was well versed in the dexterous art of budgeting funds and stretching them till the next time I received funds, but this was actually the first time I was actually forced to really budget on a salary or wage. Rent was due, food had to be on the table, school books had to be bought. This country brought forth an avalanche of bills that seemed to be rolling downhill towards me that I didn’t envisage, threatening to bury me alive! What was happening? This was not the pursuit of freedom, liberty and happiness! It was the engulfing of myself by captivity, tyranny and sufferance! This was hell on earth! I consoled myself and figured out that the suffering would stop. I had to be patient. This was only the beginning. It would get better. Could the dreams of retiring by 25, maybe 30, be valid? I wanted to retire just like the Silicon Valley youngsters who had upstart dot com companies and sold them for millions and billions of dollars before the ripe old age of 28! What was I doing wrong? I thought I had escaped penury when I got onto the Boeing 747! My dreams were not being validated and this left me in a financial tailspin!
As I miserably trudged on, the balmy days of late summer turned into colder dreary days of autumn. The leaves of the green deciduous trees that we had learned so much about in our geography lessons started turning a reddish brown and would finally fall to the ground, hence the name fall season. Just like in the foreign story books we read when we were in nursery school. (kindergarten) At first, the colder weather wasn’t too bad. It was a welcome respite from the humidity of the summer. Actually, the end of summer and the beginning of fall was the exact replica of the weather in Nairobi. However, it was like someone was adjusting a thermostat every day. The temperatures fell a degree a day and soon, the thin jacket that I had brought with me from Nairobi ‘for the cold’ couldn’t prevent the cold Northeasterly winds from cutting into my skin like a knife! Brrrr! It was cold! How I longed for the warm sunny days of Nairobi. On most days, the sun would mercilessly tease me, rising and showing off its rays but withholding its warmth. This was the strangest phenomenon I had ever experienced! How could the sun shine so bright despite the weather being so cold? As a ghetto yute, we would wear woolen caps and ‘winter’ jackets on a balmy Nairobi night just like we saw the Americans do in the sitcoms and rap videos. I had no idea that those chaps on TV were protecting themselves from the arctic weather! The weather in the U.S was truly bipolar. Just a few weeks before, lads had been wearing what I later on came to know as ‘wife beaters’, essentially white vests. Lasses were wearing ‘booty shorts’ and tube tops! The oppressive heat and its accompanying humidity was too much to bear. The heat was now but a distant memory. I confessed my concerns to an American neighbor of mine and he laughed hysterically! He repeated the phrase that would soon become a recurring theme… ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet!’ I was shaking like a leaf and it wasn’t even winter yet! The hours of daylight also grew shorter. In Kenya, all you had to do was look at the sun and estimate the time of day. It was getting too dark too early in the day! It would also rain and the icy rain would pelt my African skin and lower my body temperature. I was using public transportation and walking to and from school and work and I was beginning to get fatigued, just like my roommate! I now understood why he collapsed in a heap at night. Sometimes, I wished that a day had 28 hours. I would listen to the TV or radio and guffaw when doctors advised me to get 8 hours of sleep! I was lucky if I got 4. I realized why Americans drank coffee like thirsty camels at watering holes at the oases! They craved a much needed jolt of caffeine! I remember only drinking coffee in Kenya so as to study for exams in high school. I started drinking coffee passionately, maybe excessively, just like the Americans! I needed a fix. Otherwise, I would have been more haggard looking than those zombies in the movie ‘Zombie Massacre’. The weather and hectic schedule was throwing a spanner in the works! I was running around like a headless chicken! My roommate told me that I needed a car. ‘You can’t survive without a car here’, he quipped.
I remember back in the day in Kenya, we attended a harambee (funds drive) of a young lass who was leaving for the U.S. I remember the guest speaker, the master of ceremonies alluding to the fact that some of the money would be used to buy a car for her. Suddenly, there were discontented murmurs from the attendees, some of whom were astounded by that revelation and seemed to wish that they had not contributed to the kitty. A car? Why couldn’t she take a bus, a train? Were there no ‘matatus’, minibuses in the U.S with boorish touts shouting ‘beba beba’ ‘carry one more, carry one more’ at the top of their lungs as they herded you into an already overloaded minibus? Were people not commanded to ‘kaa square’, sit in an overpacked ‘matatu’ and leave no space unoccupied? No ‘City Hoppa’ buses? It was as if the guest speaker was reading their minds and eavesdropping on their murmurs. ‘You need a car in the U.S. There are no ‘matatus’ in the U.S. The place is huge. You could be living in a place like Nairobi and working in Thika and going to school in Athi River. Commuting daily is no joke. America is not Kenya!’ A few attendees were convinced but I believe the disgruntled vast majority wished that they had reduced the amount they had chipped in by a few thousands or hundreds or so or avoided contributing any Kenya shillings altogether. They themselves did not own cars. Why would they assist someone to buy a car, they must have wondered?
I needed a car. I had scrapped together a few dollars and I started searching for cars. The car prices that corresponded to the money I had saved were at best lemons, junk cars, those that are sold with a large unassuming bold sign ‘Sold As Is’! Those cars which a buyer was not too sure would make it off the sales lot. Luckily, a Kenyan co-worker friend was only too happy to offload his car to me for a measly US$500. That was a King’s ransom for me but I had seen just how expensive late model cars were, so I had no complaints. I was to pay him in installments of $100 every paycheck. I had purchased my first vehicle ever! This Hyundai Accent had a dent at the back the size of the Menengai crater! However, you should have seen me beam in delight as I drove to and from school and work. I looked like The Cat In The Hat in his thingamajigger! ‘Here we go go, on an adventure. The thingamajigger is up and away’! This Hyundai Accent was like the clichéd ‘ugly’ girl with a lovely personality! It was loyal. I just needed to crank it and it roared to life. The air conditioner did not work, the passenger window could either go up or down but not both, the fabric seats and carpet were stained by previous owners who had chain smoked in the car and left numerous ugly cigarette burns. None of these mattered. What mattered was that the radio worked. That’s all I was interested in. I listened mostly to hip hop stations so that I would get versed in the latest American slang. However, these American radio djs spoke too often, played songs too short and it seems all radio stations played the same songs! I missed Capital FM, KBC radio, Citizen, Nation and all those urban Nairobi radio stations that I had hitherto looked down upon! I even missed a vernacular station called Kameme FM! As bad as things were, they were improving ever so slightly, it seemed.
 

When I called my relatives in Kenya to update them on my inculcation into American life, I informed them that I had bought a jalopy for purposes of driving to school and work. I reiterated to them that I needed it, especially now that old man winter was approaching and snow would cover the ground. ‘That was fast! You are doing very well. That’s the spirit. Don’t be discouraged by the cold weather’, some of my relatives assuaged me. I then told them that life in America was no walk in the park. It was like a trapeze artist walking a tightrope! Car insurance was a tad too extortionate; school was expensive; rent was high; I missed nyama choma, roast meat; it was too cold and got dark too soon! However, they kept reminding me that at least, I had a car.

 

Remember my male relative who had grudgingly lent me his jalopy on several occasions when I was a struggling youth in Nairobi? The same relative who had left the guests (who had attended my farewell cum prayer party before I ‘flew out’) in stitches when he talked about not marrying a lady who adorned acrylic nails? He had got wind of the fact that ‘I had now settled’ and he called me unexpectedly early on a Saturday morning. I wondered how he had procured my phone number, since I had just procured the cell phone just two weeks prior. When I picked up the phone, he greeted me happily and remarked that I had become too quiet and I was ‘lost’, ‘missing in action’! Nowadays, I have become wiser and when I hear someone starting a phone or actual conversation with the words ‘umepotea’, you have been missing in action, or ‘umenyamaza sana’, you have been too quiet, I know that the person is about to drop a bombshell, usually the ‘I need some money’ kind. After exchanging pleasantries and feeling guilty about not communicating as frequently with him, he changed his mood. Suddenly, the cheerful mood disappeared and from his tone, I could tell that everything was not okay. He let me know that he was going through a tough issue and he had decided to ‘disturb’ me a bit despite the bitter winter I was going through. Once he laid down his financial issue, he extrapolated the financial misfortune he was going through with the financial misfortunes being experienced by the rest of our countrymen in Kenya. ‘This place is raining cats and dogs man, people have been swept by the floods, very sad indeed’, he lamented! ‘Everyone is suffering, you are very lucky there!’ I was feeling a bit guilty now. True, I had just finished burrowing through the snow to dig my jalopy out but I was done and I was now ensconced in the warm living room sipping on some hot chocolate. Hopefully, in the summer, when the temperatures warmed up, I would sip some mango juice. I was safe, but many Kenyans were not. My relative went for the kill and mentioned an amount he wanted me to ‘lend’ him, which amount he would repay ‘very quickly’ once he had sorted his issues out. I began to object and let him know that he was simply asking for too much money; however, it was almost as if I had never spoken. He switched into a diplomatic mode of speech and as if negotiating for the exchange of political prisoners, he urged me to reconsider. After terse negotiations, I finally bowed to pressure and agreed to ‘loan’ him the amount he had requested. I reminded him that I desperately needed the money to pay off my fall semester and to pay a bit of my upcoming spring semester fees as I was in arrears. ‘Don’t worry! At least they don’t kick you out of school like they do here in Kenya!’ He ignored me when I answered him that, yes, you could actually get kicked out for non-payment of fees.
Having dealt with me in the past, he knew that my word was bond and I usually kept my promises. Therefore, my word was a promissory note to him and was as good as cash. His somber voice suddenly changed and was replaced by a gleeful one. He jovially reminded me of the biblical beatitude ‘it is more blessed to give than receive’ and told me that, from where that money came from, more would be found and it would be multiplied tenfold! ‘You are truly a blessing’, he reassured me. Abruptly, he asked me to hold on for a minute and he would get right back at me. I heard some static on the other side of the line and I assumed that he had put me on mute. Maybe it was because it was a long distance call. He probably thought the same thing. However, he didn’t and I could hear him speak to someone close to him. ‘Wekelea ka-nyama na ka-ugali na usisahau kachumbari, unasikia Kariuki?’ (Hey, put some roast meat on the grill and in addition, cook some ugali, cornmeal/maize meal to accompany it and don’t forget the pico de gallo/salsa fresca, you heard me Kariuki?) Immediately he mentioned the name ‘Kariuki’, I knew where the bugger was. He was at Wambugu Grove Hotel (popularly known as Wambugu’s) in Parklands! Kariuki is a popular barbecuer cum waiter at the establishment. The man had just given instructions for choice goat ribs, which he would be tearing into in a couple of minutes, to be barbecued/roasted essentially at my expense, while I was busy toiling here in subzero temperatures! After succinctly instructing Kariuki, he got back to the phone, un-muted the line, or so he thought. ‘Sorry for the hold’, he apologized. He thanked me for the umpteenth time and reminded me for the umpteenth time how lucky I was. ‘You know what, the drought here has become too much, people are dying of hunger!’ I suppressed my laughter: Drought? Had he not talked of floods just a few minutes before? He probably thought that I did not keep up with Kenyan affairs and I would swallow his balderdash hook, line and sinker! Was it the bipolar Kenya weather, the ‘kanywaji’, the Pilsner Lager that was talking or did he just lose the plot to the story he had prepared to get money from me? Was I financing a weekend jaunt or was it a genuine plea for help? I remembered how he had helped me with his jalopy a while back and bit my lip and decided to let him enjoy the ‘remittances by the diaspora’! ‘You’ll pay for this one day you young one’, ‘malipo ni hapa hapa’ he would ominously bellow while reluctantly giving me the keys to his jalopy and sounding off with endless instructions of where to drive it, how to drive it and so on. Boy, was I paying for it! ‘Twi hamwe!’, (we are together) he sounded off, after gleaning me of my hard earned dollars. We are together indeed! I could hear raucous laughter in the background as he hung up the phone! I realized that we had not worked out the modalities of how he was going to pay me back…
The bugger never paid back a single cent and this plus other numerous financial ordeals necessitated a trip a month or so later to the schools accounts office. Paying for school was a Herculean task. I now understood why numerous lads and lasses dropped out of school. In fact, working and going to school and successfully completing school was a miracle in itself. I also gained some insight as to why most American college graduates were deep in school debt. School was simply too expensive. Without school loans, few, if any would make it. I had to stay put and endure the hardships I was facing then. I had to engage in what is known in Kiswahili as ‘kujikaza kisabuni’ and succeed despite all odds. I remembered the song that was played in the KBC radio and TV every day. ‘Someni vijana, muongeze pia bidii, mwisho wa kusoma, mtapata kazi nzuri sana.’ (Study hard children/young men and women, put even more effort in your studies, once you are done with your studies, you shall get a very good job.) Once I went through the harrowing experience of school, getting a decent well paying job would follow, I convinced myself. ‘Kalamu na karatasi, ndiyo silaha ya siku hizi,’ (Pen and paper are today’s weapons.) the song went on. Another popular song that dominated the Kenyan airwaves back in the day motivated me. The song by The Maroon Commandos went like this: ‘Hata wewe mwanangu, amka kumekucha, kwani hizi ndizo saa, za kwenda shule.’ (Even you my child, wake up as it is daybreak, and it is time to go to school.’) These songs provided the motivation for one to go to school in order to prosper and here I was. In school, ready to prosper.
There, at the school’s accounts office, I met a lad, a close friend of mine who I shall call ‘Kwame’. Kwame is from the regaled land of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana, formerly called Gold Coast. Kwame was wishing that he had several gold ingots with him to solve the problem he was then facing! Kwame was being quizzed as to why his tuition account was in arrears. He quickly answered that his sponsor had fallen into some difficulty but would soon send over money to cover the arrears. He asked for more time and he was granted more time. He gave me a tacit look as he walked out and it was my turn to be grilled about my arrears. Just like Kwame, I told the school official that my sponsor was in a temporary financial bind which he would soon overcome and all monies, arrears plus current charges, would be sorted out. I got granted more time. Kwame was waiting for me in the corridors. ‘What happened oh!’ I told him about my pleas for leniency which mirrored his. ‘Let’s go!’ He forcefully led me to a mom and pops food cart. We ordered lunch sandwiches and we went into one of the buildings. We ate the food with a lot of seriousness, as if we were distinguished gentlemen breaking the kola nut. After we were done, Kwame gave me an insight into his financial troubles. In between fits of laughter, Kwame told me that, his ‘sponsor’ was a man bedeviled by penury! ‘I have more money than that man. In fact, I am the one who is currently sending him money!’ I had to laugh! ‘When the guys at the accounts office were asking me to remind my sponsor to send money, I was trying hard not to laugh. Do I send him money so that he can send it back or what? The Kente cloth wrapped around his body, it is through my remittances that he is buying it!’ Despite the dire situation, I could not help but burst into peals of laughter! We were in the struggle together and his problems mirrored mine! I completely understood what he was saying and going through! I wondered if they had a ‘River Road’ down in Ghana’s capital city, Accra where documents to present to the American embassy were prepared. They probably did, I concluded.
I was driving from school one day when, out of nowhere, a small dog darted out of nowhere and ran right in front of me. I swerved to try avoiding the dog but it was too late. I saw my car hurtling into a small bush. Bang…
 

 

 

Trials And Tribulations Of A New Immigrant! (Part I)

*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.

