There’s a neighbourhood in Kenya’s capital, a little-big place shoved somewhere behind an infectious disease hospital. It is the butt crack to the Mbagathi Way and Kibera Laini Saba cheeks – a little slice of middle class Kenya that gives the residents of Africa’s biggest slum something to aspire to. Ngumo, they call it.
A road runs in a circle, separating the classes because castes are never allowed to mix. In the inside of the circle sit townhouses; three and four bedroom houses with stairs on the inside. Stone walls keep the riff-raff out of eighth-of-an-acre plots in which the houses sit bordered by patches of grass and trees.
On the outside of the circle, tin roofs and tin walls cluster together less than spitting distance from each other. “Riff-raff” tend to stick to this side of the circle; they dart in and out of the tiny mabati rooms, some going to school, others to work. Kids jump over sewage puddles as the friendly neighbourhood drunk pees against someone’s wall – but it could be anyone’s wall, because on this side of the circle nothing is ever really anyone’s.
In that circle lives are created and lost. Babies are born and shriek their sadness at leaving the warm womb to be plopped in this cold, cold world. Old folks croak with their skins crumpled by all the trouble and joy that they’ve accumulated in their folds.
When the sun rises, it shines on everyone. Once upon a time, God kept the sun from shining on the rich and let the poor Israelites feel its warmth back when the Pharaoh refused to let his people go. Here, he couldn’t be bothered. What’s good enough to be an alarm clock to the little kid sleeping next to a trash pile is also good enough to remind super-mom to put sunscreen on her nose before heading out for her power walk around the estate.
When I was a little boy, a time not too long ago when the internet had just checked into the country but social and media were not words put together in the same sentence, I stood at the edge of the circle lost between two worlds. My hair still smelled of amniotic fluid but it quickly lost that scent to the wafting cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes from the million and one matatus that clogged up the road. I stood on the edge but on the correct side. There was a gate between the estate I lived in and the cacophony of madness and ambition that characterises any informal settlement.
My folks had done pretty well for themselves. For a pair that had started by going to school sans meals quite often to putting their kids up in a middle-class neighbourhood, they had worked themselves past the skin of their teeth.
Of course, back then that didn’t matter to me. As long as I had my three-a-day meals and a good book, my life was sorted. It didn’t matter where it all came from.
The beauty of being a child is in the lack of worry. I don’t think there is any kid that has stress lines on their forehead. Maybe newborns. I hear newborns are pretty folded up. But those aren’t stress lines; nine months is a little long to be swimming in someone’s fluids.
Outside the estate gate was this little shop that had everything you could want. It puzzled me that we had to go trudging to a supermarket every month when Maasai’s shop had just as much of what we needed as the friendly but far-away mega mart. And, he didn’t bother anyone with signs all over the place saying it was all under one roof.
Maasai. We never got his name. He provided so many people with so many essentials and I can bet that only he and his parents knew his real name. Had he seen an Ian Fleming book, he’d probably be at embassy parties introducing himself as, “Sai. Maasai.”
But that is beside the point. Once a month, all us kids would be bundled into the car to take a trip to the supermarket. Back then Uchumi hadn’t seen as many losses as they have now. Ngong’ hyper was the place to be. In my eyes, it was the biggest retail space on the planet. Aisles went on and on with rows of shelves stacking so high my neck ached when I tried to see the top one. And they had everything under the sun; antacids to zucchinis.
We’d have a ball in there. My brother and I would race trolleys. Mom would look at this and that reading all the ingredients and window shop her heart out. My sister would be grumpy in the back. It was way before Apple had the iPhone shipped this side south of the Sahara; she couldn’t just ignore us and Snapbook a friend the whole time.
When we’d traversed the vast landscape of the African supermarket, we’d leave with a boot full of paper bags. We were never to return again until the next month.
Back at the estate gate, I watched people struggle balancing kids and shopping bags in their laps. They forced into a single seat one adult two children and half of Nakumatt’s inventory. Miraculously, no one fell through the window when someone breathed in. But I just couldn’t understand why the dads didn’t just drive them to the supermarket.
There is another beautiful thing about being a child: everyone is the same. In my mind, coz my folks had a car, it was a right for everyone else’s to have one too.
Communist thinking at its best over there. Maybe the USSR had it right. Maybe they saw that a system where everyone has the same thing as everyone else would reduce the hatred and jealousy and the deep-seated inequality that is the product of a capitalistic set up. Maybe they like me were naive enough to imagine that everyone should have a car. Or maybe we can work something out that works for everyone.
For some reason I keep remembering a story I heard back in those days. It made no sense to me then. Back in the day, around the 1700s, I think, the French were going through some pretty serious food shortage. A princess was riding in the back of her carriage through the streets. She looked out of her window and saw so many people holding their arms up to her. “Why are those people raising their hands at me?” She asked her carriage driver.
