VOLUNTARY DRINKING OVERSEAS- II

Last Saturday night found me at yet another Voluntary Drinking Oversees party. Some people have said that the only reason I keep getting invited is because of my nappy hair but the truth is that these volunteers need a token African to feed, once in a while, because they have realized that they cannot feed the entire continent.

The reason I attend these atrocious parties is because they are excellent blog fodder. Your average volunteer is such a made to measure protagonist, for my NGO Bashing genre, to the point of being a caricature. He possesses vast amounts of self delusion that imbues his existence in Africa with a dramatic irony only paralleled in the Comedy of Errors. The volunteer is a Quixote per excellence- forever tilting at windmills; windmills of the protestant ethic, the American Dream, capital and all those Occidental measures of success.

He says to himself: I want to save Africa while in reality the thing he means to save is himself due to his inability to fit within the capitalistic construct that is his society.

The party last Saturday was held at an Ethiopian restaurant. The mood got a little uncomfortable when I arrived. It seemed unclear who had invited me. As things stood everyone had had issues with me and my blog post filed after the last party.

The Peace Corps girl from the look of things had forgiven me for what I said to her the last time: “The Peace Corps and al Qaeda share the same agenda—hegemony—but the Peace Corps fail because its troops cannot spell ‘infiltrate’. But angry at me she was nevertheless. She was angry because she didn’t get a mention on my blog, it seems that even a wee moment of ridicule would have sufficed. How was I to know that American’s cannot leave the ‘look at me: before and after flab/ clitoris piercing/ county jail, etc.’ mindset of their voyeuristic society at home?

When I said hello to BS (no points for guessing that BS stands for Bull Shit), a Canadian volunteer, she got up and hugged me. The table went quiet and you could hear three pieces of silver clang clanging somewhere in the deep recesses of her gypsy skirt. Woah… and then she kissed me so hard she roused Dakimu’s messianic complex (unto you stupid girls a dick is given!)

B.S introduced me to a new volunteer so freshly arrived that she was carrying around a brand new Rough Guide and Lonely Planet and was still goggle-eyed from hours of watching Lion King and Out of Africa. For God’s sake she had to peer into a well thumbed copy of (Generic) Swahili for Dummies to say Hakuna Matata.

“Kenya Hakuna Matiti!” I told her even though the restaurant’s cashier looked like Pamela Anderson’s new boob job.
“Hakuna Matya-tya!” She corrected me.
“Ohhh,” I mocked. “Hakuna Matya-tya is a song by Boney M.”

“For God’s sake Potash,” B.S interjected. “I am determined to keep you in white chicks so the least you can be is polite!”
“Keep the Trojan Horses coming, you mean.”
“Of course not, Potash… I could never compromise your integrity.”
“My integrity is like the ‘NARC Government,’ an oxymoron.”

“Whatever dude… “BS said and turned to the new girl (lets call her, er… New Girl), “Potash is gay.”
“What, but I thought you guys had a thing?”
“Here is the thing,” I explained. “In my writing, I am out rightly gay and that in a society where it is unacceptable to be so. Therefore being seen in public with a white girl creates a hetero-normative façade for me because everyone imagines us to be having vanilla sex both literally and figuratively of course. ”
“So there is no vanilla sex, in any sense of the phrase, going on?”
“Well, not at all, quite frankly, but she is gradually warming up to my idea of a threesome, with two boys obviously. The cool thing about that is we all win. She gets to live out her rape fantasy…”
“Come on Potash, I have no rape fantasies,” Interrupts BS.
I ignore her… people are so touchy about such of their sexual fantasies that society generally deems deviant it is no small wonder such things continue to be branded abnormal.
“So she gets to live her rape fantasies, the other guy and I do our thing and wipe the lube off with her arse and then we walk out wearing the heterosexual guy’s badge of honour: putting the Big O into orgy! It is cool for two straight guys to hit one chick…

Fuck, it gives me a mighty boner to recall all this…

(Exeunt Blogger& Co. to jerk off, frot et cetera!)

BLOG WEDNESDAY

Insane thing being this blogger being blocked out of his own blog for so many days. He is mighty drank now but all he wants to test if is his pals' internet connection works better in the mid of a heavy night of drinking. We appreciate that he has had nothing to say for ages!

Sitting here starring at the screen. On my ear the music is so loud. Maybe I need to numb myself. Spend a few days away from the semi colon, the hyphen- all those punctuation marks that I cannot use correctly and yet the world expects me to.

Like what is all this about? My business is words. That is what I trade with. Maybe it is not a rewarding occupation but it is inspiring.

No wait a minute. This business of words used to be inspiring. But it is not anymore. Maybe it is- in the deep down corners of my self- still fulfilling but I am not sure what I feel about it all on a day to day.

The thing is writing has become a job. It is no longer a passion- something I do because I can and love to do it- it is all about a word count now. It is all about deadlines that I cannot meet not because I have burnt out or that my creativity has hit its lowest ebb but just because I have to meet them and yet I have this image of a reckless slob to live up to.

So all the time, in my email these days, is one call for submissions to the next; some short story contest, anything. Yet I have entered none. I would have loved to be all published, worldwide, but that seems like a dream from a past long gone. A childhood ambition that so isolated from the person that I have grown up to be.

But maybe I have refused to grow up. Refused to accept the fact that I am at that place and time when opportunity knocks on your door and you have to prove yourself. Show the world that you are all what you claim to be.

Maybe I am too scared to rise up to the challenge. It takes more than talent to be a writer. In fact the greatest asset is discipline. And that, of all my failings, is the greatest.

Now wouldn’t that explain why I am doing yet another lame blog post? See it my way: I have to put up a blog post every Wednesday, yes I have to, and I have only twenty minutes today to do it. Well, when I got started I had less time in which to do it… but then I didn’t have to do it, see?

Now where is that booze?

HETERO-NOMAD

1200hrs, Thursday May 31.

What I have been doing for the last 16 hours is drinking. Now I am wandering about- my autopilot engaged against any inclination to do a KQ 507 into the nearest bush- in search of a place to crash.

I stagger past Mama Hannah’s simu ya jamii

“Wee Malaya ya mwanaume, leta pesa yangu!” Yells she

“Kubaff!” Exclaims I

What I owe her is a mere sixteen shillings for a call I received last year, but you would think I owe her a Kay for using her vagina to masturbate.

I empty all the change in my pocket into her leprous palms. It all comes up to the grand total of Kshs 23/-

Oh, I need a matchbox. I grab back three shillings and buy a box of counterfeit Rhino Kubwas from Jamo wa Veve in the next stall.

“We umbwa hii, Kwani umefilisika tena?” Mama Hannah anzias me again. I reach into my shirt pocket produce a fresh pack of premium band gaffs. I light up slow and easy like as though Potash was James Bond’s middle name.

Pulling out my gaffs a piece of paper drops out of my pocket. Oh, shit, a bus ticket. I am meant to be catching a 1300hr bus to Somewhere. Damn I must have forgotten.

“Shika hii ununulie mzee suruali ya ndani” I tell Mama Hannah and throw a fifty bob at her and jump into a passing matatu.

Moja moja mpaka tao. I patia the kange a soc and tell him to keep change. You know how we do when we have a little change: share it all around.

1345hrs

The bus is late but so what; this is Africa- the bus leaves when it leaves. I am on seat number er… “wee kaa chini, Kwani Michuki ni baba yako… hapa tunabeba pesa; watu wanapanda ndege!”

I look for a free seat but cannot find one. I squeeze myself in between two enormous mounds of luo femininity. Two pungent strands reach out from beneath their armpits and grasp me firmly by the olfactory nerve. I pass out.

2130hrs

I am jolted awake by the bus crew: “Wee Kwani unafikiri hii ni lodging?”

Strange sounds all around me; new smells assail me. The air is humid- like in a seaside town. Maybe there is a lake nearby… maybe.

I step out of the bus. It downs on me that I am drunk. The only two brain cells still alive in my head are telling me that it has been sixteen years since I got laid. Sixteen, for God’s sake! I need a brain transplant.

Some tall dark guy waves at me: “taxi… taxi!”

I am not sure even why I am here. No wait a minute; I am not even sure where I am.

“Potas?” the guy asks.

Oh la la, I think to myself. Wherever I am at least there is a reception committee.

“Gari iko upande huu baba.” He continues.

I follow him thinking: Whoever it is that I am here to see must give me the full God treatment- I am that and a rib of goat.

