Late Night Talk Show Humour

It is through a well known research technique known as ‘running stomach’ (it is lauded by well known researchers) that I find myself listening to late night radio talk show which I unfortunately forget the name. Luckily then names of the presenters did not escape me: Melody Sinzore and John Maloba. They played a lot –okay, they were only two, which is still a lot) of Luhya songs and gushed over them as if they had stumbled upon a secret formula to extend their lifespan.

The two presenters reminded us – listeners, although one gets the feeling he alone is being addressed –that the topic of the night would be revealed in the next hour. They reminded us more than once, which, under the research conditions I was in, was a lot. I wondered who the target audience of these late night shows is; thieves, night runners, or night shift workers.

Before the topic was introduced, Melody read news with extremely long pauses between news items. The three items that I thought were important were the rise in the price of fuel prices, Ruto reminding people that corrupt leaders would be accorded fair and just hearing – which meant they were already cleared to run for public office- , and lastly Museveni allowing Bobi Wine to go to America to seek treatment after his head exploded through thinking that Museveni would be removed as president.

After the rewarding news experience, the two presenters embarked on the topic. The topic is basically a snippet of the life of man or woman in severe distress, so much distressed that he or she wants complete strangers to put into context. As an intellectually upright person who has not undergone any form of major surgery whatsoever, I placed the topic of the night in the following context: it was not real.

I imagine the man send it as follows: ‘I, (name withheld for privacy reasons), has never in my thirty two year experience, discounting the time I waited for my organs to mature, has never had any conjugal experience. My parents have intervened by selecting ladies of diverse characteristics but, unluckily, my member has not been responsive. I would love to choose a lady for myself. I have a decent job and a tidy sum of inheritance. Also, my friends are laughing at me for being a virgin.’

The topic seemed to have been a continuation of the previous night’s. The presenters made subtle reference to it. Maloba repeated the topic two or three times more, which was way too much this time round. Melody interjected with thoughtful responses such as ‘ehe, hajawahi kula uroda…’ each time Maloba talked about it.

And then the lines were opened. The first two were intercepted by space aliens, ending with the eerie ‘duuud duuud’ sound. Subsequent callers managed to have theirs through. The first among those did not even have to introduce himself. Then he went on to offer his advice to the thirty two year old virgin, who I bet was fast asleep or fondling himself if he indeed existed. I don’t remember what he said because he made sense. He exited by saying that he will hung for his friend who has a more sound advice by virtue of his background: he has overtime demonstrated that he has an IQ of mboga ya kienyeji.

I was surprised that the callers did not even have to introduce themselves. And they all sounded like Kisiis. One in particular was an old man. You always know an old man when he begins a sentence by ‘wakati wetu….’ In a tone that suggests that human beings have mutated to something that does not at all resemble humans that came before, especially the youth. He veered off the topic by saying that in those days, women were virgins and the only known way of deflowering them was using a special cow horn. He said the bride would be held by strong men, and phew! she was no longer a virgin and the young man would harvest his fruits.

When it came to advising the young man, through his vast experience, he said that the young man should be taken to a cow pen, where a bull would make an excellent tutorial material for the gentleman. The bull of course would be present where a cow on heat would be, lying naked and ready to be serviced. Then the young man would take in the breathtaking copulation, picking up various stylistic devices that the bull has learned from other bulls, and practiced over a long period of time. The young man would be ready to face the vast world of women beckoning at his feet, because he learned a bull, thereby qualifying to be a bull. In the bed. But his problem was that his jethro toll never rose to any occasion, except peeing.

A horse would have been a better idea, I concluded as I fell asleep. 

The Ultimate Wing Man

In the days of our forefathers, days that the white man has duly assigned a word-primitiveness- women walked bare-chested and it was not something that Mutua (the film guy) would yap about in connection to morals. With all due respect, morality is now defined by western concepts and religion, and is passed down as African. Yes, because we’ve become too westernized. The white saw our nudity and determined that it was gross, gave us clothes and proceeded thereafter to found a million dollar porn industry.

We, the almost morally bankrupt millennials, marvel at this technology called the internet. I mean if you type certain words on your search engine, you are likely to stumble upon a million photos of naked women, in all their varieties. Well, some of us actively seek these photos day in day out, as we wait for our bets to ‘enter’ or ‘drink water.’ If you think deeply, it’s quite the easiest thing to do knowing that we do not have people who can walk into a ministry and withdraw ten billion shillings and walk away scot free. Almost always, these pictures seek us out too. It sometimes form the headlines in the local tabloids, or sometimes when you are taking a brisk walk down the anonymous and dark alleys of social media, bulky men accost you with the following headlines: LEAKED NUDES OF [insert the name your crush].

