ROMANCE BY THE RIVER

To one across the sea...

There is a place down-river from the glorified squatter settlement I was raised in. Right on the banks of the Kitisuru river. That Kitisuru, the life-blood of my people... and lots of others in the city who partake of cabbages, sukuma wiki and varied greens nourished in its waters by a motley bunch of peasant farmers along its meandering tracks.

Yes, there is a place. A place that brings succour to my broken spirit. A place where I take my rustic retreat. It is a place of escape from life's theatre of broken dreams and the harries of a city that will not let me be. By the pleasant stream I lie with the tapering royal palm and the ancient mugumo tree as my shield from the invidious beckoning of a city that cannot brook my penury.

Sometimes I loll upon a grassy knoll, with the slender stalks of the Kikuyu grass brushing against my blushing face. My countenance lights up as I pull, ever so gently, on the wet, tender fronds of the water plants. As the musky fragrance of new bloom tickles my nostrils with a bitter-sweet stimulation, everything about me is transmogrified. All of an easy sudden, those wet... tender fronds are dark tresses of hair. The cuddly soft breeze is not the wind but your whisper in my ear.

How I have longed for your company. Right from when I was a little boy, shaping flutes out of the giant reeds and humming happy tunes, I knew that someday there will be two of us here. Two of us, all giggly, perched up on the crook of that Meru oak. Up there with our just-for-two tickets to the Kitisuru Bird Orchestra. I have always known that on that day you will share the magic of my world and marvel at the refrain of the weaver birds. And the birds, as you would realise, sounding as though they were calling out my name.

And all that merely the matinee.

“So, how about a late lunch?”
There is a glorious clump of arrowroots thereabouts. How is that with a side of that sugar cane, there? How luscious it looks. How succulent? Just like... just like... Then we can wash it all down with this here water melon.

Hey, I can even show you a trick: how to split the water melon's outer covering with just the teeth. ...split it and suck it... Suck it all out.... With my tongue! Here Boo Boo, want to try that?

It is the taste of the Kitisuru. Wild. Addictive. Changing. Just like chocolate, this here as they say, will make you never want to go back to vanila.

Want some dessert?
There is a wide selection of berries down stream. Hey watch out for the stinging nettle... Ouch! Okay, let me rub this there. Right there where it itches. We used to call this weed rub-rub-sweetness. Works better than that there your newfangled Vaseline.

Berries?
Try those ones. No, No... that there is Datura Stramonium... I meant those other ones. The ones to the left. Yes, those in the glistening shades of Kitisuru rich ochre.
Delicious, eh?

Let us sit here. Uhm, this spot reminds me of a Christmas long gone. We had no money for liquorice and all sorts of goodies and yet we had grown up knowing that Christmas was about special things. The special things, mind you, that money can buy. But we had no money so we made do? No way, we improvised. (Sometimes I feel like poor people have the best fun sometimes, they can draw joy out of the smallest things; make a feast out of the most banal of ingredients. But it is always a fleeting thought... me, I have no time to romanticise poverty).

We had no money so we pinched a wee morsel of lard from the filthy tin-can in grandmother's kitchen. A can that had started its journey around the world carrying cooking oil: Gift From the People of the USA. That must have been the year when our parents used to walk over to the Chief's camp to pick food rations. And sometimes we would accompany them and finding our nursery school teacher there, she would make us line up and sing: Wi ara the woud... wi ara the shudren...
With the lard and a discoloured, used can of Kimbo, we made our way through the thickets and over long barren plots of land to this place.

On this spot we made our greatest Christmas lunch ever: fried grasshopper with flame-grilled locust. (A chameleon happened to pass by and changed colour from the dusty brown of that rock there to the crispy, golden-brown of kuku porno). To crown it all, we munched on pilfered sugarcane, sweet potato and nduma baked the traditional way- just the way cucu used to- under a pile of smouldering ashes.

Sometimes Christmas comes but once in a lifetime!

After lunch we decided to paint the waterfall blue. Literally. Yes, we had half a tub of paint from God-knows-where. Oh, waterfall... It is upstream... Here, give me your hand, sweet lover... let me show you.

Beautiful, no...? See... look, baby, look... over there on that rock-face on the right bank. No, not where the antelope is... a little lower... yes there.

POTASH

On that Christmas day I wrote my name there. I wrote it in blue paint. Blue is the colour of love, my love.

Uhm, that... a Swastika? ...yes it is. We were young country boys, what did we know about all these Western wars, symbols, semiotics and bullshit? We just liked the symbols because we thought they were cool. Cultured. Drawing a Swastika on your wall was right up there with sticking a Pele picture on your autograph book. It meant you were with it. No, you were IT. You knew that you knew and everyone knew that you knew. Tut tut...! Hey, look here on my left arm, see? I got a Star of David tattoo. I did it with that prickly plant over there. Maybe I should replace that star with your name. No, no... it doesn't hurt. Not much, anyway... There you go... yeah, deeper sunshine... deeper....

Now pass me that there rub-rub-sweetness.

MAD AT SELF

I write best when I am angry, but I angry in a different kind of way now; angry at myself. My penchant for self-censorship, these days, cannot allow me to write here this week. But I will write elsewhere. Catch me if you can...

...otherwise, see you next monday

P.

HAVE THEY TAKEN OVER?

Sunday afternoon.

I am at Peterson's (gwa bita) throwing jug- worth and mug-worth of Senator left, right and centre. This is Kiambu and before me, in various stages of inebriation, are its jobless youth, lowlifes, petty thieves; the dregs not only of a social system that does not brook penury but also an economic construct that allows for only two things: having and not having.

Njoro, my cousin on my mother's side, is re-introducing me to this space. He runs me through the basic rules, once again, as I throw scar-faced Muriuki a 1 litre jug. The rules: stay calm; pay cash; and do not buy too much too quick. These rules are premised on certain facts: if you look fidgety, you are either new here or carrying large amounts of money. If you buy too much too quick, it means that you have a large amount to blow. The guys you buy the drinks will be the ones that will relieve you of your change, eventually. And, finally, pay cash because a bill in these kind of places is just a piece of paper with numbers on it; it has no correlation with your consumption.

But I cannot be bothered about rules. Me I am always saying, any young bachelor in this country who has some kind of hustle going on needs to redistribute their income. If the big fish will not share, if they insist on running a capitalistic economy and refuse to put in place safety nets for the disadvantaged majorities such as a better access to income generating activities, health, education and alcohol, then someone else has to do it. Someone like me...so, “Wakonyo, wape kitu!” If you want to inflate my bill, go ahead, how much can I possibly spend in a place where you can get totally wasted on 100 Kshs? Wee, kuzoo, pewa Napshizzle! I am only here for a week or two; these dudes haven't seen me in a dog's year, how will they know Potash lives?

The zero inches TV is on and a grainy John Dematthew VCD is playing. “I love this song!” I yell throwing my hands up like a Nairobi girl to the first riff of Linking Park's Numb. I wave my hands this and that way and hum incoherently. Of course I have never heard this song, but it is one of those John Dematthew 'Kikuyu Power' chants and I am seeking credibility. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Kikuyuland, and having been away for quite a bit, I need to prove that I haven't lost it. Especially seeing that, in the height of stupidity, I am wearing an orange shirt.

Scarface Muriuki's phone rings. It is one of those fancy phones that only a guy like Muriuki can answer in a bar like this. A bar where they will stab you for your last twenty bob. He has a text message. He reads it. He whispers, something, to the guy next to him and I see the other guy's face crinkle in a half-smile-half-scowl. Furtive glances are exchanged. Nodding heads and drinks being pushed away, thoughtfully. The room slowly begins to empty.

“Yo, P, take me I buy a joint.”
“But we got drinks cousin, niaje, niaje...?
“Okay, dude, I will see you later then, baadayes....”

I follow him outside wondering what happened to our drinker's creed that to leave an unfinished drink is like chewing on a goat's bone and throwing it away without breaking it; taboo.

“Tomorrow, cousin, it is going down.” he mutters and I am not even sure he is talking to me.
“Kesho, aje, aje...?” My cousin doesn't respond. Outside the bar, we squint our eyes in pain as we transition from the dark and smoky den into the sun-splashed afternoon. No more words are exchanged and we end up walking our separate ways. I walk into a 'proper' bar, with beer in bottles, across the street and my cousin heads off to God-knows-where.

At the 'proper' bar, I find a clump of uncles, cousins and kinsfolk of various removes, join them and swallow several litres of beer. At 2.00 am, Monday morning we stagger home.

***

I get out of bed at 10.00 am. Today, I will go into the city and meet up, or at least try to, a couple of writing projects contacts, I decide.

I choose to skip a shower and jump into the clothes I wore on Sunday. At the matatu stop, things are others....

...Mungiki has taken over!