The Chariot I would hope for is no where to be seen. The tall dark guy ushers me into a rickety tuk tuk.

Fuck. Even Cinderella got to dream till midnight!

2156hrs

The tuk tuk hits a pothole and grinds to a halt. All around me I see shadows coming alive. They could be anything, mungiki, Five-o, or a horde of other windmills that my inebriate imagination tilts at.

A door opens somewhere and lights up a section of the pothole and, with it, silhouettes

like a moonbeam through a shapely pair of legs. And maybe there is a pair of legs but I do not see them yet because I stagger into a warm and receptive bosom and even as its flagrance tugs at my gonads I am dragged into the embrace of a lavishly furnished room.

Dinner is served. Prepared with love I would serve but certainly not with my savage palate in mind. I cut to the nice part. Not sex silly… the booze.

Damn, it is Malibu and coke for fucks sake. What a waste- I was weaned on Napshizzle, you know.

2230hrs

A bottle of vodka has materialized from the ether. I am lying on clean white linen with a cold drink on one hand and a warm breast on the other. I am in heaven. In the next building some fucker gets sent to hell. Why the fuck do people keep beheaded everywhere I go?

***

Okay, I am tired after a long weekend on the road and I just might not get to tell you about how I ended up with a pack of condoms, lubricant and an anal sex manual. Oh and then there is the lesbian chick who, even though she has enough personality to feature on my blog, doesn’t appear on the scene till Sunday night. In a sense then the full story of the Hetero Nomad will remain untold unless someone buys me a bunch of beers tonight and I get to write about my long weekend by two lakes.

It would be nice to mention two things about the Lesbian: We hang out, drinking, till 0100hrs when we realized that we were useless to each other. So we parted ways everyone retiring to a lonely night of self abuse. (Well, at least that is me speaking for myself.)

The other thing about her is that we hang out in a dusty Nairobi bound bus on Tuesday. And guess what, if you thought that you had to go to the Island of Patmos or some mountain to find revelation then you haven’t had anything yet. This chick and I hang out for, as she put it seeing that I was too drank to count, seventy two hours before we found out that we had one thing in common: We both love breasts!

MOMENTARY MADNESS

Soundtrack: Bloodline, Slayer
“I’ll kill you and your dreams tonight…”

Momentary madness. Seasons of darkness. But escape… escape paths elude me. Is it the time to die. Today. Tonight. I do not wanna die.

In some places we live, but in most we die. We die in mind, in spirit- but in the physical realm, we live.

Zombies: Wanderers in spaces beyond our perceptively challenged selves.

How do we know dreams. How do we experience them when the subconscious cannot exist unless as a sequel to consciousness. The consciousness that we lack. The subconscious is the staging point of Living and the conscious its aftermath. Those who sleep dream, those who wake live but we slip and slide-- from one pseudo-world to the next.

My mind has taken off to Perdition.

Here is libation...

WEST SIDE (SEX) STORY

(Holed away from both the marauding militia and the Presidential Guard and his arm too heavily bandaged but his head still where he left it in a drunken stupor last night- in the gutter but still connected to his torso, Thai... ahem, Hallelujah- this blogger has inchoate reminisces on a life a long way gone.)

When some were chasing dreams, we were chasing dragons. They had just bust Akasha and with 960 million bob worth of hash to get through, that shit became cheaper than Saf Cane. But who cared to buy Saf Cane anyway while you could just shop lift it from Sarit Hyper.

The food court was always crowded, but only one kid would be buying. And then there were the girls. Madame wasafi; madame wa kibabi. Girls who were game for where the weed was at, where the booze was at and most importantly, where the dick was at. And they didn’t mind paying for it all.

When M-‘s folks went off to England, The States or wherever else they holidayed, he had the cribs to himself. So the deal was, if you were down for some action all you had to bring were the condoms and have yourself a zung chick, a pointie chick and a miro chick, one after the other or all at once. It was your dick, damn it, you made the choice of where and when to shove it. If the condom broke, well, you moved on to the next shag as the receptacle of your seed was left with the small bother of finding time after school to go for Plan B (A soc over the counter at a chemist near you- proof of age not required.)

Sometimes, if you were so inclined, you could have a Tupac loving chuta chick let you put it in her arse. (Such is the agony of a dick lover who is expected to bleed on her wedding night!)

Life was one big orgasm, or at least it seemed to be in our hallucinations. And we called it Westland’s summer of 1999.

I remember the nights, clearly as though they were days. I remember sitting at the stalls at the corner of Rhapta and Chiromo at dusk. That side of the highway was under one PD and the other side was served by another, but who cared about cops in Westlands when your boy’s surname was a get out jail free card? Those were the Moi days remember.

Sometimes I wonder what happened to some of those kids. The rich ones I mean. Of course they all went to England and as it was seemingly becoming vogue: Australia and Malaysia. But then what? It has been many years. I would love to see them wearing suits and ties and building the nation; or at least making a worthwhile pretence of it.

JOHNNY MOST WANTED

Take him to prison, officer; correction and instruction must both work, ere this rude beast will profit. -William Shakespeare; Measure for Measure

January 2007

Now Johnny has gone out and done it. Yes, Johnny, that homeboy of mine that got himself a gun. Used to be my homeboy, actually, but he moved out. He lives in Kile now. In an SQ he lives, or so I gather, but Kile is Kile. And he drives too. A stolen car, it is but to drive he does and that is about it.

I reckon kids down here have been watching too many movies, picking the wrong images from television; choosing the wrong idols. A while back, Johnny told me that, like rapper 50 Cent, he had to get rich or die trying. That he has got rich I cannot tell but I can see him dying soon, for the trying. You see, he has made it to the top of the Police’s ‘Most Wanted List’ and since when did the police get them alive- see what I mean?

***

I am sitting at the Stone Zone sipping on Napshizzle and starring at the front page of today’s newspaper, having borrowed it like I used to, from Mutua’s kiok. Yes, that is Johnny there, his glazed eyes peering from beneath a branded baseball cap. It is a good enough mug shot of him. It is as though he was hanging with his Flying Squad buddies after a heist- you know the one where all the thugs are gunned down apart from the one with the loot- and they pulled out a camera and he said: Cheese!

Now these fellows want him. Real bad is how they want him. Knowing Johnny- he has watched his fair share of gangster movies, you know- he must be looking at these pictures, musing: “…dead or alive, it is nice to be wanted!” (Who does he think he is, anyway, Billy the Kid?) But that is the trouble with kids from down here. They have lived in utter squalor and as victims of a system that treats them like they do not exist, for so long, that they begin to covet social and economic acceptance by all means necessary.

Do not be quick to accuse me of justifying their criminal tendencies. In fact, emphatically, I am an advocate for ‘societally approved means’ of navigating Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. But I am ever a pragmatic believing that what I dictate for myself will easily be shunned by certain elements down here.

In fact, a professor I met in a Mamlaka Road bar once, told me that there is a ‘plausible causal connection between social disability and delinquency.’ I cannot be sure what he meant but my lay interpretation is that: economically marginalized communities or individuals born within them are increasingly crime prone. That is especially true in view of incidences of violent crime. Certainly I am no sociologist so correct me if I am wrong.

My professor friend attested that socially induced stress influences criminal behaviour. He gave me a mouldy paper from The Social Service Review of September 1968 by John M. Martin, et al where such ‘tension state’ theories were referenced to as accounting for delinquent behaviour. They wrote: “In essence, this general theory holds that delinquency is a response to the frustration created when a society, committed to middle class ideals, denies to millions of youngsters the possibility of lawfully attaining these ideals because of inadequacy of schools, housing and employment opportunities.”

All that gobbledygook I will have to leave to you to interpret seeing that I am no social scientist my ambitions towards that end having been hampered by the self same inadequacies highlighted above.

There is one thing that I know, though, and it bothers me no end, that down in this dump, Johhny is a hero. A mere six months ago he sat right here not knowing pretty much where his next meal was coming from. In a little while, he started drafting what came to be jokingly referred to as Johnny’s Christmas shoplifting list. Needless to say, that list was ‘alcohol heavy’ indicating how escapism and means to achieving it are basic needs in this neighbourhood.

At that time we could not have imagined that that wee seed of pilferage would blossom, in little time into grand larceny (to use an Americanism that would appeal to Johnny.) But now in a ‘capital starved’ economy, Johnny has discovered a high yield enterprise that requires minimal venture capital. The son of a Council worker and a fish hawker now shops in a mall a long way from that dirty, little ‘credit book’ at Mama Njeri’s grocery stall.

