DARLING... ENHANCE YOUR BEAUTY...

“Man saw colors and invented paint.  Woman got inspired by paint and invented makeup. Man coined words and invented conversation. Woman got inspired by conversation and invented gossip. Man learned agriculture and invented food. Woman got inspired from food and invented diet. Man discovered friendship and invented love. Woman got inspired from love and invented love triangles. Man discovered trading and invented money. Woman got inspired from money and invented shopping… that’s it! Thereafter, man has invented many things and women are still shopping!”

This goes out to all men out there who take their girlfriends to shop for hair. Before I continue, let me state that I have nothing against weaves or any other hairy implants. My friend Manyasi told me that those artificial hairs come from an indian kinyozi, they are packaged well then send to Africa for financial purposes. I like indians and I like hair too. In short I do not mind the weave… but that does not mean I like shopping for them!

Take yesterday for instance; my sister had tricked me to go shopping with her.we were welcomed by  hot air decorated with all mixtures of perfume. Someone must have been burning something back there!  The room was disturbingly pink. It was almost noon, the sun was generous enough to light up the place but some genius saw it better to light it up, complete with disco lights! it was like entering the Hair kingdom where all the women had arrived to worship the hair queen! My heart beat my ribcage with such determination; it wanted to get out of here…

Before I hatched my escape plan, a lady with all exaggerated body parts suddenly appeared and gapped my left arm. She wrestled her way through the sea of ladies. The staff of Moses would have done me good at this moment! I was sweating  (like everyone else) by the time we reached our destination!

“si hii ni skin tone ya Sabina?” (isn’t this Sabina’s skin tone) she inquired pulling my skin towards a gang of women for inspection.

“ni hiyo exactly!” a lady who looked trapped behind a drier shouted over the noise of boiling water next to her. “I think that Darling number 203 will be good for her” with that, the big lady shoved me out of the shop, my job was over.. I was calculating on how I would break  out if this hairdom but luck was not on my side… I bumped into my sister.

“Which one do you think I should buy?” now I have no knowledge of hair!

“Darling number 203” I said with such confidence.

“nope.” I was dismissed. The next three hours looked like centuaries! At some point I even thought I had missed the 2017 election and my 24^th birthday! Here is another thing I learnt, if left to choose, women do not know what they want! Imagine my dismay when she finally picked DARLING 203 on it was written “enhance your beauty”

I wanted to punch her on the nose!

SUB CHIEF VERSUS MUTUTHO

I did not know I was under arrest until Jesse the sub chief pissed on his old khaki shorts while at the same time crying like a little boy. Jesse is our sub chief and I am proud to have shared a cell with him. Dont get me wrong, I am not happy at all that I was arrested. Before I go any further, I just want to state that Mututho is a real person, as real as "his" laws. I had faithfully gone to pick my girlfriend from Murenju Bar where reports said that she was drunk as a fish and her high heels had fallen in a pit latrine. Another piece of advice, if your heels fall in a pit latrine, let them go.

So before going to Murenju I decided to pass by the sub chief's premises to collect some back up. One has to be prepared for such missions.

Mzee Jesse took his sweet time to go inside his official regalia, a white long sleeved shirt (I suspect it was originally white because, like everything else in his abode, was dirty), an old khaki short, a thick pair of beige socks whose torn parts were hidden in a pair of shoes that were originally gumboots. The upper part of the gumboots were cleverly cut off by some genius whom I suspect was Jesse's son, Wekhomba.

Where was I? yeah, at Jesse's house collecting backup.

"Nalyanya do not worry. I handle cases like these every night!" The good sub chief assured me. There was something about his heavy Luhya accent that added confidence to his words.

"So I hear your girlfriend is a regular at Murenju's!" He chuckled. Like his shirt, his teeth too were originally white; but not at present! "My son tells me that she even has a table there... is that true?"

It is embarrasing to have such girlfriends. What is even more annoying is that I had met MJ (Those are her initials) during a Bible study session. Like any other good christian girl, MJ was hard to get. It took me countless prayer sessions and Bible verses in equal measure just to get her into a restaurant! How she resorted to this disgusting habit of drinking , dropping her heels in latrines then trying to retrieve them is a long story...

Back to the events that led the sub chief and I behind bars.... I had to endure the lecture on dating, courtship and marriage all the way to Murenju's. We needed not to be directed to where the ladies was, MJ was screaming at the top of her voice you would have thought she had dropped her bad liver inside there. There was a small crowd of potbellies watching the scene. The guy who had called me was busy receiving blows to the face as he fought to restrain my violent girlfriend.

Jesse took me completely by surprise when he gave birth to a five feet whip from somewhere within his sub chief uniform. The effect was impressive, miraculous I dare say. the wine in their systems immediately turned into water and all openings at Murenju's were converted into emergency exits! some fool even pulled the fire alarm!

It was after Jesse, MJ and I were thrown at the back of the Uasin Gishu county Police pick up did we realise that the drunk folk down at Murenju's were not running away from Jesse's whip. It was 11:01pm. Mututho.

you can find this article at kenyawriting.com too. 

OF SECOND SHARE AND A BEATING.

The year is 2005, I am 12 and hungry. The sun is up and I have just licked of the plate clean, no evidence of my illegal second share. Yet my stomach won't just shut up. I look at the queue leading to the dining hall, its reasonably long. I get creative. Maybe the cook has not registered my face. But its dangerous given that I had already gone for a second share. The fact that I had been arrested thrice the previous week just made it even riskier to go for a third share. To add on that, the same cook who was serving had caught me pants down stealing remains of food from the staffroom earlier on that term. All odds were playing against me. My stomach growled again as if telling me "Be a man!"

