It’s December and that means hutaki story mob which further means you have the attention span of a Kenyan voter or a Kenyan politician…perhaps both…so I will keep my stories, erm, short. I will tell you three stories because I am in a charitable mood and truth be told, I just had my mouth stuffed with four or five chapatis, maybe more…but more on that later.
Story I:
We are driving down to Texas, okay, Machakos. I told someone’s daughter that I was leaving town and she was like “Again? This is why you remain unmarried!” I told her this is why men don’t open up. I have not responded to her texts since then…
Forget her (like I did). We are cruising nicely and we are singing word by word, to whatever the stereo is spilling out, just us two men, two women to R&Bs, it was so romantic you should have been there.
Remember when R&Bs were R&Bs? When Joe and BoyzIIMen and Chris Brown (before Rihanna) and Usher would sing and dance in the rain just to win a woman, something I wouldn’t do…because of my hair.
Maybe Sakaja needs to seek God or as the children in the ghetto say to saka Jah (did you see what I did there?) because Nai haiwork but I am here from the desert to tell you that love inawork. It’s only in Nairobi that things don’t work maybe because everything in Nairobi needs capital (I did it again).
Once we left that woebegone city, it’s like I had a reverse Damascene conversion, turning from Paul to Saul, jamani to be loved is nice. Go and experience it.
I had a minor experience with the law on Mombasa Road. Wacha niseme hii kitu initoke. I hit a lorry with my side mirror and as I was about to lose my marbles, the guy, Dominic, in his 50s, just smiled and said hii ni mambo ya Barabara. The good book was onto something when it said a gentle answer turns away wrath because I was the one in the wrong.
Dominic with a white lorry and a scratched car door you can have my malaria vaccine. A traffic police officer came and “took photos” of the crime scene and said, “Nyinyi nyote ni watu wazima. Muelewane.” The benefit of living in a slightly dysfunctional country is that serikali may have mkono mrefu but niko na mbio. Jokes jokes. Tulielewana na Dominic because serikali doesn’t need a, erm, hand? Wah. I am on a roll.
We are rolling down the picturesque hills of Machakos as we head to Kitui. Everything is green. Like any true Kenyan, I turn and ask our local tour guide how much land is going for here.
“Usinunue saa hii. This place is dry!” Come in January, they say. That is the real Ukambani. “What you are seeing now is a Potemkin village.”
They have a term for that, I tell her. Obtaining by false pretence. Yaani intentionally deceiving another person into parting with their money by making false representations which is what Ukambani with its greenery and virgin land is doing to me. I know this because Nairobi girls have obtained fare from me na wakakula but nobody needs to know that.
What you need to know is that we are now in Mwala. Mwala is a Kamba word that means small, I think. I deduced this because of Inspector Mwala, that short guy on, well, Inspector Mwala. We are here for a burial. L— lost her father. We are from Nairobi so we were fashionably late. We asked for tent ya Nairobi but they had forgotten to set it up, or so we told ourselves.
I didn’t know this but apparently, in Ukambani we eat first before the burial and I think that is a tradition every Kenyan tribe should embrace. There was rice and meat and chapos and cabbages—reasonable.
In my book, I don’t consider rice human food so I charm and voodoo my way into several chapatis. Anyway, for fruits they had a watermelon. Is there a more versatile fruit in Kenya than the watermelon?
Like corruption, it is everywhere. Matanga. Harusi. Baby showers. There is even that one in politics. Yaani, the watermelon is ubiquitous like those wall cabinets in the homes of men of a certain age. “But it’s healthy!” Which part, the melon or the water part? But I understand. I do. It’s the Bata Ngomas of fruits. You get a fruit…and water. And this is Ukambani. I get it.
L— seemed happy to see us…or to be seen. Full of beans. TikTok therapists will say she was masking or coping. Me I don’t know. I just know that tent ya Nairobi had been forgotten or so we told ourselves. Anyway, L— was saying how now she is an orphan, playing up to our sympathies.
“Mnajua me ni orphan,” she says.
“Not yet, but 50 percent there,” we say.
L—‘s way of dealing is deflection. But I know this is hard for her. As we become the Bonafide new adults, our parents and elders aging become the harbinger of an age to come: death. Their sicknesses are the John the Baptist’s of their looming demise. Those we love may not make it to the end of the race with us. That’s not being morbid or denuded, it’s accepting a world forever changed by their absence.
What else did I notice? That it is men who bury you. And in that, a life lesson, that it is men who give you life, and it is men who see what life takes when it is taken away from you. Man at his birth is supple and tender but at death, he is rigid and hard. As they hoisted the casket, I saw on their falling faces the hangdog gloom when you know you are next—the dead of tomorrow burying the dead of today.
Wahenga with their methalis, say it better. Adhabu ya kaburi aijuaye ni maiti. We shall leave but they shall be left alone. While I could empathise with them, I could never know the kind of pain it is to lose a father, or a husband. Grief is a river one that you can only cross alone. This is the premium adulting experience, no ads, no ChatGPT, just cold, hard pain. Where do I unsubscribe?
The more funerals I have attended—and there have been many lately—the more I have discovered that grief is an energy that wants to move through the body. And in our loss-avoidant culture, we’re prone to fight against it. It’s why when we sing “Cha kutumaini sina…” or “Amazing Grace…” or “Bwana u sehemu yangu, rafiki yangu wewe…” we feel it in our bones, the futility of it all.
No one here gets out alive. But you are here. They are not. This is the time to lean in not opt out. A part of, not apart from. Tell one of those people who keep saying, “Let me know if there is anything I can do” that there is something they can do and it is to ban watermelons from appearing at funerals. Yet so many things you promise yourself you won’t get used to, and then you do. Taxes. Death. Watermelons.
Yesterday I read something poignant in Mahmoud Darwish’s “A River Dies of Thirst.” If, the book read, someone said to me again: “Supposing you were to die tomorrow, what would you do?” I wouldn’t need any time to reply. If I felt drowsy, I would sleep. If I was thirsty, I would drink. If I was kissing my girlfriend, I would devour her lips as if they were figs. What else could I do even if I was braver than an idiot and stronger than Hercules?
I charge you, what else can you do? You are alive today, live. I knew a man who once said, “Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.”