KIAMBU; A MOMENT OF REALITY

It has been many a month since I was in Kiambu. Kiambu, the land of my people; the motherland. So last week, finding the need to wean myself to reality; to set the pace for my re-engagement with the hoi polloi, I set out for Kiambu.

Kiambu, being the most affluent of the Kikuyu districts, is without a doubt Kenya's least poverty struck region. But therein lies an irony because Kiambu is easily one of the most unsafe places, in Kenya, to live in. Kiambu is the birthplace of the scum that runs Nairobi nights. Long before robbers graduate into gun-totting killers and take over Nairobi, they are schooled in blood-thirst and impunity; a callous approach to human life, in the dark village paths and muddy cattle tracks of Kiambu.

Kiambu the land of my birth. Let me take you there...

Imagine you were a made gangster. It is about mid-day and you are about to rob a bank or a Forex Bureau on Kenyatta Avenue. At this hour, you know that the exit routes towards a westerly direction are your best bet. The traffic is low and the roads are less pot-holed. But most importantly, they all lead towards home: Kiambu.

So, 1215hrs. Grab the money and shoot your way out of the banking hall. Saunter towards the white Toyota Corolla, it is your getaway car. (You idiot of course you didn't come here in it, but it is your GETAWAY car now, so shot the driver and get in). You are the one driving and you should concentrate on just that but at the back of your head you should be listening out for a single shot. That is one of your accomplices putting a bullet in the head of a random woman across the street. (Just in case people get the despicable notion that you are packing toy guns like village petty thieves.)

Step on the clutch and accelerator simultaneously. Good for effect. Then let go of the clutch and push the accelerator to the floor. Take a right at Kenyatta and Uhuru (fuck, isn't that a father and son from Kiambu, lucky bastards who robbed not just one bloody bank but a whole country without firing a single shot?) and brace yourself for aburst of rifle fire close by. It is the accomplice riding shot gun and he is either celebrating or nervous. Ignore him and keep driving.

This route out of Nairobi is on a dual carriageway and runs through the upmarket shopping centre of Westlands, and its leafy environs, on and on into the most affluent constituency in the country: Kikuyu. Government statistics say that only sixteen per cent of the population here lives below the poverty line. (Fuck, so how come all the people you grew up knowing were poor? But that gun, that posse... will change all that. Well, maybe you will just die trying to change that!)

'Welcome to Kiambu,' a billboard used to say. Urutaguo Mwiruti (It is taught to the self taught). Such is life.

As you drive past, your attention is drawn to a clutter of peeling paint and dust streaked shopping centres interspersed with incomplete yet fully occupied apartment blocks sharing the same gated and well manicured compound as posh bungalows, rows of one-roomed rental shacks made of corrugated iron sheets and small holder farms, (a successful one- with four fat cows lolling in a pen and hundreds of chickens fluttering about a storied run- nested against a desolate one with a mangy dog chasing a gangly and featherless-necked hen around a wooden cabin with a massive column of smoke pushing out of a window-shaped hole in the wall). This, as I said, is Kikuyu constituency of Kiambu District in the Central Province of Kenya.

I was born here. In one of the desolate farms. I was born here, not in an actual sense, but in the way that a Kenyan national ID puts it. I was born here because no one, as I grew up being told, is from Nairobi. I have lived in too many places; too many woe-begotten shacks, but this farm- this has the saddest memories. This place is real, the others are just dream places, spaces that I occupied in other lives that I cannot really return to. But this one, this one there will never be an escaping it. It feels so strange to be back.

Now if someone could just get that cow to shut up, I could finish this story....

SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI

The higher you go the harder you fall. Here I am returned to the flat in the sky. Returned long enough to sign out; kiss the good times bye bye.

But first a party. A big party to celebrate my descent. In a few hours I will be down there with the masses. I am close enough now, to the masses, and as the clock ticks away, I begin to smell the stench of depravity and shattered dreams. My nostrils are inundated with the bitter-sweet stench of every-day-people Nairobi. Everyday, like I soon will be. Good bye tower; good bye drinks that come in glass bottles.

Tonight we drink, tomorrow we forget. At the dawn, the sun will rise in beautiful splendour. The serenity of the white clouds against a blue sky will find itself reflected in the pool. The trees will swing this way and that sending gentle ripples over the bird-baths. At noon the sun will move up the sky and while burning the meagre clothes off the backs of everyday Nairobians, it will find itself tamed and celebrated in this gated community. The neighbours will bring out their deck chairs, put their feet up on the porch walls and soak up the sun. I know they will do it, because I have always seen them do it; but I will not join them for I will be gone.

Good bye my serene Ivory Tower, let down the bridge over your moat for me. The real world awaits me. And thus passes my glory in your world.

SUNDAY OF THE PRODIGAL SON

Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found. – (Luke 15:32, KJV)


In the old days, a son returning home was celebrated. The Kikuyu people did not celebrate with the slaughtering of a fattened calf, like the Jews of old, but they slaughtered a goat instead. But things have changed- in my part of the city, at least- returned sons get wary smiles and uneasy back-pats as their pockets get picked. Sons who return with empty hands get the cold shoulder.

I returned with empty hands. My mother embraced me. Tukutenderesa!

My mum sat on a stool outside her house. She was poised delicately, leaning over the charcoal brazier, with only two legs of the stool touching the ground. The stool's third leg jutted out of its seat at an unlikely angle- broken. Like dreams in this neighbourhood. The fourth leg was missing; gone for as long as I can remember. Like many sons in this neighbourhood.

“Thanks and praises to the almighty...” My mother yelled as she reached out to me her calloused palms touching my face. The stool tumbled over an edge of its seat hitting her unshod heel before finding the pebbled ground. In its rapid descent, the stool spun slightly and knocked over a plastic bowl of uncooked sukumawiki. “Welcome home my son...” mother said putting her arms around me. At that moment, the charcoal brazier she had been coaxing came to life. The measly bits of charcoal burst into low, dancing flames sending sparks all around us even threatening to set the palm fronds placed against the kitchen wall on fire.

It was Palm Sunday and this place was my Jerusalem. Would I last through Easter before the local chief crucifies me, for a crime I have not committed? I thought to myself.

“Where did you go to, Potash?” My mum asked her eyes squinted somewhere between joy and pent up concern.
“I have been around and about, mami... here in Nairobi.”
“So how comes you never came to see us, at all... did you move out of home and not tell me... is it a girl that kept you away from us; we that have always loved you?”
“What are you talking about mami? ...I was busy. Working.”
“What kind of work is this, Potash, ...work, work, work..., for twenty four hours a day, seven days a week? Even muhindis give you a Sunday off, once in a while.”
“I cannot make you understand, mami, but that is what it is: I have been very busy. With work.”
“So you have money... you really need to give me some. Look at this house, this place... look at my roof... over there... can I tell anyone that my son is out there working?” My mum started to sob but could not stop talking. “... my son, Potash, all you are, I made you... and if you got married and didn't tell me, hmmm....”

I had no money and no girl. Not here not now. In the year and a half since I left this place, there has been money- not much, but a lot for where I am coming from- and there have been girls. But now I have nothing. How could I make my mum understand that I had done my best, at least tried to, in most cases, to make a better life for me and in the broader scheme of things, for them too? Here I was, with nothing, and yet I had done my best- in love and in labour.

I stepped out of my mum's embrace and stared at all of the horizon that I could see beyond the low-lying cluster of tin roofs. Dusk was creeping, rapidly, upon this neighbourhood. My mind wandered into the nights of a distant past. Nights filled with rancorous yells; muffled grunts, of both pain and pleasure. Illicit pleasure. Sobs of a two year old flower plucked. Some times the nights smothered you with an eerie silence. A silence punctured by gunshots and the wailing from the vigil of another son.

It is the vibrating urgency of my cellphone that brought me back to the living. I pulled out my phone. Flipped it open expectantly. Maybe someone, from the world I had left a few hours earlier- a world of affected conversations: the craft of writing and the proper use of a semicolon; construction and deconstructions of the 'other'; positive ethnicity and the role of the writer, over exotic cuisines, Scottish whiskey and South African wines- was inviting me back.

“Eiiii, nice phone, baba Potashi...” Karis, my brother's son, Exclaimed. “... ni ya camera, eh? ...Photo me!”
I could barely hear him as I brought up the phones screen to my face while fumbling with the 'answer' button.
“Hmmm, is that one of those people you left us for, ii? ... you know, Potash, and I have told you this many times before, the book of Isaiah tells us that blessed is the man that does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the way of sinners... those there friends of yours are nothing more than chaff in the wind...” she punctuated her sermon by brushing spit off the corner of her mouth with one hand and waving the other about to mimic the wind. “...but here son, in this house, no matter how much we use poverty to light the jiko, Jehovah knows our way. And our way is righteous. Stay here, with us, where you belong and the lord will make you like a tree planted planted by the water's side...”

