It’s 641 PM. I am running short on my deadline to submit this column before my editor, God bless her soul, sends a curt: Your piece?
No salutation because she is on the move, her head whirring from the number of words she reads in a day; she is busy like that. I have many excuses, chief among them the cold weather, but Nation doesn’t pay me to tell anyone about the weather. I am struggling—the adulting I am supposed to be writing about is the one I am currently in.
On the TV, Gachagua has called someone “Soprano,” and I wonder when he started watching the mafia movies, but then they show pictures of the deputy president, and I get the reference. I jump onto social media, something to distract me from the emptiness of reality—a distraction from my distraction—and people are shaking nyash on my face, Twitter has crucified yet another dissenting musician on the cross of cancel culture, and Facebook? Who even goes on Facebook anymore?
I was sensing exhaustion rising in me, like rot. Worse, I was given to mood swings, and I thought myself Tony Soprano in the flesh, who, in the span of a day, can go from a murder scene to a family dinner without an iota of remorse. If I had a drink, I would drink. But I would not hang my head, for that is not how our people are. It’s now 7:18 PM. I have written the opening sentence and deleted it three times.
I found my finger hovering over the remote; Gachagua was still talking—oh boy, can that man talk or what? I could feel myself wondering about checking myself into a psychiatric hospital, but we wouldn’t call it that because the world has euphemisms for it once celebrities and politicians’ kids and Kenya’s 1% go there, people who—given their stations in life far above the nobodies who worshipped them—should have known better than to do such a common thing as lose their minds.
I find myself listening to Dr Jose Chameleone’s “Shida za Dunia,” because at a certain stage in a man’s life, music stops being entertainment and becomes a narration of your life. Dr Jose Chameleone was the richest musician of our childhood; at least that’s how we knew it growing up in Shirere, Kakamega. We certainly helped inflate his pockets because his music would play on West FM or Vuuka FM or Ingo FM, and you know how Luhyas are when they love you. The man had a BMW convertible for his first hit song, Mama Mia, in 2001! A year before ‘Kibaki Tosha’ , a year before “Unbwogable,” a year before Kenya was voted the most optimistic nation in the world (now everyone and their dog is either stressed or depressed).
But do you know what he was singing? “Mbona umeniacha? Umeniachia Watoto, Njoki wewe!” Needless to say, Dr Jose Chameleone was pleading with the mother of his eight children, who had abandoned the home citing poverty. The good Chameleone wonders why now and pleads that he is the only one who truly loves her and not the guys driving Beemers and Benzes. Now that’s what I call real music.
That was Dr Jose Chameleone’s story before the glory. When he would hang on to matatus, before he would play in matatus, kabla achorwe kwa matatu . But for every Dr Jose Chameleone there are hundreds of Red Bantons, for every Sauti Sol there are thousands of Zikki and Ngesh’ wa Vasha and Stoopid Boys. An erstwhile lover gifted me Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Outliers', and in it Gladwell argues that it’s not enough to have talent; luck, timing and opportunity are the real catalysts behind ‘self-made’ people. In other words, you can be the hardest-working donkey on a farm, but people will pay to see the zebra.
The key to success is opportunity. Enda useme nimekutuma . And the older I get, the more I believe nobody escapes this life without regret. What collapses a man from inside is his buried life—the business they never started, the risk they never took, the art they never created. You have an inclination of this in your 20s, when life is party balloons and whatever, but you really start to feel it in your 30s, where sometimes you have to choose between being mentally stable or financially stable. Sometimes one, often none.
Such is the lot of the man in his thirties. They are like lychees that have been picked from the tree; each passing day makes them less fresh and less desirable, and only too soon will they lose their value, and have to be gotten rid of at a sale price. Forget what the manosphere says; there is indeed a short window from which you can grab life by the proverbial, before you fall from your castles in the air, before you become those 40-something-year-old men who never left their parents’ houses in Buru Buru or Otiende or Moi Estates. The longer you stay on the wrong train, the more expensive it is to get back home. The farther it travels, the less point there is in going on, and the lesser in getting off.
Imagine trying to withstand the pressure of your old lady to settle down, trying to keep the bolts in your head screwed on tightly, trying to make something of yourself in a country trying to make something of itself. It’s a failure to launch. It is, and yet it is not.
“Wacha kulia, shida za dunia, hebu tulia Mungu anakujali pia!” That’s Dr Jose Chameleone in Shida Za Dunia. He’s right, and yet he isn’t. Especially because, shida zangu za dunia notwithstanding, the editor still needs this piece to build the, erm, Nation.
