ManTalk: Life lessons a man will learn from a car accident

Someone somewhere has a voodoo doll of me and is plucking each immaculate shred of hair one by one. It is the only logical explanation for what is happening in my life. Yet, I have paid my taxes…well, some. I say “Please” and “Thank You” and “Waah, saa utado?” often. I bow to every cat, I have successfully avoided de-heading (which is like beheading, but worse) every boda guy, and I greet every feminist with “Your Majesty” while denouncing, sorry, “decentering” men. Heck, I even listen to the academically shy Sudi without wanting to commit intellectual suicide. But no matter what I do, it seems some elders somewhere have spit on their cadaverous chests and cursed me. I am going through a lot right now; a lot is going through me right now.

What happened? I hate that question. It is annoying. But this is Nairobi, and there’s no law against being annoying. I know you want to know what happened, and I will get to that in a bit, but let me start by saying it was not my fault. These things happen. They happen to everyone. They can happen to you. They happened to me. So, what happened?

What happened is that these guys were in such a hurry they decided to go through me and my car. Rammed me proper. Screech of brakes and crunch of metal. Youth genocide, if I do say so myself. Almost wiped out the mascara I was wearing—if you must know, I was just from a date with an apparition, this girl who is more beautiful than yours, whose sly touch filled me with a wild loneliness. I must have been thinking of the things I could do to her, erm, consensually of course, or the things she could do to me, when these sons of the soil skipped the foreplay and butted into me. It hurt. I let out a few curse words that rhymed with sheet, duck, mother-father, even Spanish words that start with “Ma—” and end with “—ko.” A few? A lot.

It didn’t look good. My bumper was gone, and with it, my Christian upbringing. My washer fluid was bleeding on the asphalt like a drunk man had taken a really long pee, like how drunk men take really long pees. The more I looked, the uglier it seemed. I was pissed. My anger was a knife they couldn’t blunt. I did that very Kenyan thing of “Do you know who I am!” It didn’t help matters that I was alone in the car, and these guys were what? 11? 1,000? I felt like Samson against the Philistines; all that was missing was a donkey’s jawbone.

It’s at a crossroads like this that you really learn something about yourself. Perhaps I could have checked if everyone was alright. I could have frozen; I could have fled. What did I do? I did what the 8-4-4 system has ingrained in us: I clicked, I complained, I gyrated. We traded barbs; he didn’t win, I didn’t lose. For the sake of national honour, I can say that I released my Rolodex of road rage insults, invented a few too. I confess that possibly I have a hair trigger of a temper, but you would too if you were in that situation. Kenyans drive like monkeys—no offense to monkeys. My mother keeps dogs, she says, she trusts her dogs to drive than letting a Kenyan drive her. Speed limits are a suggestion. Traffic lights are toys. Traffic officers are the leading cause of traffic.

Thankfully, abductions are no longer in vogue, so the police could make time for a small fisherman like myself. Which is just as well because in no time, that place was filled by everyone and their dog, milling around, teeth out, caps on, aghast, a hubbub, as if the president was about to launch a bridge, or a toilet, or a footpath, or a relationship. It was one person, now a hundred or so. Not even Jose Camargo can pull off such numbers. Each, owing to their nosiness, as if they had been very witnesses to the incident, invited themselves to offer expert analysis on what transpired. “Mtu wa VW ndiye mwenye makosa,” offered one. “Waah, hiyo gari imeenda,” said another. “Wapigane waheshimiane,” counselled another. They were there to listen, to collect stories with their eyes, to turn them with their ears the way you turn sour porridge in your mouth to know if good grain had been used, and to carry them back home on their tongues, flavouring the anecdotes with new information, a little hyperbole here, a little untruth there, framing by exclusion rather than inclusion, with the exaggerated tone of a citizenry accustomed to lies: “Hizi barabara zitatumaliza. Huyo kijana ameponea chupu chupu!”

Each man told his version of events, and then I told mine. I have to say that mine was the best version, since it included a short, extremely insightful, and probably completely irrelevant digression about how elders—wahenga—nowadays don’t serve new methalis, just rehashing old ones. I even threw in a suggestion—using a methali no less—about limiting boda bodas to one per ward, something I know will not go down very well with my readers in Kisii. “Wataka kuvuka border na boda boda?” You had to be there.

Still, Kenyans are who they are, and they kept flooding the scene, each new entrant with the eternal question: “What happened? Nini mbaya?” I got bored. Angsty. Started changing details here and there. Like Barbarian against Christian; Kenyan versus Colonialist, little me would remix history. Truth is simply what men believe or what men are made to believe. What happened? I saw a Subaru; I thought they had come for me. What happened? My girlfriend tried to break up with me, and I can’t—won’t!—live without her. Were you driving? Yes. Who was in the wrong? The boda guy. What happened? “Mtu wa boda alipita katikati yetu.” What happened? A lot! If you can, don’t get into an accident in Kenya. You have to explain what happened every time. You know how human beings can be.

Colombus said, “Death comes in a million guises.” Maximus said, “Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.” I understand it now. Still, I would have to deal with the aftermath alone, soaked in sadness—the profanity of pain—the way that your entire existence, the narrative that is your life, can be snuffed out in a second, without any warning or premonition whatsoever. The mortality of an otherwise immortal youth. At least I can now use the term “survivor, not victim.” How did I feel? All I will say is that if you fused the instant when Gen Z infiltrated Parliament to the instant the police fired live bullets and shot that concoction straight into your brain stem, you might have a sense of what it felt like for me to be in that scene. What have we learned? Nothing we didn’t already know—that Kenyans drive like monkeys and I need to pour libation to my ancestors, immediately.

Later, when I leave the shower, I shall find three missed calls, and a curt text, with no emoji (her way of pronouncing displeasure) from my girl who is probably prettier and certainly has bigger nyash than yours. She will say: “Babe! You were to call me. Kwani what happened?”

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