Perhaps you should begin thinking less lowly of nudity and stuff, because it has been proven to one of the qualifications to a ministerial position. Also, nudity and all that appertains to it is present in nature, just as espoused by that sculpture at JKIA. The animals are not ashamed of this act that human beings have associated with every diabolic thing possible. But then there are dogs that apparently are clueless about the act, so much that men, with all their brain cells functioning properly, decided to help them mate. It was gross to say the least; two grown men holding dogs, one the gonads of the male, and the other the ears of the bitch. This was a video conducting a guard of honour on twitter, whereby people expressed their insights, because it is a crime not to. One that caught my eye was ‘AND THE AWARD TO THE ULTIMATE WING MAN GOES TO…’ I presume he was the one holding the bitch.

Speaking of wing men, man (not the biblical man) has always been set on conquests and winning. In the ancient days, it was about masculine things such as hunting with crude weapons and going to steal cattle. The only manly thing left in this technological world, is actively soliciting nudes from ladies as well as banging them. It is the reason why men go to bars in the first place; to lose inhibitions and talk about their conquests in the same level Alexander the Great would have bragged. And then hitting on random ladies. It’s here that the wing man sometimes chips in. You never know what these ladies can do to you. Man, you could be slowly siphoning your favourite poison and all of a sudden the world gets dark, and you wake after William Ruto has been severely humiliated by the aristocrats in the year 2022. Masaibu ya boychild!!

The bar setting has ceased being the hunting ground for men. The only thing a man needs to do is wear a crisp suit and tie, look suave and stand at the matatu stage, waiting for fare to drop before he heads to his humble domiciliary. A lady will saunter around that gentleman, flaunting her credentials, once or twice before she realizes that the man is too engrossed in his phone to notice she is overqualified. She strikes up a conversation with him, where she decides that she’s also heading to the same direction as him. Because the gentleman does not want any more complications in his life, he does not even ask for the ladies number, which she notices and promptly volunteers. She’s called Beryl. The gentleman saves Beryl Beauty on his phone.

A day later Beryl claims that she’s been chased out by her brother for getting home late. She’s asking for a place to stay the night as she gathers herself. The gentleman, just like you and me, only has the house to sleep in, of course and pay rent. He recently moved, his living room is emptier than the hearts of politicians. Beryl coaxes the man until she gives up.  Later, she shows up in the middle of the night, not without a fracas with the boda boda guys. Typical Jang’o ladies. Here’s where the wingman steps in. knowing too well that it’s stupid to die for ladies who show up late in the night, reeking of cheap liquor, the wingman advises him to stay away from the fracas, as far as Timbuktu.

Being a prospective man does not make one ‘the man’. As a lady, you will deal with your squabbles before a man becomes the man. But then again nothing diminishes a man more than a lady who constantly picks up fights over extremely trivial things and expects a man to ‘sort’ the guys out. It always a losing situation especially in a public place where there are idle people itching to lay their frustrations on an innocent soul. Beryl may have learnt the hard way, escaping with only minor injuries in her internal organs.

Once the fracas has died down, the gentleman and his wingman escort Beryl to the domiciliary. There she is condemned to the coach. She sleeps like a piece of rotting log, waking up at noon. Upon waking up, she brazenly asks if there’s something to eat, and the wingman says no. the gentleman left strict instructions to the wingman before he left for work. He tiptoed out leaving her soaking in her drunken drool.  He then switches off his phone and the wingman is left all alone with a stranger in the house. His only job is to make her step of the house and then lock it.  But that’s not how Jan’go ladies operate. They came with a completely different operating manual, with some crucial pages missing. She obstinately refuses to leave, hurling curses that one feels straight in the bone, even though it is a language one barely understands.

When she asks for the tissue, the wingman knows that shit is about to go down. She enters the toilet, which also doubles up as the bathroom and the wing man promptly locks the door and calls the police who in the service to all, do not show up.

The Bullfight

He met me all grown up, a man by virtue of having undergone a minor surgical procedure on a very influential organ, rekindling my childhood. David. That was his name. He worked as our shamba boy. The details are all blurry now but I think it broke my poor little heart when he left, albeit unceremoniously. Without reason. Without good byes. It is hard to think highly of such a man.  

At the time, adults seemed like creatures sent from another planet to rescue us from our happiness. As children, we never asked too much: we wanted to play, eat, and sleep. And then we longed for Christmas, never birthdays, for our births were remarkable enough not to warrant unnecessary annual celebrations. There were chores, here and there. When there weren’t, mothers would invent them. ‘Watch that sufuria,’ she would say. That sufuria would be on the fireplace, containing a sacred liquid namely: water.  