After a lengthy transatlantic flight, I had finally arrived in the USA! When I landed, I was picked up by my then roommate, who used to ‘push’ a Subaru hatchback and this was way before hashtags.
Everything was different about this place! The darn Yanks drove on the right! I always felt as if the driver was going the wrong way each time I was in a vehicle. Also, crossing the roads as a pedestrian was a treacherous affair. You would look on the opposite side and see no cars coming towards you. Thinking that it was safe to cross, you would start crossing only to be rudely reminded by the rushing cars that the people here in the U.S drove on the right! I remember a near miss or two as I quickly darted back to the pavement, much to the chagrin of disgusted drivers. The food was also different. My roommate took me to a MacDonald’s fast food restaurant and ordered a ‘meal’ of chicken thighs and fries with a Coca cola soda. When I ravenously bit into the chicken, it was as tasteless as chewing gum after a long school trip! I now knew why my US based relatives had been so adamant that I bring them chips (French fries) from Luthuli avenue and Farmers Choice sausages from Nairobi! How I missed the chips from Luthuli! I used to take them for granted but here I was eating cardboard tasting food! Yuck! Even the Coke tasted different. I realized that this is what people had warned me about, the ‘culture shock’. The next day, I decided to make dinner for my roommate as he never seemed to be home! He would disappear in the morning and get back late at night. Despite the fact that he had a vehicle, he would be more exhausted than a casual laborer in Nairobi after walking many miles to and from work and working all day! He would religiously set the alarm for the next morning before collapsing in a heap at night. Without the alarm, he would have snoozed until mid-afternoon the next day! I had always envisioned a luxurious, cheerful and relaxed pace of life, similar to the sitcom ‘Friends’. Not this. Not what I was observing of my roommate. He always seemed to be on the move!
I felt sorry for him and decided to make chicken and ugali. (maize/cornmeal) I used the ‘Goya’ brand of corn meal flour and the ugali turned out great. It was actually softer and more mellow than ugali made using the Kenyan brand of ‘Jogoo’ maize flour. The chicken was another story; I tried to fry it as I done it numerous times previously after having seen my grandmother and mother occasionally fry delicious ‘kienyeji’ (free range) chicken back in Kenya, ‘kuku fry’. I took a few humongous pieces of chicken and attempted to shallow fry them in a pan! Lawdavmercy! The chicken seemed to have its own fat that turned the final product into a slimy inedible mush! Let’s just say that I have never fried chicken since! As Americans are wont to say, ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet!’ It was only the beginning!
I had brought curios, bangles, key holders, necklaces, earrings and t-shirts to sell to the well-to-do Americans. Like those we saw buying stacks of curios at Maasai market in Nairobi. If it were not for the strict weight limits the airlines imposed on me, I would have brought a whole stall of curios! I was licking my chops anticipating a healthy return on investment. No one had warned me that, even here in the U.S, many people also lived hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck and were as poor as a church mouse! There were a ton of ‘ma-sufferer’ in the world’s wealthiest nation! Trying to sell a Maasai carving for $30 or $40 to a ‘dawg’ as they called lads here was impossible! Where were the Americans who were buying the curios in Maasai market, I kept asking myself again and again? I tried to sell some lovely earrings to a ‘shorty’ as they referred to lasses here for $20 and she said that she could only give me $5! $5 for Maasai earrings! She had to be kidding! But, slowly, the realization that the curios would not sell like hot cakes dawned on me. I then tried to sell the t-shirts. I had inadvertently made a serious miscalculation. You see, Americans are generally a larger group of people. They are people of size. Some blame the sedentary lifestyle, genetics, the motor vehicle, the television set with a trillion channels that is on 24 hours a day, the relatively inexpensive genetically modified foods and the bipolar weather where it is either too cold or too hot to exercise. In Kenya, almost everyone is as thin as a rake and clothes are sized appropriately. The ‘large’ and ‘extra large’ t-shirts I had brought with me couldn’t make it past the girths of these Americans! They could only fit school children and the rare thin American. Man, even the schoolchildren were big! Many pre-teen and teenage lads and lasses were big and tall, just like grown men and women respectively! I was undergoing a crash course in Business 101! The Kenyans I found were probably willing to buy my t-shirts but they also seemed to be suffering from the same girth issues as the Americans! They had added a stone or three after eating the genetically modified foods in America! Note that I did not say pounds or kilos. Stones! Lads who had left Kenya as thin as marathon runners were now as blocky as American Football players! There is only one lad who has never added weight in this the land of giants; the chap is called Pweezy and lives in the Washington DC area. American doctors should go through Pweezy’s anatomy with a fine-tooth comb so as to finally discover the ‘cure’ of obesity or unravel his genetic code so as to eliminate obesity! This Pweezy chap has been seen at Kamau’s in Baltimore gobbling a kilo or two of ‘nyama choma’ roast meat and never adds any weight! There is actually a soccer team composed of Kenyans living in and about the Washington DC area which is aptly named ‘Vitambi FC!’ ‘Vitambi’ is Swahili for ‘potbellies’. Little did I know that I would add a stone or three myself in a few months! My t-shirts were not selling like hot cakes and I was afraid that they would gather dust. So, just like the hawkers in the Nairobi city center who sold their perishable wares at throwaway prices in the evening, ‘bei ya jioni’, I was painfully forced to drop my prices and practically gave my stuff away to merciless witless buyers, some of whom have never paid me to date! ‘Brary shokomsoba’, I quietly cursed, watching ungrateful customers walk out with Tusker T-shirts for $10 and earrings for $5. Lesson learned.

One day, I decided to satisfy my curiosity and took the subway to tour the city of Philadelphia. I didn’t want to look all foreign and startled, or as they colloquially say in Kenya, ‘kung’ethia ovyo ovyo’, ‘easily startled or confused’. So, I innocuously wore a weatherbeaten but prized New York Yankees cap that I had snagged on an early Saturday morning in Gikomba market in Nairobi and hoped that I looked the part, like an ordinary American. When I bought the baseball cap, I bought it because it had the ‘NY’ logo at the front. These are the types of caps that the ‘mababi’, rich kids, sons and daughters of private developers from ‘Babylon’ wore, so I was one of the lucky few to portray a Babylon look in the regular ‘mtaa’, the neighborhood. I did not attach any particular importance to the meaning of the logo. I was glad that there was a resurgence of the ‘faded’ or ‘washed’ look here in the U.S where new clothing was made to look like old clothing and sold for more money than new starchy clothes. I looked like I was in style with my cap. Upon entering one subway train, I heard a young ‘cat’, another name they used to refer to lads here in the U.S, say to me, ‘Hey yo! Don’t be wearing that Yankees crap yo, waddup doe, wazwrongwitchu nephew?’ After having watched a ton of American sitcoms in Kenya that prepped me for the American street lingo, I gathered that he was upset that I was wearing a Yankees cap and there was something wrong with me. However, I didn’t understand why he had referred to me as ‘nephew’. Not only were we not remotely related, the lad was either as old as I was or slightly younger, so ‘nephew’ sounded misplaced. If this lad was in Nairobi, I would have asked him to definitively tell me what he meant by that, preferably whilst clenching my fists in anticipation of administering a beating. However, my relatives had warned me to turn the other cheek in America. Americans never settled disputes like real men with fists, face to face, man to man, omundu khu mundu! They cowardly pulled out guns just like cowboys did in the old Western movies and the quicker draw won the day, usually with devastatingly fatal results! I was not about to find out if this young lad was ‘packing heat’ as they referred to gun slingers here. I then realized that the particular subway train I was in was heading towards South Philadelphia where the Phillies baseball stadium is located and a baseball game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the hated New York Yankees was about to start. I was surrounded by Phillies fans in a sea of red while I was the lone one in blue! It was similar to a lone Gor Mahia soccer fan in Kenya wearing Gor Mahia apparel in the midst of AFC Leopards fans! I had inadvertently entered an ‘enemy’ train and the young lad, despite his braggadocio, was probably doing me a favor by warning me of impending doom if I continued wearing the ‘enemy’ hat in ‘enemy’ territory. I quickly ditched the Yankees hat and I have never worn any Yankees apparel since. Ironically, I donated it to the Salvation Army thrift store, where it started its improbable second journey to Gikomba market! I affirmed my loyalty to the Phillies and quickly figured out when to wear what where!
My then roommate, too busy, tired or disinterested to explore the nightlife, introduced me to a few Kenyans and Americans who decided to introduce me to the U.S nightlife! I couldn’t wait. I had been marooned in an apartment all week and needed to unwind, just like I used to in Nairobi during the weekend and many times during the week. Nairobi was and still is a party city. People in Nairobi go hard, harder than they do in Ibiza, Rio De Janeiro, Cancun or Miami! You should go to a nondescript club on Monday night and see how packed it is, revelers going at it till dawn! I nostalgically remember staggering out of a club or two with other yute searching for food to eat on Sunday morning and a family dressed in their Sunday best trooping to church. When our paths crossed, the adults would look at us as if we were possessed by demons and would actually rebuke the demons of alcohol for shackling the youth! ‘Ashindwe kabisa!’, ‘may the devil be completely defeated!’ we would hear them say while shielding their children from the inebriated spectacle that was us! My friends alerted me that the clubs in the U.S closed down at 3.00 am! What? 3.00 am is when we would be leaving Klubhouse 1 in Parklands to head to Choices in Baricho road or Florida 2000 in the city center in Nairobi. ‘You’ll get used to it. In fact, chances are that, when you get a job, you shall be glad that the clubs close at 3.00 am as you shall be working at 7.00 am, 8.00 am or 9.00 am the next day’, the lads reassured me. In Kenya, very few people worked on Saturday and Sunday. Those two days were days of sojourning off to Kitengela for goat meat or Roasters Inn off Thika Road in the company of the Bajuni belle. Not working. Did people in the U.S work seven days a week? When did they take days off? I was about to find out. So, off we went to the club. For those of you who have been to Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, there was a dingy club/discotheque that was aptly named ‘Third World’. This club reminded you of a club in the residential areas of Nairobi. There were no pretensions about this place. It was not upscale and the Kenyans and Africans loved it that way. It had lovely African paintings adorning its walls, just like those you would see at the Maasai market in Nairobi. Rumor has it that this place racked up fines from the licensing and inspection officials from the city due to violating numerous rules such as occupancy limits and many others. I don’t remember ever seeing a visible fire exit sign. On Saturdays, they would charge, as the entrance fee, the princely sum of US$5 and the ladies would go in for free. $5 was a bargain especially considering that clubs in the city center had a cover charge of $20 or more and their alcoholic beverages were steeply priced. The doors were manned by the thinnest ‘bouncer’ I had ever seen. Apart from wearing black, this bouncer looked like he couldn’t hurt a fly. Anyway, once inside, African or Caribbean music blared through the huge speakers. When Lingala was played, you were transported to Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Africans felt right at home. When reggae and dancehall was played, the revelers from the Caribbean were teleported to the Islands. Sweaty bodies, packed like sardines, ground against each other as they rhythmically swayed from side to side to the exhilarating music that was thumping loudly. No wonder this club got violation notices for occupancy limits. This place was packed to the gills! The overworked air conditioning system could hardly keep up!
Apart from the Africans and folks from the Caribbean and maybe a token white guy or two, very few African American men frequented the place. It did not play their kind of music, so we thought. However, there were quite a number of African American ladies who frequented the joint. They were probably patronizing the place as they were tired of their African American men, or interested in African and Caribbean men. These ladies were women of size. They were huuuuuuuuuge! Have you ever listened to a chap called ‘Murimi Wa Ka-half’ when he sings a catchy song in the Kikuyu language that goes ‘Ino ni momo,