It was not one of those 'sinners' calling, just a reminder I had set two days before. A reminder to go home today, no matter what. But I had remembered to come home and here I was. What I should have remembered was to tell someone- anyone- to call me and summon me out of this place. But who was there to tell, anyway- the writers I was walking away from or the the girls who had walked away from me?

***
The sound of thunder reaches us from a distance and above us cumulus clouds swiftly steal the sun's thunder. A drop of water lands on my face and then another and another in quick succession. “Come inside, Potash...” my mum whispers and I can feel the soft, kind pleasure of her hand on my elbow. “... I have to put something on the floor under the leaking roof...

...remember when you were very young and I left you sleeping alone in the house and went to the market...? ” My mum smiles into my eyes.
“Mami, I can never forget, that day... but I will never believe that it is the wind that blew away the iron sheet from our roof. Baba Njenga stole it...”

THE PLACE I ONCE CALLED HOME

A mangy dog yelps past propelled by the sheer force of my boot against his backside. I pluck a leaf of nappier grass and use it to wipe a spot where the new and tan leather of my boot has been soiled by its collision with the dog. Well, maybe the dirt is not particularly evident but you can never be too sure in these places- what with rabies, tetanus and all.

I continue to walk down the slope. It is 2.00pm and the sun is perched high up in the sky leering furiously. Nairobi has been so hot lately but today it is scalding. Maybe it is this place. There are no swimming pools and trees and hyphenated cocktails here; those rose coloured glasses that turn the African sun into an endearing tourist attraction. In this place the largest water mass is a gallon-full and it is in a chang'aa brewery. The only trees, here, are burning: the charcoal and the marijuana.

“Potash....” It is some kid straight out of a Save Africa commercial. Too bad I have not brought my camera. That there would have been a great image for the blog. Nothing like a photo of a mud-streaked African child running towards a camera (towards the salvation that invariably wears a white face?), to get that hit counter dancing.

The kid runs towards me, his arms outstretched, his ribs pushing against his dark skin. It is the kind of moment that international careers; fame and fortune, are forged out of. Imagine the savage beauty of that photograph. The boy, caught in mid air and his smile photoshoped into an enigmatic grin, looks like an outcast grasping at the straws of the (international) community. His puny frame, his bare feet- everything about him, scabs, ringworms and all- captured in one frame. Africa freeze-framed.

“Wee, mtoto...Usinipake matope!” I yell at him while he is still at a distance from which I cannot see the ubiquitous skin lesions and fungal infections that mark childhood here.
“Mimi si mtoto... kwani umesahau jina yangu?” Damn it, it can walk and talk.

The child is so close now I can see his swollen eye. He parts the distance between us enough for me to recoil from his slum fragrance: urine and dirt. The boy is upon me but not before a blob of mucus can swing out of his nose and perch on the sleeve of my polo shirt.

“Baba Potashi...” he coos, his emaciated arms attempting but failing a stranglehold of me and his messy nose succeeding in grossing me out.
“Karis...” I say holding him by the arms, lifting him up and looking into his eyes.

The son of my brother is my son.

All my yuppie affectations melt away. Is this child me two decades ago? What chance, for a decent life, does Karis stand in this place? What can I do for him that would be worthwhile; more meaningful than all that sneakers, fresh fragrances and material bullshit? Love, affection, mentorship, what?

Karis' eyes lock with mine, the good one at least. I run my thumb lightly over his infected eye. It all reminds me of a time long ago when I sat in a corner trying to read for an exam. Only one of my eyes was working because I had caught an eye infection from my cousin who had caught it from our other cousin on and on ad infinitum. It is not the discomfort that I remember from that night though, it is that the lamp ran out of fuel. Such a long time ago, I mutter inwardly and hug Karis closer. Is there a me in him, I wonder

“...You have grown,” I say to Karis. I use that sing song voice adults speak to children with and it doesn't feel cheesy or awkward, to me at all.

I put him down and with his hand firmly held in mine we walk together into the sunset. Okay, okay... I put him down and we walk into that place I once called home.

POTASH PRESENTS: The Stories I Forgot

The best times blur in remembrance; it is the painful ones that have stayed with me. Long days of seeking and not finding; of empty pursuits thrust into perpetuity. Hard, cold nights of catching moonbeams through an ageing roof. Some nights the full moon, hanging low in the sky would turn an eerie shade of red, the wind would blow malevolently against the tin (or the mad and wattle depending on where we lived then) walls and dark clouds creep on the moon; smother her light and loll over the sky an ominous rumble in their wake.

Then it would begin to rain.

To remember it all brings tears to my eyes- these tears do not rain, they pour. In private, in between spotless white linen, I curl myself into a foetal position and let the sheets mop up more fluid than they have from all the trysts they have seen lately. Those are my only moments of truth; times when the uppity conversations in mood lit rooms are done and I have no one to go home to.

In those days, the conversations would have been vulgar- held in coarse tongues over ugali and sukuma wiki (a jug or two of Senator or a jik of Chang'aa as we grew older) but at least there would have been someone to go home to. You would always return to your brothers' drunken snoring as they lay sprawled over the Vono single-bed. Or maybe it was one of your relatives from the village; an old mate from high school. Someone. Sometimes all these people would be all in there, sober and hungry, hurdled over the charcoal brazier telling war stories. Other times there would be nobody and you hoped for the best: that at least they were spending a night at the police station.

The Police station... nyumba ya mawe kizee!

Yes and the police station came with security. Security from our biggest fear: The Police. If you were spending a night at the police station it meant that they had caught you alive. And that, I kid you not, was a rare occurrence. Most important of all, the police station, for those who know its ways, came with a guaranteed breakfast. Scalding tea and a measly slice of bread after a night of cat naps in a crouching position might not seem like much but it was divine compared to the air burger breakfast at home.

In the morning, the OCS (Officer Commanding Station) would put you to work sweeping the police station's compound and send you on your way. They knew those who could be bailed out and those who couldn't. And you knew that they wouldn't bother taking you to court on charges of 'idling' because that was a charge they preferred on those they hoped to extort money from. Money which they knew you didn't have. Set free you returned to the same emptiness- to the constant struggle in search of any means of escape from poverty. In most cases the only means to be found was through cheap drugs and alcohol.

I say these things now because the soft voice that has been whispering in my year for over a year has turned into a yell. When I started this blog, it was because of two things. First I knew I had a story to tell. I did not know how well to tell stories, as I do now, but I had more stories then than now. But stories do not go away, they live in our hearts but the desire to rewrite history and escape its lowest moments thrusts us into the murky depths of forgetfulness.

The story I wanted to tell was that of a mid twenties Kenyan guy trying to afford his next shot of moonshine; his urban escape vehicle. About the realities of a life of fruitless striving and the ways we tried to escape it. It was about how life was and still is in that small theatre of broken dreams that is our end of Nairobi. The story of an urban space and a people who only live in NGO statistics and the dispatches of foreign correspondents. I wanted to imbue this space with character, take away the jaded and callous ways real people were constantly reduced to objects to which a subject (war, hunger and pestilence) and a verb were added to complete that 'balanced' news story. I meant to take away the emasculation of a people through turning them into data that fit well into a pie chart in a funding proposal. I desired to translate the lived experience into the written word. Maybe in the process of transferring life into words, I would be discovered as a writer.

The being discovered as a writer was the second reason I started doing this blog. These days they call me a writer. But how can I be an accomplished writer while the story that made me languishes in oblivion? Without the Kenyan Urban Narrative, I am incomplete.

I write these words now because, lately, I have been thinking about truth and forgetfulness. The written word has been for centuries, now, the most efficient way of documenting and preserving truths. Books, nay, written words have an element of permanence, they immortalise the author and grow the database of the record of a human existence. Our existence. What is written now affects what we think tomorrow. Yet all that is written today is not of necessity true. And some of those falsehoods are peddled purposely. The purpose is never, out rightly, to deceive but merely to add drama to mundane experiences.

Mainly, I am talking about the Memoir here. It is amazing how many autobiographies are being called to question in recent times. Forget about the blatant inventions of Margaret Seltzer aka Margaret B. Jones in Love and Consequences, Misha Defonseca in Misha: A Memoire of The Holocaust Years, the Oprah-Bubble-Busting James Frey and the like but the accusations of embellishment and anachronism in say Ishmael Beah's A long Way Gone. If such accusations can be true, can these narratives be seen to have been ruined by a desire in the publishing world to publish what is sensational, if badly told, rather than what is mundane yet well and truthfully narrated? Are readers more interested in the humanity of their subject or in their celebrity, infamy and vileness? Are stories of every day, forgotten people remarkable out of once-in-a-while news features?

Can the Kenyan Urban Narrative be told for and as what it is- a lived experience- and continue to appeal to its audience and the world that does not know the story?

Most important of all, how much can its author remember? How much of story is there without the detail? Is the accuracy of time vis a vis incident relevant or is placing real incidents in wrong times a misrepresentation of fact enough to push the narrative into the realm of fiction?