And therein lays the trouble. “That Johnny from the ‘hood has made it, then we too can,” or so Komo, Viki and Zale from down the road think. The import of this: more guns on the streets than there are people to rob. Sooner than later we will have hordes of drugged out adolescents shooting folks for their last pau and shooting them, all the same, for having nothing. In a short while, this will be the next Kariobangi. What is worse; one gun is dangerous but two guns is two spheres of influence.

“I got a gun so get out of the way,” says the tall kid.

“oops easy dude, I got mine too, so you get out of the way!” exclaims the short one.

Stalemate.

Pop! Pop! Move over L.A, New York and mother fucking Jo’burg, this is the new gang warfare capital of the world.

As usual though, I worry most about the here and now. That fat woman from Sector III must be busy telling the chief that Johnny was a Stone Zoner. The same woman who said that our friend Timi’s shooting was a case of chicken coming home to roost. That when, even, the good lord knows Timi wouldn’t hurt anybody and Timi got shot by a rogue cop.

***

The militia must be gathering now- frenzied like the murderous Orcs of Mordor- their machetes gleaming. That they are a belligerent lot of self seekers I know but pray tell, where in our crappy constitution do they draw the right to bear arms?

I know that by the end of this day lots of Stone Zoners will be ‘helping’ police with investigations. Now that is as scary a proposition as they come. Really. Personally,I am tired of this business of being picked up on the premise that since I have no job, then I must be a criminal. The police batter me till the obvious reveals itself- I know nothing of criminal ways (“Huh, Potash?” Shut your mouth, you bastards!)- so they put me back on the street, still with no job, until the next major crime. It is no wonder then that some of us break upon the realization that the system doesn’t see us as ‘individuals in trouble’ but as ‘troublesome individuals’.

When the cops come, I will tell them what I know. Which is not much. Johnny if you read this, know that I will not snitch on you but only because I do not know anything about what you have been up to- merely rumours. But frankly, I hope they catch you.For real. You are my friend and all but someone must send a tacit message to your younger brothers and other little homies that crime doesn’t pay.

My earnest desire is that they take you alive. They should arraign you and give you a fair trial because we all have a right to ou rday in court. That is the only way justice can be done and seen to be done. If they find you guilty, may the penal system straighten you out. (I saw it on TV the other day that jails are no longer as nasty as they used to be. Besides you could make it as the next Mr. Kamiti. Even meet Lord Delamere.)

If they send you to the gallows, do not fret, the hangman might easily hang himself in trying to hang you; he is so out of practice. So you can be rest assured they will not even try to. Anyway, if they take you to the Big House, know that we love you even though we feel that the streets are a lot safer without you.

Hey here come the police... I am out.

STATE OF EMERGENCY

(His conscience pricked, this blogger visits with his old Kiambu cronies and ‘in the cutting of a drink,’ as always, rediscovers that many years since the end of the State of Emergency, to be a young Kikuyu man is still a crime.)

Even the smallest successes are to be celebrated but never at the expense of the things that matter. The Kenyan Urban Narrative was about a people, a dispossessed urban majority.

It was about letting the stories that remained untold, because the mainstream media couldn’t package them into a commercially viable product, be told. Stories about real people; the putting of faces behind the incomprehensible Donor Driven statistics: x % living below the poverty line, y Million youths lack ID cards, z % remain unemployed and live in informal settlements.

The journalistic exigencies of the 5 Ws and the H of journalism and the literary demands of form and structure were of no consequence in these narratives. After all, the story was of more value than the writing; was bigger than the story teller. Always was until people began to listen and suddenly the writing became larger than the real life stories Sooner than later the pursuit of issues was replaced by the carnal experiences of the one protagonist who rose beyond the statistics: Me.

So here I am, my conscience pricked and the school of hard knocks still in dire need of an ambassador. The streets, they say, have been a little safer since Matheri’s death but then the question remains: safe for who? The social economic variables that drive a certain demographic group into crime, especially that of a violent nature, remain in play. The guns might have gone silent in your neighbourhood but elsewhere, in the squalid domains of the Proles, they are still a blazing; machetes are still a flashing.

It is with all these in mind that Monday morning found me with loads of change and a desperate need to assuage my delirium tremens with more alcohol. (Dawa ya moto ni moto!) But this time round, I didn’t walk into Uchumi and buy myself a 750 of rum, as I have taken to doing these days, no; I made my way to the crime capital of Kenya’s crime capital, Kiambu.

***

It is 8.30 am on a Monday morning. Those who are gainfully employed are out there trying to afford their Labour Day beer; those without jobs are in here drinking in lieu.

I am sitting at the head of the table at Mbuthia’s Hardware and General Store. Well, Mbuthia’s Hardware and General Store is what the sign up front says, but once you walk into the shop; past what passes for hardware in Mbuthia’s crooked mind and ‘crude weapons’ in a court of law, you go through a side door into a dimly lit chamber. That is where I am seated; holding court before a bunch of characters whose names I know but who police generally refer to as: Suspect, Idler e.t.c.

And the conversation here is intellectually stimulating:

“iii Potash, shias… shias!”

“Cheers House! Wee… Shiku, letea yeye Kane Extra ingine.”

“Ee, dio dio… na ulete pia hiyo kitu yako na ulipishe huyu… hehehe… ni kapoa eh? Anyway, shief, can we appry the Socratic Method to the adage In Vino Veritas?”

“Uhm, well actually I have already used Cartesian logic to conclude that I drink therefore I am.”

“Hehehe… you are another one Potash, I tell you. But I like that wani. In fact I wiro rove it if you say: We drink therefore we are. Yes, WE. In Africa we never forget the We. It is about Ubuntu as Madera would say!”

“Hmmm”

I know where this conversation is headed: way too left for me. So I excuse myself and follow the tracks of a pungent odour to the urinal.

When I return, I find that the conversation has meandered, as all bar talk is wont to, and they are now discussing the similarities between the military tactics of Field Marshal Kimathi Waciuri with those of Ernesto Guevara.

This definitely intrigues me. In the last meeting of the Potashian Book Club, we discussed an extremely rare text, a manual on guerrilla warfare that is generally attributed to Kimathi Waciuri. It is said that Waciuri dictated it in Kikuyu to an aide. The original manuscript, no one has seen, and its translator into English remains unknown.

Other theories exist on the authorship of the manual. The most credible one is that Timi (R.I.P) wrote it circa 1995. That theory makes sense particularly because he was in boarding school in Laikipia at that time… Go figure! The reason I suppose the manual ended up being attributed to Kimathi was maybe to challenge the reader to take Kimathi’s ideology, for those that knew it, to heart.

Some theorists say that Potash wrote the manual in English and no Kikuyu version of it exists. But that theory is discounted by street intellectuals on the basis that the word Guerrilla is misplaced on the cover. (Hmmm… maybe that was a devise but who cares?)

“But El Che cannot possibly have encountered Kimathi,” I jump into the conversation. “Besides in matters ideological the Mau Mau was not a communist movement, and neither was it nationa…”

My oration is interrupted by a brief commotion that sees the door burst open and six heavily armed men in jungle fatigues and red berets pour into the bar area.

“Mau Mau..eh eh eh… Hii ndio Mungiki kabisa,” the beefy unit commander yells. “Na hii ndio kiongosi!” He adds pointing his ex-shifta battalion Heckler & Koch MP5 at me.

“Kila mtu lala chini…” he continues yelling. “Kiprono ita Sergent!”

There are about five tables in the bar and they all empty as everyone dives onto the alcohol and mud streaked floor. All the tables empty apart from ours. Our table is ten deep. And we remain seated sipping on our drinks with decided nonchalance.

The constable who answered to the name Kiprono returns and busies himself with trying to salute cock his AK 47 and at the same time salute the lanky Somali with Sergeant stripes he has just brought back.

“Hi ni ile Israeli trained commando, eh!” Mbuthia observes.

“Ahhh…” I chuckle, “ile ya Israel inasimama kwa mlango ya choo ya rais!”

The loud guffawing that follows drowns the cacophony of menacingly cocked assault weapons.

Sergent Somali orders everyone who is lying on the floor to squat and hop out in a single line under the armed guard of two constables and the beefy corporal. I cannot help musing if there is such a thing as Indian frog file… and make a mental note to use that phrase in my next blog post.