“They have nothing to eat, not even bread.” He answered.
“Well then,” she puzzled back, “why not let them eat cake?”
I walked in and she was on the chair, a pen dangling from her fingers, its cap resting on her lower lip which was unburdened by any lipstick; they were just slightly red from her chewing on them. Her mind was in the document she was reading. Studying for her papers seemed like a hobby to her. She had so much focus. I, on the other hand, couldn’t stand to read class work for more than fifteen minutes at a time. Which is why I was pissed as hell; because I hadn’t read as much as I should have and ended up being shafted by a paper.
She waved at me, absently. Her mind still focused on those Psychology notes. I got angry. Mostly because I hadn’t eaten all day and was starving which turns me into a steam-from-the-ears rage monster, but also because in that moment I wasn’t worth a hello to her.
So, I stepped back outside to take a breath. “Calm down, dude.” I told myself. “You, calm down!” I replied. “She’s busy trying to pass her exam and you are getting pissed at that?” “She’s always busy.”
That’s a statement I’ll not soon forget. She is always busy. It got me thinking about how I live my life, how we all live our lives. I’m usually hunched behind a keyboard, or in front of a screen editing this, writing that, designing the other… my ears are plugged with earphones banging out some obscure Hugo track or blaring dance tunes. I walk around with my eyes to the ground, a hoodie covering my peripheral vision and my ears plugged. In matatus, I’m on my phone reading about this photography technique or that writing method.
I’m always busy. But I always have time for her. When she’s around, most of it stops until she falls asleep. I try to listen, to talk, to engage, to learn, to fall for her all over again. Every single time I see her, I want to look into her big brown doll eyes, and just live there hanging from the edge of her pupils like the kid on the Dreamworks logo. I’ve never wanted to do that. Not even to the one I proposed to a few years ago.
So when I am worth nothing more than a cursory glance and a flippant wave, I get pissed off. Call me selfish, self centred, egotistic, call me whatever you want. But at least you’d have spent a few microseconds deciding which insult best suits what I am right now.
I’m not one to pick fights. So I stewed in my anger sat down and just chilled. I had just done my last paper as an undergraduate student, so I had something to smile about. And that I did. Until it was about time for her to leave. She had on this dress; a yellow affair that I had never seen her in before. It’s hem flirted with her knees. It’s straps showing just the right amount of shoulder skin. And her arms out in the open. She was enchanting.
I stared. She noticed. She ignored it. Usually she makes a big deal about me staring. I don’t do it all the time, just often enough to seem creepy. This time there was no playful retort, or smart telling off. It was just silence. She looked at me – right at me, deep inside, and just turned away.
There’s loads to say about when women stop caring. Nothing is as potent as when she doesn’t give a rat’s ass what you are doing. That’s when you know your goose is cooked. The world is full of men getting an earful from their WAGs for stumbling home smelling like Sharon-from-accounting’s perfume, or for leaving their socks on the dining table again. These men hate being told off like that. Being shouted at by anyone is annoying, Shouting is ugly. Veins pop, eyes bulge and neck muscle protrude. Spittle flies like bullets in 1944 Europe, and fists are as plenty as turboprops in the Blitzkrieg. Sometimes you get hit by a snot bomb. It is not pretty.
But after a moment, we smile. Despite having to bear loud noises and angry eyes, we know that she still cares.
As a man, I am nothing more than ego covered in skin. And that means I am the be all and end all of all conversations. Being ignored irks me. It burns a hole through my skin from the inside. More than that, it pisses me off. I make myself a nuisance just to get some sort of reaction. I am, sad to say, an attention hog.
But this time, I wasn’t angry anymore. In the course of life, there are moments when one feels like they’ve transcended the physical and had communion with something greater than all of us. Some people have that when they are high off their tits on psychedelics. Others know it when they see their kids for the first time. Me, I feel God through words. Or rather through the lack of them. As she stood at the door rummaging for her keys, I looked at her in that yellow dress and couldn’t say anything. I had nothing to say. So I stared. And I saw that the Christians have it correct; this woman was made in God’s own image.
Universities are thought to be hallowed halls with students and lecturers striding along with purpose in their step, doing mental arithmetic and coming up with theories and theses that pick explain everything that happens under the sun. On a bad day, unis are quite close to that. We call those days exam season. Difference is, it isn’t new theories that we are exploring in our minds; it’s the old ones that we just crammed into our heads and can’t wait to unload.
Don’t you dare think that because someone has seen the inside of university lecture rooms they are smarter than you. They aren’t. They are just smartasses. The most intelligent folk on this planet of ours are the guys who hustle the day away in the streets. These guys can turn a bean from Jack and cow hide into a Gordon Ramsey-esque five course meal. I may have exaggerated a bit. They are pretty nifty with the little they get though, that’s what I’m trying to say.
