Sex, drugs and alcohol is not the answer. Unless you are asking what I was witnessing over the weekend. What did I witness over the weekend? Don’t ask me what, ask me where. Where?
I was at one of those Zen cafés-turned-clubs frequented by twenty-something Gen Z yellow yellows with faces smudged in makeup like they are editing God. Their serpentine guiles, accentuated by heavy mom jeans and bralettes, show off their stomachs which I’ll have you know are flatter than an Ukambani rock python. Sensual women.
I figured they were the kind of women who could make zebras walk up to them and give up their lives. They looked like they answered to the name Tonia or Aurora or Jasmine.
If the president wanted to know whether his Africa Climate Summit thingy got results, then I stand as witness: These Gen Z babes were, I am told, aiming for an earthy vibe. “Earthy aesthetics,” my date called it. Za ndani, shehe.
If indeed youth is wasted on the young, then my compatriots are spending theirs like it is an inheritance. Girls just wanna have fun? Then, fun was had. That’s to say, the seven deadly sins that maandiko talks about were in full display here; and I watched with passive interest, the voyeur leaning against the window and fondling himself.
That’s how I came to the realization that we probably have a vaping problem in this town. I dare say, we have a smoking problem. The girls there may have been smoking hot but they were also smoking a lot too.
Kenyatta the Second talked about how single parent homes have risen in the country, then later, the problem that refuses to hide its face, alcoholism. But there is something else in the closet: vaping.
Late September I was out with another youngin’ at the apogee of her youth (yes, it’s true. Niko na nyota ya Gen Z) and as I was flirting with the idea of taking her home (to her house.
I don’t take strangers to my hacienda—especially if she comes from Roysambu, which she did). She pulled out a vape, and offered me a puff. Look, I parsed my mouth, I am a conservative Rastafarian Anglican. I am shy, I told her. I will be disinherited!
She eyed me like a hungry man who had just spotted a German cockroach scuttle across the delicatessen. Yet, I admired the expression on her face, which was simultaneously vacant and self-righteous.
Calling me an ‘oldie’ (ouch), she proceeded to vape the reminder of our date—her face seemingly softening with every puff, releasing into the clammy air of Nairobi all the frustrations of being young and experimental and carefree and nonchalant.
It is here that I’ll identify myself as a former cigarette smoker. Or more accurately, I tried, twice and choked. How people say they enjoy smoking beats me. First, I hate holding things between by fingers.
Second, how many seconds should someone take in between puffs? My Biblical impatience saw me do five seconds between puffs. Okay, it was three seconds.
Enter vapes. To speak about smoking without including vaping, is to talk about TV without including streaming. Now this is something I believe people are pretending to enjoy. Because it looks cool. And because people who look like they are cool are doing it. Vaping is like the diesel of cigarettes.
I have seen some amazing things in the streets of Nairobi. It’s like everyone is just pretending as if everyone has been cast as the star in a movie about their life, so they are one step removed from it.
They pretend to be something they are not. There is something in the air of Nairobi that turns everyone into zombies—maybe that’s why a lot of the younger generation are after the flavoured air.
Vaping is an aerosol boiler filled with chemicals like nicotine and flavouring to get you addicted. An e-cigarette, for those who don’t know what vaping is (in which case I am tempted to ask, how heavy is that rock you have been living under?) It works by converting liquid nicotine into a vapour.
Suffice it to say, nicotine is highly addictive. Essentially, vaping was or is a smoke cessation device.
Every generation has its gimmick. Millennials are the swansong generation, inhibiting that ambiguous position between the binaries of baby boomers and Gen Z, between here and there, some impossible other, some impossible both. While our parents were mostly cigarette addicts, Gen Z have taken to vaping like the government to corruption, I mean, connections.
Without trying to sound like I am saving a fish from drowning, I’ll confess that I too wanted to be a smoker. (I even had a stint with the nicotine pouches, weuh!), but nobody needs to know that).
It really did look cool. I fetishized wearing those audacious god-papa hats, a long earthy brown trench coat and a drawn-on pencil moustache — its giving Mafia vibes — just so I could meet someone at the corner of City Hall Way with a brown envelope.
There, I’d hand them the envelope with an appointment letter from a shadow briefcase company—but only after they have given me the money, my ‘facilitation fees.’
Then, I’d take a puff, disappear into the night like the Dark Knight, after, quite literally blowing smoke up my victim’s ass. I don’t know about you, but if there are any Hollywood execs reading this, I am ready to sell that script.
Regardless, life isn’t a movie. I don’t start things because I am terrible at stopping. Social learning theory suggests that social behaviour is learned by observing and imitating the behaviour of others. Smoking is a vice that unites.
Everyone shows up with the vape expecting to have the time of their life, and nobody wants to disappoint their friends by not having the time of their life, so everyone pretentiously behaves as though they are absolutely having the time of their life.
This is the one thing all fools have in common; Seneca wrote. They are always getting ready to live. They are always thinking that they have plenty of time. (Aside: More than 6,000 Kenyans die of tobacco-related diseases every year; 79 men and 37 women die per week).
But as the saying goes, one man’s charisma is another man’s absolutely intolerable nausea. Maybe there is a silver lining in all this. At least it saves the environment from the eyesore that is cigarette butts.
Maybe — za ndani — that’s why the earthy aesthetics girls love vaping. Who cares about lungs anyway?