Sergent Somali approaches our table.

“Nyinyi naona dume, eh?” He laughs while adjusting the frayed string that passes for a shoulder strap for an equally battered Uzi Sub.

“Wewe ati ndio Kiongosi…” Sergeant Somali addresses me. “Ebu leta kitambulisho…!”

I stare at him outraged. In the background, the radio is playing Cross That Line and Akon is moaning monotonously:

...Comin' from a life of crime
Tryna be on my best behaviour
You see my rep's gettin' bigger but still that same nigga bustin' shots at them haters
But only if you cross that line...

“Anauliza kitambulisho Kwani anataka kunadika sisi kazi?” My boy Mbuthia wonders out loud.

“Hapana, anauliza kwa nini hujavaa kipande kwa shingo; Kwani yeye ni Native Police?” Mburu (BComm, UON), an off duty makanga chips in sarcastically.

Over the ridges yonder in Banana Hill, the soundtrack must be from Ice-T in Cop Killer:

F**k the police, for my dead homies.

F**k the police, for your freedom.

F**k the police, don't be a pussy.

***

Skip sequence of events that involve me being told to stand aside and the conversation I have with Sergeant Somali as he chews miraa and dandias my gaffs while his boys order my boys to strip. Note that I tell him I am a social researcher gone underground to find out how a quasi-religious entity turned into a social-economic monster and its ramifications on Kenya’s political economy and related blah blah blah. Note also that it seems the Government of Kenya has a theory that mungiki adherents wear shorts and not briefs.

***

We, Sergeant Somali and I, are standing outside Mbuthis’s Hardware and General Store. I take a huge gulp from my half bottle of Kibao Vodka and extend the rest to Sergeant Somali. He spits out a huge Big G-less tuksin and swigs the vodka. He throws the empty bottle at the township’s Madman in Residence and misses.

The main street is empty. Two green General Service Unit trucks stand, one on each end of the street. Heavily armed officers watch over long lines of young men being loaded into the trucks. On the sidelines a huge group of women screaming: where are you taking our sons?

This is 2007 but it could be this same place at this same time in 1953. The only difference is that, in 1952, that young officer charging violently at his own people was a minion, in the starched shorts of the Native Police, taking orders from a crazy Johnnie. But he is grown up now… he is a big man in a suit and a plush Harambee Avenue office.

He won his independence and his people won dependence on him.

EULOGY TO TIMI

“O, that a man might know the end of this day’s business, ere it come! But it sufficeth that the day will end and then the end is known.” (Julius Caesar; Shakespeare)

Timi was a nice kid. As nice as they come. A beautiful boy and a humble spirit, he was. And under a hail of police bullets that life was taken away from us. Humanity, in one sadistic pull on the trigger of a Government Issue assault riffle, lost one who the goodness of time would have revealed as a prince of men.

Now we sit on The Stone Zone, sipping on Napshizzle and Coke from used ketchup cans. A dark silence hovers ponderously over us as everyone beseeches their God (whatever they make her/ him/ it to be) to preserve Timi’s soul in eternal bliss.

In times like these, our hearts also reach out to the souls of all those other kids that we have lost along the way. Some were victims and some were villains but when they fell, our hearts cried out. Every bullet hole on their youthful frames was like a gushing wound in our hearts. Every knife wound like a shredder through our own guts.

With their compromised immunity, mottled lunges and flambéed livers, they left us.

Maybe they went off to a better plane…

And now… Timi… Timi is gone from this plane.

Personally, I do not care much for heaven, but if it does exist, then I wouldn’t see what it is worth if Timi cannot reach it. That there is a better place is of no consequence to me. All that matters is that when my life’s work is done, the least common denominator of my moral worth- or whatever parameters they use to send some to hell and others to heaven- takes me to Timi’s eternal domicile.

I know that in eulogizing our dear and not so dear departed we are given to using rosy superlatives. In fact, where there exist no real virtues in some of our dead that we can exaggerate at their funeral we employ our creativity to attribute to them some modicum of nobility. All this even though their journey through life was a vexation to humankind and society has taken a collective sigh of relief at their passing on. It must be a habit moulded out of our deep seated fear of death and, consequently, an assumed reverence for the dead. That could explain why we sit here and have nice thoughts about Timi but indeed it doesn’t.

Dead or living, Timi was a gentle person. That is about all.

We had great moments, Timi and I. He was the only soul on The Stone Zone who genuinely shared my passion for books. The only kid I knew that had read Plato’s The Republic and Machiavelli’s The Prince, and an odd thing that was when we had peers who believed that Machiavelli was a prophecy by Tupac Shakur.

When Timi and I first met, we had our different tastes in books. I swore by the English classics: Dickens, Edgar Poe, Milton. On the other hand, he was a popular fiction junkie: Patricia Cromwell, Ludlum, Thomas Harris, and without a doubt, Stephen King.

But there was one thing, Shakespeare, in that I found a kindred spirit. His favourite play was Julius Caesar and in an uncanny way, I find Anthony’s eulogy to Brutus so apt as though it was written for Timi: “His life was gentle; and the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world, “This was a man!””

But not all my thoughts right now are about Timi. I worry about those of us that are left. What are our chances of seeing the new dawn? Are we doomed to sit here forever and have society ridicule us and the neighbourhood brand us criminals? Is there in some government arsenal bullets with our names on them eagerly awaiting some trigger happy cop or other to bear them?

As I look upon these kids’ faces, I am convinced that they are all thinking, nay, worrying about their tomorrows. When the chips are down, you must allow us one moment, each for himself, when we must see Timi as just another kid with a bullet through his head and the only thing that matters is just not to be the next. Not even a jobless youth sipping on Napshizzle in the ‘hood.

So what will tomorrow bring? Well, nothing really but if any of these kids wake up, then you will surely find them here. Find them here still waiting for the government to create 500,000 new jobs.

Talking of jobs, you might think that they do not look. In all honesty they do. Earnestly. Sometimes I feel as though they look too hard while the successful ones just look ‘smart’. That thinking sort of makes sense because an acquaintance once told me that the jobs are out there; the trouble is in finding someone to give them to you. That would explain how some guy from the other side, who retired in my primary school days, suddenly has a new job and a government limousine.

The good book says that ‘the race is not to the swift, nor battle to the wise, but time and chance come to all.’ (Eccl. 9:11) That may be true but not in my book. Well at least not in my short lived experience. If it were true; then convince me what time and chance came to Timi.

What is it worth to get to the starting point and then sprain your ankle? All those hours spent practising for the race, for Timi had a Diploma, painfully squandered and wasted. All that is what makes me view The Stone Zone as a metaphor for the real world that we all live in where as someone else would say,’ the cost of living has persistently gone up and the chance of living has come down.”

Everyday parents spending down to their last goat just to see their children through school and every other day young adults are dying. What is to console that aging parent whose entire material wealth was invested in his/ her child’s future and that child now merely a clod of mud?

The Christian God they tell me puts as all here for a purpose; but whose purpose does it serve when a twenty year old graduate is mortally wounded by thugs? Personally, I do not care much to die so that my family and friends may learn how to deal with tragedy. If I die today, let it not be said that I lived my life to the fullest because I have plans for the next fifty years and they do not include death.

***

A sunny day it is today. A beautiful day. I pour some liquor on a spot next to where I am sitting. Right where Timi was sitting exactly twenty four hours ago; the spot where he sat and regaled us with merry tales.

If I was to wind back the hands of time, to exactly this moment yesterday, he would have been sitting on this very stone his eyes forever dancing, his beautiful hands in a frantic dance for emphasis. His mouth… his lips- those lips that always made me blush in flitting thoughts of my closeted sexuality- would be smiling as he told us what he would do if he won a Mercedes Benz worth six million.

My last image of him is and will always be one moment yesterday. He looked at me and said: “That Benzo,I’d flog it. I shika lavash,kwanza I throw you a crate- frotho.. bila ati rock-o, naps, nini nini…!” I remember thinking: how nice it was that he of all people would think of me first.

To have known that he always liked me and let me know it counts as a legacy. And I am happy he died knowing I liked him. Maybe it would have offended him to know I liked him in other ways but I feel his spirit hovering over my shoulder and I know he is reading this.

Rest in peace little brother. And in the words of Brutus: “…whether we shall meet again I know not. Therefore our everlasting farewell take:- For ever and for ever, farewell (Timi). If we do meet again, why we shall smile; if not, why then, this parting was well made.”