I would escape to the farm to be with David. We would dig, him telling me stories or me telling him, none of which I can remember now. David might as well been the only adult who was not keen on reprimanding a child. Given the chance, I would accompany him wherever he went especially when he was on duty. My favourite days were weekends where we’d take cows to a cattle dip approximately 247 km away. We crossed two rivers to get there. Nevertheless I enjoyed them.

The morning would begin early, with a ritual David had cultivated over time. He would go and fetch the finest cypress branches, cleaned to a baby-ass smoothness. He would fetch two of them: his and mine, although mine was a little smaller. Those days, mother would milk the cows a little early, and we’d set of at six thirty latest. We would drive the cows, and cows being cows were always ready for mischief. They would stray into people’s compounds as if they sensed that some of their relatives lived there. The fine cypress branch came in handy at that moment, where David would whip the cow into submission. Not only would the errant cow submit, it also did download the map to the cattle dip, where it proceeded to guide the rest.

When he left, that responsibility became mine. But then mother wouldn’t allow me to handle a panga, I made do with twigs or if we were lucky, picked branches from pruned trees along the way. The cows would always be a mess, so much that I dreaded taking them to the cattle dip. Calves would always want to explore farms with densely covered indigenous trees. I was with a cousin, who was older but belonging to the other gender, who, for lack of a better term, I will call female.

Because cows and rowdy cowboys didn’t respect us that much, we had to stick to a plan: maintain a schedule (every other Saturday), and get there neither too early nor too late. Like any other plan, it is bound to fail one time or another. That’s when we learned the importance of sticking to a schedule. One time, just before we got to the cattle dip, a huge herd of cattle emerged from what seemed like a forest cover. It wasn’t huge at first but then, slowly by slowly, the cows trickled one by one until the filled the road. Ahead of the heard were finely built bulls, billowing with unspeakable horniness. They heard to be restrained by the herdsmen.

Speaking of bulls, they always got charged in presence of too many cows. It is either because they are overwhelmed by the fact that they can’t get the chance to sniff all the private parts of cows at their disposal. I imagine them having bull thoughts such as: All these cows, man there has to be one on heat. I gotta get laid. When their frustration gets to a certain threshold, they decide to go with whatever cow that’s near them. Sometimes other bulls. As a tradition, experts on bull psychology recommended that the bulls have bull rings in order to restrain them. Some risk their noses for a chance to get laid. As a result a lot of unwanted pregnancies would result, leading to many cases of abortion among cows.

As a policy, we never let our cows mingle with the rest. They would be infected with strange venereal diseases. No, that’s was not the reason. They would get lost especially calves. So we waited for this large cloud of doom to pass. We waited. We had to wait also when it got to the cattle dip.

Another time, we encountered a hard of indigenous cows just after ours had swum in that filthy insecticide ridden pool. The best part of this exercise was that cows would have these mournful faces, as if wondering what crime they had done to be forced into a pool of filthy water. For that matter, they always knew their way home. This is the time grow boys and girls took to flirt with each other. We had a ferocious bull at the time: small and stocky. If it would have been a human being it would have been a Mexican drug lord.  And this is how I knew it.

As we approached the indigenous herd, which also had an indigenous bull, the bulls began getting charged.  A small boy, I stayed close to barbed wire fence ready to escape to avoid being trampled upon. The adults taking the indigenous cows had brain capacities the same as used condoms. They spectated rather than drive away their bull, which was seven and a half times bigger than our bull. The odds staked against our bull would be similar to the odds given to Gor Mahia when they face a Barcelona: 2000 against one. The bulls charged at each other, the other fellows cheering and I cowed on the other side of the fence since I had long decided that the match was going to be completely unfair.

If that bull had been listening to me, it would have also cowed. It charged the zebu breed with all its might, making maximum use of is centre of gravity, which the other bull lacked. Fearlessly, (our bull didn’t have horns so I can’t use the term locked horns) the two bulls locked heads. As I waited for our tiny bull to be pinned to death against the fence, thereby being converted into meat albeit prematurely, a strange thing happened. It pushed the other bull almost effortlessly, and pinned it against the fence. The zebu bull whimpered away with barbed wire marks and its ferocious billowing whimpered away too. If the herd boys hadn’t stepped in, it would have been turned into mince meat. And we have demanded a share.

At that moment, I may longed David had been in charge instead of me.

Christmas and Guests

As a kid, there were only two occasions that I looked forward: Christmas and the days that guests came. Christmas happened once a year, and spaced too far between, leaving a vast and expansive field of days in which to expect visitors. They didn’t come often, but when they did, mother would prepare them tea and put an unusually high amount of sugar in it. Maybe she always wanted to prove that we were ballers, sugar-wise.  Also, mother exercised an extraordinary amount of restraint by not even pinching us. But when the last guest left….

