roadside streams

African Peculiarities: TO ALL THAT SAT THE KCSE EXAMS; There is one thing that many will not tell you, but I believe that it is my responsibility, as somebody who has at one time been considered a failure. At this time, many people will trip you into positions of guilt, your aunts and uncles, and sadly, for some, YOUR PARENTS. They had expectations of you, and sadly, you might not have met the expectations. The luckiest today, will be those who ‘passed’ their exams. This battle, so you know, is not about your KCSE grades. It is a battle of egos. What will I tell the neighbours? What will I tell the chama? But a good question, did you know that ‘A’ students mostly end up working for ‘C’ students? A Few examples of perceived failures? Warren Buffet, Richard Branson, Jack Ma? (PS: They are all dollar billionaires.) The society will not want you to know, but it is because most of them don’t know either, and are conflicted right now. Your parents might be worried, that the dreams of their...

African peculiarities: Form Four Ladies Just so you know, the society is a keen and ruthless judge. For all those who are finally joining us here, getting to your sweet eighteens and finally believing that you have conquered the world, welcome to the boiling cauldron that is the society. To begin with, the society is more judgemental towards ladies than dudes. Caption this, the young guy you went to primary school with comes into the picture, and they pay you a visit, marvelling at the beauty you have become, so distant from the ugly duck you were in primary school. They are attracted, and at this age, you see love, and you make plans for marriage. You keep it under wraps for a very long time, after all, your mama is too ignorant to notice it, but she knows, and she is watching from the periphery. You are too lost to see why she is angry and fussy over everything, making mountains out of molehills, until it boils over one evening when you return late, the feeling of bliss melting and...

We Shall Times are getting unkind, to he whose skin is dark. ‘They’ fear not to say it out in the open, they fear not to take lives, lives they never gave, lives they never nurtured. There is nothing we can do, they say, for the odds are against us, the odds have always been against us. ‘There is nothing that the niggers can do, for they worship and adore us’. Two hundred years in chains, and right now, they still cherish the chains, and they crack our backs with their whips, but not for much longer. With complete rebellion, we shall march, even while the chains on us are still dripping injustices. We shall parade our uncovered wounds with pride, the stripes on our backs, so that they can see, that they scarred the flesh, not the souls. They burnt the skin, not the will, and though they heap fire and coal all over us, we shall never burn to ash. We shall refuse, to breathe this poisoned air, the rancid oxygen. We shall refuse to partake, in this torture, and we shall refuse to be pa...

African Peculiarities: Village gossip. It has been the largest source of intrigue, the line followed before gossip finally gains flesh. I believe it starts with the observation of a pattern; observing how baba so and so spits, how a certain chic has a penchant for bodaboda guys, and how mama nani stuffs mandazis into a paper bag after every chama meeting. Without the strength to ask or confront, without the capacity to question, presuppositions are formed. This is done by an ugly mouth with self-esteem issues, that seeks relevance, a means to stand out in the crowd, and there being none, they choose this avenue. It is a special kind of itch, like sitting on a flame, or smelling sweet cooking meat, that you shall not rest until you have had a bite. It is hard to get to understand these merchants of malice. They shall laugh with you today, and you are so relieved that they have seen a good side of you, but a day later, with no confrontation, they go about slinging mud, destroying you...

African peculiarities: Ma-Uncle We all have those strange uncles, the kind that laugh with the ‘khkhkhkh’ sound after every unfunny sentence. We have the ones who we cannot tell a joke at close range, for they have a habit of reinforcing their laughter with a tough smack on your back. Some ask you to repeat your joke, their mouth hanging open, waiting for the sting to land, and they laugh again, rewarding your humour with an undeserved slap. We have those rake uncles, the kind that slash half the tray of ugali in one flow, and the younger ones are left weeping, the one with greyish vests, eat githeri like they chewing sugarcane, the kind that know busaa dens that you never knew, and they are just new to the community. We also have those uncles that will take you out, buy you ginger nuts and ball gum. You look at them, your eyes in tears and you’re like, uncle, I’m 24. We also have that uncle who would want to say hey to everyone, and once they do, they try to find out how they ar...

