Mantalk: Rastaman hustles, and Nairobi CBD shenanigans

We need to talk. Picture this. I am galloping in town. It’s been a good week. Someone who owed me money paid up, someone’s daughter promised to make chapatis over the weekend, perhaps she’ll sleep over, perhaps she is moving in slowly, what with how she’s been annexing my cabinet space.

So you can understand why I have a spring in my step and sunshine in my pocket, why I am wearing life as a loose overcoat. The sun is shining, but not too hot to scald my chocolate-caramel skin. I am in a scandalous fruity Cuban collar shirt and hoochie daddy shorts, looking like the crossbreed of a patrician son of an autocratic South Sudanese warlord, and a pimp-named-Rasta. Far too often, I have been described as tall, tempting, and ruggedly handsome. This comes from my gay friend, Eli, but I’ll take it.

I’m on Monrovia Street, that lane with Sno Cream, where I spend most of my Sunday afternoons, feeding my inner child Piña Colada milkshakes. I’m walking, jaywalking. Blackboy joy. It’s only called walking if you have money, which I do. Otherwise, it’s loitering. I’m headed to either Alliance Francaise or The Collective or Mwendas, who cares? I am feeling good about myself. In my mind, Ini Kamoze’s Hotstepper is playing:

Here comes the hotstepper (murderer)
 I'm the lyrical gangster (murderer)
 Dial emergency number (murderer)
 Still love you like that (murderer)

I quieten on the murderer part because I don’t want to take the government’s job. I crossover to the other side of the road, to get away from the sun, and land squarely behind some youngish lady, who hastens her steps. Ini Kamoze is getting louder in my mind, I even add the Mapangalee dance craze and do a jig. Perhaps I shouldn’t have done that.  As I pass her, she holds her ladybag tightly and I shudder. Did she just profile me?

That really hurt. I know Rastas in this town don’t get a good rep but come on! I am in shorts. When was the last time someone in shorts robbed you? Exactly. This is the matatu equivalent of people boarding and avoiding sitting next to you. I am mad. By mad, I mean angry.

But I get it. Recently, I was late for class and was rushing through human traffic in Nairobi, but I couldn’t run. Why? Because what are the optics of seeing a Rasta man running in town…how long would it take before someone screams, “Mwizi!” And just like that I have to explain that it’s not what it looks like afande, I was running to class. Nobody runs in Nairobi CBD. Only a fool. And mama didn’t raise no fool.

Speaking of, when I started spotting long hair, dear mother would be worried that I would get no job. Who’s going to employ you looking like that? Told me every chance she got that it wasn’t going to happen. When I wouldn’t play ball, she threatened me with sanctions. I wish I could say we talked it over, but I am pretty much stubborn. You know how it is. Really, I just wanted long hair because I wanted to keep a ponytail like Steven Seagal.

Why couldn’t she understand that? Or when I was feeling naughty, like I am right now, I’d have my hair in mullet form, flowing like Jean Claude Van Damme in Hard Target. Mr Steal Your Girl. I clearly wasn’t that smart in those days. But I had a vision you see. And when you are 20 and a virgin and shameless, everything you do is for girls. Girls were a hard target but guess who I was? Van Damme Mwenyewe.

So what happened? Exactly what you’d think. I got some (jobs). I lost some too. The Lord giveth. The Lord taketh. As for the girls, it turns out you do need a job to keep things, erm, working. Money is the oxygen on which the fire of romance burns. But it’d never left my mind that in this world you need to do some bit of bootlicking, self-abnegation, ring-kissing, and genuflection that would embarrass even a medieval Pope.

Not my father.

He never really told me what happened, so this story is bits and pieces I have got from listening in on conversations with his boys, his wife, his outbursts when nani is on TV making promises of tumetenga, tumeweka na tutafanya.

I wouldn’t call myself a Chinese spy, but I would understand if you did. Anyway, this one time my father was a hotshot manager of some foot-wearing company, you know the one. That one. He was doing well for himself. The youngest manager then. The only black manager in a sea of well, Indians. Until that day. What happened? The premises caught fire on a Friday, just after they had finished stock-taking. All the money got burned. Allegedly. They didn’t out rightly say he orchestrated it; they just suspected him. Suspicion is a short step from blame. He got wind of it and confronted them, never a man to let things slide.

Words were exchanged, words that became sticks and twigs, dry kindling, bursting into a furious bonfire. His cracked cup runnethed over with molten rage that no saucer could contain. I am going with the operative word “disciplined” but really, father metered out a violent punishment approaching death, leaving his persecutors with patches of vitiligo. Nobody stared because that would be rude but they definitely looked. There is a lesson in there. Don’t let your mouth write a check your ass can’t cash.

This is how he lost his job. That’s not the reason he was fired but what’s that Chinua Achebe said? Till lions have their storyteller? Tales of the hunt will praise who? I don’t know what kind of conversation he had with mother; I shall leave that to them. All I know is a hero was born. Sure, he has a temper. My younger brother has a temper too. Something inside me tells me I am no different.

But I imagine him going home, with a hint of burnt optimism, whistling to Kasongo ye ye ee, Mobali na ngai; because he is the kind of man to listen to Kasongo type of rhumba, but also the kind of man who prefers the truth. Things like that get in the blood, and they become who you are. The tragedy of the human condition, or should I say, “user experience” is that we spend time trying not to make rational decisions but rationalising the decisions we’ve already made. We stay too in too long in dead-end jobs. We dig in to failed marriages because what else is there? We stand by politicians, even after they violate our principles.

It’s sad, but it’s true. Most of us will never make the giant leap. Me? All I know is that until Steven Seagal reposts my ponytail, my work here is not done. So…here comes the hotstepper…

[email protected]