Ino ni momo I…’, which loosely translates to ‘this is a plus-sized girl’? That was them right there, ‘momo!’ 18 wheelers! They were the kind that would be contestants in the show ‘The Biggest Loser’, or the Kenyan equivalent ‘Slimpossible’ These ladies would probably be referred to as ‘bonge la mke’, (woman of size) as beach boys in the Kenyan coast cheekily refer to the hefty ladies who would fly into Kenya to try their luck and snag a young, dark and handsome man. They would usually hang out together close to the bar and seek out skinny and slender African brothers. In the beginning, there would be no takers. People steered clear of the ladies. However, they say that beauty is in the eyes of the beerholder! As the hours wore on and the depressant also known as alcohol kicked in, I guess the ladies started looking svelte and willowy. It usually took a brave thin brother to start approaching the red bone sisters. I would never fault a brother who took advantage of such an opportunity. There is a saying that espouses that a lion can eat grass when there is drought, it can stuff a tuft of grass into its carnivorous mouth.
Once one adventuresome brother took the plunge, the rest followed and in a few minutes, all ladies were preoccupied with men who were now at their beck and call. As the night wore on, a rare fight occurred. When Africans go to the clubs in the diaspora, they try to avoid fights. On that night, an African American man came to the club and started arguing with one of the Africans. The African American threw the first punch and a fight ensued. It might seem like an exaggeration but, less than a minute after the fight broke out, everybody had fled! The patrons fled first, followed closely by the bouncer and a chef-lady who was selling West African delicacies. Coincidentally, the famous song by Bob Marley ‘Iron Lion Zion’ was playing and everybody was literally running like a fugitive! Even the Dj took off as if in hot pursuit, leaving his expensive equipment behind! The only people left there were the seven or so ladies of size! When the police came a short while later, they were greeted by the ladies at the door. After the melee ended and the police had left, people trooped back, slowly at first but in a few minutes, the place was packed just as it was a few minutes earlier, as if nothing had happened! The DJ was back in his booth, spinning on the ones and twos! The African and Caribbean patrons when talking amongst themselves, got a kick out of the melee as they wondered why the ladies had not fled. Was it the weight issue or did everything happen too fast for them? My Kenyan lads informed me that an encounter with the police is the last thing you would want to happen to you as an immigrant. This is because, any encounter is recorded in the impenetrable computer records and whenever anyone wanted any type of information from you or of you, one would only have to search for it to get it. A criminal record here clamped the shackles of doom on you, preventing one from accessing most, if not all amenities available to the citizenry; jobs, benefits, loans, voting rights and so on. I immediately understood why all the immigrants had fled!
Since I was new to the country, I decided to get a wardrobe change. After wearing ‘mitumba’, second hand clothes, for most, if not all of my life, I decided that I needed to start buying clothes with the new clothes smell for a change. I decided to ignore the sage advice that I had been given in Kenya to ‘wear cheap second hand clothes which are found at the Salvation Army thrift stores and not spend all your money on new clothes!’ One or two new outfits wouldn’t hurt now, would they? I was buying them on sale, was I not? I heard of a sale advertised both on radio and TV which promised amazing price reductions if you could get a 20% coupon printed from the Internet or cut out from the daily newspaper advertisements. I promptly picked out a few clothes from the clearance section at the back, a habit I have been unable to shake up to this day due to perennial penury. The clothes at the clearance section were bundled there and not quite as well arranged as those clothes not on clearance. Some of them were in a pile in a large box. As I rummaged through the pile of clothes, I got flashbacks of myself rummaging through a heap of clothes at Gikomba market aka ‘Sunshine boutique’ in Nairobi, expertly picking out a little worn piece of used clothing from a dead white man, so we believed! The clothes in this department store were new though, so I was happy to rummage through the bundle. Once I was done picking out clothes, I ambled to the front counter ready to take advantage of the coupon savings. The cashier was a plump and bumptious lady with fake nails that were longer than the artificial nails that the sadistic ladies at the Newark, New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) adorn! When I saw her nails, a red alert lit my brain up.
Just before I immigrated to the U.S, I had a small farewell party cum prayer session. The wicked demons that were thinking of carrying out their devious plans to accompany me from Kenya to the U.S to derail me and make me inject cocaine into my veins just like the Americans were rebuked and shamed into oblivion. They would not get into the plane! They were also bound in the mighty name of our Lord and ordered to disperse and scatter into the oceans that the plane would be flying above! This party brought together people who gave me all the advice, true, exaggerated and outrightly false, I needed to survive in the U.S, even if most had never been there. ‘Don’t take drugs, everyone in the U.S takes drugs!’, some warned. Everyone? ‘Don’t quit school, finish’, some advised. ‘Come back home immediately you finish school; that place is like the city of Mombasa. (In Kenya) Once you are inveigled, you cannot leave, it is like the place is full of jinn’, some forewarned. ‘Don’t argue with any American! They all have guns! Turn the other cheek!’ they reminded me of my biblical obligation. ‘Kiguoya kiinukagira nyina’, ‘A coward always goes home to his or her mother’, they added in the Kikuyu language. ‘Don’t sign up for any credit cards! Do you hear? In America, no one has money. They all live above their means and run out of money! People use credit cards to pay for everything, even a burial plot!’ I really wondered about that one; imagine the chap at Lang’ata Cemetery in Nairobi accepting credit cards. The body would ‘refuse’ to be buried in protest! You laugh? Haven’t you seen the Kenyan TV clips of bodies that have ‘refused’ to go ‘home’, usually after a thoroughly beaten up jalopy masquerading as a hearse breaks down in the middle of nowhere? The superstitious mourners ‘appease, coax and talk to’ the body so that it can ‘agree to go home’. In the meantime, the terrified driver cum mechanic cleans up the clogged up carburetor, (why is it always the darn carburetor?) and the body ‘finally agrees’ to ‘go home’! Sometimes, the car completely refuses to move despite the body being soothed to ‘agree to go home’ and another jalopy is sought! This second jalopy then promptly breaks down after a few kilometers/miles, proving the body’s mettle of not wanting to go home! The now hysterical bereaved start getting vexed with the body for refusing to go home! Any relatives or friends who had grudges with the deceased are urged to renounce the grudges and immediately ask for forgiveness so that the body can ‘stop being angry’! A chap who happily thought that his debt to the deceased had escaped the deceased’s reach is reminded to pay up immediately lest he faces the wrath of the antsy deceased! Wow! Anyway, I digress; back to the farewell party. One of my male relatives was more specific on his advice. When telling me what kind of woman I should bring home to them, he told me that I should not marry those American ladies with long acrylic nails, as they would not be able to cook. ‘They cannot go near a fire, those ladies! Their nails shall catch on fire, they’ll melt!’ There was an uproar of laughter when he said this and his sage advice sealed the deal.
So, when I saw the corpulent cashier, she fit the description of the kind of woman with the kind of nails my relative had warned me about! She also had a tattoo on her arm of a knife cutting through a strawberry and red strawberry juice (or was it blood?) was oozing out of the strawberry. She tried to scan the coupon and tapped the cash register screen, not with her fingers but with her brittle nails! However, the scan was not going through for some reason or other. She told me that the coupon was invalid. I then replied and let her know that the dates on the coupon were current. She twirled her palms and cocked her head and looked straight at me. “I can’t hear you.” I am not really a loud person and soft spoken at best, so I cleared my throat and told her, this time loud enough for her to hear, that the coupon was indeed valid. “I can’t hear you…” she snarled! This time, I was sure that I had communicated loud enough. I reiterated my communication, this time saying it quite loudly and with a hint of annoyance in my voice. “I can’t hear you, talk regular” She barked! My mouth was aghast! My thick African accent was the issue here, not the decibels! It was as if the world had come to a standstill. The shoppers had stopped what they were doing and were all anticipatorily inching forward to catch a glimpse of the impending meltdown and showdown! The rotund cashier seemed to be relishing the moment, waiting to strike like a cobra. There was laughter from a hefty lady shopper who had two children, not twins but very close in age, strapped to the largest stroller I had ever seen in my life, accompanied by her man, who I quickly learned was referred to as the ‘baby daddy’ in this the land of milk and honey. This ‘cat’ had a teardrop tattoo close to his eye and sagging pants despite wearing a shiny belt with a large buckle. The sagging pants revealed a worn out ‘Fruit of the Loom’ ng*tha with a rather large hole in it! I have always wondered why one would wear beat up underwear if they intended on sagging their jeans, but let’s not even get started on that! He would frequently let off a wry smile that revealed gold teeth adorning his mouth. I later learned that the innocent looking teardrop tattoo was a lurid sign that he had killed or murdered someone! Wow! The hefty lady, the ‘baby momma’, smirked and snickered, ‘he be African.’ Wairraminit! (Wait a minute) The tough looking man notwithstanding, I really needed to correct this lady! She had butchered the Queen’s English! I immediately wanted to tell her that the right way to say it was ‘he is African’ or something to that effect. We were caned thoroughly for these grammatical errors in primary school. My high school literature teacher would go bonkers if he heard an adult assault the English language in the manner this portly lass was doing! Her grammar was wanting and I was itching to point it out. However, I realized that I was losing focus. I had a coupon to redeem. I turned my attention back to the paunchy cashier and, I told her, this time speaking slowly and pointedly, that the coupon was indeed valid. I was determined to win this. Since I am a dark skinned fellow, I didn’t turn pale like a Caucasian would but my blood was boiling! She seemed nonplussed about what I had told her and I decided to end the standoff. Mustering the best American accent I could clobber together from years of watching American sitcoms such as ‘The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air’ I thundered, “Lemme speak to yourrr supervisorrr!” These words wiped the silly smirk off her face; an African American Supervisor came to see what the commotion was about. The cashier said something like ‘I axed him if he had the right coupon’! Axed? I instantly realized that she probably meant ‘asked’ but had omitted the ‘s’. An axe would probably be needed to chop off her nails! When I explained to her supervisor what the matter was, he seemed to decode my English and my accent and he immediately sorted out the coupon issue, much to chagrin of the sassy lass. Once the 20% savings had been deducted from my final bill, the roly-poly cashier mumbled the most dishonest ‘have a nice day’ known to man. I looked through her and walked out of the store triumphant, snapping my head from side to side to reinforce my ‘win’! The shoppers who had gathered to watch my ‘defeat’ slithered away from view!
That experience at the department store threatened to shake me to the core! Maybe this is the culture shock they had warned me about! I could not fathom how I was not able to communicate with someone despite putting my best English on the table. It had taken a lifetime to polish my English. You see, some of us went to public primary schools in Kenya. Since our parents were not private developers, we could not see the gates of the private schools, which in Kenya were mostly called ‘Academies’. These academies were expensive. The school fees for one term or semester was a small fortune! Enough to buy a prime plot of land in a place like Ruai, a Nairobi suburb where the buying and selling of plots of land is as hectic as the trading of stocks in the New York Stock Exchange. They either had the name ‘academy’ or an exotic sounding British name of the school, without naming the level of the school. For example, there is Kigumo Bendera high school, a school for ghetto yute from Murang’a, Murang’a county in Kenya. Then there is Braeburn school, a school for the people of Babylon. There is Maranda High school for regular folks, then there is The Banda School. There is Shimo La Tewa High School, then there is Hillcrest school. Naming a school ‘high’ or ‘secondary’ cheapened it. There are schools where presidential debates are held and then there are schools where the presidential elections are held. They are as different as night and day. I happened to go to the types of schools where the elections are held. In these schools, when we sang nursery rhymes, they went something like this:
Heady, shown da, niece and tow

Niece and tows, niece and tows

Heady, chow da, niece and tow

Fa ra ra ra.
The kids in the academies and international schools did not sing it like we did. They sang it the proper way, which was;
Head, shoulders, knees and toes

Knees and toes, knees and toes

Head, shoulders, knees and toes,

Fa La La La!
Therefore, when you went to school in a school that was not an academy or an international one, you had to polish up your accent real quick to keep up with the ‘Babylon’ Joneses. At least it seemed important then. After listening intently to how the children of private developers spoke, I learned to somehow speak, twang or ‘tweng’ as close as possible to them, as they call it. Also, I listened to the radio presenters on Capital FM! Those people sounded like they had just landed from New York. ‘Guuuurrd mrrning lisnerrrrs’, they enticed you! So, after all this ‘training’ to get my ‘accent’ up to par, I realized that my training had come to nought. I had to start from the beginning, I had to start from the bottom…

 

 

The Narrow Road To The American Embassy (Part II)

         *Please read part I of the blog (choose from the menu above) if you haven’t already done so so that you may get the gist of the story.

     Goodness gracious! Have you been following the riots in Baltimore, Maryland? A young black man called Freddie Gray died after he sustained a spinal injury while at the hands of the Baltimore police! The policemen were at least charged with a crime, unlike in previous instances where there was usually no indictment of the rogue police officers. Rumor has it that the main and/or only reason that the police are being charged is because some of the policemen were black themselves. That’s a story for another day. I am glad that, with the advent of smartphones that record video and audio, a lot of these cases of police brutality are being brought to light. Policemen should also be required to wear body cameras. This is an essential tool that protects both the officer and the citizen. In London, the bobbies have truncheons as weapons! Maybe this should be applied here in the U.S! I don’t think that it would work though! Can you imagine a policeman beckoning to you ‘hey fella, stop or I shall pull out my truncheon!’? 

           Finally, the D-Day, the date of my interview at the American embassy was here. My ‘mtumba’ secondhand suit looked new! If the ‘John Smith’ who had donated that suit saw me in it, he would not have recognized it! The mean-faced security guards almost strip searched us when we got to the embassy. I understood why. The American embassy in Nairobi, Kenya was attacked by terrorists back in 1998 and they were not taking any chances. Their security metal detector wands beeped as they ruthlessly asked us to remove all metallic objects in our possession and roughly patted us down to feel if we had somehow smuggled a dangerous object into the embassy. If anyone felt personally violated, no one said a word. It was their way or the highway and we grudgingly but quietly obliged; we had been on that highway and we didn’t want to go back to it…

      We were then unceremoniously herded to an interview room and just like the gladiators in Ancient Rome, desolately awaited our fate. Was I going to emerge victorious and be granted my ‘freedom’, my visa, or would I be vanquished by the gladiatorial interrogators or torn to pieces by the lions that were the American system? I was about to find out…

     The interrogators gleaned through the glass and asked for documents. These documents included title deeds, bank statements, graduation, wedding, baby birth invitation letters,  school acceptance letters and any document that could have opened the pearly gates of America!