Such have been my thoughts for long days. I have many answers from the ethical to the philosophical but what I have realised is that those answers are not necessary or in anyway related to what I set out to do. Not, at least, in the most fundamental of ways which is whether or not this blog can give voice to a disenfranchised majority. To my own self, then, I shall be true and return to the neighbourhood. Shed this ridiculous pandering for literary greatness that is lived more in association that in works published.

I am slipping out of the writers' network that has taken me into its bourgeoisie embrace. Now, I will jump back into the murky depths of Nairobi under-privilege where this writing business all begun. I seek to and hope to return to those days of striving and not finding. Return even in metaphorical ways: through memory and lucid dreams. I want to go back to those days, when the writing was cathartic. To that place where words were the best way to escape that low moment when the alcohol and drug buzz is worn out and you know not where your next high is coming from. I am going back to a time when I wrote and wrote, grinding pencil lead to a pulp and wearing out exercise book after exercise book right through to the margins just to still the demons and wait out the unpredictable, yet much hoped for, arrival of a psychotropic escape route from despondency.

I am going back to the Kenyan Urban Narrative. At least to the most of it that I can still remember.

QUEER FOR 2008

These queer folks sure thrown down a cool party. Friday night and the first queer bash of the year is, finally, here. I have been waiting all week. I need to go because I have long run out of lube and it has been ages since I have seen more queer folk in a room that I got head rush.

It all began the other week, on Monday, when a little birdie whispered in my browser: Q-Bash on next week Friday. I called my people. Got confirmation- venue, ticket prices et al. But a party is not a party without an entourage, so I called my other people. My other people happen to be press so I called my people to vouch for them.

Then D-Day crawled upon us. Friday, February 29th. It was a busy day. I had this writers' support group thingie to attend, at the British Council, all day. It was one of the better ones, I must say, where you know everyone and you have read more of their work beyond what they are presenting that day. I have been a lazy one, you know, so I had nothing to present which is such a shame as it was the kind of writing that has a guaranteed publication and possible payment option. But, I think I am getting enamoured to the life of a struggling artiste: spend all your time between getting wasted and complaining about how hard it is to make money as an artiste in this country.

But I digress...

After the workshop I walked downtown with two of my mates and I made a meal out of a dead goat and some rice. Then some chick texted to say she had hit the airport and was cruising in my direction. “What's happening P, you going for the gay party or can I buy you some Ethiopian?”I assumed that to be a rhetorical question. Some truths, ladies and gentlemen, you have to hold as self evident, that queer parties and exotic dinners with heteros are not created equal. So the gay party it was, but not before some lame conversation was had:

“Potash...”
“Niaje... niaje!”
“I am really dying for some Ethiopian food...”
“Pole...but there is some gay action to catch...”
“Sawa...but can we eat first?”
“Nope, I will not let your hunger eat into my crotch time...”
“But wait... you do white chicks and black guys, no?”
“Yeah!”
“I am a white chick...!”
“Nice, so we have to go find a black guy at this party so I can have me a sandwich!”
“Okay fine, lets go then... what is Ethiopian food anyway, isn't Ethiopia not more famous for the lack of food?”
“Hey, do not insult starving Africans....”

My retort was interrupted by the arrival of the rest of the entourage, to make up a party assault vehicle of: Potash, the, two girls, two boys and one homophobe. The homophobe had the ride, but it was my invite he was rolling on, so I threw my rule book at him,

“Dude, parental advisory, it is either you are in or you are out. I would rather you out but on the promise of good behaviour I will let you in.”
“Potash, us guys are miros, man.... this shit...”
“It is two ways here... and please, do not miro me... either you are in or out. If you are in, then it is quit-homophobia-cold-turkey-night for you.”

So he was in. And like that guy in the bible- Jesus Christ, or something- it is like I had said to him: Ephphatha, for behold, on that night the homophobe's eyes were opened.

Ahhh... I am too lazy to write these days but I need to keep this blog going. So this will suffice for this Monday's quota. I am off to the bar. Such is the life of the struggling artist.

ZARATHUSTRA AND THE GOD POTASH

A Dream That Will, Hopefully, Become A Work in Progress

“Potash ist tot,” Thus spoke Zarathustra.
“Indeed,” said I, Potash, The. “For what does it profit one to abandon the pursuit of Godhood and, in lieu, wallow in carnal pursuits. The raison d'etre of mortals.”
“False premise, that,” said he. For mortals- Men; humanity- live not for canal gratification. The corpus is not but a mere vessel, in truth, the soul makes the being.”
“...and you, Zarathustra, deign the soul choice?”
“... or words to that effect!” Zarathustra grinned.
“But assuming that the soul allows, nay, commands the vessel to seek its own gratification, what comes first: the erogenous zone or the orgasm?” I asked knowing him to be of the teleological school.
“Come...?”
“A philosophical question you perverted soul...”
“I, Zarathustra, has a penis because I need an orgasm”
“How shallow. I, Potash, has an orgasm because I have a penis. And that orgasm never was a need but a consequence of penis usage- that usage deriving from said penis telling the brain that in that vagina, that anus, (or my right palm, in most instances) lies an orgasm.”
“But would, in the absence of your penis seeking it, the orgasm still not exist?”
“Cause and effect, sir, is the nature of the orgasm. As a spark is born when steel is put to flint and so is an orgasm when mortise and tenon conjoin.”
“You are the steel, my man; the spark bringer.” Zarathustra touchéd.
I could see the colour drain out of his eyes and gush downwards through his blood vessels. Nature indeed abhors a vacuum penis.

***

“Potash ist Hootttt....!” Thus cooed Zarathustra.
“Indeed,” said I, Potash, The. For what will it profit I to pursue Godhood and, in failure, fall; recede from high up into the arms of a frumpy maid (or manchild)?
“Yes, yes,“ agreed Zarathustra. “For even though canal gratification is not the purpose of man, there sure lives another orgasm out there waiting for you to find. And you can only find it by remaining mortal.”
“Where, my good man, do you reckon that orgasm lives; in you perhaps?”
“Oh, you are too kind...” he blushed.
For one second there I couldn't convince myself that it was his mind, I was attracted to. Not for the way his face crinkled in cute lines and the crow feet under his eyes turned into rivulets draining away his happy tears. There are wrinkles, I thought to myself, that a facelift can ruin. All this while I ran a wary finger down a vein on his forehead.
“Maybe, “ opined Zarathustra, “you can be a sex God.”
“I could be a Greek god. I will be a Greek God. I, Potash, the Young Urban Polysexual is become, henceforth, Hermes the Pansexual... and you, beautiful being, are Hermaphroditus...”
“In my father's house are many gods but I go now to prepare a shrine just for you, Potash. My people shall be your people and their gods... their gods I declare an abomination, before thee.”
“I am. I, Potash... I am the Lord; your sex God. Thou shall not have any more gods before me... for I am a vengeful God!”
“Amen!” cried Zarathustra genuflecting.
“God, humble Zarathustra, can never die. Not unless your need to invent him does.” I philosophised.
But Zarathustra was too busy burning incense at my feet to be bothered with philosophical cogitations.
“Arise, Zarathustra,” I commanded.
And at that moment I tore my garment into two and Zarathustra, beholding the holy of holies, went down on his knees to worship.
Potash came.

TIME OF THE KENYAN WRITER II

In conversation (maybe ranting) with writers. A transcript


Let peace prevail... ha... not until I get into the New York Times.

Good Evening ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you for coming out tonight.

I see many faces I recognise: those of writers, journalists and varied media types..

You all know as much as I do that the Kenyan crisis is bigger, much more sexier now, than HIV babies...

You all know that in Africa, careers are made in adversity... are we going to let Bono and Angelina Jolie beat us to this one?

The speed and accuracy at which shit hits the fan in Africa means that we the chroniclers of this continent- of its body count mainly- will never go out of business.

The question we as writers have to answer before the international gaze shifts to the next crisis is not why Kenya happened or Rwanda...or Chad... but where we were when it happened.

To those who were no there, may fame and glory elude you. Elude you unless you are Ngugi wa Thiongo and have a book of prophecies to sell.

And the book of prophesies is indeed the easier way out... The template exists for an African crisis: The Shona and the Ndebele, the Igbo and the Yoruba, the Kikuyu and the Kalenjin are all by a singular thread of atavism conjoined.

Indeed, all of Africa is but two tribes: The Killers and the Killed.

So where was I when Kenya happened? Story for another day but I can tell you this:

For one moment at the beginning, Britney spears had a tantrum and we got thrown of the News Charts.

Then we blew up a church and the Christian civilisations up North stopped to listen.

Damn, Kenya is so big now, even George Bush knows where it is...

We have weathered a storm in china... the slave trade in Chad, the siege of Ndjamena even Amy Winehouse's coke and Grammies party.

