I love Bungoma. Words absolutely no one has said. Except the sign in Bungoma, which, needless to say, says, “I love Bungoma,” heart emoji and all. I have never met anyone who “loves” Bungoma. Maybe it’s because I don’t live in Bungoma. Not that it matters, for somehow, I am in Bungoma, and I can see myself loving Bungoma.
Accommodation is cheap, I paid Sh1,500 bob for a deluxe room with a 25-inch TV bolted up so high even a giraffe would crane its neck. It was tuned to some western channel, where the announcers were oohing and aahing over, who else, a bullfighter, who was doing, what else, bullfighting. Wait, actually, I paid 1,000 bob, having negotiated adroitly.
Later, around midnight, we tour Bungoma town, which you can do just by walking. It is safe, the people tell us, which is exactly what you’d want to hear from the people. The smokie pasua guy, Freddie, after soliciting money for weed, tells me, “Uvae CD huku. Ni kubaya.” Get a condom. Why he told me that, I don’t know. Then he proceeded to list the CD options he has: The cheapest? 150 bob.
I remember in Moi University, Soweto Hostel H, room 15, which is where I stayed, and which is where the Hostel Matron, Shangazi Amina, would share with me the “Sure” condoms. They were red and free, and you wouldn’t miss them. Sure, they did the work, but since they were from Asian countries, the running joke was that the condoms were small. And tight. Come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t a joke after all.
Back then, as I later found out, it was usual for someone to come out from nowhere, say a MercyJoy Korir, or Favour Achieng, or an Abigail Wairimu, always those Christian-sounding girls, always in her second year, and publish a list of the 300+ “prominent politicians and students” she had infected with HIV. This apparently was done in revenge, after the woman herself contracted the disease from a “popular student leader”. Nobody could prove these allegations, but nobody needed to either. An accusation is just as bad as a conviction.
The news would shut down the university libido for a week, as students and faculty alike did their own yes/no insect Math of whether they had contracted the disease, tracing their sexual partners to the nth degree. Those who claimed to know the girl personally would scrape the linings of your veins, saying the number is even higher. And that would hit us like a seizure, like a knife blade thrust into your spine, like an upper cut on your solar plexus. Himalayan pink salt meets wound.
The white man said there is safety in numbers. Maybe they weren’t just spiteful colonisers after all, for we could relate. 300+ students infected? Big deal. Kifo cha wengi, harusi. “At least I am not alone,” we would tell ourselves, unburdened by the weight of numbers. Those of us who wondered where they would use their Quantitative Skills I and Quantitative Skills II finally found the platform, moving the maths around the board, carrying over, switching an x for a y: We calculated the possibility (probability?) of anyone infecting everyone with HIV. You won’t look stupid if you’re wrong, but you will look like Nostradamus if you’re right. That was our thinking.
Let’s say the number is actually 300. She is a second-year student. Get rid of the first semester, where she was still learning the ropes of campus life and had not become the succubus she is now. That gives us approximately three semesters, each about four months. Thus, that’s 12 months. Or 365 days if you are that kind of person. Take out a week for her period each month. That’s 84 days, leaving us with 281 days. Three weeks (one week each semester) for exams, and weekends when she is sick. Actually, let’s leave in the weekends. Minus 21 days. That’s 260 days. Take 10 days off for emergencies, mood swings, headaches. You know, the usual girl stuff. 250 days. The logic is simple, unless she was sleeping with 1.2 men every day, and this is EVERY DAY, there is no way she was going to infect 300 men with HIV. The math doesn’t add up. Was it possible? Yes. Was it probable? No. I wouldn’t call myself Blaise Pascal, but I wouldn’t stop you if you did.
In the end, it wouldn’t matter. You know, once there is a possibility that you could get something, the impossibility of it diminishes. We were all one partner away from contracting the virus. It’s psychological warfare. You’d picture yourself losing weight, the wounds inside your mouth, the stench of regret lingering on the roof of your mouth, getting thinner and thinner, and it was no joke, and it was no dream.
Despite 20 years of government preaching against stigma, until you are in it, you wouldn’t relate. And I’m telling you, the worst type of disease is psychological. Eats you from the inside. About the nastiest thing you ever saw. “Jikinge!” the condom ads would admonish. For health is about you, everyone else, even your partner, was suspicious. And suspicion is a short step from blame.
People talk about, Oh, I did the eye test, and it was just one time, and this and that, and I always say, Well, does it matter now? And the answer’s always no. I have always believed alcohol is the snarkiest of the drugs, for it gives you the base to try every other drug. And she is there, gyrating, her ass straining against the jeans a little too professionally, her breasts threatening to tear the seams of her blouse, and she is not wearing roll-on but you don’t mind, and she is saying things like she knows me, like she knows all my secrets, what a dirty-minded boy I was, what a nasty boy, and can we get out of here? Only in a thick Luhya accent. Rasta, si twendeko? It was beautiful. Like the moment before the Messiah comes.
Sex on the street goes for 200 bob, 150 on Black Friday. Free, if you bargain like an African mother. Money is not everything; that’s possibly true, but what’s probably true is that everything is money. Still, the radio stations will report, “Young people are not fazed with HIV! Gen Z don’t fear anything, just pregnancy!” and I will want to shout, That’s not it! That’s not it!
They have the facts: the youth aged 15–34 account for 54 per cent of new HIV infections. But they do not have the knowledge. And no accumulation of facts constitutes knowledge, and no impersonal knowledge constitutes the intimacy of knowing. The facts are that there is a prevalence of HIV among young people. Knowledge dictates that you don’t change a culture by condemning but by educating. The ego of man is such that everyone wants to assert their independence. Don’t tell me what to do; give me the facts, help me understand, for pride and stubbornness share a fence. He who alleges, must prove.
Maybe people love Bungoma, maybe they don’t. What people certainly love is knowing they can go to Bungoma, whenever they want. I have learned you don’t discover the evidence of any cause in its result. Just like some men can fall to the drink in their hand or the angry thing swinging between his thighs. Possibly both, probably all.
