This is how I remember it. It was 7pm. I was in the CBD, moving from NBO to Kanairo, and as the city changed from cosmopolitan to gangland, so did I, my face turning from welcoming to mafia adjacent; hypervigilance. As usual, this is Kanairo, and the only person you can trust is yourself. And even then, you can’t be too sure.
I was hopscotching and jumping over mama mbogas on the streets, boda boda riders who think themselves Valentino Rossi, and nganyas who wanted to be Lewis Hamilton, but they were born in a dysfunctional country, so here we are.
I am alone, a Rastafarian with dreadlocks, prime meat for the Nairobi cops who would love to plant a case on me. The word ‘bedlam’ was made for how chaotic city planning is: jaywalking pedestrians, traffic cops overriding traffic lights, Sakaja removing this cabro here and putting it there, where there were also some cabros installed a few months ago, but the vibes were off, so let’s get new ones.
The city itself whispers things to you: this building was owned by so and so, but since Nani came into government, they fell out, so it was sold to that other community, who have gotten rid of all the bars and are setting up halal restaurants. The city has a thousand ears, and most of them were in the walls. The eyes through the windows. The calm and the wise have learned to treat everyone with suspicion; if Cain could kill Abel, what can’t Kamau do to Kiprop?
That’s when I saw him. George “DMore” Kamau. That’s not his real name, but Dmore was his sobriquet. We were in the same class at university. Took the same units, some might even say had affiliations with the same women. But who didn’t? It’s been what? Seven years since I graduated? Never seen him since we bid Maggie goodbye; Maggie here is what we used to call the Margaret Thatcher Library at Moi University.
DMore had lost weight. Or maybe he seemed like he had. His eyes had a faraway look, staring the way lecturers once watched over all of us as they invigilated exams. Nothing had really been spoken, but it might as well have been said that things weren’t looking good. He didn’t look good. The world had had its way with him. He had some clothes on a mat next to Club 64; this was how he was earning his keep in this bad city, he told me.
“Nauza mitush.” Mitumba. Second-hand clothes. Dmore is a graduate, second class upper, in the prime of his life; and he was all about hustle, hustle from sunup to sundown.
I have been thinking a lot about this. About how life can beat the dreams out of you. Recently, I was having coffee with Vincent Odhiambo, CEO of Ashoka, and he said something that stuck with me. “Consciousness is a burden; that understanding that the human potential is not necessarily matched with opportunity.” Scripture said it better – the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong.
Yet no matter how big you are, Kenya will humble you with its madness. We have deep systemic failures, where meritocracy is sacrificed on the altar of cronyism, giving birth to a dysfunctional society midwifed by a kakistocratic government. People don't turn out the way they do, of their own volition; there are so many things that influence them, and that has taught me to judge less.
Adulthood has unpredictable twists. Strange things happen. I know two people who got married that I swore on my mother’s grave would never be together. Well, they are (still) together, and my mother is no longer here. Another friend of mine is deeply entrenched in government, “two calls from the president,” as he puts it, while another has not had a job since we left campus, surviving as one does on the streets. Some of my close friends have grafted themselves onto the fabric of the world; they could be in the same building as I, and we will never meet. We could promise to call each other back in five minutes, and five minutes would turn into seven years.
The most pressing thing a man can have is the ability to withstand the needles and arrows of life without going crazy. The Stoics called this concept Apatheia, freedom from irrational and destructive passions. Looking outward at what others have achieved breeds a restlessness that nothing can satisfy. Because this world is an active fault line, it will kick you and beat you down to your knees, and after it’s done, it will piss on you. My father, a lover of abstractions, used to call this Real Life. “Hii ndio maisha sasa ,” he’d say. Real life was sharing a bedsitter with four people.
Real life was walking to Industrial Area from Kawangware, to save 20 shillings, pound, because a rich man would be happier to lose pounds, but a poor man would be devastated to lose just a pound; one of those periodic lapses of faith in the Kenyan shilling. Real life was my father screaming that as a man, you eventually have to face Real Life.
Tragedy is the occupational hazard of being a man. It’s not what I said to Dmore as I bid him my goodbyes and nice-to-see-you and tutafutane-next-week, but I hope it passed between us. You can work hard, you can do everything right, but for one reason or another, things just never work out. You sit and listen to the stories of the coulda-beens and has-beens, and it becomes clear that sometimes talent isn’t enough. The gods choose who they choose. And then Sakaja’s Kanjo boys struck, and just like that, Dmore was gone. It’s an art, really, how he disappeared, just like that, and I could picture my father with his swig of beer, and a glint of cheekiness in his eyes, and those eyes said, “This is Real Life.”