SEX AND THE FUNERAL

“And devout men carried Stephen to his burial and made great lamentation over him.” Shiru reads from the Acts of the Apostles.

I stare at her and wonder if my tears are running as fast as hers; if hers are as hot as mine.

The Reverend Dr. K_ approaches the grave. His face is set in a scowl that says that he didn’t get his DD for purposes of burying miscreants. Abominable misfits who even the Good Lord Jesus Christ, with his basketful of mercies, would give a cold shoulder. Hopeless. Bangi people… phthuu…Mungiki!

The Reverend stands as far as he possibly can from the coffin. He doesn’t even glance at it. When he begins to speak, he doesn’t look at a central spot, as you would expect, with alternating nods to the left and to the right for emphasis. No. He stands at a ridiculous angle all his attention, his sermon and all the glory of the almighty God emanating from him, directed at the people to his right.

To his right. To his right where the so called watu wazima and such young people as have ambitions of being referred to as that, stand. The youths to the right are unlike the rest of us. So unlike us: the juvenile delinquents. They are youths, youths with a capital Y.

Church Youth.

And most of them are decent fellows I must say. But amongst them there are devious characters. Like those choir guys… aih… apana!

The choir guys hold bashes kila Friday that would be like the Last Supper but for the fact that when the guy at the head of the table gets kissed, he doesn’t open his mouth to say, the hour has come but kisses back and says, wee kamu. Their bashes would be as tame as kiddie birthday parties if only they would end when the Britannia and Bamboocha are over and if all the bouncing on the Bouncing Castle didn’t have to happen horizontally.

Their parties are meant to be a remake of the Kesha. I guess it is the New and Improved Kesha (sms the word KESHA and win). Here they come in with leather bound bibles that are only opened to admire and exchange the cute little bookmarks within. Bookmarks inscribed with biblical verses. Verses from the Songs of Solomon are preferred.

Their keshas are music heavy. But you will not find their music in the hymn book you bought from Uzima Press. After all these are young people and they weren’t colonized by some self-righteous limey who found Amazing Grace in the pitiful wails coming out of the slave deck. These youths are from a new generation colonized by the descendants of those slaves and not their masters. These ones are colonized by T.D. Jakes. So their praise music is inspired by the discordant screeches of Kapuka acts with names like: Gospel Gangstaz and Thugs 4 Christ.

Their praise and worship sessions go like this:

Worship Leader: “D.J weka traki…!”

D.J: “Can I get a muthafuckin’ halleluiah!”

Worshippers: “Yeah… Oh Baby!”

Song: Mikono juu…. Mikono juu kwa yesu

Tingisha hiyo kitu… hiyo bibilia tingisha

Kaka shika huyo dada… shika kwa jina lake

Zamani nilikuwa nawasha… sasa Yesu ameniosha

Nilikuwa napenda madame… sasa napenda his name

Then somewhere in the middle of the night the angel of the Lord appears before the choir girls, only, and many of them end up pregnant without having known any man. They are not sinners you know.

The sinners are to the left of the good Reverend. The sinners are us. We, the low-lifers and our bevy of hood rats. I can see Bobo, and she is desperately trying to catch my attention and I am grateful, for a moment, for all the people pushing about trying to stand next to me and who are shielding me from her. Well I know some of those people pushing about, Danso in particular and Vaite of Vaite’s Veve Base just want to pick my pockets but that is better than Bobo getting anywhere close to me. Damn bitch will definitely try to kiss me. Eeewww. Kissing her is like sucking my own dick… and Johnnie’s, kama’s… What the fuck, am I getting paid to list who she been with?

***

Grrrrr… okay now I have run out alcohol so I cannot continue writing this scene. It has been raining since five in the morning and it still is so I cannot get to the supermarket…yes I said supermarket and not One Love Licker Store, for a refill. I know my dead friend will understand. I mean I poured a bottle of expensive alcohol into his grave while everyone else was pouring drops of Napshizzle grudgingly. I gave that fallen soldier a send off bigger than a vain jango’s. Maybe if I can get some alcohol soon I will finish this, get down to the eulogy part.

Man that eulogy, it was like Anthony's eulogy to Brutus, only better. And I gave it…

Oh damn it, I really need a drink but in lieu and as I wait for the rain to ease up let me go abuse myself.

Oh fuck, I am bila gaffs… now that one there is no negotiating, I will just have to walk in the rain. Man there is no such joy than a post orgasm gaff… even when the orgasm is self induced.

Sawa wacha I walk to shoppie. I will get a Ka-quarter of something decent, which is too much to ask from some of these neighbourhood kiosks, and finish this narration there. Sawa?

***

Hiyo ni how much?

P: Sawa nipe hiyo na lights…

P: Ati ngapi… si pako, Kwani?

P: Eh, na unakaa poa…

P: Kwani?

P: Hapa per day wewe humake mangapi…

P: Sawa si nikugee mshande yako ya leo alafu ufunge duka…

P: Ehh funga duka tuingie kejani…

***

Ati bado ma fans wanangoja story ya mazishi, maumbwa; mi niko juu ya vitu. We nani, hata sijui jina yako ninani… ebu sema jina yangu.

Sema tena!

***

Aii Aii Potash!

IN BABYLON I TRUST

I have been called a fraud. A child of privilege trying to pass himself as the voice of the scions of the Proletariat- the herald of Nairobi’s dispossessed majority. A product of Kenya’s most elite academies- the best schools in the Republic- claiming to be an alumnus of the Streets; a self made pseudo-intellectual. That and many other things that remain the inconsequential opinion of The Few who suddenly finding me holding my own in their circles desire to drag me into the exclusive folds of their glorified embrace. They endeavour to claim me as one of their own but first, as they say, I have to drop my bullshit stance and face up to the stark realities of my yuppiness.

How do I make them understand that I come as a package; that what I bring with me is not mere baggage but the sum total of my heritage?

Yet in other circles, the circles of the Insignificant Others where I cut my teeth, my name is no longer praised but spat out like last night’s tuksin. “Behold,” they chide, Potash the sell-out riding shotgun in the cream SUV and the exotic bitch not seeing her stick shift for that self publicising dick. But the dick cannot see beyond the bottle of Jack Daniels.” Maskini hapati…, they murmur to each other punctuating their snide vitriol with gut wrenching gulps of Napshizzle …na akipata… si unamuona!

But you know what I have resigned myself to? It is the fact that I can be many things to many people but only one thing to myself: me. A certain Latina Academic- or whatever that gorgeous creature of Boricuan extraction might want to call itself- tells me that my street voice is my real voice. So whose voice is this I speak in now, my doppelganger’s?

I am sick and tired of this talk of Potash lost his voice. Like what the fuck was I destined to be, Vox Clamantis in the Ghetto? When I declared myself a voice crying out in the wilderness, preparing the way for the messiah, I meant that I was preparing the way for me, myself and I. I was the messiah to come and now that I am here, I say verily unto you: I was sent by me to save me.

I cannot save the ghetto. What, and keep the North’s surplus labour out of employment? Who am I to fight the onslaught of the development industry as they, armed with all the poverty eradication jargon that the conscience of Global Capital can buy, scramble for a corner of my street to raise their mayday flags from? Saving the Wretched of the Earth is the White Man’s Burden. (Remember Kipling?)

The best I can do is allow myself to be a foot soldier in their communications departments and save myself by taking a pittance for working under a Communications Consultant who earned his Save Africa credentials from his many years working as a janitor in the offices of the Bullamakanka Gazette in Nowhere, Australia and who cannot tell Kenya from a map of Kenya.

But I haven’t taken that NGO job yet. All I am saying is that I wouldn’t turn it down. I have said time and time again that I am not a believer. Believers die poor, a situation that would be in my case a waste of one of the most entrepreneurial minds of our generation. A generation that doesn’t have much time left to live if the jeremiads at the United Nations can be taken for their word on our life expectancy. A generation that has no chance of bearing successors if all those women screaming for the abolishment of our beverage of choice- Napshizzle- are to be seen as a testament to our libido or the lack thereof.

Maybe I will not live to see forty three but I can increase my chances by getting out of the way of stray bullets. That still leaves HIV/ AIDS to contend with and as that goes, even though I still cannot afford premium brand condoms, I can now have women who can afford to buy condoms in the flavour they want to have me in on any given night. Besides, the great difference between leisurely coitus sans interruptus in a yuppie’s boudoir and frantic sex in a phone booth is that, in lieu of a condom, you can always take a hot shower a la Jacob Zuma- he is negative you know- afterwards.

