Who doesn’t know that a Luhya man will marry, as a minimum, two or three wives, and father two or three children outside, before leaving you for the love of his life at 74?
And isn’t it public knowledge that a Kikuyu woman, the matriarch, in the event of a failed marriage, will always leave with the children, who will also bear her name?
We are deep in murima. E— is here to pay dowry or homage or whatever it is called nowadays. He only told us about this last week, “Unado nini next weekend? Tokea.” He wasn’t really asking, and if he was, I wasn’t going to say no.
E— has been with this girl for some time, and when he first introduced me to her, I didn’t think she would last the weekend. It is always the ones you don’t think, innit? She runs a strict regime, that one. All the girls who used to comment or “like” his Instagram pics vanished. She is like Idi Amin Dada, who, when once asked why people keep disappearing during his regime in Uganda, said, “Because if I don’t make them disappear, they will make me disappear.” My boy E—, once a jihadist, is now a political prisoner, exchanging his campus six pack for a dad bod, wearing those gauche married-man-Nairobi-mall-flower shirts, and when you ask him if he is okay, he smiles, strangely. Hat’s off to the babe. It is just as well she is called Eve, because he, E—, ate the apple and gave in to temptation. He didn’t want to stop eating the apple; he wanted to own the orchard, which is why we are here. A line from Toni Morrison’s “Jazz” comes into my mind, and I chuckle to myself: “When Adam left Eden, he left a rich man. Not only did he have Eve, but he had the taste of the first apple in the world in his mouth for the rest of his life.”