     As we were waiting in the interview room, we glanced nervously at each other and wondered who would get a visa and who would be unsuccessful. We were all surrounding the walls of Jericho and waiting for the clarion call by Joshua to fell the walls! ‘Joshua fit the battle of Jericho… and the walls came tumbling down…’ I quietly hummed the song as I asked for divine intervention from above. I could not help but notice a middle aged man who looked like he didn’t want to be there or had woken up on the wrong side of bed that morning. This chap was clad in a suit that had seen better days. It looked like it was a ‘Raymonds’ suit, the world renowned immaculate ones made in Kenya a while back when clothes were still manufactured in Kenya before the flooding of the Kenyan market with secondhand clothes, ‘mitumba’, like the suit I was wearing on that day. The irony wasn’t lost on me. He looked like he had been wealthy or financially stable and had been doing well for himself but somewhere along the way, financial misfortune had struck and he was desperately seeking for a way to reverse this misfortune. He had possibly felt that Lady Luck would finally smile down upon him. He was very neat though; his clothes looked like they had been ironed with a charcoal iron. In Gikomba market. They had sharp edges that could cut through a housefly unfortunate enough to fly into them. When he had walked into the room, I noticed that his shoes made a metallic sound when they came into contact with the cement floor, as a cobbler had expertly hammered a metal piece on the back left and right hand side of the shoes’ soles respectively to prolong their walking life. He forlornly looked like he needed to smoke a Sportsman cigarette really badly; but couldn’t. He desperately needed a sip of Keringet Natural Mineral water but none was available. He was nervously chewing his fingers from time to time but would catch himself doing it and stop himself as if on cue.

     His eyes kept darting around from place to place, fidgety, as if he knew that something or someone was watching him; suddenly, the ominous sign of the security guards trotting towards him confirmed his and my suspicions! They grabbed him and pulled him out of the waiting room and threatened to hand him over to the police. I could have sworn that he had inadvertently passed gas as the guards were leading him out of the embassy. There are two ways to pass gas: One is passing it softly, where you don’t intend for the people surrounding you to hear the (sound of the) gas being passed. It goes something like this. ‘Yussssssuf’, very little hissing noise, very soft ‘s’s. Similar to the sounds made when one is slowly releasing air from a ball. Like the sound the balls that were deflated for the American Football quarterback Tom Brady made! Only the smell bombards the unfortunate people next to the gas passer a few seconds later. The other, louder way is where there is a loud eruption, just like a nuclear bomb blast! ‘Oduorrrrrri’! Loud ‘r’s. The release is usually unplanned or done when one is alone and no one is within earshot. This chap reflexively passed the louder version when the guards grabbed him! Brrrrrraap! What had happened? What had he done? Soft murmurs from nervous interviewees were heard speculating on what had happened. ‘He had fake bank statements!’ one lad remarked. ‘No, it was a fake title deed!’, a lass corrected him. ‘Both!’, an elderly gentleman who looked like he had several children in the diaspora and seemed to know his stuff, helpfully added. The gray-haired elder seemed to be the only one certain of securing the visa. He was the only one sure of passing the ‘Are you going to come back after your visit to the U.S?’ test. The rest of the lads and lasses looked like economic refugees masquerading as visa applicants, taking a leap into the unknown and not certain that they would come back, or even wanted to come back. The murmurs quickly died down, lest the interrogators decide to send you away for noise making. You don’t want to miss the coveted visa due to unnecessary noise! So, just like the Thompson’s gazelle or the dik dik antelope in the Kenyan savannah, who watch as an unfortunate member of theirs is chased and mauled by hungry carnivores, we watched in horror as the unlucky chap was mauled by the American system. We waited for the next victims and everyone said silent and some, even loud prayers of deliverance so that they would not be the next to be mauled and denied a visa, or worse still, handed over to the Kenya Police!

     Fake documents you ask? Welcome to Kenya! There were some Kenyan brokers who were stationed in River Road in Nairobi who produced the exact documents needed to slay the Goliath-like interrogators at the American embassy. These brokers were experts in the world of certificates and documents. The documents that they ‘manufactured’ in the mean streets of River Road were ‘authentic’, just like the ‘real’ fake Rolexes sold by cunning counterfeiters. River Road or ‘Grogon’ generally referred to the seedier parts of the city center where you could get anything and everything you wanted if you asked for it and you could afford it. The documents passed the watermark test as their watermarks were usually authentic. Getting these documents was not cheap! It cost money and the more valuable the document, the more it cost. So, if you needed a title deed, school certificate, bank statement, invitation letter or school acceptance letter, they had it. There was one particular chap who was famously, or infamously depending on whose side you were, known as ‘Waziri’, ‘minister’ who was the master of these documents. It was rumored that his documents passed the veracity test even in the eyes of the hawk-eyed American (and British) interrogators. He was nicknamed ‘Waziri’ as he seemed to have the ‘keys’ to various government ministries and got genuine documents faster than you could say ‘New York’! Rumor has it that Waziri had an insider or two at the relevant government and educational agencies that print these documents. He was clean and always clad in his signature ‘Godfather’ hat and cowboy boots, replicating the John Wayne look. He was more suave than many of the other brokers wheeling and dealing in the murky profession of documents, who were mostly a somewhat disheveled group of con artists whose documents were not ‘authentic’ and did not possess the requisite watermarks! They couldn’t muster the authenticity needed to cross the river Jordan! ‘At the crossing over Jordan he’ll be there’, goes the hymn. It seemed like the unfortunate chap who was led away from the interview room had the fake documents that were of inferior quality and were easy to spot. Waziri would occasionally be seen in the presence of former customers of his who had aced the interview and successfully resettled in the United States and other countries in the diaspora. They would come to pay homage to him, like Tibetan Buddhists paying homage to the Dalai Lama!

 

       Two interviewees later, a lady who had worn red as if she was on a date during Valentines weekend, approached a female interrogator. Red skirt, blouse, blazer, shoes, purse and she had on red lipstick! She probably felt that wearing red would finally ensure success, get her over the hump. The Kenyan lady had carried a thick file full of documents and her passport full of stamps from other countries that she had visited in the past. I am not sure whether red is the color of choice at such an important interview but I am no fashionista, so I’ll let the fashion police chime in. The female interrogator kept asking for documents and the lady duly pulled them out of her file and slid them through the only available slot to the interrogator. From the conversations between the lady in red and the female interrogator, it seemed like the lady in red had been to the embassy before and had been denied a visa. Every time your visa application was rejected, you had to re-apply and spend more visa fees, which are currently $160 (Kshs 12,800) and many other fees. So, this lady had already spent $320 (Kshs 25,600) at the very least, as the figure is higher due to the numerous additional fees that the American government tacks on to the visa fees. So, the female interrogator kept asking the lady in red tough pointed questions and the lady in red answered each of the questions asked calmly. After asking her a multitude of questions, the lady interrogator pulled out her ace card. ‘Where is the title deed of the piece of land that you claim to own?’ The lady in red calmly explained that the land she owned was managed by a land buying company which had delayed the issuance of title deeds as the matter was before a court of law. All she had was a ‘share certificate’ showing possession, she helpfully added and passed over the share certificate under the thick glass. ‘I asked you for a legal title. This is just a share certificate. It’s not a legal document!’ the hidebound interrogator thundered! ‘That’s all I have madam, the share certificate is valid. People use them as security and proof of ownership all the time’, the now exasperated lady in red remarked. ‘I need a proper title’, the female American interrogator said, with the finality of the final prayer said by the prison chaplain before the hangman disposed of a condemned man. ‘With time, the titles shall be out. Many Kenyans just have these share certificates,’ the crestfallen lady in red clarified. ‘No, I said I need an official title.’ The American snarled! The lady in red knew that it was over. The American mountain lioness had captured her and was clamping her jugular vein in order to suffocate her. Then, something happened.

     Suddenly, the lady in red snapped! She saw red! ‘Stupid! You think this America is the only country one can travel to! My passport has 4 stamps from 4 European countries, Britain, Denmark, Netherlands, Spain, countries way better than America and I came back. You think I am interested in America? You, what do you own in America? Stupid! I own property in Kenya. In fact, I am already going to South Africa in 2 weeks, stupid!’ She kept waving her share certificate and her passport to reinforce her argument. Everything and everyone froze! Even a housefly that had found its way to the hallowed halls of the American embassy ceased its irritating buzz and perched itself on the wall, as if waiting to see the impending showdown and divulge the juicy details later on to fellow eager houseflies! The American interrogator, who was seemingly enjoying every moment as she tormented her hapless prey was taken aback. The Americans have a metaphor that says ‘ain’t no fun when the rabbit got the gun’ and the lady in red temporarily had the gun! The security guards’ feet were glued to the ground! They did not know what to do! Should they rush in and scoop up the lady, wait for the lady to stop her rant and then escort her to the outside parking lot, or what? The rest of the interviewees, myself included, were in utter shock! We smelt defeat, especially if you were the next victim to be interviewed. The last thing you wanted was to be interviewed by an angry interrogator. The garrulous lady in red was not done! Like a bull in a china shop, she was on a mission and hellbent on causing the maximum destruction! ‘Go to hell, you stupid American. If you are so clever, what are you doing here working in the embassy instead of Wall Street in New York? Mmhh, answer that!’ The American interrogator abruptly left her seat and went inside the offices. The showdown was over. The angry bull had been flustered and subdued by the matador’s red flag and had finally run out of breath. The matador had executed the final sword thrust, the estocada. The Kenyan Little Red Riding Hood had been eaten by the American big bad wolf! This was the perfect example of ‘when keeping it real goes wrong’ as Dave Chappelle wistfully reminds his fans in the Dave Chappelle show! This was probably the cue that the security guards were waiting for. They approached the lady in red but just stopped short of touching her. They were wise. ‘Don’t touch me, touch me and you shall see!’ The lady gathered her documents and her passport, knowing full well that her chances of coming to America had been nullified due to her rant. However, she looked like she had felt good about it and cracked a confident smile. Her pent up emotions were finally out and even if she could not set foot in the land of milk and honey, the land of Martin Luther King Jr, she felt that she had come out with her dignity intact. She looked around and cast glances at all of us, as if looking for a seal of approval. We all ashamedly averted our gaze, lest the interrogators mark us out as co-conspirators! She slowly strutted out of the interview hall like a model strutting her stuff in the fashion houses in Milan or Paris, with the security guards following her but from a safe distance, lest she snapped again and pounced on them! In another forum, I and speaking for the rest of the terrified interviewees, would have clapped and given the boisterous lady in red a thunderous round of applause! But this was not the time nor the place for that; it would be foolhardy to engage in behavior that would jeopardize your already slim chances of securing the visa. So, we sat rooted onto the uncomfortable chairs, as silent as the grave. You could hear a pin drop as the clickety-clack of her red stiletto shoes faded into the distance. Once the noise of her shoes was gone, the flummoxed American interrogator reappeared back to her booth and I prayed silently to the Almighty God of Shadrack, Meshack and Abednego that I wouldn’t be next. They say that you plan and God laughs! My name was called next!

     Like a deer in the headlights, I faced the lady in red’s nemesis. I had hoped that she wouldn’t be my interrogator but here I was in front of her. It looked like the antics of the lady in red had rattled her. The lady in red had questioned her station in life and her upward mobility. Everyone was watching; their gazes were averted but they were listening in on every word she and I spoke, waiting for the powdered keg to explode. The lady who interviewed me was an attractive African American lass who had the cutest dimples you had ever seen! Her looks and seemingly calm demeanor were very deceiving. She was the perfect epitome of ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’! On another day and in another forum, she would have been the ideal candidate to chat with, to whisper sweet nothings to, to ‘holler’ at. However, this was not just another forum and this was not just another day! It was the D-Day! I was in the lion’s den and I was praying that the Angels were tightly holding the jaws of the ferocious lioness in front of me shut, lest she pounce on me just like she had pounced on the lady in red. Hon. Raila Odinga, Kenya’s former Prime Minister used to remind his opponents that you should never mistake a lion that had been rained on for a cat! ‘Mliona simba amenyeshewa mkadhani yeye ni paka?’ (You saw a lion that had been rained on and assumed it was a cat?) The American interrogator was still a lion despite being pelted by the lady in red’s verbal raindrops. She asked me one question and one question only. What I was going to do. When I told her, she looked through one supporting document and nodded her head. I hoped that that was a good sign and not a trap. Suddenly, she told me that my visa had been approved and I should collect it in the afternoon! I said a heartfelt thank you, scurrying away lest she decided that she had given me my visa too easily and wanted to review my application! Wow! When I got outside the precincts of the embassy, I saw numerous lads huddled together huffing and puffing cigarettes furiously as each explained how lucky or unlucky they were! I heard one lad say that the poor chap in a Raymonds suit and the lady in red had been blacklisted and would never set foot in the hallowed gates of the embassy, ever. This made me feel even luckier. I got out of the embassy quickly and thanked God for approving my visa application. I then thought of my wealthy relative. His title deeds and bank statements had not been perused. This meant that they could be used again in the never-ending search of the elusive visa. How lucky I was, how lucky I was…

        In the evening, I had to return the coveted bank statements and title deeds to my wealthy relative who was ensconced in his fortressed mansion. ‘How did it go? Did the documents help?’ I told him that I was lucky enough not to be asked for bank statements and title deeds. ‘How?’, he asked, somehow disappointed that his marquee documents had not been given the opportunity to shine. I narrated to him the ‘Game Of Thrones’ clash between the lady in red and the American interrogator. He shook his head, feeling sorry for the lady in red. ‘Not everyone can get a visa. They have a quota. You can have all the documents they want but the quota determines how many people go to the U.S. You are one of the lucky few…’ He surmised. I thanked him profusely and excused myself as I had a ‘matatu’, minibus to catch before dusk. I had heard horror stories of yutes waylaying people at the bus stop and giving them a dose of ‘ngeta’, which is a chokehold that temporarily disables you as the yutes relieve you of your valuables. I was sharply dressed and therefore, a prime candidate for ‘kupigwa ngeta’, that is to be put on the chokehold. I boarded the ‘matatu’ whose music was earsplitting and was playing the reggae song by the late South African artist, Lucky Dube. ‘I am a prisoner’, the song rattled the whole ‘matatu’. The visa had freed me from my current trials and tribulations and I was a prisoner no more, so I thought! Just before I got to ‘tao’, town or the Nairobi city center, the song by George Michael ‘Freedom’ was playing. ‘Freedom, freedom, freedom’, the song blared through the thumping speakers. I felt free…

