Errands In The Concrete Jungle

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.

The Phone Peeper

As a mature adult who gladly files nil returns every June, I take seriously my legal responsibility of peeking into people’s phones in matatus. It gives me a chance to make insightful remarks about strangers we happen to be travelling together, just in case we are asked to form groups on an impromptu trip to heaven.

For a long time, the arduous responsibility had been a dreary one, where the only things I managed to see were people chatting on whatsapp, or playing some really stupid game such as candy crush. That was nothing to report about, not until the other day.

It was a Friday, at noon, when I calmly locked the door to my house, walked a few metres and went back to check if I had really locked it. Satisfied that I had actually locked, proceeded (still calmly) to the stage. An excessively pimped up manyanga stopped and the conductor spread all his fingers to indicate the fare to town. Using the capture and recapture method, I concluded that it was the right amount.

I boarded it and scanned studiously, with passenger’s eyes encouraging this arduous intellectual endevour, whereupon I selected a seat at the back for one great aesthetic purpose – it was the only seat. As if it was fitted with thousands of tiny invisible thorns, I carefully laid my Kalenjin ass on the green seat.

The seat could afford me a 360 degree view of the passengers, and my attention was drawn to a fine lass seated in front of me. She had these bright red acrylic nails. I watched her dive these nails into what I considered a dangerous territory and fished out her phone.  The phone had a cover with bunny ears at the corners.

The lady with red acrylic nails pressed the power button and then proceeded to draw a pattern as complex as nuclear physics. From my experience, her phone was more secure than our IFMIS systems. She couldn’t draw the correct pattern on the first try. Neither the second.

On the third try, she managed to bypass he security feature, then entered a pin as long as River Nile so that she could open her whatsapp. At that point I was wondering the kind of job this lady did. One way or another it involved her phone. There’s no way in hell you can put such stringent security measures on your phone if you just used to receive calls, send texts, and occasionally updated you IG account.

A while later she switched to the gallery, browsed through a couple of photos. She stopped at some, studied them in the same way you would study a mathematical problem that involved numbers and letters either on top or below each other, went to another or deleted them.

Then bingo, the photo that I had all along been waiting to see on someone’s phone. It was the photo one of the greatest news quality as taught in schools; unusualness. There, standing at attention, was a cartoon drawing of someone’s mjulubeng, and a lady on her knees eyeing the promulgation weapon with the keenness of a surgeon. The lady looked at it and a wry smile registered on her heavily made up face. I can’t guess what was on her mind, but it must have had something to do with Chinese debt.

Happy about this unusual sighting, I concentrated on the music playing on decibels that suggested that all passengers were partially deaf. It was great music that awakened nostalgic feelings. Some really nice old school music that introduced our teenageness to the idea of love – pure and undefiled. I personally was yearning to go back to those days when I could just sleep without ingesting some mind altering substances into my body.

The effects of the music was quite profound as nobody wanted to alight from the matatu when it got stuck in that jam at Ngara. Everyone was quietly seated, engaged in their own teenage thoughts and perhaps wondering where the rain started beating them. As far as I was concerned, life can’t get any cruel.

The Conman

He dressed for other reasons except fashion; everything on him was rated G (G for Gikomba). And like everyone else, he was trying to make it in the big city. But then there was something striking about him. He walked like he had just survived a tornado. There wasn’t a sense of purpose in his strides, he went, wherever it took him. He seemed to be escaping demons, demons that have made it clear that wherever he went they’d be steady on his heels. And so he just walked knowing all too well that the government won’t even save him.

He tried to make an acquaintance with me along Haile Sellassie Avenue. I had just emerged from traffic that was steadily building up. The sun was a little hot. I was carrying a brown envelope. May be that’s was the reason why he approached me. He thought I was a little miserable, that I had fruitlessly tried to woo fate into agreeing a dinner date at Kempinski. You, the envelope was a little worn out from manhandling. Then he saw it fit to pass me a bit of his misery. He should have had the mind to see that tuko ndani ya serikali.

‘Boss habari,’ he greeted me.

‘Poa,’ I replied, trying to sound as repulsive as the price of unga (when the price of unga was plummeting towards the sky).

‘Do you know where I can convert South Sudan currency?’ he asked. I thought him rude. He should have at least commented on the weather, what he thought about the NASA lineup, the price of unga…..you know strike a conversation. You just don’t go about asking strangers where you can convert South Sudanese currency, which I was sure he didn’t have any way. Unlike you, he thought I am bothered by the rising price of unga and milk. He thought I’d he gullible. No, man, I man above that, because we are in government. In case you wondered why we often make pathetic political decisions, collectively, we would like to clarify that we don’t want to give up a special monthly stipend for jobless people whose people are in power and those special discounts that make us immune from hiked prices of important commodities. 

Just to know the extent to which he thought of me, I asked him the currency South Sudan uses. He said pounds. He then went ahead and told me about there being a south Sudan and a north Sudan. He was trying to win me, and subsequently try to ask me to give him Kenyan money, at a terrifically low prices compared to the current market rates.