That said universities have their fair share of intelligentia. Those books on the merits of phytoplankton to sediment flora in the euphotic zones of Mediterranean biomes don’t write themselves. Those are pretty dope things to read on, and even cooler to understand. Then there are the social brains. The Dr. Wandia Njoyas and the Prof. Obonyos. These are the earthquakes that start tsunamis on transparency, equality and communication excellence.
So in recognition of that fact, I decided to listen to these teachers more. Maybe I’d pick something up from them. It isn’t high school anymore where I’d wait to be force fed the formula for calculating the income tax of fictional individuals. Speaking of high school, it is an absolute wonder that my classmates and I made it out of there with anything more than the first 11 of Arsenal FC in our heads. It’s not that we were bad students. We just didn’t give two hoots about academics for most of our time there. I had this classmate called Morris. He was a Rendille guy; the first of his kind that I had met. I wasn’t the first Lunje he met though. Tall, curly soft hair – it was a different time then. A man could touch another man’s hair and not be gay.
Morris was the epitome of a broker. He knew everyone, and was Nokia to them (connecting people) – at a fee of course. Usually, I got him to bring me monos to send to the canteen for my soda and bread. His fee was a couple of smokies and a Sprite of his own. But where he and I really saw eye to eye was in novels. This guy had access to everything I wanted. He had Jeffrey Archers and Dan Browns and Sidney Sheldons. And when I needed a blast from the past, he told me to give him a minute and came back with a Hardy Boys or Animorphs in his palm.
Every evening prep our classmates would be busy with Omosh’s maths assignments. Morris and I would have our noses stuck in novels unmoving until the back cover came into view. I hated that moment. Perhaps that is why I reduced my reading. But I guarantee you that back then I knew much more about plots and characters in PG Wodehouse books than I did about Pythagoras’ theory. Honestly, I still don’t get that Greek’s obsession with triangles.
Anywho, I was rambling about lecturers. I tried listening. Oh my goodness, I tried. Instead of a laptop I came to class with exercise books. I turned off my phone. I read ahead. I did everything a good student could, short of tying the lecturer’s laces with my teeth. And jack. I got nothing. I still sat there, behind a little desk looking at an adult drone on and on and on about some topic or the other. I found myself commenting on the yellow yellow’s exposed thong, or this other guy’s bicep. I wondered if either would let me touch their items of interest. I asked the brown skin chick. She didn’t take it kindly. No word on the bicep of Mr. Muscle man.
I’m a few months from graduating. Please, stop the applause… maybe just a little more. Ok enough, now. We’ll be a few thousand gradaunts. Buses will throng the campus grounds and relatives will pour into the school, some from as far as Nigeria. It’ll be a hard day for me. I can’t stand that accent. It makes me want to punch them in the face. Anyone feel like donating Beats By Dre headphones for the sake of African unity? No one? It was worth the try.
Graduation is supposed to be a happy day. Parents will be waiting for their kids to be proven smart. I’ll be there in my black robe and hat, feeling like I took a wrong turn off the set of Harry Potter, and hoping that no one asks me what I learnt. Because all I will have to say is, “don’t ask a classmate if you can touch her thong.”
Sometimes he speaks; a loud roar of a voice. It is deep and warm. It feels like being covered in warm marshmallows that smell of freshly ground coffee. His voice is gravelly, but not too gravelly. It’s just right. He speaks and every one listens. Maybe he has nothing to say or he is simply repeating something someone else said a few seconds ago. That matters nought. But his voice is worth listening to. It demands respect. It demands recognition. It demands an audience.
Sometimes he doesn’t speak. He just sits there in the corner of the room, his keen old eyes moving from face to face as his mind digests the sounds coming from those mouths. He takes a sip of his scotch. If by any chance he clears his throat, the room goes silent waiting with bated breath for him to raise a point. But he doesn’t. And the rest go on chattering.
I don’t remember him slowing down in his talking. It wasn’t a gradual decline in the expenditure of his daily allocated words. It was more a now-I’m-here-now-I’m-not affair. I left him being the life of the party; talking people into the wee hours of the morning, swilling a glass of whiskey in his right hand and a fistful of gesticulation on his left.
Then the next day he was quiet. His hair had all gone grey and his voice seemed to have lost some of its lustre. It didn’t demand for attention anymore. But what it lacked for in marshmallow-ey goodness, it made up in wisdom. Have you guys ever been in a CU meeting? Go to at least two and in one of those you will hear someone mention a small still voice. That is the voice of wisdom and good guidance. That’s what his voice gained.
He was no longer playing the young man’s game of attention. He wasn’t jostling for centre stage. He’d had enough of the lime light. A switch clicked and he decided to let the other warriors dance with the maidens as he documents the rituals and rigors. His mind got keener. It seeks insight now. It grasps a grain of information and in a few seconds sits this polenta of conclusions, accurate to a T. Where the rest of us see a sweater, he sees a plethora of needles and threads that went into it. He picks apart the details and lays them out. He would make the best kind of journalist. One who cuts through the muck and gets to the meat of matters.
