On a pleasant night in Kisumu City, the folks inside this enclave of sinful joy are at their partying best. There is no decorum in dancing, and everyone’s girl is, well, everyone’s girl. Pimps, thugs, goons, players, drug dealers, and every other sort of hustler swarmed over tables, buzzing like bees looking for honey, looking to sell.
Why am I here? Well, I am here because I am here. If in Kisumu, visit this place, they all told us, this place in Dondez that says Bar and Restaurant: Accommodation Available. I will not yield to the stereotypes that everyone in that bar was speaking English, but they were. It was more or less a shebeen, but its atmosphere felt very much like a jail’s—quivering with suppressed violence. Still, as a young man convinced that everything that happened to him was something he’d someday write about, one night in such an atmosphere wasn’t too horrible.
You wouldn’t be wrong to assume that this was the kind of night that everything that could go wrong went wrong. Maybe the waiter messes up your order, brings you a straight instead of a straight up. They should be the same thing, but they are not. Or someone steps on your shoes, with akala. Or you look at someone’s girl wrong, and she smiles, and now you are paying for her drinks, and she is not getting tipsy because, to paraphrase Chinua Achebe, as Eneke the bird observed, since men learned to fear the bottle, the girls discovered that the throat is also a muscle, and one that strengthens with use. That kind of thing.
Perhaps I should have sensed danger when these three sisters joined our table. They claimed the club was full, and we were only two at this table. Would it be such a bad idea if they joined? They’ll get their own drinks, they said. “Tunataka tu place ya kukaa,” the eldest, and I presume, the mother hen, decreed on their behalf. She was plain and colourless, in a grey and white dress. We could have said no, but we didn’t. Who knows with these things?
Everyone’s having a good time. D— and I are checking off our itinerary: earlier in the day, we visited the cinema at Mega City Mall, and we were just four people. It was amazing. If you ever have time, go to a cinema when there are no people. You can fart. Easily. And clap when the movie ends, which is a tacky thing to do when there are people in the cinema.
We pay for our drinks and close the tab. We take our jackets, it is, what, 2 AM going on to 3 AM. The night is still young. We head to the door, which is when we notice one of the girls is running behind us, asking, can we follow you? We were charmed, not deceived. We could say no, so we do. No, says D—, we are going home. Ah, makosa . She follows us outside and starts shouting, says something about ‘wanaume bure’, ‘shenzi sana’, and calls us dog in Luo, which hurts more than being called a dog in any other language.
Word travels quickly, I learned, when a female is angry. Suddenly, the mother hen is on us too, talking about how rude we are. Me? Rude? I was raised by a terrorist mother; I am nothing if not subservient. Anyway, she calls her boda boyfriend, and we are surrounded. D— doesn’t like being surrounded. I am thinking, What am I doing in Kondele in the middle of the month? I don’t get time to answer that question because I can feel some rough hand on my neck, and usually when that happens, it is consensual, and I am the one with the hands on the neck.
Mountains of rage built through my head, and I could feel the volcanic eruption on the horizon. We were clearly outnumbered here, but so what? All the ‘calm under pressure’ things I write on my CV were fooling no one as I climbed the cliffs of my nerves. And the demons, finding the house unattended, had calmly strut in through the open door. Is the pain of the mind greater than that of the body?
There are certain times in a man’s life when he is hit by a tremendous clarity of thought. One of those times is when he becomes a father. The other is when you are surrounded by a gang of nduthi boys, vagrants at a bullfighting ceremony, expectant as celebrants at a particularly bloodthirsty rite. The truth hits you the way a hailstorm destroys a garden of flowers. “Hii hatuwezi,” was the shared thought between D— and I. Pussyfooters? Perhaps. Hatuwezi. This was true. Sherehe haitaki hasira.
I have no illusions that I am the kind of man who’d rather walk away from a fight. In fact, if I can talk you down, I will. You meet people like Majembe or Mbavu Destroyer, people who are pure sinew, zero percent body fat, guys built with concrete, muscles trained and hardened by life, a lifetime of misery distilled in their fists, and you think you can take a swing? Not me. There are other ways to be a man. And I guess every man believes that he can beat up the next man. But almost every man is completely wrong about himself.
Weka mawe ? No bro. Because it doesn’t, as the saying goes, take two to fight. One person with an urge to hit somebody else is enough. Cowards of the county? Maybe. But if you provoke somebody, then you might have to hit a guy in the face and get hit in the face in return. I wasn’t a natural fighter. I wasn’t born making fists. I am no pugilist, forever a realist. The difference between self-defense and manslaughter is about 15 years in Kamiti Maximum Prison. 20 if your judge is affiliated with FIDA. With hard labour. Ni mbaya. We swear we’ll never come back to Kisumu, to this bar. Never. But of course we will.