But then the notes could have been fake and that would have left me with the option of looking for desperate Kenyans hawking the same story as his.

She Left in a Huff

She left in a huff, leaving a trail of her displeasure. She couldn’t hide disgust, and/or frustration at me. Stacy had been sort of meticulous in her plans to put me in the most uncomfortable of situations; a pile of soaked laundry, a kitchen floor that looked like an after party of chickens after prowling through muddy puddles and most of all a blocked kitchen sink. She left the toilet unflushed and the stench that emanated from it was way too putrid. Of all, the unflushed toilet stuck a sore thumb in me, something I am more than willing to stake my life to testify against her in heaven ( should she land there anyway). I can’t even wrap my head around it….how can a completely sane human being…..maybe I should done a background check if there was any history of retardation in her family.

She’s gone. Stacy is gone. It seemed her scent didn’t even hang around any longer. It is like she coaxed it to leave with her. She left for every other reason girls leave; unfounded infidelity claims. Stacy is gone. In a huff. She said I should grow up then banged the door as she left. She never even asked for fare, even though the previous week she had spent almost the entire second reiterating how a church mouse is richer than her. Whoever programmed girls to constantly whine about their lack of money in presence of men should be hanged for mental sabotage of the fairer sex as well as treason on fundamental rights and freedoms, if such a thing exists.

As I paced up and down the living room getting accustomed to the silence, I resolved that following her up and apologizing will be futile. In itself it would admission of guilt. I am not guilty. I subscribe to one man one woman kind of philosophy and to be accused of contravening my own doctrines is another matter all together.  A part of me also knew that it would be hard to adapt to the absence of her hearty laugh, a laugh that stilled echoed at a distance, filling every empty space inside the house.

Stacy will sober up. She will. I thought as a consolation. When she does the relationship would be on my own terms not hers. I can even go against my doctrines and cheat on her so that the next time she goes berserk it won’t for no reason at all. Then I will have known where the meat is sweet, a basis for my apologies if need be.

I am also paranoid of the fact that she may have already moved on immediately she stepped out that house. You never know with girls. Or maybe she doesn’t have transport and a dude will offer to pay and she ends up in his bed. I can only imagine me calling her a week or so later, having immensely missed her.

“Hallo,” I will say after she picks on the fifth try.

“Hallo, who is this?” I can imagine Stacy saying, a curdling in the stomach takes shape, seeking an outlet in the rage I will feel. I mean for all the resilience, calling more than five times only for her to ask for introductions? Jesus.

“I am the guy who will be stamping you ticket to heaven, “I will solemnly reply.

“Sorry?” she’ll retort and the disgust in her voice is palpable, you know the kind you can knead and make small balls of IDGAFs? Yes that one.

“I am the guy who will be stamping you ticket to heaven, “ I will not resist the temptation to repeat even though I know she heard me right.

“I am sorry I am not interested in heaven right now, it’s not a destination of my craving,” she will say again, without actually hanging up. A cue. You know those kinds of girls who will tell you they don’t want to talk to you yet they actually picked the phone, and they are not in any hurry to hang up?

“I know someone who might be of help…might actually know where you…..” bleep bleep! She hangs up.

That’s the kind of shit you just weren’t build for.

The Losers: Nice Guys

Even with a face of a scalded toad, it is still the dream of every gentleman to be desired, irrevocably and irresistibly by ladies. Some take the hardest way, building muscles, instead of making money and drawing the beauties through its magnetic powers. (Over time, we’ve learnt that it is quite advantageous to have both money and muscle).

Money and muscle aside, ever since the hoe ceased being a mere agricultural implement, ladies cannot the resist the opportunity of telling others that men are dogs. How do they do this? They date bad boys. Nobody knows why, but a wild guess would that nice guys are sore losers. Nice guys don’t to win at anything, and rather than telling a lady point blank that he wants to see her naked, he circumvents, beats around the bush like he is waiting for a fire, as Moses did in the bible. That’s why poetry sucks, and that’s what bad guys know.

To a nice guy, bad boys do not even deserve to get near any female, because they present a pleasant side of themselves. On the contrary, the bad boys just live their lives without seeking any form of validation whatsoever. They may even have the same intellectual depth as diapers, and ladies will think that they can change them. It never happens. You liked him doing the things he was doing and he is not about to change. Not the nice guy. He will do anything to please a lady, and they are not easily pleased. They want a challenge. They want the bad things so that they can say: see, I changed him.

All relationships are about giving and taking. The bad guy just gives without being bothered by what he gets in return. The nice guys however want people to recognize they are doing it themselves, and without them, the world may as well stop rotating around the sun. on that vacation, the nice guy will be out seeking praises instead of just having fun like the bad guy does. On drinks, the bad guy may just buy them without thinking about the reward. A nice guy will be thinking about the reward all the darn time.

When the nice are bottling up their emotions, the bad guys are quite expressive, telling whoever impresses or irks them the truth regardless of the situation. He does not care whether there will be conflicts in the end. Nice guys prefer tranquility, avoids conflicts at all cost because they focus on being nice.

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.