And now people who know people are telling me that Don Cheadle has been spotted at the Hotel Sirikwa in Eldoret.

TIME OF THE KENYAN WRITER

Also: The Inchoate Thoughts of an Indolent Blogger


Now the Belgians fucked up a bunch of African nations and when you look at them, they have the same shit to deal with at home: the Flemings, the Walloon and the German speakers. Are those tribes? No, sir... those are social cultural movements and ethnological groupings. Tribes is for the rot the Belgians perpetuated in Rwanda. Tribe is for the atavistic Africans who manifest their culture in backward ways and whose penchant for primitivism and regression into the murky depths of the primordial soup is both inevitable and inexplicable.

***

As I continue with my series of essays examining the Kenyan psyche, with a specific emphasis on Kikuyus, the desire for self-advancement leers.

In these troubled times, that I continue to refer to as the time of the Kenyan writer- a time when anything a Kenyan writer and us pseudo-writers of the blogosphere writes counts- the need to create a balance between this blog and other media out there cannot be gainsaid.

I have made a commitment to myself to blog every Monday and present on this space well thought out, analytical posts but challenges abound. For one, I am a lazy writer who prefers to engage in bar room intellectualism and high-faluting discourse via email. When it comes to being what I am meant to be- a writer- I just fail to deliver. The effort of translating words into clean, publication ready copy I refuse to take upon myself.

Secondly, and this worries me the most, the realities of being an unemployed writer mean that I have to divert my attentions to things that put bread, or the alcoholic equivalent, on the table in the short run.

Anyway, everything needs to begin somewhere. I appreciate all those who continue to pick up my work from this blog and republish it elsewhere. It allows me to kill two birds and saves me the agony of editing myself for publication. In the meantime, by manner of first-steps, I will attempt to give six solid hours of writing today. I have a couple of beers to work to so I reckon I will survive. If I do not pull it, then damn it, I will find it to be compelling evidence that, even though I claim to detest the concept of the struggling artiste, deep down I aspire for it.

Isn't it silly?

FACES ON A KIKUYU WALL*

"In the eyes of the Kikuyu people, the submission to a despotic rule of any particular man or a group, white or black, is the greatest humiliation to mankind.”
In the living room of every Kikuyu man of a certain age, a portrait of the Muthamaki. And with every portrait you see, Jommo Kenyatta, the man turns into God. A man who in real life is not imposing in stature turns into a giant killer in the ubiquity of his image- larger than the family portrait- that dominates every wall shrine from Kabete to Ruguru, Ruare to Warubaga.
Kenyatta is resplendent in leather jacket- a status symbol among the Kikuyu of that era- and the ceremonial monkey skins of authority. He stares out the future, nobility perched on his brow, with dignity. The fly-whisk in his hand, a freeze framing of autocratic grace punctuates the caption: Mutongoria Njamba/ hero and leader.
Sometimes when you have visited enough homes, you begin to encounter, rather sporadically, another photo. It is always a small one, often times seen in a butchery or hoteli owned by an angry old man who wears the same great coat every day and talks of old wars in foreign lands. This photo has no caption. It is a photo that seems to have lost the fight to stay relevant yet it still clings tenaciously to what space is left, after Kenyatta is done, in the gallery of Kikuyu pride. But in a society where folk lore speaks more than a thousand pictures, every one knows the name of the man in the untitled photo. The man whose name is only mentioned in whispers. Kimathi. Dedan Kimathi Waciuri.
Kimathi's photo looks grainier than a Chinese DVD. Kimathi is lying on the ground his hair in matted locks and his lean frame emphasised by the blanket wrapped around him. He is in handcuffs.
A few years later, I join school. In my history text book, Kimathi is still in handcuffs.
My history textbook dedicates an entire chapter to Jommo Kenyatta and one paragraph to Kimathi Waciuri. Kimathi Waciuri was a Mau Mau; Jommo Kenyatta, as he wrote (or another mzungu wrote for him, again) in Suffering Without Bitterness, was not. In this Kenya of today; a Kenya premised on Uhuru na Kazi, there can be no place for terrorist elements. As Kenyatta was quick to remind us, at the birthing of our republic,(or did we just overhear a private conversation between him and the settlers?), Mau was a disease that had been eradicated.

As I grew older, the image of Kimathi in shackles began to haunt me. Then the haunting turned into a deep seated pain that was constantly awakened by a modern Kikuyu saying: Nairobi (Kenya, really) was shared out when people were sleeping.

That saying and the photos of the two independence heroes coalesced into a kind of metaphor for this nation in my mind: Some Kenyans had inherited the monkey skin- control over the means of production- while others had inherited the shackles- cursed to forever feed at the foot of Dives table. Slaves in their own land. The homeland that was shared out while they were out fighting for it.

The Mau Mau war, my grandparents told me was about land and freedom. Half a century later, tens of thousands of Kikuyus roam this country with no land, no Uhuru and no Kazi. About ten Kikuyu families own land the size of a province and control all the free and foul enterprise of the Kikuyu nation and beyond.

The new picture on Kikuyu walls is that of Mwai Kibaki. Don't you wish to hear him remind the Kikuyu, the Economy, anyone, that the disease has been eradicated?

There is only one picture on Kikuyu walls yet, once again, just like in the colonial days, the Kikuyus are being hounded out of their homes. Is there a new picture of a Kikuyu man in shackles? Is there a new name whispered?

The saga continues....


*Post to be reviewed in 30 mins for footnoting and disclaimer

WHY I BLAME KIBAKI

On Thursday December 27th, 2007, I voted. I could have been somewhere having a beer, but no, I went out to a polling station and stood in a line waiting to cast my vote.

Yes I voted in Kenya's last General Election. I didn't vote because I believe in democracy; I didn't vote because I wanted to make a difference in my country; I voted because it is both my right and civic duty. I voted because, even though I believe democracy to be a sham, it is a nice ritual every couple of years that creates the impression that the power to govern- to lord it over the masses- is derived from the masses.

But I was worried that this time round, after several years of doing it right, we would get it wrong. And when nations get it wrong; when the mandate is questioned or appropriated by individuals or a group of them who have no ability to beguile the masses, anarchy takes over. And Kenya was headed that way.

The incumbent president, Kibaki had lost control over Kenya. No, Kibaki had never had control of Kenya. Kibaki was president because Raila had said: Kibaki Tosha! (Translation: Let there be President Kibaki). And there was President Kibaki.

Granted President Kibaki had the Economy- which is something you could take to Equity, er, I mean, the bank- Raila had the masses. And in these Third World, emerging (pseudo) Democracies, the masses is what you need. Raila was the new religion.

Kibaki's mistake wasn't because he was corrupt. Corruption, after all, is the smallest, big issue in Kenya. And you would have expected Kibaki to know that. Having served in both the Kenyatta and the Moi governments, he must have learnt from the best that Kenyan know that the President is never corrupt, it is the President's men who are.

Kibaki's mistake was in the things he didn't learn from his predecessors: have pictures of you doing manual labour like building gabions placed in text books; rename streets and roads after yourself (Mombasa Road by any other name will still congest the same); hire and fire people at random so that all of Kenya stays tuned to the same radio station only to hear that today you went to church or that you bought bananas by the roadside in Kangemi; meet the people because unlike you, they do not live in State House. But most important of all, detain an Odinga.

Because he never did these things, Kibaki lost control of this country. In the meantime, his Roads Minister, an Odinga was out there building roads, by-passes and such other fancy things that only Kenyans in the diaspora with their, “you know in America... (or wherever else Kenya's economic exiles congregate) ...” could fathom. Playing to the gallery. Raila Odinga, then Roads Minister, was working while Kibaki was nowhere that Kenyans could tell you of. That while Kibaki, from his experience in two regimes, should have known that Kenyan ministers do not work, the President works through them.

Every day, Kenyans heard: Raila was here, Raila was there, but the only time the Kibaki name was mentioned, it was Lucy Kibaki behaving badly, again.

Then Kibaki called a Referendum on a new constitution. Kibaki lost. That was November 2005 and I knew that this country had gone to dogs.

What followed was two years of political bickering. For the first time in the history of this country , every fool with a mouth could say that President Kibaki was a *$%& so and so and live to vote again. Na hiyo ni upubaff!

Suddenly, to me, the terms President Kibaki and the Kibaki Government became an oxymoron in the league of Nairobi Water and Kenya Power. For the first time in Kenya's post-independent history, the office of the president, that of the Head of State and Government and the man occupying them were separated; there was now the State, the Government and Kibaki . Too many centres of power.

Kibaki, in a country that was used to Rais ndio baba na mama, mwalimu namba moja... hizi mbuzi zote ni yeye na tuko nyuma ya matako yake, reduced himself to: the man who sleeps at State House; a mere mortal; fallible.

The myth of Government was shattered; the siri was yanked out of Sirikali.