         We had been warned that it was premature and foolish to buy or do anything before the visa application was approved. Now that I had been given the go-ahead, the frenzy began! The Kenyan belts, T-shirts and safari boots, the Kenyan made Nigerian looking dashiki, the American themed but made in China Jordache boxer brief that I had so painstakingly bought from Felo in Madaraka estate. All had to fit into my suitcase. I was advised to go to Maasai market and buy some curios to sell to the Americans. ‘Americans are rich. Even if you sell each key-holder or earrings  for $10 or $20, you’ll make a decent amount of money. They’ll sell like hot cakes.’ I was persuaded. So, I bought Maasai belts, key holders and t-shirts that said ‘Kenya hakuna matata.’ I got some ‘large’ and ‘extra large’ Tusker T-shirts which I envisioned would be very popular with the Kenyans in the U.S. It is the atrocious weight limit of the airlines that prevented me from buying more curios to sell to the Americans and the Kenyans who wanted to remember home with nostalgia. Off I went to get the requisite shots of yellow fever and numerous other diseases that Africans are not supposed to import into the American shores. I got emails from some relatives based in the U.S asking for stuff that sounded regular, even embarrassingly crude to me. ‘Bring me chips (French fries) from Luthuli avenue, the greasy ones, plus a kuku porno (rotisserie chicken) from Munyiri’s fish and chips, pleeeeeassee!’ I didn’t get it. With all the lovely foods we saw on TV being consumed by culinary-savvy Americans, why on earth would one want chips from Luthuli?! We heard that the Americans had an entire channel dedicated to food, which we heard was aptly named ‘The Food Channel’. Another one wrote ‘Haki (I swear) if you don’t smuggle Farmers Choice sausages, I’ll kill you!’ Were there no sausages in America? A friend of mine who had watched too many American TV shows warned me against carrying foodstuffs. ‘They have sniffer dogs at the airports man, those dogs sniff out anything, everything! Don’t joke with Americans! They have even trained their dogs to sniff out cancer man!’ I cut him short. Okay, I didn’t doubt the fact that they could sniff out the greasy chips and kuku porno from Luthuli. The smells from those foods were so powerful, even a human nose could smell them a mile away; but cancer? C’mon man! This ghetto yute was getting ahead of himself. I followed his advice of not carrying the foodstuffs but dismissed his claims of dogs sniffing out cancer as fictional ludicrous claims after watching too many sci-fi movies. Turns out the lad was right about the cancer sniffing dogs after all! In the meantime, I was unsuccessfully trying to chase my debtors; those slippery lads had got wind of the fact that I was leaving the economically harsh Kenyan savannah and going to the gold-paved streets of America. They laid low like envelopes for the two or so weeks I had before departure and I heard through third parties about some of the debtors lamenting as to how someone going to America could expect to get his or her money back when they are going to the land of opportunity. I disgruntledly wrote those debts off and focussed on the more important mission of packing and organizing the minute details of my trip.

     After a flurry of activities preceding my departure, I was finally on my way to America. I bid farewell to my relatives and friends and after a tearful goodbye, I boarded the jumbo jet that would take me to the U.S, via London…

     

The Narrow Road To The American Embassy (Part I)

     Boss, did you see the dresses that Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez and Rihanna wore at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) awards this past weekend in New York? Weuwe! My dress my choice! Those dresses, if you can even call them that, were out of this world! Not only did they leave very little to the imagination, they left you imagining how the ladies put the dresses on! It must take a team of experts to help the women put on the dresses! It seems like the theme of the night was commando night! None of those bodacious lasses had worn a ng*tha! Their fundamentals were covered by patches of clothing reminiscent of the paintings of poor Adam and Eve after they had eaten the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, which show them covering their nakedness with leaves! Despite the outlandish dresses by the powerful American socialites, I still hold the view that the dress worn by our very own Kenyan Chero during the 2015 Las Vegas International Rugby Sevens is still the dress to beat! Where was she? Someone should have bought her a ticket from Los Angeles to New York! They should reserve a spot for her at the red carpet so that she can strut her stuff! Maybe I should become a fashion blogger so that I can get up close and personal to these lasses! 

     Americans really know how to market themselves! The MET gala awards were held to ostensibly raise money for charity by the Metropolitan Museum Of Art’s Costume Institute. However, who even recalls or even cares what the event was held for? The dresses broke the Internet and more! The designers of those dresses were laughing all the way to the bank. Marketing savvy people these Americans are. They can sell blocks of ice to a polar bear in the middle of a blizzard! They portray their country as the most advanced, developed, happy, learned, extensive country on earth. When they do that, they whet the appetites of curious outsiders who want to share in the excitement! America projects itself as the land of the free where you can pursue freedom, liberty and happiness. Let me ask you, who wouldn’t want to pursue freedom? Who would not want to be liberated? Who wouldn’t want to be happy? Isn’t that the quintessential purpose of life? The thoughts of freedom, liberty and happiness start crystallizing in many people’s minds and they put their thoughts into motion. They finally gather and present themselves to the American embassy…

     The road to the American embassy was and is still more perilous than the Yungas road in Bolivia! This 40 mile (60 kilometer) road, the world’s most dangerous road, is dubbed ‘El Camino de la Muerte’ (The Death Road) as it kills 300 or more people every year as it dangerously snakes its way through the Andes mountains. Passengers who board buses that travel on the Yungas road pray real prayers to The Living God before they embark on the journey. Getting to your destination requires divine intervention. Many people, maybe all people who troop to the American embassy pray fervently for a successful visa interview. Lads and lasses who last heard the Living Word in Sunday school in kindergarten or bible study in primary (grade) school suddenly revisit their churches to seek divine intervention. They ask God to help them circumvent the traps and snares that waylay vulnerable interviewees on the road to America. I am sure atheists and agnostics temporarily drop their silly ‘There is no God’ charade and pray to the same God that they reject! The road to the American embassy has many casualties that hear the word ‘No’ from the dreaded American interviewers, who are more like interrogators! The U.S embassy is the gateway to ‘heaven’. In fact, one Wamalwa Kijana, the late Kenyan Vice President once said that it was easier for the biblical camel to go through a needle-hole or for a Kenyan to go to heaven than get an American visa. 

     So, there it is. Thousands of Kenyans, like a moth to a flame, are drawn to the dreaded American embassy. They falsely believe that America shall be the panacea to the insurmountable problems that are continually plaguing them in Kenya. I recall the English story of Dick Whittington and his cat, who falsely believed that the London streets were paved with gold only to shockingly discover that streets were in fact grimy and poverty stricken. The Kenyans also believe that the streets of New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Boston, Seattle, Miami and Honolulu are paved with gold and all you need is a good shovel and basket to scoop and collect the gold!  The American interrogators are like St. Peter at the pearly gates of heaven! They flip through your stack of supporting documents just like St. Peter flips through the Book Of Life to see if your name is emblazoned on it! They unilaterally decide who goes in and who doesn’t! One person on the other side of the glass (rumor has it that it is bulletproof to prevent a disappointed interviewee from lunging at an interviewer after the words ‘no’ have been said!) plays the role of shaman, judge, jury and executioner! By eyeing you and looking at bank statements and title deeds showing that you are fully capable of sustaining yourself in the U.S, he or she says the magic words, ‘come for your visa at 2.00pm in the afternoon’ or whatever time he or she says. Few are lucky and hear ‘yes’. The majority of interviewees hear the cruel words ‘no’! At the embassies, no means no! The rankled Americans who work at those embassies have killed numerous dreams by refusing to hand over the keys to the U.S cities. Some people have grown stronger and succeeded immensely in Kenya after failing to secure the coveted visa. Some people unfortunately go underground after squandering funds that were painstakingly collected for the purpose of securing the visa and settling in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

      Some of us are fortunate enough to have that one rich uncle, aunt, relative or family friend who has succeeded in life and has quite a few properties littered in the city and the suburbs. These prosperous people seem to have the Midas touch! Everything they touch turns into gold! They don’t need to go to the gold-paved streets of London, New York or Los Angeles! The Nairobi streets right here are paved with gold! Their bank accounts have a few zeros after a number greater than zero, whilst your bank account has an amount that is close to zero or sometimes teetering on the brink of the world of overdraft fees. These banks are thieves. They charge you hefty bank fees for having an overdrawn account, which is absolutely the last thing you want happening to you at that time! Pleas of leniency or clemency fall on deaf ears as the bank managers have strict instructions not to give in to demands from the proletariat so that they can beef up the already supernormal profits of the bourgeoisie that shall get the bank balance sheets looking healthy at the end of the year. Sometimes, the bank fees are so high such that, when you get funds and finally find your financial footing and give to Caesar what is his, the funds you deposit in the bank account are gobbled up by the incredulously exorbitant fees! We should have an Islamic system of banking where usury is forbidden! Rich banks robbing the poor!

     Where was I? The rich aunt, uncle, relative or family friend. We have learned to treat these wealthy relatives with a lot of respect, probably with more respect than we treat the rest of our penurious relatives! As unfair as this sounds, these relatives usually pull you out of the numerous financial quagmires and calamities that seem to befall you way too often! You remember the overused cliché ‘money makes the world go round’ and its sister ‘money talks’? Sadly, it’s true. So, when they visit your homestead, you kill your prized fattened calf, pour them your finest wine in your best wineskins, and laugh incessantly at their jokes. These relatives usually have bank accounts in the banks that matter; Barclays, Equity, Kenya Commercial Bank, Standard Chartered, and so on. The bank account from your local SAACO (Savings and Credit Cooperative Association) might shatter your dreams of landing at the JFK Airport in New York! They also have pieces of land in places where land prices are very high! Runda, Lavington, Westlands, Mombasa Road, Lang’ata and so on. The types of places that ‘private developers’ love grabbing public land! Your title deed of the 40 x 80 feet plot you proudly own at Kahawa Wendani or Kia Maiko, less affluent areas in Nairobi where the hoi polloi live, shall not suffice. These plots also hold their value and cost an arm and a leg but their names are strange sounding and put off the American interrogators, who prefer a familiar sounding name like ‘Westlands’ or  ‘Upper Hill’, names that roll off their tongues easily; places they have been to and seen with their own two eyes. Trust me, none of the American interrogators has ever been to Kahawa Wendani. 

     So, you arrange for an important visit to the wealthy aunt or uncle. Since his or her title deeds and bank statements are on heavy rotation in the Western embassies by eager relatives desperate to show the financial might of their sponsors, they leaf through the numerous bank statements and title deeds that they have and choose one bank statement that has never seen the gates of the embassy. ‘Use this one, I don’t think the U.S guys have seen it. It was used at the U.K embassy successfully, so it is a good one’, the propertied relative assures you. I like the way prosperous people think and talk. They are always knocking out the ‘T’ in can’t! They are always in the ‘Yes We Can’ modus operandi, always positive! Once they avail to you a ‘fresh’ bank statement, they then leaf through their many title deeds and pull out one that has also never been seen by the wretched interrogators in those embassies. ‘This one is for the new plot I got at Mombasa Road just the other day! These land prices in Nairobi are preposterous I tell you! Millions for a small plot!’ the rich relative commiserates at the millions they have just spent on the property. When they hand over to you the bank statements, the large figures and the trail of zeros send a shiver down your spine! The large amounts involved make you feel sorry for yourself. They take you back to the mathematical problems in primary (grade) school. ‘If Kamau earns Kshs 500 (US$ 6.25) a day, works for 20 days in each month regardless of the number of days in each month, how long in months and years shall he need to work to earn Kshs 1,000,000? (US$ 12,500)  Show your workings and how you arrived at your answer.’ You start doing the math in your head. Kshs 1,000,000, a cool million, divided by Kshs 500 per day is 2,000 days. Divide the 2,000 days by 20 days in a month, that is 100 months. Since each year has 12 months, it shall take you 100/12 which is 8.33 years to earn a cool million, Kshs 1,000,000 if you earn Kshs 500 a day. 8 years!!! This math baffles you! How are you ever going to get to the level of this monied relative, you ask? The only way you can get a million Kenya shillings is to win the ‘Tetemesha na Safaricom’ promotion, where winners win different amounts of cash, but a million is one of the prizes on offer. That, my friends is the crux of the matter, the cruel disparity of income between the rich and the poor; that is why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer! The poor folks simply have the odds stacked against them!