There were no phones those days, at least a small part of my childhood. Phones at time competed with an eighth of an acre of a plot in prime areas. And so visitors came impromptu. As if to compensate for their unexpected arrival, they came bearing gifts. It was mainly a kilogram or two of sugar, a packet of tea leaves, and, if they were richer, a loaf of bread-family bread. The bread especially ensured that we kids never forgot their coming, made even richer by our fights of who would eat the upper and the lower slices.

Sometimes we’d predict that visitors would come when chicken fought. You could wonder how we knew about this really important prediction mechanism. We overheard mother once saying so when two hens, I presume in the teenage-hood and craving the attention of the hunk cock, fought. That’s when it triggered a huge sense of responsibility in us, trying to spot fighting hens. They fought two or three times. Each of these times, to our childish glee, no visitor came.

Those were those days. I believe they were good days. Even the music sung in those days, especially rhumba, has a way of sticking in the mind. The simple fact that you don’t understand a single word makes them even better. There were standards that were never breached. Standards to everything. I will devote time to talk about visiting standards. One of those was that you never showed up at a person’s place empty handed. Maybe the punishment was that you could be struck by lightning on your way back, or something disastrous could happen.

Not these days. The people of this generation don’t understand how protocols enhanced our childhood. They’d rather buy bundles and check how people are living better lives than theirs, make them even more famous especially if they have had their butts chemically enhanced. Perhaps the god of vanity overthrew the god that reminded visitors to take goodies wherever they went, and would be termed as visitors. Or the god that controlled visitor’s minds got choked by the tremendous amount of a cocktail consisting of industrial waste and illicit brew. 

I could be wrong by laying blame to these people who intend to be visitors, and have a positive impact on young kids. I mean all you have to do now is have a swanky game that kids like, and simply hand them your phone when you visit. But then what about us adults, with bills to pay, girls to impress, and basically the ever increasing vanity to look good on these numerous virtual spaces. You have to bring foodstuffs that will last you through your stay. Some people have perfected the art of going for days without eating. That would be troublesome especially if you have a medical condition that makes you eat after every thirty seconds.

It is quite unfortunate to receive a guest who has ulcers. My dimwitted interpretation of the condition, that it is caused by stress, would have made me write a bad word for these visitors, like they are somehow disabled. You know, we are used to a certain unchangeable diet which may not be conducive for your stomachial specifications. We could go a great length such as ensuring you starve so that you can quickly go away, and we resume our routine.

However, you could enhance your stay by bearing gifts. If not just come and create a wife hotspot so that we can bet and search for pictures of naked women on the internet. That way, we won’t forget to, and perhaps wish that you visit often.

What it Takes

The sun is high,

Theirs is a motivation to fly past it

For a dream is a dream

Unless it extends beyond

And past the confines of the dark hours

As the clock ticks

Efforts they put drive them closer

And closer

To their most sacred of ambitions

To grow, to mold and to inspire

Generations after them

For them tomorrow is an inspiration

To a tell a tale

Of hard work and self-motivation

That they can sit and spell

What it takes to be them

Dear Lord

Dear Lord liberate me from my prison

Illuminate my life with righteous thoughts

Thoughts that have elongated my nights

Straighten my paths, take away the meanders

Light them or at least make the journey bearable

Give me courage to believe in the impossible

Give me courage to shut my ears to naysayers 

Dear Karma

I am pretty sure that you are okay wherever you are, probably screwing up someone’s life. I don’t object that, because it’s your job to do so.

The reason for my writing is to formally ask you out on a date, does Friday sound good. I’m suggesting taking you to Vila Rosa Kempinsky, is that cool? My assumption is that bitches like you love life on the fast lane, like expensive wine against an expensive back drop, served with smiles that is part of the job description of the waiters there and most importantly expensive food.

I want you to eat to your fill, then slowly tell me when you’ll check into my life and fuck me really good. I’ve since long held the belief that everyone is your agent, unknowingly executing your mandate. With this notion I think I overstepped it and almost took over from you. I’ve failed two people greatly. If we ever meet think their eyes will pop out bullets or something more fatal. But I know you know what might happen in advance. I want you to tell me that it’s okay. That you were kinda indisposed on the day I made those decisions that have either irrevocably changed their lives or impacted negatively on it.

I want us to strike a deal. If I’ve done you any good please consider my footsteps henceforth. If I haven’t, please be lenient. Dish out my pain in doses, like medicine. 

Looking forward to meeting you.

Yours sincerely

Kipchirchir Rop