What followed was Kenya's most politically unstable reign. What was seditious and treasonable in past regimes now wore the veil of democracy and freedom of expression. The Press declared itself free and was generally seen to be so- at least on those nights when the First Lady wasn't insomniac.

Democracy had found Kenya but a Social Contract that would have bound the Kenyan People and their leaders to it was still not there. The President, it would have been expected, would have filled this vacuum; steered Kenyans towards the enjoyment of new freedoms responsibly. But he did not. The People, ever dependent, or at least used to, strongmen cried out for leadership.

While Kibaki retired to State House, with his Old Money peers, the new faces in his government took control of the public coffers. They threw the safe doors open. They had inherited massive corrupt deals, they signed them over to themselves. This was the Government of the Noveaus Riche. The public returned to its disgruntled mumblings.

New heroes rose. Unlikely heroes. The political thieves of yesteryear, finding themselves wearing the strange new mask of The Opposition, took it all in stride. They reinvented themselves as the new voices of probity. Our version of democracy was defined: the tyrants and the corrupt are only found in the government in power, they become Democrats and progressives when they cross the floor and vice versa.

In the meantime, Raila Odinga was still reading from Machiavelli. He had found himself ousted of government for revealing to Kenyans the real reason he had said Kibaki Tosha, in that October 2002, at the twilight of the Daniel Moi rule. He had signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Kibaki, it was said, that would see the Kibaki presidency promulgate Raila's preferred constitution for Kenya. Somewhere along the way, having emerged president and yet again achieving political glory without breaking a sweat, Kibaki had either suffered a massive concussion and forgotten the MOU or realised how powerful the current constitution made him to be bothered with changing it.

Raila protested. Kibaki stayed put.

Raila began to fight against Kibaki's. Kibaki continued to ignore him. Raila was on TV every day. Nobody knew where Kibaki was. Raila began to galvanise the masses; sell himself as the real and only hero of the liberation from the tyranny of Nyayo while Kibaki was a pretender to the throne. Kibaki continued to sit on his throne- the throne Raila made him- nonplussed.

Then 2007 came. The year of the General Election. Raila had been campaigning, politicking, since 2003; Kibaki had been sitting and watching the economy grow. Raila had been all over the country and all over the media talking to people. Kibaki had been sitting at State House- a gated community of one.

2007 was the year of the Opinion Polls. Kalonzo was leading at first, but Raila worked hard to prove that Kalonzo's appeal lay merely in looks and not substance. Sooner than later, Raila took the lead in all the polls. Kibaki did nothing. The campaign period hasn't begun yet, Kibaki's men said while continuing to cast aspersions at the accuracy and neutrality of the polls. The point they missed though was that this was about politics, and the one thing that matters most is not truth but perceptions; and the public perception was that Raila was in the lead. That Raila would be the next president.

As the election approached, Kibaki hit the campaign trail. He had the benefit of incumbency- which in Kenya means that he had an arsenal of political goodies to bribe the voters with: Districts were dished out, hawkers were allowed to take over the CBD and the police were warned against harassing the youth. A week to the election date, the final polls came in and Kibaki continued to trail Raila.

At this point I became immensely worried. People asked me: “do you think Kibaki will win?”
I responded, emphatically, No!
“What do you think Kibaki's strategy is?”
None!
“So will he hand over power?”
“Kibaki cannot hand over power... the power he has is not his to hand over, Kibaki is holding power in trust for the Kikuyu people.”

Of course by the Kikuyu people I meant, the Kikuyu elite. Those Kikuyus who amassed wealth under Kenyatta; Kikuyus who kept their wealth under Moi even as Agriculture, the lifeline of the Kikuyu, found itself crippled. Kikuyus who purport to speak for other Kikuyus even when their, economic and political realities are worlds apart.

Then came December 27th. It was clear that Kibaki had no winning plan. As the poll results came in it became increasingly obvious that Kibaki was loosing. I began to worry. Then a series of sad and dubious events transpired and Kibaki was declared the winner in the presidential election. I was angry but not because Kibaki had won. I felt that the election had been rigged, but it is not for that that I was angry. I was angry because I felt that the election had been rigged after the fact. I was mad because, for the first time in Kenya's multi-party era, the charade of democratic elections hadn't been well executed- the majority felt cheated and those on the winning side felt they cheated foolishly.

On Sunday 30th, December, Kibaki was sworn in as the President of the Republic of Kenya. He was sworn in a few hours before the expiry of his previous term. A term he had taken over at a glorious public ceremony was being extended behind closed gates. Kibaki came out of the bowels of State House, took his oath in the gardens, and went back in.

Outside of State House, the country exploded.

Many Kenyans, have died since then. Many more will continue to die, especially poor ones who happen to be Kikuyus living without high walls and armed guards, until Kibaki steps out of State House and speaks to Kenya.

WE THE KIKUYU

Walking and talking to a crowd of Internally Displaced Kikuyus in Eldoret, this blogger revisits his Kikuyuness.


When I was young, I wanted it all: the pick-up, the farm, the Godfather hat and the pointed shoes. I wanted the beer, the goat ribs and what in those days was called a Public Opinion- a beer belly. For God's sake I even wanted gout, because it bespoke, eating well, conspicuous consumption. Gout was to me the disease of those who had arrived.

When I was young, all I wanted to be, when I grew up, was a Kikuyu.

I was born in Kiambu. That was just after Jommo Kenyatta died but just before the first coup in Kenya's history. When I became of a school going age, I was sent off to school in the Rift Valley. In my school were many Kikuyus: Kikuyus from Rware and Kikuyus from Kabete; Kikuyus from Muranga and Kikuyus from the Diaspora. Those were days when Kikuyu regional rivalries and one-up-manship had been lost in the passage from one generation to the next and all that was left for us were the witticisms, hackneyed stereotypes and jocose contestations. Nobody cared where the next person was from- unless it was Dundori- and yet I made a point of reminding everyone that I was from Kiambu. I was Kiambu Mafia.

Then I grew up.

When I grew up, I realised that there were People from Kiambu and then there was the Kiambu Mafia. I was of the People- Kiambu had its owners. Indeed there was a Kiambu Mafia, with its GEMA conspiracies and massive loans to buy off every Mzungu settler from Kabete to Warubaga; loans that would later find their way into that classified document called the Debt Register which states how much you and your descendants, for ever and ever, amen, owe a Shylock in the Isle of Man. But also there were People From Kiambu, a significant majority, who scrimped and saved to buy land- through, often fictitious or fly-by-night, land buying companies formed by the Kiambu Mafia to dispose off the parcels of land that they had acquired through the previously mentioned loans.

In retrospect, I was blessed; my family was privileged- my grandfather had land in Kiambu. He had a parcel of land in what was formerly known as the Native Reserve and a plot in the Gicagi. (My grandfather inherited those from his father who had acquired them in the Demarcation, colonial land allotments, and split it out between all his sons from a stable of wives. The Gicagi became the dice throw of Kikuyu-land: in some places, Gicagis became shopping centres and the land appreciated while in others they became a Kibera in microcosm.)

Then the Mau Mau war happened. Everyone was shipped into the Emergency villages. When the war ended, many returned to nothing. Some men returned from the bush and found that the only thing that their, now homeless, wives had acquired was a son or two that looked like the Chief and that one of the many things that the Chief had acquired was their land.

Isn't all fair in love and war?

When I was young, I was taught that the Mau Mau war was a struggle for independence. Then I grew up. When I grew up, I realised that the Mau Mau war was a dud; Kenya's independence was negotiated. Long before the Mau Mau declared war against the white man, Jommo Kenyatta had been sleeping with a white woman. Jommo Kenyatta knew- because he had known books that one- that the problem was the top; the system, and not the colour of the man at the top. The British knew that he knew. And he knew that they knew that he knew. So the British called Kenyatta to England and negotiated a deal with him that would allow them to change the colour of the man at the top without changing the system.

And that is the way Kenyatta and his ilk; their kinsmen and descendants, from 1963 to perpetuity, won their Independence.

The Mau Mau war didn't win anyone their independence, it won them dependence on a black man rather then a white one.

It thus came to pass, that one day in December of 1963 the Governor of Kenya, on behalf of Her Majesty the Tyrant of Empire, ceremoniously handed over power to Mzee Jommo Kenyatta. A celebratory mood rose all over Kenya; this was one nation under God, and no blessings from the Queen needed. The Union Jack was lowered. The Kenyan flag was hoisted.

Ee mungu nguvu yetu.
Ilete baraka kwetu...

Red, White, Black and Green

They told me that Red was for the blood that was shed and green was for the land that was won. I grew up and then I realised: red was for those who died fighting and green was for those who lived- to reap matunda ya uhuru. My ancestor inherited the red, your ancestor inherited the red; so why do we have to die that those that inherited the land may stay ever green?