The important thing to me in the end is that I never romanticised poverty. I never glorified the streets. I spoke about it all because that was the life I knew. Those who want to stand there and mourn the angst-ridden tales cannot possibly claim to be my well wishers. It might seem, to many of you, that somewhere I began to sound too aspirational, nay, pampered. That is not because I have become those things but simply put, somewhere in this literary journey my anger began to dissipate as gradually the light at the end of my tunnel became, seemingly, more than the flaring torches of rampaging mungiki.

I soldier on, the lure of Capital guiding me on like a pillar of smoke to a manna sated Jew in the Sinai, grappling for every tool, through means foul and fair, that will help me navigate Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. There isn’t a thing that changed in my philosophy. I still will not rant and rave about Them, Babylonians, vs. Us, whatever we call ourselves. I still refuse to appreciate the concept of babi and still maintain that it is the most superfluous word in our urban lexicon.

I continue to insist that babi in its usage on the street or the slums (damn I hate the word Ghetto) and low income neighbourhoods of Nairobi is a metaphor for diminished self-worth and a nod to communism. And I am not a communist- damn I hate communists- and only poor Kenyans seem to subscribe to communism, well and some lazy Muslims who continue to wait for Idi.

***

My heart bared and my feet numb with genuflection I now lay prostrate before the god of lucre. “I have said my three Holy Shillings and pray thee Great Capital, accept my humble offering: my writing.” I have no pretensions. I refuse to suffer beneath self-imposed glass ceiling of Babi. I want to look, to reach out beyond my corner of the street into the other side. Into the Westside. The Best side.

Maybe, as you said, I do not write as well these days as I used to. It could be that the greatest words I ever wrote were the scrawls I made with shit streaked fingers on the walls of Choo Namba Nane: Kanjo Mavi! Or the charcoal squiggles on the crumbling cardboard walls of my lean-to. The unmetred rhymes pencilled on the back wall of Mama Pewa Pewa’s shebeen as we shared a wank, a joint, a gaff while we peed and or abused her prepubescent daughters; my dirges to dignified life. But who cares? Who would have read all that apart from you and I as the wit and turns of the phrase continued to languish, in myriad bits of incoherency, in the ossified brain cells of the semiliterate Urban Detritus we knew? Not that anyone has read it yet, but at least they now know it was written. Because they listen when I tell them it was.

Maybe stripped off the angst, my writing is nothing but a god with feet of clay propped up by those who discovered me. The words that I once layered with meaning are now mere handholds for a grappling, vacuous mind. Suddenly the word Come has no ‘Viral Transmission’ and ‘Yet Another Unwanted Pregnancy’ encumbrances. It is just another keyword to keep the fan mail coming: Shag me Savage, the Mancunian redhead will scream… on and on ad infinitum.

I started blogging because I was angry, now I blog for the fans who need their dreams of being my future sex partners kept alive. I am not yet custom paid or custom laid, I know, but I am close enough to that place to smell the plastic in my wallet by the bedside and the smell of friction as my dick meets yet another willing pussy.

SHIBBOLETH II

(The Second Potashian Epistle to The Adept)

Part the First

Behold I have risen

Kasha Omoka the- Holy of Holies; Excalibur; The Holy Grail- zenith point of our dreams stands before me.

Let Judgment Day dawn on me now. I will stand fearless before Anubis, Baal, Osiris, YAHWEH; whatever the duty God might be.

I have paid my dues to The Canon.

I am ready to die;

to shed this vessel of mortality.

I will not have died in vain

Ave Potashius:

Noblest of Nairobi’s sons.

He liveth.

Deified

Potashius Nairobus

I am who I am!

Part the Second

My Narcissus Vs. Your Nemesis

(As it was written in the scrolls of the Butterfly People- there will be wars and bloggings of war.)

Because in the circles of writers my name is mentioned,

You traded Wadua the Necromancer for Nemesis.

On her steed you ride charging at I that is Narcissus.

Nemesis- puny goddess not fit for the least of my orgies;

Where I do all races and complexions, screaming:

“If my penis were a chameleon, I would be shooting rainbows!”

And the world over beyond the embrace of the Literati-

Who have learnt to say my name in scholarly ways:

Nairobus, Potashius, (Circa Unknown BCE to Immortality).

And the name spread, not through the phalluses of conquistadors,

To be drank from more vessels than the Lachryma Christi-

Deflowered damsels suck you in memory of me!

I called out for the intercession of the tribunes,

But they all lay beneath masochistic clouds of dragon smoke.

Valiant soldiers with promise now by Napshizzle emasculate.

As you asps gnaw at my feet, my rod twins with Asclepius’-

I become the Light Bringer; the Ghetto’s Illuminati.

Behold, unto you a prince is born!

PART THE THIRD
(If you my kindred spirits put the Con into Consensus)

VOLUNTARY DRINKING OVERSEAS

“My name is Kamau.” That was the lanky English volunteer introducing himself to me. He was wearing authentic maasai bracelets: beads from Brazil and craftsman from Kikuyu-land, on each arm, the ubiquitous Bob Marley T-shirt and what I call Volunteer Denim (Jeans so perfectly worn out and dyed an even shade of dirty.)

His hair, as is common with that of mzungus who try to go the dreadlocks way on a backpacker’s budget, was caught somewhere between dishevelled Merino and Dagoretti Market’s official madman.

About him was a lingering smell of pussy- black pussy- and the way his squinty eyes lingered on and caressed every swinging backside (said backside being clearly swung for his exotic attention) on the dance floor told a tale of the taste he had recently acquired. After eight months (never mind the prolonged periods of Rest and Recuperation spent lying on top of a local bitch… sorry, lying on a local beach) of drinking warm beer in the intrusive heat of Kakuma where in his sober moments he was expected to palpitate the distended bellies (though he could swear by Hippocrates that breast cancer was the bigger risk that he should have been examining for) of refugee girls, he had acquired a taste for the distended backsides of local women.

“I love the way people, wherever you go, give you a new name.” I responded.

We swigged our Tusker Malts then looked into each others eyes, smiled and nodded in unison. At that moment I knew that if these had been our great grandparents, his ancestor would have asked mine that they be blood brothers and soon after asked him (he that couldn’t read or write) to sign the deed of blood brotherhood- a deed that the quick passage of time would hold as evidence of his signing away all our ancestral land from here to EnoKumamayo.

“So, yourself, have you been places?” he asked. “Been given a new name?”

“Yay, mmmhh…of course,” I mutter a wee bit distracted by the red headed Canadian who had moved to the seat next to mine and was trying to tell me something. “When I went to America, Kamau…” I began, “When I went to America they called me Crow. Jimmy Crow!”

That wiped the avuncular grin off his face and while he fumbled in search of a vacant spot on the bar’s walls to stare away his embarrassment, my ears staggered closer to the cutely perky mouth of the Canadian. But if those home made gaffs she is smoking taste as awful as they smell, I thought to myself, then there is no way I am kissing this chick.

“I hear you write.” She stated. “So what do you write?”

“Words, mainly,” I answered. “Sometimes I get lucky and manage to write sentences and even paragraphs.”

“That’s so cute.” She laughed pursing her lips and clogging my nostrils with acrid smoke.”

“Not as cute as you are…!” I choked and managed a wink. Of course I was winking at myself for having managed to have a corny moment. (The Word Smith needs those to avoid taking his trade seriously and calling himself a writer id est: a boring fellow with an ego inversely proportional to his ability to use words.)

“Thanks. You are so nice.” She responds and I marvel at her ability to swallow my non-garnished lumps of corny. Though it is rather early in our conversation, I cannot help approaching the conclusion that she is one of those girls who are so stupid it is cute. Like really, the kind you want to shag as a service to mankind because you once read in a respectable journal of Sexology that: Ceteris Paribus, intelligence can be sexually transmitted.

“Oh, Potash writes a blog.” That is the German guy interrupting. He is still nursing his first beer. Maybe he cannot afford another- the poor guy is a UN Volunteer. What surely can one do with that 100 USD a day stipend? This business of saving the millions of Africans living on less than a dollar a day is such a thankless pursuit. Only heroes like our friend here, Individuals blessed with a great spirit of volunteerism can get that work done.