     As the well-off relative is handing over the prized title deeds and bank statements after having agreed to act as your sponsor for purposes of acing the interview at the American embassy, you can’t help but notice the numerous phone calls that they are receiving. The phone calls are not casual phone calls; they don’t contain useless banter; they are full of money and property transactions! ‘Why don’t we meet at Safari Park Hotel for dinner so that we can discuss the 2 properties in Athi River? I want to get those. I want to get rid of the properties in Isinya. There are too many thugs in that place! Insecurity is an issue. Athi River is much safer, it has a better value on returns’ he says. Just after the dinner reservations are made by the secretary, another phone call comes through, this time from a stock broker. ‘These stocks you sold me on are not making me any money! I am paying you a lot of money to make me money. Shuffle them and make me money’, the relative bellows! I notice his harsh tone and I make a mental note. Successful people are not meek and docile! They are assertive and straight to the point. Beating around the bush is for losers, I conclude. Phone calls to their driver, cook, ‘shamba-boy’ (gardener) and others make you realize just how busy the well established relative is and how lucky you are to have him as your sponsor. ‘Now, don’t tell anyone about the money and property, you hear young man?’ he commands. I assure him that it is only the American interrogators who shall see the documents. ‘You know, Nairobi is very unsafe. If people see these documents, they shall camp day and night at my place waiting to carjack and rob me and my family…’ You reassure him that the documents shall be under lock and key for the entire period they shall be in your possession. He then peels out a crisp Kshs 500 note and tells you to have lunch on him! You recall the math question, ‘If Kamau earns Kshs 500 a day’ and it hits you that the well heeled relative has casually given you a casual laborer’s daily wage! ‘Buy lunch with this small note. When you go to America, don’t inject yourself with that cocaine. Don’t become a junkie after all this work to get there! Work hard and don’t forget me when you come to visit after you have made your money! Buy me a ticket to Los Angeles! I want to see Michael Jackson’s ranch’ he confesses. You hearten his mood by letting him know that none of your veins shall come into contact with a cocaine filled syringe and needle and you are a man on a mission! After bidding him goodbye, you rush to Luthuli avenue…

     

     Your stomach is growling and after hunger pangs all day due to ‘eating air burgers and water shakes’, that is having nothing to eat for lunch other than water, you decide to cross over the city center to eat lunch in a budget friendly establishment. As you walk towards Luthuli avenue, you cut through Jevanjee Gardens and see scores of people seemingly idle and listening to the few preachers who are warning everyone within and without earshot of eternal damnation if they don’t repent immediately and deliver their souls to Jesus Christ. You feel bad for the jobless people who are huddled in what was and is still called the ‘jobless corner’. Each person is hoping for a change in fortunes and is probably stopping by the gardens to plot their next course of action. There are usually two preachers, one who preaches in English and one who translates in Swahili. These preachers are very good! They work in tandem just like synchronized swimmers. Sometimes, the translator in Swahili starts translating even before the head preacher is done with his line. Shall this roadside preacher ever get to the heights of Bishop TD Jakes, you wonder? Aren’t both hardworking and delivering The Word? You keep moving. You remember your wealthy relative’s documents and you wonder whether anyone has been tailing you. This is Nairobi. However, the hunger pangs force you to overcome your paranoia and off to Luthuli avenue you go. You decide to spend only Kshs 100 of the Kshs 500 you were given for lunch, as you need to get that special outfit for the interview at the embassy. 

     Kshs 100 didn’t buy you much in Nairobi then and buys you even less now! The only ‘meal’ I could afford with Kshs 100 then was a gruel known as ‘dubukisa’. In classier establishments, the meal was known as ‘tumbukiza’ where the meat was fried and then potatoes, spices, beef on bone and water were added and the mixture boiled to make meat stew. However, in Luthuli avenue, they shortchanged you and did not include the meat, potatoes and vegetables! In Luthuli Avenue and River Road and all those avenues traversing the less affluent parts of the city center, ‘dubukisa’ was an au jus soup that had been skimmed from that meat stew with a ladle and served either by itself or in tandem with a piece of ugali (maize/corn meal) chapati (naan) or any starchy substance. The gruel was called ‘dubukisa’ as the customers dipped the piece of ugali or chapati into the gruel.  Dipping is ‘tumbukiza’ in Swahili,, so the word was a corruption of ‘dipping’. If you were lucky, the cook added a potatoe or two to the gruel. This soup is similar to the soup that a famous blogger called Karoki got served at a Kenyan run establishment called Afrika Fusion in Dallas, Texas. Karoki, who writes a heavy hitting blog on WordPress called ‘whispers of a whiskey drinker’ decided to patronize Afrika Fusion and he innocuously asked for soup. He probably did not realize that the lady owner-operator was a Kenyan at heart and had Kenyan habits and had probably served ‘dubukisa’ in Kenya without any complaints before relocating to the U.S; so, Karoki’s soup was brought to him and alas, it had one potatoe! It was ‘dubukisa’! Karoki said potatoe, Afrika Fusion said potato! Karoki raised a ruckus! Karoki is a former marine and as you all know, marines are the crème de la crème of the U.S defense forces: The few, the proud, the Marines! This tough marine was not going to take that slight lying down! He fought back and it seems like there is an impending showdown between Afrika Fusion and Karoki. The owner of Afrika Fusion should probably revise their menu and have them list their soup as ‘dubukisa’ and alert people that the gruel comes with but one potatoe! That might clear the confusion and shall maybe avoid the ‘cease and desist’ orders that are being flung Karoki’s way by Afrika Fusion! Whatever happened to the truism ‘The customer is always right’? Afrika Fusion should acquiesce to Karoki, offer him an apology and offer a replacement buffet for his troubles. Kenyans running businesses in America have to adopt American style customer service!

     So, I wolfed down my piece of ‘ugali sosa’, which was a small piece of ugali that fit into a saucer that was meant for a small cup of tea. I kept dipping the ugali into the ‘dubukisa’ and once I had ‘quietened the worms in the stomach’, I went home in order to prepare for the arduous task of buying a second hand outfit with which I would present myself to the interrogators at the American embassy.

    The next day at the crack of dawn, I dressed in the shabbiest clothes I had and wore shoes that could not be intimidated by the muddy street paths. You had to wear shabby clothes whilst visiting the secondhand clothes market as you needed to blend in with the people at the market. Transactions were carried out on a willing seller willing buyer basis after intense haggling and you did not want to give the sellers a reason to raise their prices on you if you looked like you were from ‘Babylon’. Yes, even rich people from Babylon secretly visited the clothes market.  I promptly took a ‘matatu’, a passenger-carrying minibus  and went to the market called ‘Gikomba’ aka ‘Sunshine Boutique’. It was cheekily known as sunshine boutique as it was an open-air market and the sun shone brightly and hot, unlike other formal boutiques that were in air conditioned brick and mortar stores! This market is one of the dumping grounds of all those clothes that the ‘rich’ people from western countries donate to create space for newer clothes. The clothes that Westerners donate to clothe the poor in Africa for free are then sold to the poor in Africa, an oxymoron! The concept of creating space for newer clothes is alien to us Kenyans in Kenya. You see, in Kenya, a ‘sufferer’ does not have too many clothes. It’s all about needs and wants and you somehow have just the bare minimum to survive. In fact, as a ghetto yute, having only 3 or so pairs of jeans was not unusual. You needed to be in Gikomba very early in the morning. There are two reasons for this; first, although the vast majority of people in Nairobi and Kenya by extension wore second hand clothes, no one readily admitted to wearing ‘mitumba’, second hand clothes. It was the fashion elephant in the room that everyone sidestepped. So, savvy people shopped early in the morning so as not to be spotted going to and coming from sunshine boutique. Second, early morning is when newly arrived bales of clothing from the West were opened up, and you needed to be there when the bale was opened so as to cherry pick the better clothes from the bale. The early bird catches the worm. The clothes that were picked out just after the bale was opened were called the clothes of ‘camera’, I guess since they were the first from the bale, newer looking and would probably make you look better in front of a camera, who knows! Present in the opening of the bale were regulars like us and stall owners, who were cherry picking better clothes to hang in their stalls. The bale owners would shout a 3-2-1 countdown and open the bale. Lights, camera, action! There was a mad frenzy as a sea of humans rummaged through the pile of clothes so as to pick out the best clothes! This melee usually resulted in a lot of fracases as everyone felt entitled to the best clothes in the bale, especially after getting there very early in the morning at dawn just after the city cocks crowed. Once the disputes were settled and clothes paired with their owners, it was time to pay. This was usually a spectacle. You see, Gikomba was one of the most dangerous places to be if you had cash money in your possession. There were as many pickpockets as shoppers, if not more. These pickpockets were sleeker than the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates, the famous pickpockets under the tutelage of the elderly criminal Fagin in the tales of Oliver Twist! Just like the Artful Dodger practiced picking pockets where the goal was to take the handkerchief from the pocket without the bell ringing, the Nairobi ragamuffins would slide their deft fingers and pull your wallet out of your pockets without you feeling a thing! They would also slit the sides of women’s handbags and purses with razors and pull out the money that was inside! How they did that was and is still a mystery. A few of the urchins would be caught in the act and shouts of ‘huyo, huyo’, ‘that’s him, that’s him’, and ‘mwizi, mwizi’, ‘thief, thief’ would fill the dusty Gikomba air! Business would temporarily come to a standstill at the market! People would focus their attention on the vagabond, who by now was fleeing faster than Usain Bolt, the world record holding sprinter in a desperate effort to save his life, with crowds baying for his blood whilst giving chase! These chaps would jump over bales of clothes, stalls, people, raw sewage, wooden planks, handcarts and cars, just like the nimble warriors in the movie ‘Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon’. It was literally a life and death race. If unfortunately they were caught, this meant imminent death as the angry mob would pounce on the luckless youth and rain blows and kicks onto the poor soul! A used tire would quickly be found and cries of ‘weka yeye tire/taya/taeri’ ‘put the tire on him’ would rend the air and the poor waifs would be ‘necklaced’, that is, burnt alive as the flames from the rubber tire engulfed the disconsolate youth! Ironically, the desperate youths would spot the police and run towards them, not away from them, as the police would be their only saving grace! Only the presence of police, who would frequently shoot in the air to disperse the murderous crowds, would save the poor guttersnipes! So, secrecy was paramount in the pickpocketing profession. It was the difference between life and death! 

     Due to the numerous pickpockets in Gikomba, you had to hide your money in places that pickpockets would find it impossible to get to. For men, these places included, amongst other places, the insides of socks after you had worn the shoe. So, to access your money, you had to remove the shoes first, socks second and hand over the crumpled smelly bill or note to the unenthusiastic seller, just like my friend Oti did while treating the ravenous Goldilocks to a slice of Black Forest cake and cappuccino in a bakery in Westlands! (See my other blog, Moto Kama Pasi Ya Makaa. The Bajuni Love Affair That Never Was, Part II) The same Oti also taught me another way of carrying money and hiding it from prying fingers; one would wear boxer shorts with an inside pocket and put the money in the boxer shorts pockets and then wear a tight fitting pair of jeans or trousers. This would mean that one would have to undress you to get to the money. So, it was not surprising to see a lad in Gikomba unbuckle his belt, pull down his trousers a tad and then reach into his boxer shorts and pull out the crumpled note and hand it to the unenthusiastic seller, who by now was bombarded by various natural bodily scents! For the ladies, they would hide the money in their brassieres, stockings, inside biker shorts and other places that I shall not mention! So, payment in Gikomba was usually a sight to behold with people in different stages of undress, handing over smelly, crumpled notes! 

     After snagging a shirt and a suit from the bales at Gikomba market, it was time to go home. However, the chore of buying clothes in Gikomba involved burning a lot of calories. Since I had not eaten breakfast before heading out to Gikomba, I decided to pass by a ‘kiosk’, a hole in the wall eatery with budget friendly prices. The menu was very standard and I wanted to have tea and bread. Tea was ‘chai’ and a toast or piece of bread was either ‘tosti kavu’ if there was no margarine smeared on the bread, or ‘tosti badika’ if you wanted Blue Band margarine to be smeared, that is ‘bandika’ in Swahili. I wanted to splurge and treat myself to ‘tosti badika’ but I still had to take my suit to the dry cleaners, so ‘tosti kavu’ it was! These kiosks nickel and dime you for everything. The tea was also priced differently; there was ‘chai turugi’ or ‘chai strurungi’ which was tea without milk and sugar and then there was ‘chai maziwa’ which was tea with milk and ‘chai maziwa sukari’! So, I chose ‘chai maziwa’ and decided to convince myself that I did not need sugar in my tea. As you can tell, it is usually the people flom the sropes, I meant people from the slopes who ran this establishment and had misspelled one or two of the menu items. You should have seen the customers in that establishment! This was not a four star restaurant where the head waiter heartily welcomed you with warm towels. This was a place frequented by people who were very busy and did not have the time for luxurious greetings and accessories! Traders, vegetable sellers, pickpockets and policemen all converged to fill their bellies. No one had time to waste and they broke all the ‘table manners’ that had been carefully drilled into me when I was a small boy! Sweaty people were talking loudly whilst having pieces of ‘tosti badika’ in their mouths, using their mouths to cool the steaming hot tea, mixing foods that were not ordinarily mixed in one plate and loudly crunching and munching the food on offer! Once I was done, I dashed to the city center by ‘matatu’. 

     The suit had to be taken to the dry cleaners so as to get rid of the moldy second-hand clothes smell that clung to the clothes like a tick on a cow! Very few dry cleaners could eradicate the pungent smell. There was only one place to take a second hand suit to; White Rose VIP dry cleaners at the National Bank building at Aga Khan walk. Once the suit was dry cleaned there, the lurid smell was washed away and the suit was now suitable for human fashion! The shirt had to be washed too. As I wrote in my earlier blog, (Moto Kama Pasi Ya Makaa Part 11) washing clothes in Kenya was no mean feat. It was a backbreaking exercise that involved collecting water, sitting down, scrubbing, rinsing and drying clothes in the sun! You would hang the clothes using wooden pegs that would pinch you if you were not careful. You also needed the help of the sun. If the sun did not come out and shine brightly, the clothes would not dry for days. So, each day would be spent hanging the clothes in the morning and unhanging clothes in the evening. Sometimes, the dogs in the household or neighborhood would pull the clothes from the clothesline! If you lived in those overcrowded flats, you had to be hawk-eyed and you had to be on the lookout for neighbors and outsiders who would purloin your favorite pair of jeans; or ng*tha! The weather forecasters in Kenya were not too accurate and would wrongly forecast the weather. There was a particular weather forecaster called Nguata Francis who used to engage in guesswork whilst predicting the weather. This meteorologist was more like an astrologist! He would boldly claim that the weather the next day would be fantastic and it would be sunny all day, only for a heavy downpour to drench the city and countryside. On the day when he would predict rain and thunderstorms, the sun would shine all day with nary a cloud in the sky! So, sometimes, you would foolishly follow Nguata Francis’s weather prediction and you would get burned! You would head out to the city center after hanging your clothes out to dry and while in the city, it would rain cats and dogs!  You would dash back to salvage the situation but it would be too late. The clothes would be dripping wet and usually, a dastardly wind would blow some of them into the muddy ground! This would force you to repeat the entire process of washing clothes. Eat, sleep, slave, repeat! Some lasses would outsmart the situation and blow dry the clothes. For the lads, they would sometimes place the clothes beneath the mattress to speed up the drying process.