That’s a man I have known all my life. Mr. Mutua. Babu Mutua. He always has been wise. But maybe it is because I’m getting wiser that I notice it more; or his wisdom has grown to the point it assaults everyone in his presence.
Some say age is just a number. Usually it is people getting sugar daddies and mommies who have to justify their actions to the world, but mostly to themselves. If age really is just a number, a thing of inconsequence, we would never make a fuss about it. Age is more than a number. More years mean more experience.
Mr. Mutua’s age means he has lived long enough to recognise his is not the only voice to be heard. He has waded through enough crap to recognise it from a mile away. He has lived. And it is an insult to say that his age is nothing but abstract concept only getting meaning from the halls of primary school classrooms.
Do you guys know that radio ad by CBA? I have mentioned it a few times. Time for more, is the tagline. This deep soothing voice prods your conscience awake asking what you will remember at the end of your life. Then he goes on to ask what wealth means to you. Whether it is a manifestation of all your material possessions, or the memory of a life lived to the full, rich in experience.
Well, Mr. Mutua has had his life. It is encapsulated in his voice. You can hear the boring meetings drone on in his coffee and cream voice. You can also hear the surfeit of adventure; the conquests, the lions he has slaughtered, and the ones he was forced to bow to. You can hear so much just from him saying, “Hi. Call me Mutua.” He will introduce himself however he likes. First name, last name – whatever. It doesn’t matter. As long as you are younger than him, you will recognise wisdom and experience in his voice. You will call him uncle or grandpa or babu. You will recognise that age is a lot more than a number.
Guzamtu, over and out.
Commitment. That’s a long word. It is a whole ten letters long. German has some pretty long words. But I can’t seem to remember the German word for commitment; so I’ll just stick to English. American sitcoms will have us believe that commitment is the one thing most men are most afraid of. Men can’t commit to one woman. Apparently we like to “play the field”. Apparently sticking to one woman is the scariest thing on to us. Apparently we’d rather sleep in the same bed with Freddie and Jason with the Boogieman under it than say to a chick, “you are the one I choose,” and actually mean it.
Maybe we are scared of committing to just one woman. But that’s just mostly because we don’t want to miss the next one who comes along. “What if the next girl I meet is hotter, kinder, better?” We ask ourselves. There’s a high likelihood – in our heads, at least – that the next one who tickles our fancy, and we tickle theirs, is version 2.0 if the one we are currently with. According to Friends and Brooklyn Nine Nine, Undateable, and anything with Charlie Sheen in it, men cannot – unless under pain of CIA advanced interrogation (read water boarding) – commit.
Well, on behalf of all the guys out there (especially a particular group) I beg to differ. Let me put this in caps in case some of you are blessed with crap eyesight: MEN CAN COMMIT. Look around you. How many happily married men do you see? How many guys are holding their girlfriends’ and wives’ handbags as she picks out earrings at Maasai market? How many men are teling their mates to piss off with their promises of hot women at the bar because they’d much rather hang out with the one they have? How many are braving the dirty looks from mothers-in-law and disapproving silence from dads-in-law just to make one woman happy?
But I’m not here to extol the virtues of the many, many men who are standing steadfast beside their chosen spouses. I’m here to talk about the commitment millions of men indulge in every evening. Half a litre of commitment.
You see, when we are children we love soda and juice. We chug it every chance we get and sometimes try to lick the tiny drops from the inside of the bottle. We love it and it can be justified: juice is sweet, sweet things make us happy. As we grow up we are introduced to a whole kaleidoscope of flavours. I say kaleidoscope when actually there are only four according to the taste experts – sweet, sour, bitter and savoury. The one least appreciated is, of course, bitter.
Yet, year after year, KBL shares stay on the good side of the profit-loss curve. Yes, we are talking about beer. That bitter, piss-brown liquid that is the mark of modern day manhood world over. A man who cannot stand a beer is considered to have a missing nut. No, get your minds out of the gutter; I mean they are considered a little crazy.
Beer has long been marketed as a reward for a hard day’s work. Remember the Pilsner guy? The one who bounces along a msafara of vehicles then deflates the tires on an 18-wheel truck to let it pass under a low bridge or something. He gets to the bar and because of his tales of heroism is handed a cold Pilsner. Or Michael Power; now he was something else. He stopped terrorists and saved damsels – all for the cold black Guinness Stout.
What those advertisers seem to forget as they show kina Michael chug down a cold one, is the shocking taste of beer. For someone with options you must want something really badly to stick to just one thing. And when you walk into a bar, the options are plenty. You could go for a quick high and do shots with lemons to kill the taste. Or you could enjoy a few cocktails with all the alcohol content and none of the terrible taste.
