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| A giraffe with the Nairobi skyline in the background [Source/andBeyond] |
You have lived a part of your life wallowing in the luxury
of aloofness, cramming shit that wouldn’t even be a bargaining chip to use ‘toilet za kanjo’ for free. You cannot
walk to that public toilet, umebanwa choo,
and begin telling the mean faced attendant (by the way what does he talk about
when people are discussing serious issues?) that you know about mitochondria,
or, to descend to his level, that you know about salmonella typhi and vibrio
cholerae. As far as he is concerned, you can shit on yourself with that gargantuan
pile of knowledge. On the bright side, the cramming brought us to Nairobi,
where we realized that those yoyos
that made high school miserable came from high-rise slums-Pipeline and Umoja.
And so we came to the city. Over time, the grim and harsh
realities of this god-forsaken concrete jungle has replaced the very knowledge
we thought was a ticket to that Ferrari or Lamborghini with a huge void that’s
very receptive of savage thoughts and ideas. For example you could be walking
along Lang’ata road, and you suddenly see people milling around and peering
into a ditch full of black sludge, and the mind receives the following signal;
THERE COULD BE AN ABORTED FOETUS HERE. Or you could just be hawking your
credentials in brown envelope then suddenly your eyes catch a glimpse of a man
sprawled on the hot tarmac, still as if he can never vote again, and your brain
picks the following signal: YOU MAY BE STARING AT A DEAD MAN. People could be
fighting, and instead your mind waits for replays and slow motion, and blood
spurting out of the fighters’ mouths.
On one occasion, I am walking home in the evening with the
heavy burden of expectation weighing on my shoulders. I had prepared my body
well in advance that the last time it took cheap vodka may as well been the
very last one. May be I told it in a whisper, ‘baby, from now henceforth we
will be drinking whisky, and sometimes beer. We will not frequent those dinghy
pubs along Mfangano Lane.’ May be my body, using the correct apparatus, smiled
in the same way a poet would liken it to the sun on a cloudy day. It turns out
that without blue blood coursing through your veins, you may endlessly chaining
yourself to the yoke of mtu wetu,
renewing it after every five years. The only achievement you’d see that evening
would be an accident. And the void begins engaging its savage receptors,
roaring them to life like those cog wheels that mark the beginning of every
Lionsgate movie.
It turns out that three Japanese cars decided to test their
structural strength, catalysed of course by gross human incompetence. There
were a pile of cars behind. Two potbellied policemen walked around without a
hurry in the world, as if waiting for some instructions from above. Probably
because there was a sparkling brand new V8. Accidents, just like all accidents
are often a terrible inconvenience especially to pedestrians who planned on
walking home without any interruptions along the way. As one of those
pedestrians, I walked looking at the gloomy faces of the people who went to
check out what had happened. There was disappointment, too, because there was
no blood and no one was writhing in pain. Juts a slay queen in one of the cars
fiddling with her phone trying to contact one of her sponsors to come and
rescue her.
One of the guys involved in the accident drove a Toyota
fielder. He was a middle age man, dressed and built just the way a taxi driver
would be. I have never boarded a taxi but I have surely seen them hovering
around taxi parking areas, talking animatedly like it is their sole job. The
middle aged man was talking too, volunteering information to anyone who looked
like they were about to ask what was happening. As part of my journalist
training, I applied the principle of non-interference, leaned to grasp a few
things he was saying then left surreptitiously as if I were some sort of wind. However,
I gathered that the problem was solely on the slay queen, who had the letter L
pasted in front and the back of her car.
“You see, she’s even a learner,” taxi driver said and
everyone agreed with him. His car had born the greatest damage, having had to
mount that barrier in the middle of the road. It decimated a few of those knee
length plastic poles filled with concrete, crossed to the other side, the
supposed Canaan, with a flat tire, patiently waiting for a handshake.
It is served to reinforce one prejudice about slay queens
that I had held for some time; the only psychomotor skills the possessed were
lifting one leg slightly up in strict adherence to standard photo taking
procedures, which, if not obeyed, can lead to death. Whatever it is, do not put
an L in your car. You can get knocked by a drunk driver and it will be
attributed to your learner status.
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