It hurts because betrayal comes from a friend.
In 2018, just after I graduated from Moi University filled with academic brio and public intellectual swagger, I moved to Lavingware, in the larger Kilimani air space. Lavingware, for the unsullied, sits at the locus of the Kileleshwa, Kilimani and Kawangware Bermuda Triangle. If a girl asked, I was more a Lavington homie than Kawangware, odi. If a boy asked, well, mi ni msee wa ’hood, Kawangware Massive. It was a way to have my baddies and eat them.
However, the reason I moved here was that I wanted to be closer to my “people”. After all, identity politics is endemic to the average Kenyan as corruption is the typical politician. I was assured of vegetables near the Kawangware market, because someone had come up with a ni mi nakushow story that this was a fresh depot for food and veggies by a woman called Wangari. So, anyone who went to the market would say, I am going to Kwa Wangari. Hence, Kawangware.
No need to thank me for that history lesson, just be a good citizen and pay your taxes (or avoid them). Anyway, as my hair grew – so did my bad boy looks – and I struck up a friendship with Mama Caro, convinced that our strategic partnership would be beneficial for both our governments—she supplies me with veggies, and I, in turn, raise her tax bracket. Until one day when Mama Caro said she was bringing avocados, from Kisii, “zile za mafuta” and she would like me to be the first to taste her avocados (you know what I mean).
Rigorous schedule
Anyone who is anyone knows that if it comes from Kisii, then it must be the best, IMF-approved. These were not cheap avocados either. For a bachelor who had to balance sherehe, tithe, several baddies scattered along Thika Road, and a balanced, one-meal-a-day (OMAD) rigorous schedule, it took some convincing for me to part with the Sh50 required as sacrifice for the pound of flesh. But this is Mama Caro, my mama mboga and in the bachelor Order of Wamama stratosphere, she ranks second: behind my Mama Mzazi, and just before my Mama Fua. I ordered three avocados, breaking my financial stock market at that time and causing a surge of panic at the IMF that led to debt restructuring.
The girl I was playing kalongolongo with at that time came over, at my behest, convinced that I was going to propose. I was, but the proposal was that she should not eat anything that whole day as I had prepared a feast for her worthy of any government economist. She duly obliged. I dipped into my savings – which at that time was about Sh5,700-and-something – bought half a kilo of goat meat, ordered spinach ya thate, chopped ndogo ndogo (spinach petite), dhania for garnishing, pilipili kwa umbali, Saturday Nation (for entertainment) and, to set the mood, I bought some wine because I read in a Danielle Steel novella that women like good wine and fine men. Good wine was Chamdor, which was good because it is what I could afford. That was what? 400 bob? In Kawangware, sorry, Lavingware, I was king before they knew what kingdoms were. Fast forward.
I shaa shaa shuuu shuu and the meal was ready. I prepared the bedsitter and asked my madam to get ready for a feast of a lifetime. You know how it is. But my God. When I cut the avocados, not only were they falsely ripe, they were the watery kind, the ones grown in Mathare Valley with sewerage water. My date, while impressed that she had found a “man among men” who could cook, I was seething. Mama Caro lied to me. That was not the first time I was betrayed, but that is the one I took most personally.
People lie in Kanairo; people lie all the time. It’s part of the caffeinated romance of the city, in a Nairobi where you get along to get along. We never say what we mean, hoping that the other party will read between the lines (or lies) and come to a befitting conclusion. That’s why we say “naenda hivi nakam” to mean you will see me anytime between now and eternity (emphasis on eternity).
Fish and water
I don’t know who said it, perhaps I read it in the Constitution or Twitter (I shall never call it X, which is in itself a betrayal), that the relationship between fish and water should make you believe that betrayal is real when you see water participating in cooking the fish. Recently, a popular/known guy on X (hehe) was accused of betraying the national movement, after purportedly getting in bed with the oppressors.
I listened keenly to both sides of the story, weighing it on my armchair scales of justice, and I thought: wasn’t it always so?
The default of man is betrayal: Eve betrayed Adam, who betrayed God; Brutus sold out Julius Caesar, heck, I am not fit to judge as my own ancestor, the Nabongo Mumia from whom I inherited my cycling hobby, betrayed (or as the white man calls it “collaborated”) his people for a bicycle and a few chickens (for which I am eternally grateful).
The Last Supper, too, is a story of betrayal and why I generally avoid kisses.
Are we good because we are good or are we good because we can be evil but still choose to be good? It is easy for me to sit back and say I would never do that. But if I was given the alleged Sh5 million bribe, do you know how many avocados za mafuta from Kisii those are? Perhaps the answer is, I don’t know. I don’t know if I would not betray my country, my flag.
I question it all the time and I come to the haunting realisation that I am an individualist first before I am a nationalist. It is self-preservation.
The astringency of truth hits you sharply, like vision or revelation when the time comes, a new clarity, the kind of madness that overcomes Pauline travellers on the road to Damascus. This is what betrayal in the city feels like.
I get it now. All of us, at one point, will get betrayed by that old Judas kiss. And so shall we do the same. If I am right about this, which I am, perhaps why betrayal cuts so deep is because we never see it coming. We never expect it from the ones we hold in high esteem. They lift a mirror and show us why we are damaged men, moving around the world with a hollowness in our eyes. I understand why, in The Godfather, Michael Corleone gives his brother Fredo the il bacio della morte, the kiss of death, after he discovers Fredo’s betrayal.
We are human because we feel betrayed but we also feel betrayed because we are human. It hurts because betrayal comes from a friend, and yet it is true that it wouldn’t be betrayal if it didn’t come from a friend.
It just would be human nature, but it is because of that human nature that betrayal occurs. It’s a contradiction but no less so than the kind of tangled ouroboros, the snake-eating-its-tail fact of them as contradictions.
Mama Caro did what she did for herself, and she reminded me why betrayal lives in the heart, for because of her, I now verify everything she says, Nyayo chambers-style cross-examinations.
It is for the same reason I moved to Mama Mark, adjacent to Mama Caro—because I am shameless/petty/vengeful like that—and I discovered I had been living a lie. Mama Mark’s avocados are actually from Kisii, and what’s more, I have a little bit more money now, and she thinks I should give her my number “for personal reasons”.
Mama Caro may feel decentred, and probably seethe with jealousy but this is why betrayal has no redemption. She has no choice but kuanguka nayo.