“Hey, you are Potash…Like, The Potash… Potashius Nairobus?” A Belgium girl buggers into the conversation and suddenly I realise that I am the only local on the table. The strange feeling that gives me can only be shared by that Savage Woman with her engorged pudenda flung wide open to the scrutiny of the civilised world. Noble (savage) Potashius put upon a pedestal; representing at this moment every African from Cape Town to Cairo- even though he has never met them.

“I cannot believe I am meeting you… you know, like this. Like when you said your name was Potash, I thought it was a common Kenyan name…” The Belgian rambled. “…But really, I love your blog… and when I was planning my trip to Africa…”

“Africa…?”

“Hehe… vintage Potash.” She laughs. “Kenya, I mean. I was planning my trip to Kenya and I was thinking: I want to meet this guy. I want to be a character in his blog…”

“But it takes lots more personality than you have to be a character in my blog.”

“Oh, that’s great! Now you have gone and blown away all the chance you had of getting laid by me.”

“Oh, and you just took away- from a world already devastated by the effects of Britney Spear’s hair cut on Global Warming- a most anticipated moment of succour: The sequel to the White Maasai!”

***

And that’s how another white chick, personality- the lack thereof, precisely- not withstanding got to become a character in my blog. It becomes clear then that events on this blog happen ‘in the cutting of a drink’ so let’s meet at the bar about 9.30. AM of course, who knows, in the PM I just might be getting laid!

RETURN OF THE RANT MASTER

The evolution of Potash will not be televised; it will be blogged- Gin Scotch Heroin

I spent too much time seeking- seeking God. I sought him because the bible says: seek and you shall find. He stands knocking at your door, the bible said. So I opened the door and behold it was me.

Now I stand here all alone. Alone because Gods, just like their prophets, are never worshipped in their own land. No chicken heads at my feet saying three ‘Oh my God’s’ as I pour holy come on their bowed heads. I am all alone- Narcissus by the pool- making love to my own image: The image of God!

In times like this, coherence eludes me. I stare vacantly into space pondering over this rapid metamorphosis beyond Kafkaesque parallels. I know who I have been but who knows what I have become?

A shift this from life at seventeen degrees below the poverty line to this unknown level. Back in the day I had the love and adulation of the streets and was shunned by the mainstream; now I am too fabulous for the ghetto yet too rough around the edges for the other side.

On the streets of Nairobi, they say that I changed- that I moved on up. The truth though is, I started out with nothing and I still have most of it. Yeah maybe, I moved on up, moved on to this place 11 degrees below. So I got a little change now and I am buying my own booze but I still do not have a flat in Kileleshwa and yet they will not let me still call the streets home.

***

I run come streaked paws through the kinks on my head. Man I am still a nappy head but now even white girls look through me. Is it because I wear white shirts and my nails are clean? Or because I always want to talk about terra-formation of Mars and discuss post-modernism rather than smoke weed and talk about how hard shit is on these streets?

The black girls will also not let me touch them even with someone else’s eighteen foot dick. Those from the ‘hood say ati I am full of petho these days. Bitch Please! “Bobo I saw you stretched through three gang-bangs. I was there and didn’t hit it because even those days I had petho. How can I respect you if you do not respect yourself?”

The pseudo-middle class girls will not touch me because even though I have a little change now it is still not enough for six movies and four pizzas. And I still don’t buy mixed drinks. “Oh, Katee when I walked in you were nursing a flat bamboocha, now that I am buying your drink has acquired a hyphen! But it is so cool that you ask me to buy you a drink now- Rosso this Bianco that- remember two years ago when you asked me what I could do for you just because I couldn’t afford a round of Coke’s at Recommended Retail Price for you and kina Piree? That was when I was down for Napshizzle at One Love Licker Store, now I am all about premium rate Tuskers.”

Now the yuppie girls will not touch me but who cares- they never did anyway. They will not touch me because I cannot tell a Bullish market from a Bearish one and I would rather buy my greens from Mama Njeri kwa corner rather than from Nekyu-mett.

The yuppies want a young man with prospects but all I have to offer is poisonality. So what if I cannot flash a BarclayCard after our lunch at The Serena… “I am paying cash Nimo. I am from the street and out there, cash is king! And when we talk don’t ask me to state what I do in one word- I told you I am white collar hustler and you said that was an oxymoron, okay so can we move on? And when we are done talking don’t ask for my business card. I need to get a business first, no?”

***

And in such an empty world, all the company I have left is that of writers. Man, how I can’t stand writers. Frankly my issues began when people started calling me a writer. A writer…hmmm! I will ask you one thing: If God doesn’t play dice then pray tell why did he make writers? Why would a compassionate deity make a creature with such a high sense of self worth and deny it talent?

One thing I know is that if writers could write just half as well as their egos told them they could, then the world would read more…

Okay I have run out of beers so let’s do that rant another day. Yes I mean another day. You thought I was going to stop blogging, and do what the fuck else? This is my private rant space where you all come to live out your voyeuristic tendencies. Therefore I feel obliged by my misplaced sense of nobility to let you watch me go to a thousand posts without a single corny line.

For all those waiting for the book, lets get this straight: what book? Most writers want to be widely published, but I am not a writer, all I want is to be widely plagiarized!

FROM GRASS TO GRACE

They call me Smith, Word-Smith. Usually I do not have a coin on me but if you slight me I will pay you with your own coin. Mostly though, I just coin words and phrases. (Thought I said I brought you take away, yani: thayo mbili na uweke juala. Unadhani ni kuku porno lakini tukifika home si ni ngono!)

Growing up, in the boondocks, all I really wanted was to write. But as it were that was a dream and we were too poor to afford dreams. So they kicked me onto the streets: “Bread, Kumanina!”

Bread or no bread, I just kept on writing even as Maslow’s middle finger kept pointing out the upward mobility of my new found street friends; friends who believed they could find self actualization by selling your kidney.

Some of those friends made it; some made it to the other side and others even made the headlines maybe because of what they had done with an AK 47 or what an AK 47 had done to them. For the rest of us, the scribbles continue…

***

Abuse your employer’s bandwidth a little more and let me tell you a story. The story of a once upon a time close friend of mine. The story of one of those kids who made it, a kid from this neighbourhood that I kicked with back then when we were straight out of high school. Yes those days when armed with our perfunctory O’levels- that were worth nothing more than casual labour at The EPZ sweatshops- we resolved to beat the system. We had high hopes of cheating a system that was determined to- with our plebian roots and no hopes of tertiary education- keep us at the nadir points of society’s food chain. A system purposely designed to maintain the status quo where the privileged classes took a surfeit of the national cake while we- the hoi polloi- elbowed; knifed and robbed each other for crumbs at the foot of Dives’ table.

We were young then, like really young. I was seventeen and a half and my boy- let us call him Roba, just in case the five-Os are reading this- had just turned eighteen. There we were, sitting on these very stones listening to EPMD and the Lost Boyz; Tupac Shakur had been dead a couple of months and Biggie Small’s own bullet was in its chamber. Waiting. Biggie took it a short while later.

Those gangsters, or so called gangsters weren’t what you would call our idols but their music and purported life stories were our inspiration. Those were kids, or so we thought, whose life chances were once as bleak as ours. But they had hustled (it is almost always the hustle where we are coming from) their way into Pimp’s Paradise.

My plan back then was to write a couple of stories for Young Nation, get the name; get the fame and then move on to bigger, meaner fora. With time, I hoped I would pay for a liberal arts education then cap it with an MBA. In the meantime I would get my gig- Potash Infotainment- out of the ghetto and be custom paid.

I guess my plan was too mainstream, nay elitist. It is no small wonder that I am still sitting on these stones over a decade later, with no college degree and no gig worth talking about writing stories that no one ever reads. Maybe I should have chosen the hustle. The real hustle! Roba did and now he is a once upon a time friend of mine. Nothing really changed between us, we are still cool but when a brother is pushing a VX into the leafy suburbs and you are still in the hood: chilling for a half-life then I jua wassap…! you cannot stay tight, can you?

Now Roba looked at my plan and said, “Yeah, Potash, this is all neat and tidy… real right and dandy but your daddy never played golf with two Editors and a Vice Chancellor. In fact they never heard of him. You see for us folks in this dump, we never have it cut. We have to cut it ourselves- with machetes and axes because They will never let us near the power tools. At least not here. Not now. The thing is, you do your thing and I do mine then I’ll be seeing you from the back of my Pimp Mobile!”

