Do not neglect your mental health in this Maandamano era
Youthful demonstrators wash off teargas from their face while staging a protest opposing the 2024/2025 finance bill demos along Koinange Street Nairobi on June 20, 2024.
The government would respond by saying, “Terrorists have infiltrated the protests”.
The protestors would laugh them down, livestreaming mambo kwa ground, and pointing out goons who everyone claimed to know, but no one claimed to have hired.
The police would ask us to go back home, we would say Kenya ni home.
There is a popular expression in the streets, “Weuh”. History has it on the white man’s account that when that colonial ninja, John Hanning Speke was taking a walk in good old Africa, along the dusty murrams of the British East Africa Protectorate, saying “Jambo” to every lion and “Hakuna Matata” to every antelope, something tugged at the hem of his garment. An imperial Everyman, he decided, on the toss of a halfpenny, to join an expedition to the Great Lakes of Africa, where on his peregrination there, he was stricken by heavy malaria, flesh eating ants and primitive African juju, but like the main character that the white man is, he miraculously survived and made it and saw this large mass of water and his first reaction was to write to the Queen back in England. He said, “Weuh! What a Lake, innit? Hurry on then, come, big land, no owner, hakuna matata.” Then he named it Lake Victoria. That’s how Lake Victoria was “discovered” and that’s how “Weuh!” entered daily lexicon—a word that goes through the whole gamut of expressions, a birthday, “You mean Vera is still 27? Weuh!”; a burial, “Yaani Jamo mmoja died? Jamo, Jamo? Weuh!” to even a wedding. “Ati Mercy is married? Mercy wa Habanos? Weuh!” True story. Ni me nakushow.