THE RISE OF THE CITIZEN JOURNALIST

Dec: 27th, 2007: 13:35:15- Wuod wa ner wan rigging plan kendo tho mua. PNU ose keto mipango mar rigging to ini nyalo stop. Ani kode nyathiwa OBAMA.

Dec: 27th, 2007: 13:50:15- Mwathani arokugitara kumana na maundu mothe ma mucukani ta mirimu, aici, arogi, thuya, ndaa, ngunguni, na muno muno kiama kia ODM.

Dec: 30th, 2007: 14:33:20- the only way is the third way, the only guy whose results are not in doubt, akubalishwe apenye!

Jan 1st, 2008: 01:34:45- The ministry of Internal Security urges you to please desist from sending or forwarding any SMS that may cause public unrest. This may lead to your prosecution.

Jan 3rd, 2008: 02:33:59- In the interest of peace, we appeal to Kenyans to embrace each other in the spirit of patriotism, and exercise restraint to restore calm to our nation.

***

Were u @... Hukus is Harsh. That was the text message I received on new year's day. It was one of a string of truncated texts from Kakamega, Kisumu, Kibera; status reports from people too weighed with worry to bother with detail. It was a radical departure from the text messages of the previous two weeks: those voluble, half essays that moved from the witty, to the abrasive, to the repugnant.

On December 30th 2008, President Mwai Kibaki (was) declared (himself) the winner of the hotly contested presidential election. The aftermath: an escalation of violence, hooliganism and anarchy. This was not only the bloodiest General Election in Kenya's history, it was its most embarrassing. The results were delayed; the public grew restless, then the results were announced and the simmering discontent and allegations of rigging led to what various analysts have termed as a premeditated genocide.

The anxiety was heightened by the ban on live news broadcasts by the Minister for Internal Security. As witnessed earlier, in the 2005 Referendum, the General Election in 2007 had seen hundreds of private citizens, sitting at polling centres throughout the country, sending text messages of the vote tallies as they emerged; broadcasting, virally across the country on the cellular networks any irregularities and anomalies that they saw in their polling stations. All over the country, people had a general idea of the losers and winners from every constituency. And it was suddenly becoming evident that figures were being adjusted to the advantage of both sides. (Raila Odinga has conceded and named the constituencies in which he was added votes, Kibaki as always is not saying anything.)

Then the winner was announced. Chaos reigned. The Minister for Internal Security took over. He declared, while the country continued to wonder as to the whereabouts of the President, a virtual State of Emergency- ruling by decree. Text messages that may cause public unrest were outlawed. But no one told Kenyans what consisted a text message that may cause public unrest: questioning the final tally? Freedom of expression was thrust out of the window. The public was left to its own devices: the grapevine- a hub of half truths and conspiracy theories.

To bridge this information gap, many Kenyans went to the internet; to the blogs and mailing lists. The digital age is, after all the age of the citizen journalist where big media finds itself rivalled by its primary audience in content provision. The monopoly of 'truth' has shifted from the media house with the widest coverage to those private citizens reporting 'live from the scene of their lives.' Some of these stories are well told, a majority are amateurish and filled with conjecture but they are living stories, imbued with that touch of human reality that mainstream journalism has long lost in its pretentious quest for objectivity and angles. These stories continue to find new broadcast media, to travel across the world on their own steam; they are redefining not only the traditional media's approach to reporting but also the communication models of advocacy groups.

It remains unfortunate that this blogger has been quiet at the time his opinion mattered most. But the truth of the matter is that he has been involved in a larger behind the scene attempt by Kenyan writers to 'give a human face to the crisis that erupted in this country. These writers have also set out to They also set out to counter the prevailing view of Kenya, by the world, from the the jaundiced eye of the Foreign Press.

In the meantime, we promise to resume regular transmission from this space, our efforts towards moving house having been thwarted by forces beyond our control.

MOVING PLANS

The more they called me a writer, the less I wrote. Well, lets put it all in perspective: there is writing and then there is writing. I feel like I write a lot these days. Not the most I have written in my most prolific times, previously, but a lot still. In fits, I write; in hits and misses, just like before. The only difference now is that most of what I write cannot and will never add to my dream of a Kenyan Canon.

One of my handlers said to me the other day, “Potash, what is this thing about not blogging? ...You are nothing without that blog!” Indeed. For all its bawdy leanings, an ovum thin veneer of pseudo-intellectualism and pedestrian approach to the craft of writing, this blog remains my only claim to literary cred.

It has found its spaces; thrust me into new places. Six excerpts from it made it into the latest edition of the journal Kwani? Charles A. Matathia has done an impressive rendition of Voluntary Drinking Overseas for the latest edition of the Nigerian Literary magazine Farafina- Farafina 11: Journeys. Keguro Macharia taught excerpts from it out there in the American Midwest. Then there was the BBC interview, being plagiarised by fringe newsletters and being turned into spam. Hey, some nice Italian journal even translated me into Italian.

All said... I need to return to this space. I need it. And I am working on that return. It might not be as dramatic as I had envisioned it... but I am working on things... working with others, to find this blog a new home.

All this hopefully in the new year. Meantime watch this space.

SENTENCES

“Imagine me Hon. Potash, M.P, LTE- Legal Tax Evader. I want to be the first kid to bring a tax-free salary, or any salary for that matter- to the ‘hood.”


It is midnight here. Half past midnight to be precise. I have just been working on this piece for some (Insert journal of choice, if this is not for them then you can be sure I will be writing for them next) and it feels done. I revised, for God's sake I revised. Now I got a bunch of sentences in there that feel so neat I cannot recognise that I wrote them.
I kinda like one of the sentences:

“They die deaths so painful and laboured for they have mastered the world- caught a view of the living from across multiple planes of existence- seen, heard, walked with the whispers of the Great Winds creasing their ears as their toes crunched the sand on the receding shoreline of mortality.”

Can you spot the punctuation? I do not know man, but in the last one year I have learnt a thing or two about the craft of writing. In one year I have moved from a self styled street philosopher and pseudo-intellectual into a Writer. Yes, I have become a bore.
I open a document with my entire blog that a so called groupie sent to me. I read two pieces from the street days and tears come to my eyes. It suddenly occurs to me that I haven't blogged in ages and I become aware of the fact that it isn't that I have been too busy to blog, it is just that I cannot do this blog justice.

For many years I went on and on about how much I wanted to be a writer, but now that in the circles of writers my name is mentioned, I do not write no more. It is true that the best path in life is the one of learning, improving, even perfecting your trade- in a word, growing- but growing for me means I have lost the best part of me. I am at that point where art meets commerce and being the kind of person that is not averse to prostitute what their mother gave them, I have shunted the art to the back burner to pander to the philistine pursuit of life, lucre and a ranch in Laikipia.

Growing means that I I write and rewrite/ revise- okay let us be frank, I just do some significant plumbing of the prose and chuck out the messy adverbs. It means that the honesty is gone, the angst and heat of the moment is yanked out of sentences like:

“But mama needs her insulin and Pfizer didn’t get big doing Pro bono, see? It’s the money or she dead- deader than The Rainbow Alliance.”

It is when I read that sentence that I decide to call a future writing partner- the one I intend to collaborate on my A Laikipia Ranch for Potash project- to share the earlier sentence, the one from my new story.

“wee mzungu”
“sema”
“I just wrote a sentence that I kinda like...”
“oh..”
(I read out the sentence.)
“hmmm...”
“You know, more and more I am beginning to sound like one of those MFA types...”
“Cool stuff...”
“No, that actually is the problem..”
“Huh”
(There is a thump on her end)
“You funny chick... what are you doing?”
“I was crushing a bug that fell out of nowhere.”
“Eish, you see why we need to work on that writing project: it is so that I can get me a ranch in Laikipia...”
“That ranch will be part mine funny boy...”
“That's fine- you can be the memsahib of the house and instead of worrying about bugs you can trouble yourself with more meaningful things like how to get decent help.”
“My own masais you mean?”
“I don't know ma'am. They don't make masais like they used to!”
“So you... what about the sentence, anyway, Mr. Sketchy Boy?”
“Dammit, quit calling me boy. If you call me that in Laikipia the neighbours will think I am the Kitchen Toto in my own house.”
Sawa. Tell me about the sentence, Bwana!”
“Ahh.. let me just get back to my writing. Shit's gonna get me paid like fucking soon!”

THE PROSELYTE OF OPHIR

For a struggling writer, this blogger is too lazy. Picture this: The editor of a insanely exciting South African journal asks, 'Potash can you send us a couple of random words?'
'Yea, easy like,' says P, The.
Two months post-deadline, Potash, The, in one of those ubiquitous moments of deliriums tremens, pens some inchoate junk but passes out at a point sub- 700 words.
Here it is...

In a small village, near Voi, as you approach the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa, there lives a young man. A man of great learning. A man well versed in both Bantu folk lore and Judaic-Christian-Hellenistic thought. His name: Mengo Samana- the philosopher; the mad man.