 

     So, I washed the shirt and fortunately it dried without incident. I then went to pick up the suit from White Rose dry cleaners. Wow, the moldy second hand clothes ‘mitumba’ smell was gone! It looked like I had purchased the suit at the nearby Abdulla Fazal and Sons on Mama Ngina Street in Nairobi or Little Red Unmistakably, both clothing stores whose prices were exorbitant and one suit could buy a late model midsize sedan! I had the suit, tie, shirt and shoes ready.

     With bated breath, I waited for the impending meeting between me and the American interrogators from the American embassy…

Money, alcohol, politics and women, is what shall make men kill each other! (‘pesa, pombe, siasa na wanawake, ndio zitafanya wanaume wauane’)

 

        *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.

    Vipi boss? How are you doing? I saw that the Kenyans swept the London Marathon man! So proud to be Kenyan! I am sure you had your Kenyan flag flying high in the streets as Kipchoge, Kipsang and Kimetto passed the Tower of London on Tower Hill! Triple K!  A 1-2-3-4 Kenyan men’s finish! These descendants of the Orkoiyot (Supreme Chief of the Nandi community in Kenya) Koitalel Arap Samoei, son of Kimnyole, run fast! I remember when Samuel Wanjiru won the London Marathon in 2009 and people from Central Kenya were enthralled by his victory! Later on, after his sudden demise, a man called Elijah Chebon came out of the woodwork and claimed that Wanjiru was indeed his biological son! That somehow explained why Samuel had the last name ‘Wanjiru’, which is a female name in the Kikuyu community and did not have a male surname, usually one’s father’s name, as is the norm in his culture. When Chebon’s photograph appeared in the Kenyan newspapers, people were shocked. He looked exactly like Wanjiru! There was no need for unnecessary and expensive DNA tests! No wonder this Wanjiru was that fast! He combined the Kalenjin and Kikuyu communities’ DNA and his Kalenjin running DNA was dominant! Sadly, it is alleged that Wanjiru aka ‘Chebon junior’ died whilst dabbling in the exhilarating chase of the skirt! He was a very wealthy successful young man, leading some to conclude that some unscrupulous people were after his money. Rumor has it that he also imbibed a tad too much! I am afraid that as a yute, I might have been guilty of imbibing just like Wanjiru…

       The frothy Ruaraka waters from East African Breweries were usually out of reach for a lot of yute. Tusker, Pilsner Lager and Guinness Stout were drunk at the beginning of the month. I was and still is a fan of Pilsner Lager, whose slogan was ‘imara kama simba’, which is Swahili for ‘strong like a lion’! If my memory serves me correctly, the Tanzanian version’s slogan was ‘hunguruma kama simba’, that is ‘roars like a lion’! There was/is nothing as relaxing as singing along to Bob Marley’s reggae song ‘I’m gonna be iron, like a lion, in Zion’ whilst quaffing a Pilsner Lager! The current Pilsner slogan ‘King of Bold’ quite doesn’t capture it. After the third day of the month, after the euphoria of having being paid or receiving ‘pocket money’, as we called the monthly stipends we received from our ‘overbearing’ parents, was replaced by the reality of living below the poverty line, other cheap drinks were sought to drown out the misery, to make the days go faster till the next end month. One of these cheap drinks was a concoction called ‘Safari Cane’. The name seems to deceptively indicate that, maybe, there was the use of sugar cane to make the drink. Safari Cane is basically jet fuel that has been re-packaged and then surreptitiously branded as a spirit. This Safari Cane (and its cousin Kenya Cane) can fly a plane non-stop from Los Angeles, city of Angels, to Sydney, Australia, land of the Kangaroo! This is a drink that Mr. Mututho, the dreaded head of the Kenya alcohol abuse governing body NACADA, should look into! I wish the Kenya Bureau of Standards would exhaustively test some of these liquors that bear its stamp and are sold to unsuspecting Kenyans, even if it means taking a sample overseas. It seems like no one believes the Kenya government chemists and all samples of dubious association that need analysis are flown overseas! When you drink Safari Cane, your breath stinks to high heaven and the morning after, you can only recall activities up to 11.37pm the previous night while the whole outing went on until 7.00 am the following morning! The hangover you get from Safari Cane makes you want to chop your head off, put it in the freezer for a few hours like Idi Amin, former buffoonish president of Uganda, used to do to the heads of his adversaries and then put it back on your body to alleviate the throbbing headache! No wonder people who drink these jet fuels have no worms man. The spirits scorch the worms completely! I suspect that this potent drink killed off quite a few brain cells of mine and it is a miracle that I can still read and write!

     Other than the liquor that you can buy at the store, there are other liquors brewed in dens and homesteads. These jet fuels masquerading as home-made spirits or gins are sometimes doctored. Formaldehyde is added to give them an extra kick! Yes, the embalming fluid! However, sometimes, the results are disastrous. The chemist mixing the formaldehyde needs to follow strict instructions, otherwise the concoction turns deadly. We have all read the stories where men and women, having congregated to unwind and somehow numb their reality for just an hour or two, imbibe the laced up drink only to start losing their eyesight. They then drunkedly remark that ‘hata mkizima mataa, bado tutaendelea kunywa!’ (Even if the establishment switches off the lights, the drinking shall still continue unabated). These unfortunate folks don’t realize that a string of unfortunate events is unfolding; initially, the people imbibing the brew lose their eyesight and then lose consciousness and eventually, their lives! Very sad story I tell you. However, Kenyans have short memories; once the same, or different den that sells illicit liquor opens up, they troop there while their comrades’ graves are still fresh and commiserate over their unfortunate friends’ untimely deaths whilst sipping the same nefarious brew! Part of the problem is that the liquor is cheap, with one shot-glass going for as little as Kshs 10 (US 12.5 cents) which is why the brewers coined the name ‘kumi kumi’, ‘ten ten’, to advertise its cost! Kenyans never really learn! Is that why they keep electing the same politicians who con them every five years during the electioneering period and disappear once they have bagged the political positions? Probably!

     

     If you recall the satirical but truthful song ‘Pesa, pombe, siasa na wanawake’ by the Kenyan rap duo Mashifta, the song asserts that ‘pesa, pombe, siasa na wanawake, ndio zitafanya wanaume wauane’. (Money, alcohol, politics and women, is what shall make men kill each other) I didn’t kill anybody then but my and other youths’ lives revolved around money and the lack thereof, alcohol, politics and women!

     I had introduced you to Oti the ‘ambassador’ before. He had dabbled in the Habesha world and seemed to be driving the Ethiopian lasses crazy. Then, one day, out of nowhere, we saw him with a dark-skinned chocolate complexioned belle. We thought that the lass accompanying him was just a distraction, or rather, what people call a ‘side chick’, ‘mpango wa kando’. No one bothered to find that out but in subsequent meetings, he appeared to be in the company of the same lady. Tongues began to wag and the grapevine was ripe with innuendo. Whatever happened to the Ethiopian lass? Initially, when he knew that Ethiopian ladies would be present at a particular venue, he would avoid it like the plague. I approached him while we were knocking back a cold drink in an establishment called Choices in Nairobi. Oti confided to me that he had changed his tastes and he, like the prodigal son, had come back home to our local maidens. He explained that, whatever he had been going through with the Ethiopian lasses was a phase and he thought that the phase was done. I enquired further and Oti reluctantly dropped a bombshell. The Ethiopians were not as well endowed as our Kenyan girls! Our Kenyan girls were more curvaceous, voluptuous and bodacious compared to the descendants of the Queen of Sheba! They were the real callipygian queens! ‘Have you ever seen a well endowed Ethiopian?’ he asked me. I could not recall ever having seen any. He stated that, he needed a ‘brick house’, as the Commodores called these women whose measurements are 36-24-36! These mightily stacked ladies who were built like an Amazon and let everything all hang out without holding anything back! He added that he needed a lady whose derrière shook by itself without being shaken by the owner. An ass that had a mind of its own. He had a name for such an ass; he referred to it as ‘Mmomonyoko wa Adongo!’ (The ‘shaking’ of Adongo) This term was a play to the well known term ‘Mmomonyoko wa udongo’, soil erosion. I hear the yute nowadays are referring to such a behind as ‘Tetemesha na Safaricom’ (shake with Safaricom phone company) and when they are scoring ‘points’ while chatting up a girl, they are calling it ‘bonga points’, bonga, which is the Kiswahili word for ‘talk or chat’.

      There was a gentleman called Kuria Wa Kanyingi back in the day. This was when Kenya was governed by the ruling party KANU. The late Kuria Wa Kanyingi was a sycophant of the KANU party. Once, some people questioned his allegiance to the ruling party KANU, which was the baba na mama (father and mother) of our country. This was when people were fleeing the ruling party in droves to join the party called NARC, which later finally dethroned the powerful president Moi’s party from power! This party, KANU, had been the governing party since independence and its defeat was unfathomable until the emergence of the NARC Rainbow Coalition. During a ‘harambee’ as they call funds drives in Kenya, he stood by the podium to reaffirm his royalty, sorry, loyalty to ‘Baba wa Taifa’, the President of Kenya, and his undying devotion to the ruling party. He castigated his enemies and told them off! He claimed that, if he cut his finger, the blood that would flow would be none other than KANU blood! Since this man was from my county, Kiambu county, he would interchange his letters, ‘r’ and ‘l’ whilst adding the letter ‘n’ when not necessary and omitting it when it was necessary. ‘Ata nikinjikata kindore yagu, ire damu itatililika ni ya KANU tu motukubu lais!’ he thundered. (Even if I cut my finger, the only blood that shall flow shall be that of KANU your excellency the president) His allegiance left no ambiguity. He was not a watermelon, green on the outside and red on the inside. So, Oti had to prove his allegiance to the dark-skinned ladies that he had ‘rejected’ some time back. He, like Kuria Wa Kanyingi before him, claimed that the blood that was flowing in his veins was the blood of dark-skinned maidens. He claimed that it was just a phase he was going through then and he ‘begged for forgiveness’ from the dark skinned ladies! His apology now reminds me of the apology that our current president Uhuru Kenyatta gave Kenyans after he claimed that ‘dark forces’ had misled him and he had now seen the light and was ready to be president! These politicians! Oti had been misled by the dark forces of Abyssinia and had now seen the light and was ready to come back to the fold! He now wanted the company of ‘Adhiambo sianda’, the girl named Adhiambo with a nice voluptuous behind! In retrospect, I see why our darker skinned ladies use harsh chemicals to ‘lose the tint’ as Larry Madowo of NTV and other Kenyans call the lightening of the skin using bleaching creams. It is sad that the standards of beauty are falsely determined by the color hue of one’s skin! As stated above, this was just a phase and we are back to the ‘the blacker the berry the sweeter the juice’ fold, where we truly belong!

        American culture really shaped us as youths in Kenya. When we were growing up, we were bombarded by the chic American sitcoms of ‘The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air’, ‘Martin’, ‘Moesha’, ‘The Bernie Mac Show’ and many more sitcoms that had African Americans living it up, living large! Boy, didn’t we want to talk, walk and have fun like them! Back in the day, on Sunday at 7.00pm, you had to be home, glued to the TV set so that you couldn’t  be ‘passed’ by the ‘latest’ American fashion, ‘swag’ and ‘lingo’, as the ‘Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ reruns were aired. The reruns could have been months or even years old but that did not matter. What mattered is that we were watching flamboyant black youths dominating television for the first time it seemed and it was an exhilarating sensation! The streets were devoid of youth when the teen heartthrobs graced the screens! Muggers and petty robbers also watched the sitcom, so that they would verse themselves in the latest fashion trends. You need to know what to steal and its value, you know… I remember ‘Fresh Prince’, Will Smith, wearing a black leather hat/cap with a metal ‘X’ emblazoned on it and adorning a pair of Air Jordans in one of the episodes. This ‘X’ signified Malcolm X, I think. A few weeks later, I saw youth from ‘Babylon’, the wealthy folks’ abodes, wear a similar ‘X’ hat and Air Jordan shoes! These youths were those whose parents were and still are ‘private developers’, wealthy tycoons who appear regularly in newspapers in Kenya after having grabbed a prime public plot or two and appeared regularly in the Goldenberg and Anglo-Leasing scandal exposes. Even the proverbial chameleon couldn’t describe the turning green with envy that was taking place at that time. Rich girls also wore similar stuff to what ‘Hillary Banks’ (Karyn Parsons) and ‘Ashley Banks’ (Tatyana Ali) wore in the show and just like the ‘Chero’ dress worn by one of the Californian Callipygian queens a decade or so later, (refer to my earlier blog, ‘2015 Las Vegas Sevens Rugby. Battle Of The Callipygian Queens’ in the menu) dress queens were crowned and dethroned at the very drop of a Cross Colours dress or jacket! Ya Dig! Then, you had to ‘harvest points’ as we used to call the sweet nothings that the sleek gentlemen whispered to the lovely lasses on screen, to ‘unleash’ them on the local Kenyan lasses when we were in high school. The problem arose if the said local lass or lasses had watched the particular ‘Fresh Prince’ episode which you had ‘harvested’ your ‘maneno matamu yanayomtoa nyako pangoni’. (Sweet words that pull the girl from her lair)

    My (and many other acne-riddled yute) crush was Nia Long. I remember when Nia Long first came onscreen in one of the ‘Fresh Prince’ episodes sporting her then famous short perm hairstyle. It looked like an award-winning artist had painstakingly painted her head with glossy black paint. People in Nairobi are fast! By Friday that week, all fashion conscious girls and even women, having masterfully gleaned the perm hairstyle from the sitcom, had trooped to the various salons in the city to have their hairdressers recreate that hairstyle, often with varying degrees of success. The Nia Long perm was not easy to recreate. The proper mixing techniques of those harsh chemicals had to be followed. There was a luscious maiden, a neighbor of ours, who tried to replicate that Nia Long style on herself but the salon she went to had the wrong ‘chemist’ who either mixed those chemicals wrong or used inferior chemicals. On Friday she was stunning and straddled the whole ‘estate’, as we called our communities in Nairobi, with the certitude and aura of a peacock! However, Saturday proved to be fatal. The hair started falling off and she was compelled to get a quick ‘kipara-ngoto’, a completely shaven head, that replaced the previous stunning Nia Long perm and promptly exposed her oblong head shape! She quickly purchased a wig to cover her shaven head as she waited impatiently for her hair to grow back to normal! The Nia Long look involved adorning farmer jeans, basically bib and brace overalls or ‘dungarees’ as we called them and a tube top, which in Kenya was affectionately known as a ‘tumbo-cut’. The tumbo-cut showed off a lass’s navel and abs, her ‘tumbo’ or stomach, while also enhancing a lady’s svelte figure! To wear a ‘tumbo-cut’, your ‘stomach’ or abs had to be as flat as a pancake! Some ladies would erroneously underestimate the flatness of their ‘stomachs’, leading to a few hapless wardrobe malfunction episodes! Sometimes, especially at nightclubs, ladies would naughtily unbutton one or two of the side buttons to expose the lacy racy ng*tha underneath! This look was all the rage in Nairobi! 