I was in Nzoia Sugar Co. Primary School, an institution buried at the heart of a vast sugarcane plantation. Hunger pangs tend to be sharper at such remote places. Our class, STD 7W was popularly known for being masters of disguise while going for second shares. The boys would go at all lengths including soiling our faces to avoid recognition. The boarding master who also doubled up as the canteen man even tried to de-worm us to rid us of this gluttonous behavior. Wandera was his name. On the day that we were to be de-wormed, we ran away from school and spent the better part of the day in the sugarcane plantation. Our reason for escaping this medical procedure was because of Ojago whose dad was apparently a doctor. Ojago had narrated to us in gory detail how worms would crawl out every opening in our malnourished bodies once we took the deworming pill. Who wouldn't trust a medical opinion? So two of my cousins and I took to the Greenwich meridian, for that is how we referred to the plantation.

It was therefore not a surprise that I wanted to risk my life and go for a third share. We had survived solely on sugar-canes the previous day... The grumbling in my stomach made me wish i had rather had worms crawling out of my ears! I could not take this.

Hunger can make one creative. I went back in Starehe House and took out my checked green shirt. This was a clad we were to wear only on weekends. Feeling like a chameleon on a wall, i confidently marched back to the queue with my licked plate shining in the sun. My heart was racing faster as we approached the counter. Maybe this was a bad Idea. "Maybe not.." said the voice in my belly.

My turn came. Everything seemed to move in slow motion. The cook, Musa, was looking directly into my scared eyes as he dug the serving plate into the cake of rice. Just as he was about to put it on my clean-licked plate, he stopped. I was about to run for it when the other cook, Eliud, got hold of my hand.

"Marango!" he screamed for the third cook who was chopping cabbages with an axe, to come into the arresting party. My panic went wild when Marango approached still holding the axe in his hand! I had to defend my self...

"Wait!" I shouted. I had not yet broken my voice.

"Hii ni seki!" Musa said reaching for a pipe. My bladder gave way. This is why you should visit the loo before embarking on such a dangerous mission!

"I am not the one!" my soprano rang the air, "the one who was here had a sky blue shirt, I am wearing a checked green shirt!"

They stopped, thinking through my explanation.
"How did you know the 'other one' had a sky blue shirt?" Marango asked. What followed was the worst beating I have ever received in a kitchen... well, the only beating I have ever received in a kitchen.... True story.

BUNGOMA NDOGO

There is a stuffy bar in Eldoret called Bungoma Ndogo Bar and Restaurant. I cannot locate it even if my life depended on it. This is because on the night that our friend Cherotich took us there, the Kenya Power Company had decided to bless us with one of their surprise black outs. Since it was her birthday, Cherotich would not let anything stand in the way to blow her twenty second candle in style. The reason why she chose Bungoma Ndogo was because black out or not, the operations of this den usually goes on. This is because nothing down here uses electricity. Bungoma Ndogo is lit with seven smoky koroboi's (I counted) and there is the famous Namatete Band for entertainment, well they are famous back in my village.

Having been a weekly customer in Bungoma Ndogo for the past three years, Cherotich could find the place with her eyes closed; something she confirmed given the black out. All the six of us formed a queue behind her as she groped her way through the poorly drained city of Eldoret. After a whole hour of bumping into random objects and people, we finally saw the flickering shadows of the patrons at the venue where Cherotich was to mark her twenty second birthday. the un-synchronized voices of Namatete band were being drowned by their drum-mist who seemed to have more energy than Kenya Power... it only made matters worse that the members were demanding for the singers to move along to the chorus since they were not familiar with the lyrics of the jam.

"That gentlemen is Bungoma Ndogo!" Cherotich announced much to the delight of my Luhya friends. Our entry was welcomed ceremoniously by half of the bar. the other half were shaking their drunk heads in disapproval.

"Watoto wa campus (campus kids!)" said one old ancestor who despite all the years of drinking, the booze had refused to kill him!

"You look like the son of Zebedayo!" The old geezer added poking me on the stomach with his home-made walking stick. Let me put it out there that I have no relative, not even on all my in-law's side going by the name Zebedayo!

"You drink alcohol?" the man who should be dead and a half years asked annoyingly poking me again, "Zebedayo owes me money you know!"

I was about to punch him right on his ribcage. If the cheap alcohol was not ready to kill him then, I was! but Cherotich intervened

"Kenny! its my birthday do not spoil it for me!" and she immediately and squarely dislocated the ancestor's nose. We cheered and soon everybody else joined us in the happy birthday chorus apart from the old people who lead the old dislocated nose out of the bar. The Namatete Band did a Bukusu rendition of 'Happy birthtay tuyu, Happy birthtay tiya Cherodich"

Then came the time to order drinks, we had to come to the hard decision on who should get drunk and who should not. Two were not to drink. Since it was Cherotich's birthday, it was unanimously agreed that she was to drown in whatever Bungoma Ndogo would throw at us. It was then that I noticed all my friends staring at me in a manner suggesting i should sacrifice for the team.

"No! No NO NOOOO!" I cried out in defense.
"Remember last time man..." They were referring to the first time the devil tempted me to drinking Black Ice. we do not talk of that dramatic day. I was out of the alcohol budget. Then Nakitare, my friend from the University of Nairobi, who is now writing blogs about me (nakitarenakitare.blogspot.com), backed out. We nodded understandably, he had found Christ.

Bungoma Ndogo does not serve anything else apart from Keg, cocacola and makhalange. Makhalange is basically something between Ugali and busaa (a local brew). As Nakitare and I ate our makhalange and cocacola, Cherotich and the rest of the birthday party danced themselves to drunken stupor. Despite being drunk, the birthday girl still managed to guide our way back to campus in the dark. I have been trying to find this base since January first. God bless Bungoma Ndogo



this article is also featured in Kenyawriting.com