And as sure as the ghetto is sick, Roba does see me now from the back of his souped up VX, or other. He sees me walking to the city with my sheaf of notepaper and a pocket Webster that I borrowed from the second hand book vendor as the City Council askaris were him for his last finje. Yes Roba has long crossed the Rubicon but I am yet to get past the pretty girls at The Nation Centre reception.

That Roba who made his first fifty grand pushing jay to rich kids at a Lost Boyz concert in a century gone by. With that fifty he moved out of retail. He said to me, then: “In this game the peddler doesn’t get squat. All he has coming is five-Os when someone has got to take the rap for the big boys. I want to be a big boy; a bigger balla. The good lord knows I do!” And that he is now.

Wholesaling was not easy. Like they say, Nairobi was shared out when the rest of us were sleeping (or were we in the forest fighting?). Every street, every alley and every neighbourhood has its sharks and the small fish feed at their mercy. Roba put his hungry eye and his protestant ethic on choo namba nane.

Choo namba nane!

Now that is a war zone. It is a violent stretch where you deal low mark ups and thrive on volumes. That was a street that knew no honour among thieves; guns blazed everyday but no brand name academic got hit so it never made the papers; there were no Americans caught in the crossfire so it didn’t get on CNN. Kids were dying, getting dropped faster than mosques in the Christian assault on Fallujah and everyday, bodies were shovelled off the street into the back of the waiting police Land Rover. The winner of the duel joined the cops at the back and on the way to City Mortuary they took a detour to toast to life and street supremacy.

Roba insisted that there was virtue in dying for your next meal and two gunfights and four knifings later he was top cat. I remember him laughing that he was top cat in a street where, unlike in the carton Top Cat, the Inspector Dibbles were on the take. Roba kept his rivals down, the cops well fed and his game up.

In the meantime he was growing his empire: franchising, Brand extension and (insert Business school jargon phrase of choice). He even discovered a niche: American exchange students. Students from: St. Whatever, New York; some zoo (or something like that) in Michigan and a ganja worshiping bevy from a consortium of North Eastern USA universities. These kids had been getting their supplies at 25 bob a joint from the clowns at City Market.

“Low grade crude from a bunch of ne’er do wells is what that is, “Roba said to the Americans. “Say what if I give you a week’s supply of the real shizzle on the house!” Roba offered while blinding them with his bling. That bling that he bought dirt cheap from the same, so called, “bunch of ne’er do wells”. The Americans knew they were gonna love this cat.

And they loved him until the next week he came in screaming: “Show me the money… Show me the money like fucking Jerry McGuire!”

“He is kinda cute…” said the tall one with the green eyes.

“Yeah like really cute, in a Cuba Gooding kind of way.” Laughed the other with the blond curls.

It seemed that Roba would be getting himself a lot more than a premium rate for his low grade crude.

That was all a long time ago. Roba made his money and caught jungle fever. Some enemies of his development (you jua those with miro vibe of: hako kamewekwa na mzungu!) say that he caught jungle fever and made some money. Anyway, Roba’s preferred pussy flavour is all besides the point, all I wanted to tell you is that the dude is living it. Roba made it.

And all that while I was waiting at the Stone Zone: sitting on these derrière depleting rocks outside Mutua’s kiosk: snoring under a wobbly bench at One Love licker store; masturbating to the on and off flickering light of the grainy porn videos at Kamwana’s Video Parlour and swapping half-lifes, sips of napshizzle and starring in our own tales of myth bound libidos at Dimosh’s Kinyozi.

***
So today I sit at The Stone Zone and wink at my boy Timi: “Remember last night kid?” I take a liberal sip on the napshizzle and try to banish the thought of all those who have made it. I lick the stub of my pencil and begin writing yet another story. Yet another story that no one will read? I doubt. This one will be read I know. But most importantly I know that I will not be here this time next week. Everyday I hear the conference circuit calling out my name.

Bye bye Timi, you know I love you kid but I am not sure I can love you from the leafy lawns of some leisure lodge or other.

Bye bye Potash Book Club, it was great reading all those dog-eared books with you but now I have to go to all these writer’s workshops to write my own book.

Bye bye ‘hood…

Bye bye mean streets…

Bye bye the Kenyan Urban Narrative????

THE MALL RAT

When I was young, I was an incorrigible Mall Rat. Now that sort of baffles most acquaintances which is no wonder because the culture of youngsters hanging out at malls is quite alien to these shores. Besides certain of my detractors are quick to wonder what mall I prowled because the closest we got to a Mall in my neighbourhood was a Softa Container and a Coke kiosk against which mama Oti leaned frying and refrying last week’s Omena while Oti, ochieng, Omollo… O- whoever, hang around peddling roast groundnuts; kicking a polythene ball or, as baby Okumu (and baby Onyango and myriad baby O’s after them) was wont to do- swimming in the stygian effluent nicknamed Nairobi River.

But all that is besides the point because Mall or no mall within a twelve kilometre radius of our house, I still found myself one to hang out at.

My Mall prowling escapades were obviously resultant from the blatant misinformation and misrepresentations that Western media sources occasion on Third world Urban Youth. (Conscious of the my growing number of semi-literate readers and wanna be fans, I am avoiding such words as: hegemony). In those days my outlook to life was informed by earlier Black American teen magazines like: Right on and Black Beat that we got from I don’t know where. Later when I started hanging out at the malls, the affluent yoyo crowd introduced me to Vibe and The Source and wasn’t it awesome. …Like awesome, America... awesome!

I mean, all those Pop-stars in full colour. It was surreal, yeah and not forgetting AWESOME! And the conversations as we flipped through those magazines: “You mean Brandy Norwood can get uglier than in her I wanna be down Video? All delivered in a wavering Mid- Atlantic accent.

When I wasn’t at the mall, there was always the Now magazine that came with the standard and the Sunday Nation’s Lifestyle all courtesy of the butcher boy from Sector II. Even in those days, we didn’t have a TV but we were a minority so there was always the option of strolling into one neighbour’s or another’s house to catch jimmy Gathu on the hot new Channel 62. (Aside: Jimmy grew up, aged rather gracefully I must say. Matured. I sincerely hope Talia willl too some day and oh… whatever happened to Esther Mbondo?)

The thing I was picking from all these glossies and the not so glossy and Jimmy-Jam-a-Delics was that Pop-stars aren’t born, they are discovered. Discovered as they hang out at the Mall! Wasn’t that not the Toni Braxton story? Yes, that Toni Braxton who went broke from buying hair extensions. Yani, hair extensions and vile Koki from Sector II, with her 30 bob cornrows, was infinitely more gorgeous than Toni Braxton. Even when Koki had matutas and a dress with a hole that a rat- not Neiman Marcus- put there.

But hair or no hair, Toni could sing. And at the mall, the glossies tell me, she was discovered. (Was it by Baby Face or the other half of LaFace, L.A.Reid? I cannot seem to recall and someone pinched that magazine from my bedside. Pinched it and they will not even read it. Not even use it to light it a charcoal brazier unless it is in their pants.) Anyway, the point is, I believed that by hanging out at the Mall, I would be discovered.

Discovered, yes but not by some mzungu with a King James bible on one hand and a king size gun on the other, like China or Mount Kenya as though I wasn’t always there but by a talent scout.

Frankly I couldn’t sing- though I thought I could- but something inside me burnt with an artiste’s fervour. Maybe I could act or model. Certainly, I wasn’t going to insist on being on a chocolate commercial, my looks would stop sales, but there really was a spark in me a good director could use. Hey, like wouldn’t one need a convincing beast for a rendition of beauty and the Beast?

This was the thinking that carried me all those kilometres to the Mall. The sheer conviction that I was an artist of sorts even though my stick diagrams were uglier than my Primary school’s Arts teacher’s frown. In my heart I was a performing artiste even though the only time I had been on stage was to sweep it. Uhm, well there was the time though when I got on stage as an actor but being a sheep in the Sunday School Nativity play doesn’t count.

But we live by hope. I believed that talent has to be nurtured. I knew that the greatest of them all were apprentices to the maestros at some point. And maestros weren’t thumbing papier mache in stadi wan, or approving the discordant screeches of Sunday school babes.

It is no wonder then that my talent hadn’t been discovered. So far I hadn’t met the maestros. No Readership! The maestros were at the mall having themselves a jolly upper middle class time and occasionally stumbling on talent. And you had to be there for them to stumble on you, right?