But many men all over the world brave beer. It is bitter. It smells weird – a little yeasty. And it looks like urine. To start downing one is not a big deal. The hardest sip is the second one. In the first the taste hits you fresh. It reminds you of the last time you had a beer. You remember the good times. And if you are a little pretentious, you can “feel the tension of the day leave your body.”
The second sip is where you start asking yourself, “was it really this bad last time?” You hesitate. It is much smaller than the first one. It stays in your mouth a few seconds longer. But you remember why you drink beer in the first place. And you swallow. Then you swallow another and another and another. And before you know it, you are staring at the bottom of a glass.
It takes commitment to get there. You really must want the buzz. Because there are faster ways to get up there; and there are definitely better tasting things that will get you there. So, here’s to all the men and women that are accused of being afraid of commitment, but can find their way to the bottom of an undiluted, unsweetened alcoholic drink. You, ladies and gentlemen, are quite capable of committing to something.
Pictures tell stories in ways words can’t. Just take a look at how quickly Instagram is becoming popular. People want to read less and less, and hate writing even more than they hate reading, but still want to tell stories and get stories about other people. Posting a picture of a Java menu next to a plate of Caesar salad and a cup of green tea is much easier than typing, “At Java having a Caesar Salad and green tea #HealthyLiving.”
Or do you expect the socialite-wannabe to update her Twitter typing, “just tried on the pink lipstick and I don’t think it worked so I went on to the purple which I feel ish ish about so I like put those away and settled on the bright red. BTW did you see my brand new skin tight dress? Lucky my folks don’t have a clue what Twitter is so they won’t have to perform a traditional cleansing coz they think my behaviour is the product of their terrible parenting which was caused by a curse from Dad’s great grandma who we never visited until she died. #TurnUpTuesdays.” It’s a bit of a thumbful; plus Twitter only allows 140 characters per post. Instead, they’d just take a picture of their cleavage and pouted lips in all fifty shades of rainbow colours and wait for their followers to tell them which goes best with the smattering of stretchy cloth girls nowadays call a dress.
Truth be told, the preceding rant is just a way to stall the meat of this post. Somewhere along 2015 I got seduced by a camera. They are so pretty and fancy and amazing. I was mesmerised by the sorts of things I could do with a camera and a half-decent set of lights. And there are so many to choose from! If by any luck you get past the Canon vs Nikon debate, there’s 5D and 7D and 700D and 600D and 70D and 60D and D600 D3200 D3100 D3000 D5000 D5100 D5200 D7100 and on and on; the Canon and Nikon like the D. I laugh.
With a little bit of training, I figured I knew my way around one. So I went out and took a few pictures. Call it beginner’s luck or a happy coincidence but a few of those shots were nice. Then I discovered the magic of Photoshop. What a wonderful world it became. With bravado, a phony understanding of photography, and computer aided image editing I set forth into the world to conquer one snap at a time. Conquer I did. The people around me all went gaga over the pictures. Mutua Matheka suddenly had nothing on me. And when the pictures were terrible it was always the camera’s fault, never mine. My choir sang the chorus back to me. They propped me up and hoisted me high on their shoulders, untouchable by the slew of terrible photographic work I was doing. I got caught up in the praise and build air-castles out of this fantasy – I believed my own hype.
While the hype was carrying me across an equally false cloud nine, I forgot something that I know for a fact I can do well. I forgot how to write. In my search for the perfect picture I lost the feel for a perfectly decent sentence. Guzamtu suffered. My soul suffered.
Not writing to someone who loves it with everything they have is like a schizophrenic without their medicine. First you feel great; like a yoke has been lifted off you. You are finally free to experience the world without thinking about how good a story it will be later. Then you start seeing things, and those things tell you that you are fine without your writing. The thing I saw was photography. But that’s where the downward spiral starts. Your life loses all balance and you don’t know where you fit in the world anymore. So you try to experience the world through everything but the one thing that makes you sane. Finally you hit rock bottom; your vision becomes clear for just a second that this path you’re on is not your own. But it happens in a flash and if you don’t pay attention, it fleets away like a fart in the wind.
Well, my rock bottom happened. It is an unremarkable tale, so it shall not be told. But here I am back at the keyboard, fingers pecking a way through muddled thoughts and stories that I can’t wait to tell. Tales of Naivasha’s other side; the beauty unspoiled by parties and debauchery. Stories of family feuds and friendships dying. But mostly the story of Chris; a story I hope to tell and retell until my fingers are too old and frail to type and my throat too tired to croak again, and my mind silent enough to tell no more tales but only listen to others.