Samana's ancestors were great medicine men, even kings and queens. They were great travellers and conquistadors, ruling the Land of the Motapas and the territories of Moshoeshoe. Great Sangomas is what they were, holding dominion over all manner of being on the great veld long before Shaka the Zulu. They staged epic battles against the merchants from Arabia and hoarded Africa's bounty long before oom Paul Kruger's Afrikaner crud and the Rooineks.

In that tiny village near Voi, a nameless village on the Nyika Plateau, lives Mengo Samana. Mengo Samana whose belief in the ways of ancient Africa has been defiled by that thing that the Butterfly People call education. Samana now lives by a new religion that is an abomination to the kayas of his ancestors; a streak of murk against the chaste cloth that is the ways of the tribe.

That Mengo Samana is the Proselyte of Ophir and this here is but a page from his tome: Vanga va Zilizea- Ages of the Gods.

***

From whose face shall we pluck an eye, that we may be rid of the miscegenation of our times? From the face of our noble Moses or from that of his filthy Ethiopian?
“Oh our dear sister, Miriam,” quoth Aaron, “how shamed before our people doth this sin of our brother make us!”
“Ye, Aaron, that is our brother...” Miriam wept, “intercede for us. Before the altar of Yahweh our people dare not stand for we are shamed.”

Upon whose back shall we lay the sjambok, that the house of Japheth- whose purity now lies desecrate- may escape the wrath of the great Jehovah? Upon the back of the dirty Kaffir or upon that of her Baas?
“It is my right to lay this pink whip on the kaffir,” yells the Baas. He holds up the scriptures- God's covenant with the men of his choice- with one hand and the sjambok in the other. (A later day Onan on the high street). “Spare the rod and spoil the Kaffir!”Baas tells it to the mountains, the hills and everywhere.
“Whatever,” says Oom Paul in the shoulder shrug dialect, “she just a Kaffir anyhow and he a man... may that man that has not sinned against his dog cast the first stone against the Baas.”

And it comes to pass, once again, that out in the fields where only men and livestock go, the Kaffir gets the sjambok. Just for being a kaffir you may say but also it might be seen that the master likes to put sjambok to Kaffir?

Back home the womenfolk wait- wait, with ovens heated and ready, for the men to bring in the oats. Late into the night, when the hearth has gone cold and the women taken to bed their hot water bottles, douche and suppositories, again, the men bring in chaff. Chaff while every Sunday morning they stand solemn before the altar of the lord and sing: Bringing in the sheaves... bringing in the sheaves.. we shall come rejoicing bringing in the sheaves.

But who is to blame? The Kaffir will lie with anything, or so the tales of our old wives go, and the Kaffir is full of diseases and desires for our kind. Who will teach our children to be wary of the wiles of the Kaffir- the harlotry of Kaffirdom? Wasn't the wisest of our people, that great King Solomon, not violated by that Shulamite with her sexual entreaties of 'I am black and comely?'

May the thigh of the Kaffir that tempts our sons to lie with her rot and may her belly swell. That is the curse as given to us by the lord through Moses.

It occurs to us that this blogger has been AWOL for a whole month. What he now tells us is that he has been trying to take time off to revise his work for a bunch of literary journals and magazines and return to writing his memoirs- again. (Oh and some of us heard him on radio the other day, no? What exactly is the deal with that Mr. I Do Not Do Interviews?)

Well we managed to catch a sneak preview of those memoirs and all we have to say is that though they reveal him as not being the city boy we always made of him, they prove that the urban space and the pursuit of yuppiness has taken toll on his village voice. Just take a peek at the last paragraph where he goes all aspirational on us and ruins a good story.

IN THE CITY: ARRIVALS

The city is fast. Too fast. See all these cars. Rushing past... here, there, here, there. I wonder, wonder where they will all be going. Wonder where they was. And those daughters of mothers, aren't they beautiful. See how they walk: kabich! Carrot! Kabich...!

Ngai! How do they get here, to the city?Get here without wearing many clothes? Me, my sister, hapana... my mother wouldn't let her out of the house dressed like this one here. Look at her thigh- yellow like Mombasa mango.

“Darling!”

“Haiya, me?”

Woman, who is your mother?

***

I came into the city today. Yes. Wanted to walk but I got lucky. I got a lift into the city. That boy, Ngamau, his father is the only butcher three ridges over- you know him, eh? Ngamau gave me a lift today. Yes, yes his father is the one who has that brown Datsun twero. He has a Mitsubishi Canter? Yes, yes, a bluish one, I have seen it outside Chemsha Butchery. What? No, that is not true- aki gishagi people and their siasas!- the only reason they do not use both cars at the same time is because they have to use the battery to watch television and not because they cannot afford iruri!

Anyway, it was Ngamau that gave me a lift into Nairobi. Me and him go a long way since stadi one. I tell you, even nursery we were desk-mates. But mother says I never went nursery. Like she would know about school or not seeing that she was picking coffee when these women of baggy cars were eating big books. Mother don't know school from last weeks ugali. That goes for the rest of my family too. Apart from me, obviously. Me I go school many times. See, I speak English like queen. Then I write good story. I tell you, all the time in school, teachers were calling me Ngugi wa Thiongo.

But that is no matter. This here butcher's son, Ngamau, he gave me a lift into the city. It was market day today and he had to take a couple of goats, they had bought to the kichinjio at Dagoretti Market. So Ngamau said to me, “Potash, son of my mother...” (yes we are always calling each other that because we have grown up like we were of the same mother. Their was the only family on our side of the G_ River with a TV- a Greatwall, black and white that must have cost about two million shillings or thereabouts- and I was always visiting to watch Tushauriane.

Sometimes her mother would insist that I stay on for supper. When the meal was served and I saw all that nyama, I would instinctively yell, 'Merry Christmas!,' then remember that I wasn't at our mucii and blush.)

Now this Ngamau, who is the butcher's soon and also a friend of heart to me gave me a lift into the city. To tell you, my friend, the truth, I wanted to come and then again I did not want. You know mother has the sugar disease, eh? Always had it these last fifteen years but now it is too much. Last week, I think it was on Wednesday, sijui, Thursday.. but then the next day I saw her digging up arrowroots on Gikonyo's garden. And that was after she had gone down there to fetch water and off to K_ to barter the arrowroots for firewood. And all that time I was sitting there, outside my cube, with Karanja and Gitiho pulling jiggers out of our feet and me saying, 'Ngai is great for mother is well...!”

Today. Today I wanted to stay home and look at mother because she was in a bad way again. “Well,” Ngamau jeered. “You might not get another chance to see the place of lights.” Of course that bothered me many because in all these eighteen years I have been eating Githeri, I haven't looked at the place of many lights. So there, standing outside Chemsha Butchery watching that fellow who herds baba Ngamau's goats- his name is Ngunjiri, isn't it?- loading the twero, i begin to think, what if my luck works in eighteen year cycles? The next time Mwene Nyaga smiles at me, I could be long dead from all this typhoid, bacteria or kumi kumi.

So to the city I had to come. Today.

There and there I decided to come into the city with my friend- my best friend who I must have already mentioned to you also happens to be the butcher's son. Yes, yes... we came in the twero. Oh, the goats? The goats were right there at the back.

What Ngamau was telling me all this time is that as soon as we sold the goats, we would drive into City Center and he would buy us many beers. Can you imagine that, real Tuskers, for me and him like grown men with office jobs?

Sick mother or not, can a young man say no to such things?

I jumped into the twero.

Next to him? I wish it was so. He suggested that I sit at the back and watch that the goats stay tethered. And there I was, riding at the back. Astride randy goats. Ouch... it does send a cold flea... uhm, something... down my throat to remember!

But, really, I wish no one beat a picture of me. Me sitting there on top of those goats. You know I could get rich and infamous. In my next lifetime, you are saying. And to imagine that I never thought of you as an enemy of my development. Anyway, imagine one day when I make money in this Nairobi and I am eating with Honourable So and Sos and then someone gives those pictures to those people of newspapers. Can you see Nairobi Scar screaming: Beast of Burden (I being the beast and the goat, well, burdened.) Then Kenya Inconfidential will shout: Potash Rides Goats (who needs prepositions?). And the racist Nairobi Bureau chief of (some) Times or other will, as a nod to to Frantz Fanon and other noble savages before me file: The Wretched of the Earth.

***

The city is bright. Too bright. See all these lights. I wonder. I wonder who lights them. Oh, see they off. Haiya, see they on again... Mwaaa! Where are the lights staying when they are not on, in that globe?

The girls here... look at this one, Kwanza... they are showing too much. Me, my sister, hapana... mother wouldn't let her show what this one is showing to me. Not even let her show it to that boy who is bringing goats next week.

“I love you!!

“Uuuuiiii, me?”

Woman, can I touch here?