Earlier today in the bathroom, I was particularly admiring the job time does on all of us. I have been thinking—narcissistically to be sure—that in a few years, my face will spot its first wrinkles. That's if I wouldn't have made enough money to summon the innovative engineering of Korean plastic surgery.
That said, I have a YouTube curated playlist haemorrhaging through my phone speaker, specifically for this kind of long showers, listening to songs from artists that had once seemed essential but now seem absurd. I tell myself that I still got it. Kujichocha.
The machinations of male insecurity are hard to explain. One day they are hailing you as the next big thing, the next they are terming you a has-been. An old man being uneasy at the mention of dry bones? Perhaps.
But ngoja. I look at my legs, si mbaya. Next checked my thighs, just in case I have a skin wart from that time last week when I [had to] visit choo ya Kanjo hapo Archives and a cloud of flies had gathered humming Anguka Nayo , at least to me.
It was an almost perfect photograph of the human condition. Anyway, that too—not the flies, my thighs—hazikuwa mbaya.
Okay, I made up that last part. Now, the picture that should come to your mind is of a mime artist with his hands up. Sorry. I hate to admit it, but I sort of like these gloves, or maybe I just like touching myself (not in that way). I know, I know. Men used to go to war. Now they wrestle with their sexuality. Whatever. I have lost many battles to win the life I have now.
Where were we? Yes, thighs. A little further up and I remember someone’s daughter telling me my butt cheeks are like two friends who spent too much time together mpaka they have started looking alike.
I responded that is not something I can write in a self-respecting national newspaper. This is why men fear getting vulnerable, I said. Perhaps, I told her, I should get a second opinion. She said, from who. I pretended not to hear.
The shower floods me with memories and my mind drifts to high school. We had this communal bathroom. No walls. If you know anything about high school in western counties is that they are covert operations to test the mettle of manhood, pulling up your briefs and seeing what you are made of. Is the pain of the mind greater than that of the body? I went to school and those were no ordinary teenagers.
I never saw them attend preps. How could they? Those were 30-something year old men, the subtext being they had been recruited by the school to play in the physical games—rugby and football. Career students. It’s a thing.
Wallahi. You do not know this because what you do not know, they do not tell you, and what they do not tell you, you do not know.
You cannot convince me otherwise. Boots crunching on broken glass, men against boys, an angry kitten versus a resting lion. Those men were made of pure sinew. Men who constantly smelled of sweat. Men who’d never use white bath gloves.
Men who when they smiled, you’d check for your wallet. In my language, there is no word for “trauma” so how could I explain what I felt to my father? I became like those Nairobi girls—naskia lakini siwezi ongea —trapped in tongues, marvelling at the failure of language to express itself.
Those men from that period scratched a particularly weak spot in my ego. That’s because no matter how hard we’d compete against them, they would beat you down with accumulated experience, and battle-hardened bones that belonged more to a South American dictator’s cocaine plantation.
In Kakamega, where I come from, we dream the dreams we dream, and my dream then was to join the rugby team. I was a winger, because just like they assume that pretty people are generally presumed to be good people—I’ll remember what that theory was called in university, stick with me—they assumed just because I was skinny, I was fast. I wasn’t.
As you can tell from the fact that you have never seen me in State House waving that big Kenyan flag with the Prezzo, they broke my left hand with a scrunch tackle and that is how I realised size matters, no matter what your therapist/gym instructor/girlfriend tells you.
By the way, the theory up above is called the axiological expectation mismatched problem. A bad example is you meet a pretty girl, she seems well put together, even laughs at your jokes then after you part ways she needs a “favour.”
Urgently. Nairobi is crumbling under the weight of so many girls who are too pretty to be broke. But they are.
This was particularly enlightening as I have grown much older. People are rarely what they seem. They don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say.
I have seen how life tends to drift and separate the people—some of my campus friends are now married, others dead, others fell off the crevices of the earth. It can get very competitive because that is what drives most men—the primal urge to be better than the next guy.
It’s innate, and can become causative and corrosive. As Sakaja would know, even in the sewer the cream rises to the top.
I have taken this one lesson in life, that there are people who are lucky, and there are people who are not lucky. Blessed, if you may. There are those pompous personalities, those rags-to-riches, pulled-myself-by-my-bootstraps, poverty-has-been-my-entire-personality who have tasted privilege, like those who once done eating to their fill, say what a terrible thing it is to be full, and say to the hungry, “I wish to be hungry with you, let us fight gluttony, let us be hungry in solidarity.” That sounds maybe like the sermon of a Pentecostal pastor.
But no matter how big you are, Kenya will humble you with its madness. It will bruise you, and like a victim to their recalcitrant abuser, you will go back for more, excusing their violence as “passionate love.”
Look! The chief hustler made hustlers his hustle. Look at that governor’s sewage problem, but thankfully we lie on the equator—that means more sun Yay! —for Nairobi’s idea of a drainage system is evaporation. Look at this 12-year-old boy that was shot eight times, but he is still alive right?
That changed my perspective too. Every day I have been alive, I think about my privilege and luck, despite everything. I have friends back home, who failed by their country, would have been Olympic-level superstars. But for one reason or another, they’d just never made it. It is clear that sometimes talent isn’t enough. The gods choose who they choose.