But for now an apology to you, folks. Here I am hat in hat too ashamed to even look you in the eye. I am asking you to forgive my indiscretion. And I am asking you to once again be my readers. The days of chasing after bright studio lights and red carpet flashes are behind me. Maybe.
I debated long and hard whether to post this. It came about in the middle of the night, after a particularly sad Linkin Park song. And suddenly a picture so vivid it had to be written showed itself in my mind’s eye. Mom, don’t read it, please.
Sometimes I think about it. I wonder how it will look. Will it rain? I don’t think so. I imagine it more as a scorching day. There’ll be black umbrellas all over the place. Everyone will be sitting in their cars or under trees or ducking under their palms, hiding from the sun.
But my band of brothers, the two guys I chose as my family will stand stoic by my side, unfazed by the glare of the sun, dressed in jeans and sneakers and earphones hanging from their ears. One of them will be listening to Ekko Dyda and the other would be hooked to Earl Klough. They will stand separated by their spouses. Their offside hands will be in their pockets as the other holds a sobbing girlfriend.
The grass will be dry. Each step, each movement, each breeze will blow up a gust of dust. The air will be warm and crisp. Little to no humidity. The wind will be gentle. It will caress my exes’ skin just like my hand did hers. It will remind her of the stories I told about Kisaju, and about how I spent all my high school holidays walking in the wind, taking the same paths every day but hoping to find a new adventure. Always sure that nothing had changed but still wishing that something exciting was about to happen. She will grip her son’s hand just a little tighter and he’ll squeeze back.
My brother will stand with both his hands in his pockets. He would have loved to come in jeans, but our sister wouldn’t let him. She’ll have scolded him. “Have some respect,” she’ll have said, “that’s your brother there!” And my brother, stubborn as he is, will have listened and put on his best suit. But he’ll draw the line at ties. Absolutely no tie. He won’t smile or laugh or talk to anyone out of his own volition. But when he will say anything, his breath will smell of pride. He’ll know that after the ceremony, every guest will get to taste the food that I have bragged about every day since I tasted. His eyes will smile behind his dark sun glasses because he will know that lunch will be sweet potato curry, mahamri and mbaazi ya nazi – my favourite food.
My sister. My beautiful, too-smart-for-her-own good sister will stand beside my brother. She will be in a beautiful pink sundress. And she will be the prettiest thing in the audience. She too will hide behind a pair of huge Ray Bans. But unlike my brother, she won’t be hiding pride; she’ll be hiding puffy eyes. Her brother – our brother, will have asked the crew to put a chair for her, but she’ll turn it down despite her unsteady legs and the heavy weight on her shoulders and heart. She’ll chose to stand despite her weakness because she’ll know that I would have chosen to sit, and she’s made of stronger stuff than I ever will be.
My parents will not be there. We’ll have done this for them already. Namanga Road will have twice been a gridlock, with cars bumper to bumper, and pedestrians all flocking to a little farm in the bunduz to join my two brothers, my sister and I in paying our respects to them. My parents won’t be there for my funeral because no parent should ever have to bury their child. The order of things is for children to bury parents. And I will have.
My ghost will hover about, flitting from between my chosen brothers, to my birth brother and sister standing among them, speaking but not being heard. The preacher will start, “dearly beloved, we are gathered here today…” And mt ghost will shout that I am too young to be buried. But no one will hear. That’s when I’ll come to terms with it.
As the people that I meant the most to walk past my grave, they will pick up a handful of dirt and throw it into the hole. They will be reminded that they too are coming this way. That regardless of whether their feet are shod in Prada or Bata slippers, they all walk the road into the grave; same as everyone to ever live. Their handfuls of soil will thud onto the top of my casket. Then the spadefuls from the boys paid to fill up my grave will follow. One by one, the guests will leave, their car engines roaring into the distance. I, the guest of honour, will be left six feet under, never to breathe again. And the sun will set, the most brilliant sunset yet. Golden and red at the same time. The birds will quiet down. The bats and crickets and creatures of the night will sigh. And for a moment there will be silence.
But in the distance, a horn will be tooted, and a rabbit will run. Out in the bright city lights, drinks will be bought and sold, cars will be stolen and a thug will be shot. Deals will be made in dark corners. Wars will be waged and peaces brokered. But my ghost will sit silently by my graveside looking at my headstone. I will listen to trees rustle in the wind and the wind will bring with it the sounds of a world still turning and life still being lived.
Does anyone remember Scrubs? Yeah, Scrubs; that extremely funny series that focused on JD, a young doctor trying to find his way through the hilarious world of Sacred Heart Hospital – that’s the Scrubs I’m talking about. If you do, do you remember JD’s mentor, Dr. Cox? That guy was the epitome of scary when I was younger. How can one person have so many insults just sitting at the tip of his tongue?