Growing up Growing up is basically about looking back at life and sighing at the fumes that are of the past, otherwise known as memories, looking back with fondness at moments that had otherwise been painful and torturous, missing what was and never will be. If life gives you that, then you are finally growing up. It is quite a slow and torturous process, where you weep over some stuff now and again, but if it reaches a point where you can look back and marvel, then that truly is growth indeed. Pain of the past is changed into something full of pleasure, and we get to marvel at moments that broke us in thousands. Well, it almost always takes time, but if someone is willing to hold on hard enough, time shall always get to vindicate them. Life is a very painful process, but as Sarah Teasdale says in the poem ‘It is forgotten’, time is a kind friend, and it will make us old.  Since it is a must for us to age, why not seize the moments while we are young? Why pick scars from life when...

Dating in the Village Dating in the village is a cat and mouse affair, an intricate dance performed by the roadside and inside bushes, one chasing after the other, the other learning to hide. It is akin to a rooster and hen scenario, where the rooster chases the hen till they are both tired, or till she yields and lays down on the ground in submission. Girls with heavily oiled faces and tightly held handkerchiefs stand by the roadside, shifting from one foot to the other as they await men with their bicycles to pop by, to serenade them with songs from old battered phones or Bluetooth speakers, of songs that have been around so long that they have bleached, and there they stand, hair like roosters, astute on their badly shaped heads, vague beauty hidden under layers placed on their faces by life and responsibilities. The young men arrive in baggy jeans at times and t-shirts with Chelsea logos and colours and Reebok shoes, half their body still on their bicycles, and as the songs begin,...

Sportpesa It should not be sung of, with this robin-hood theft, stealing from one group to give to the other. There is not much difference between a man who deals in drugs and gives back to the society in terms of proper hospitals and roads and uplifting the living standards of the people. It is akin to a rat that gnaws at the foot of man while blowing. There is not much pain during the biting process, but does it not exist after the rat is long gone? I shall stand in vehement dismissal, and castigate it in the strongest terms I have known, for it has been the single perpetrator of greed and shortcut among a youth who have been reduced to zombies, walking the road of luck and lack thereof. It ends either in triumph or the ropes. It has given life to our sports, thanks. It has given jobs, but oh, it has lined its pockets quite well. It has taken advantage of naivety and bad times, and robbed young men blind. I shall send you back to the days of the great playwright and philosopher, Ar...

Highway to hell? Some things it is so hard to appreciate, like life, until that day when you are rolling down the highway in a PSV. It is considered a pleasure, a little bit of an honour to find the seat next to the driver, to be the conductor, an accomplice in the sharp descent to madness. There is no sambaza there after all, and there is never excess, but sitting there is akin to booking first class tickets to a madhouse. Talk of cruising down the highway with a looney at the wheel, playing raucous, lewd, and ethnically insensitive love song that sounds more like a divorce, with a blubbery mouthed driver shooting saliva in all directions, from the window and down to the glass, talking about his women and his sons who have refused to go back to school and instead harbour dreams of driving lorries, of his ugly wife who would not cease to beg for money and of his crazy boss who did not care about the barrenness of the day, only his money. You realize with time that the driver is talk...

‘Mud’ with laughter With the current muddy situation that we have in the country, it is no longer comical to see someone fall, but it still has a taste to it. The sight of someone falling seems to be a trigger to a sick, latent humour that everyone seems to possess, and surprisingly, the more crude and awkward the fall, the better the laughter. While some people fall down on the ground with dignity, others seem to float in the air for sometime before finally landing down on the ground, only to elicit laughter from a group of people suffering from a dearth of humorous situations, and in this country, there truly is a dire shortage of laughable things. We have all been there. We have been victims of these falls, sometimes in full view of the public, sometimes in our own little cocoons, but the point we all make is that we have tasted the ground once and again. Now, someone told me that it is not respectful to laugh when someone meets the ground, but hey, they are the victims, not us, a...

Mutura is a delicacy, but only as long as you do not ask where it came from and which animal was sacrificed to prepare it. A certain someone from wherever just arrived in our neighbourhood and brought with her good tidings  Men and women have been flocking to her new place, and pregnant women have developed a craving for her Mutura specifically, claiming mtoto ndio anataka. Wazee have not been left behind either. They were used to samosa za githeri but this woman packs legit meat in their crispy brown cover, and so it was expected that men would go there and digest Uhuru-Raira while they partook in the entrails and the false mandazi. This woman is generous, and it is true that her Mutura was slightly larger and her samosa packs heavy punches. She had her own recipe which she never shared, but who cares? It was big and good, and that is all that mattered, true? Nobody questioned a lot, and it barely raised eyebrows when Mukurino Wa Jesu declared his two donkeys missing. He was the o...