     In addition, the lady’s head, more specifically, her forehead had to be suitable for the Nia Long hairstyle. Ladies for millennia have stealthily hidden their oblong craniums behind hair, leaving the actual shape to the imagination. There was a lady who had a ‘Rihanna forehead’. This was before having a forehead like Rihanna’s became acceptable or even fashionable. The lass decided to try that Nia Long hairstyle! Lawdavmercy! The forehead was exposed. Needless to say, she abandoned that hairstyle for the more ‘acceptable’ ‘Hillary’ curly kit hairstyle, which covered her protruding forehead but she had to wait a bit for the hair to grow! Yes, the ‘Hillary’ curly kit hairstyle! Women sat for hours under contraptions that looked like ‘old sparky’, the electric chairs used back in the day and just like the inverted metal bowl placed on the head of the condemned, a glass or plastic bowl was placed over the heads of the ladies and the hair processors and steamers ‘cooked’ their nappy hair to a slimy, curly texture! The ladies would look fabulous once they stepped out of the salon! However, there was a downside to the ‘curly kit’ hairstyle; the harsh chemicals used would smell a mile away, a putrid smell of cooked hair and chemicals that are known to the State Of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm! You also did not want to encounter a lady with curly kit when it rained! They ran around the city like headless chicken! You see, the chemicals used were like oil in that they did not mix with water! Nairobi ladies covered their coveted curly hair with anything that looked waterproof. They would use plastic bags, paper bags, shower caps, newspapers and anything and everything on sight, in addition to umbrellas, to protect the curls from the rain. Ironically, many would be drenched from neck to toe after a downpour, but their hair would be as dry as a bone! They wanted to avoid what was called a ‘retouch’, where more dangerous chemicals were applied and cooked into the hair! Men suffered silently for a long time as they lied to their significant others about the hair and its lack of smell! Rumor has it that, since ladies had to wear shower caps to bed to prevent the slimy chemicals from being smeared all over the pillow and bedsheets, many men were prevented from enjoying carnal relations with their women as once the women donned the shower cap, the copulation window was closed. It is fair to say that men were quite happy to see that hairstyle fade into history! Some men actually took heed and got the curly kit hairstyle, recreating the Michael Jackson look or the more nuanced Al B Sure look where they combined the fade with a few curls here and there!

     After watching these actors on TV, where would one get what they were wearing? In came a lad called Felo* to fill the void. (*name changed to protect his identity)  Felo was a master con-artist-cum entrepreneur who lived in ‘Maada’, Madaraka Estate, in Nairobi West, close to Strathmore University. His mother was a regular traveler to the U.S and Dubai and he quickly became the liaison between his mum and broke but desperate yute like yours truly who needed to wear the latest ‘Fresh Prince’ gear but did not have the financial means to do so. Felo had two types of merchandise; the original gear which his mum had brought from the U.S and the ‘originals’ that came from a nondescript sweatshop in god-knows-where. Felo initially had very good original stuff such as Tommy Hilfiger, FUBU, Avirex, Karl Kani and Enyce but greed got the better of him. He started having more fake stuff than original which he would swear was original! ‘Mgema akisifiwa tembo hulitia maji’, if the palm wine tapper is praised, he dilutes the palm wine with water,’ the old Swahili sages quipped. They were not wrong. Felo’s good name quickly became tarnished like the Greek economy! Felo used to drive a VW Golf! Yes, it was his parents’ Golf but he seemed to have sole possession of it. He was ‘mobile’ as we used to refer to lads and lasses who had access to private automobiles, unlike the rest of us who duly used public transportation. This ‘mobility’ separated the ‘wheat from the chaff’ and many lasses were naturally drawn to a lad who was ‘mobile’, much to our chagrin. Due to Felo’s largesse, he had snagged a mixed-race lass, who we used to call ‘half-castes’ or colloquially as a ‘point 5’, a ‘pointee/pointii’. This light-skinned belle was from ‘Laavi’, Lavington, a leafy surburb in Babylon with walls higher than the Great Wall Of China! Snagging a lass from that particular abode was next to impossible! How or where would you have access to such a lass? In regular neighborhoods, we stood outside our gates and engaged in catcalling lasses as they walked by. In Lavington, everyone drove a sleek German automobile and had you tried to stand outside a fortress to catcall, you would have been chased away by a mean looking security guard who had a well fed growling Alsatian dog with him! But Felo snagged this lass! When not in the company of his ‘main squeeze’, his official girlfriend, he was sometimes seen in the philandering company of his ‘side chick’ who was also of the ‘pointee’ kind! He was truly a Casanova! Boy, how we worshipped Felo. He never bought any alcohol anywhere as you needed to be in his good books if you needed the latest American fashion gear! Wow! Those days man, those days!

     The great merchant Felo introduced me to the lovely world of boxer briefs. Before then, the only ng*tha style I had worn was the regular ‘Y’ ng*tha. The one that looks like a toddler’s diaper. Felo brings in these boxer briefs; just like those you saw on MTV! Felo had about 5 different labels of boxer briefs. Calvin Kleins, Karl Kanis, Tommy Hilfiger, Dolce and Gabbana and last and least, Jordache. The price of ONE Calvin Klein ng*tha was more than Kshs 2,000 (US$ 25) which was close to the monthly salary of a housemaid marooned in the boondocks back in the day! I haggled with Felo for a Calvin Klein ng*tha but my pockets were too shallow. As the Kenyan rapper Rabbit aka Kaka Sungura raps in his song ‘Ligi Soo’, I had not yet got to the big leagues, I was still in the minor leagues, ‘bado nilikuwa ligi ndogo’, unlike those who could afford Calvin Klien boxer briefs, who were in the major leagues, ‘wako ligi soo’! So I settled on the Jordache! The Jordache boxer brief wasn’t cheap either; it cost something like Kshs 800 (US$ 10) or something to that effect. I did not have the entire Kshs 800, so I gave him half of it, Kshs 400 (US$ 5) and promised to bring the rest the following week. After hustling for a whole week, I piled up enough Kshs 20 bills to present to Felo. When I went to his house, I assuredly met Felo! Beaming and with Kshs 400, I bought my first boxer brief! I had ‘arrived’! I asked Felo if I could use the bathroom to ‘pima’, try out the ng*tha to check if it would fit! I was shelling out a lot of money and needed to get it right! I went to the bathroom, trying hard to avoid the gaze of Felo’s ‘pointee’ girlfriend who was inserting an original CD pulled from an original CD case into an original Sony CD disc changer player! The gods are truly unfair. How could some have so much and some so little? I happily put on the ng*tha and Felo, without knocking, opened the bathroom door. Henceforward, all the girls would pull down their unmentionables for me once they saw the Jordache boxer brief, he assured me! The sheepish teenager in me agreed and off with my ng*tha I went! The following Sunday, I met Felo in ‘Carni’, the Carnivore restaurant during a ‘soul’ session where they played soul music from back in the day. This discotheque was also a place where you went to get noticed! To get to the Carnivore, we had to either board a ‘matatu’, a minibus that would ferry us from the city center, or if you knew a bloke who somehow had a pickup truck, you would hop in the back with 6 or more lads and hang on for dear life as the excited driver, with the lasses in the front cabin with him obviously, sped through Lang’ata Road so as to get there before 9.00 pm! Entrance to the Carnivore on Sunday night was free before 9.00 pm and Kshs 200, I think, after 9.00 pm. As you have seen, Kshs 200 was part payment for a boxer brief! Time was of the essence! That night, Felo repeatedly asked me to pull up my shirt so that he could show other ‘wateja’,  prospective customers the Jordache ng*tha that was within reach for the ma sufferer yute! I felt like a male underwear model that night! Those guys you see on the billboards advertising designer underwear! After Felo clinched a number of lucrative orders that night, he, accompanied by  some 4 ‘pointee’ lasses and two other stunning darker skinned girls who you knew were daughters of private developers and went to international schools, reveled the night away whilst drinking expensive cocktails of ‘dawa’ (The Carnivore’s signature drink which is a mix of vodka, lime juice, honey, and a little sparkling water, often with sugar around the rim of the glass.) before heading out. Monied lads and lasses would park their ‘tricked out’ cars at strategic parking spots outside the Carnivore in the weekly youthful version of Concours d’Elegance. Felo would park his Golf at the entrance of the Carnivore, put in an original CD into the original car CD player and blast his speakers to the delight of the ‘pointees’, who cooed and touched him as R Kelly crooned through the speakers. We watched, green with envy as he showed off, knowing that our imminent ride back home was either at the back of a pickup truck or ‘matatu’! Boy, was I glad to be Felo’s friend! Felo used to wear the latest fashion clothes to the Carnivore and people would ‘buy’ them in the club by booking them. They would go to his place the next day and pay for clothes that he had worn the night before in the club! That’s just how much in demand his fashion clothes were then. I was such an imbecile for saving for weeks if not months to buy a ng*tha! If my mum heard that I had bought a ng*tha for that amount, she would have skinned me alive!!! This stupidity on my part sends shivers down my spine, but youthful I was, youthful I was…

     Once you bought your clothes from Felo, you had to watch out for yute who would forcibly relieve you of your rare clothing items! These mean faced yute had developed the habit of taking stuff away from unsuspecting people walking innocently minding their own business. They used a tactic called ‘kupiga ngeta’. This is in essence a choke-hold. Variations of ‘ngeta’ exist but the main aim is to constrict your jugular vein in a style similar to a boa constrictor in order to render you vulnerable and helpless due to lack of blood to your brain. Sometimes, they use their bare arms to clamp your neck; sometimes, they get deadlier; they stick a piece of wood or metal pipe in their long-sleeved shirts and choke the diving daylights out of you! As one ruffian is choking you, the other co-conspirators are simultaneously going through your pockets and stripping you of your clothes and valuables! This happens very quickly as the victim is gasping for precious air. We got tired of their shenanigans. The rabble rousers were warned that serious consequences would befall them if they didn’t desist from relieving people of their valuables. The youths refused to hearken to the words of wisdom. We devised a plan reminiscent of the great warrior Hannibal. We sent out one of our yute who was to act as a decoy ‘ngeta’ victim. He would walk with some flashy American-themed accessories which included a pair of Nike basketball shoes, a New York Yankees baseball cap and a hoodie. We rightly predicted that the thievish yute would see our vulnerable friend, try and rob him and get away. So, our plan was to have about ten of our crew walking ‘aimlessly’ behind our decoy yute member, and twenty of our own in front of the decoy member. We were to space ourselves far enough from our decoy so as not to arouse suspicion. Our decoy member walked along an alley, seemingly innocuous of the three or so yute that had noticed his clothes, shoes and cap. They beckoned to each other and followed our decoy member; slowly at first and then quickened their pace. They quickly cornered our member and started stripping him of his clothes. He let out a cry, which was a sign for the ten or so of our crew members to come forward and chase the pilfering goons. When they saw the youths chasing them from behind, the goons took off in the only way available to them: Forward. This was the chance we had been waiting for. A few of us were armed with a rubber whip which was and still is fearfully known as a ‘nyahunyo’. This sjambok inflicted instant pain on the flesh of anyone unfortunate to come into contact with it. We came out of nowhere and cornered the goons! ‘Shwap, shwap, shwap’, the whips lashed out. We whipped them into submission and their cries of mercy went unheeded. These urchins had been terrorizing innocent victims and people knew that and felt that it was time to teach the yute a lesson. ‘Ili iwe funzo!’ Luckily for us, this was the time before worldstar and our deeds were not recorded on video using smartphones. These whippings were permanently embedded in the minds of the ruffians, who wore hangdog looks as we finally allowed them to escape. We never heard of anyone undergoing the harrowing experience of ‘ngeta’ in that part of the neighborhood again.

     My brother, let me head off, I’ll hit you up later so that you can regal me with stories of London! Be safe!