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” a few of you may say because you have watched Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Enyewe that is a movie with insults. The first 30 minutes of runtime have dialogue from only one character, and all of it is insult after insult. At some point you actually stop being offended by the language and get impressed by the imagery. Let me paint a picture, “I will unscrew your head and take a dump down your neck.” That’s just one of the hundreds of pictures painted.
Speaking of paintings, there sits a print of a famous painting in the cafeteria in school. It’s a painting of an indigenous Kenyan. I love that thing. It is so beautiful. A while ago, I thought painting was so much easier than any other art form. I mean, Picasso is famous for triangles and poorly sketched cows – does it get any easier than that? And then I tried it. Nothing that ugly has ever existed on this planet.
So I switched to photography. Point and shoot, and everything will come out hunky dory. Quick detour, once upon a time someone told me a hunky dory is a little object that is used to hang handbags on table corners so ladies don’t have to put them on floors at restaurants and other public places. Is this true? Anyway, where were we? Ah, yes, pointing and shooting. Photography is that easy. If you want an image of your face, just point the camera at it and press the button. But if you want a photo of a plane in the clouds, or an erupting volcano, or a… You get the point. And then there are the small technicalities of taking photos. The ISO, the shutter speeds, the apertures, the rules of thirds and so on and so forth.
Even after learning all these little nuances there’s still something missing from the photos I take. Maybe I’m the only one that sees it, maybe not; but I know something just isn’t right. I tell my friends and they look at me like I’m crazy. It’s like telling someone that doesn’t quite see pink about it – it makes no sense, red is red.
Being misunderstood usually sends me looking for earphones. Music helps make things easier to accept even when I don’t understand or like them. Every time I listen to a track, it just awes me that someone created beauty from silence. If music is your pink, check out Atwal’s Soundcloud account and listen to some of his music. If that isn’t your speed, go to Youtube and look for anything by the Piano Guys. If that still doesn’t touch you K.O (both of them), Tchaikovsky, E-Sir, John Legend, Michael Jackson, Chizi, Kidum, Just A Band, and literally thousands of other people have graciously put their music up there for you to enjoy. Think of it as a cheat code to the six degrees of separation.
Natalia used to get this sweet Mona Lisa smile when I went into a long tirade about some music I’d have just stumbled on. She’d listen to it and then write me a long gushing text about it. She got it. My mother just makes appreciative clicks and clucks, and when she speaks it’s like she’s overwhelmed with emotion that her asthma acts up for just a second. And the look on her face is simply inexplicable. Awe, admiration, bliss, euphoria; all that and a little hint of sadness like she wants to go back and listen to it for the first time and have her mind blown away all over again.
It’s a face that movie makers do hundreds of takes to get on film. It’s a face that writers describe, erase, then rewrite and erase again because it is as elusive as a fart in the wind. It is a face that very few people have the pleasure of eliciting.
I heard somewhere that food can have any of 4 flavours: sweet, sour, bitter, and savoury. A good dish has two flavours, a great dish has three, and a superb one puts all four together on one plate. Art can elicit one of hundreds of emotions. But the more the emotions felt by one person, the better the art.
Emotions are special. It takes something special to make anyone feel anything. Emotions come from the soul; and the only cross-lingual, cross-cultural, and cross-dimensional human creation that can touch the soul is art. Through art, we exercise one of the characteristics we share with God. Through art we create.
Through art, we bare our souls to the world. We send out a deeply intimate part of ourselves into the world to reach out to souls and touch them. So I tip my hat and raise my glass to artists. Here’s to the painters, the sculptors and musicians. Here’s to the choreographers, composers and dancers. Here’s to the painters, the rappers, and the singers. Here’s to the writers, the actors, the directors, the photographers, the chefs, the mixologists. Here’s to everyone that makes art.
That should be enough to fill a 3000 word article; just the letters K and O. You must be thinking, “this guy has totally fallen off his rocker.” Well, before you call the guys at Mathare to force me off my drug(s) of choice, listen to him.
Or rather, listen to them. There’s KO from SA. The guy with beats from the seventh circle of sickness and a wardrobe that any self-respecting fashion icon is jealous of. This KO dude can, to quote the G.O.A.T, run rap circles around square lyricists. KO is the guy you have to thank for Caracara.
Look, I’m a proud guy. Yes that comes before a fall but so does summer. And who doesn’t love summer? It takes me a long time to change my opinion of anything, be it a vegetable, or the music made coming from any country. My buddy tried to make me listen to KO a while back, but because I have never liked the gumboot dance or any of Miriam Makeba’s jams (don’t look at me like that), I expected the guy to be, honestly, shit. But at a party (pitty parties count) a few months ago, Caracara was playing and I was too tired to bother pressing next on the laptop. There isn’t a language on the planet that is as fascinating as Xhosa. And there is no African with flow rivalling KO’s. Yes I said that too.
AKA fans must be going out of their minds trying to reach through their screens and strangle me. But let’s be honest, how many AKA fans bother reading blogs by semi-emo writers with the souls of octogenarians and the minds of hormone fuelled teenagers?
Then there is KO. Non-lyrical KO. The KO millions know about but few know. Kevin Olusola. Guys you’ve probably seen his work with Pentatonix when your girlfriend interrupted CoD to make you watch the accapella group. Ladies you know him as the least necessary guy in Pentatonix; the guy who just does Boom Twaf with his mouth, the guy who gets I the way of the melodies and harmonies.
Me, I know him as the genius. I know him as the badass cellist. The sick beatboxer, and the vocalist from another dimension. I know him as the renegade, the guy that broke the rules and made a whole new mould for the world to follow. He is the guy who can back Lil Wayne’s Believe Me when the DJ’s decks die and then turn around and play Tchaikovski’s 1812 with any Philharmonic in the world. This guy can go from headlining BET’s hiphop shows to running a bow over strings at Her Majesty’s birthday (dunno if he has yet) in a single breath. This guy can… You catch the drift; he is the best of all worlds.
My moment with KO came when I listened to one of the songs for a long time I couldn’t stand: Stay with me, Sam Smith. The potency of memories I associate with this song are just too much. So I avoided it like CNN avoids positive stories. But as with all good things, my blissfull avoidance came to an end. KO forced the song down my throat. I struggled to hate it. Stockholm syndrome won. And I found tears in my eyes and the voices in my head said, “everything’s gonna be alright.”
Suddenly, it was. I was totally fine with who and where I am. Things started to makes sense, and those that didn’t stopped mattering so much. KO with a cello, a microphone and his mouth made everything alright.
Isn’t that what music is supposed to do? Isn’t art intended to open our eyes to things so far from our instinctual understanding that we go through our lives not seeing them? That sentence makes zero sense, so I’ll simplify it. Isn’t art meant to be a doorway into something divine in humans? Olusola and the other KO, in ways that I can’t quite explain, broke down the doors to an acceptance and understanding of my limitations and imitations as a human being. They showed me that no matter how similar, how seemingly perfect, however perceivably at the top of the totem pole you are, there’s always someone better. They made me realise how such a small thing as a pair of shoes in a music video or a note drawn out a half of a second longer than intended can change the collective human spirit. And things as big as POTUS visiting your home can mean absolutely nothing. They taught me that everything matters more than we know but nothing matters as much as we think it does. I can’t connect all the dots yet, but I know they are there and that is good enough.
Oh, and once while I was cooking an onion dice fell into my shoe. I thought that would make an interesting title. Did it?
Bloody hell, I’ve got another one. Another seven days with aching, watery eyes, sneezing and coughing, stuffy and runny nose, and a headache the size of Serena William’s Adam’s apple. It’s like my body recognises that I haven’t made much use of my medical insurance so far and wants me to squander the outpatient payments on antibiotics, cough syrups and pain killers. For Chrissakes, I just had a cold less than a month ago.
Remember the days when having a cold was an excuse for a five-day impromptu holiday? I used to love it when I’d wake up with a stuffy nose. I’d hope the coughs would come so that I’d exaggerate them and wake Mum up as well. She’d immediately send me back to bed with a promise to visit the paediatrician later in the day. And that would mean that for the next few days I’d get to stay home and watch cartoons while the rest of the house had to be up and in traffic before 7 am.
I miss having a special diet of milk-rich maize meal porridge and hot tea whenever I felt like it. I also got to have lemon and honey in my tea. Mom would make sure I didn’t touch anything cold which meant I was exempt from doing the dishes. Quite frankly I didn’t do any chores if I had the slightest whiff of a cold. I’d be pampered and called sweet names and asked how I was feeling every ten minutes. It felt great to be sick.
Then I grew up. Nowadays it starts with a headache. A great pounding one that tells me my system is flooded with a virus. The headaches are followed by a few sneezes here and few coughs there. Once the eyes start to tear up, I have full confirmation that the cold is with me.
At this point I would love nothing more than 48 hours of uninterrupted sleep; but unfortunately, owing to a stuffy nose and wildly fluctuating body temperatures, I can barely manage three. And there grows the headache. You’d think that the most rational thing to do when I can’t sleep would be to catch up on reading or work on a project or the other. But because my appetite goes out the window right after the headache checks in, I barely have the strength to open both eyes at the same time, leave alone sit up.
Having a cold as an adult is pretty much one of the worst things that can happen. “But what about cancer, David?” I can hear you ask. “What about all those illnesses that mean you will surely die?”
Well, when you have cancer, or any other illness that means certain death, you are allowed to wallow and be miserable and angry all the time. But when you have a cold, you are supposed to just take it on the chin. An adult is expected to endure the seven or so days of headaches, bruised nostrils and general misery. It is, after all “just a cold.”
guzamtu 