The smell assaulted his senses as soon as he got into the compound. Beni was here again. The night had dragged itself towards morning yet still morning had come. He moved from the World Outside through the wide blue gate. And the smell hit him harder. It was the same stinging smell he had associated with such places as this since his childhood. He felt uneasy. He whispered to himself that had he been given an option, he would have turned back. He would have gone to the World Outside. Yet here was necessity, forcing him to go through the gate into the compound.
Just outside the gate, the World Outside throbbed with life. Nothing stopped. The daily actions were carried out, watched and received as usual; almost as if the doers, watchers and recipients of such actions were oblivious of what was happening within the walls of the compound he now entered. People were shoving and shouting and cursing and laughing and boarding vehicles. And more. The vehicles and other automobiles not only deposited people at the gate but also ferried others from it. The battle had already begun in the wee hours of the morning. And in that morning bustle, it was evident that everybody was keen to beat the runaway dollar. How different it was for those who were closed in within the buildings he was heading to.
The smell intensified as he moved farther from the gate and closer to the buildings. Because it was neither a bad odour nor a scent, Beni determined that it had to be a smell. A bad odour related to the unpleasant things in life; a bad odour was a stench that everybody wished to avoid. This was not that kind of thing. It was, on the contrary, a smell that reminded one of the presence of medicine, and hence the existence of life.
It was this same smell that drove his mind to reminiscence. He went back to his childhood days and thought of the dreadful but necessary visits to hospital. Despite the pleasant reminiscences of his childhood that this smell aroused, Beni almost detested it because of the manner in which it half-stung his nostrils with a near-pungent effect.
“Watch out!” shouted a lady in white. “What are you doing?” she spat out. “You don’t cut corners here like that.”
“Pole sana,” Beni ejected, “I’m sorry.”
“Pole? Nini wewe!?”
Beni looked at the anguished face below the white cap and above the petit shoulders, then shifted his attention to the load the owner of the face was pushing on a trolley. Beni would have gazed on but he stopped when he saw it. The man’s leg was broken on the shin and his lower leg remained connected with the rest at an acute angle. The only connection between the two pieces was a red mesh of flesh. Blood was spurting out of it in spasms. It reminded Beni of the sight of a chicken being slaughtered. The blood from the man’s leg shot out in the same manner blood ejected itself from the chicken’s neck. And he lay on the trolley more than helplessly. his hands covered his face. Beni felt an imaginary but realistic crashing of the man’s bones in his own body as he gave the nurse right of way. The lady pushed the trolley through the crowded waiting bay, and into the door marked EMERGENCY.
The corridors were jammed with traffic going in and out of rooms. It was not he kind of thick depressing traffic jam found in the city at rush hour, but it was a jam nevertheless. Beni walked on, effectively evading collision with the people who were walking in the opposite direction.
* * ** * *
Thirty minutes had passed since his entry into the ward. He now sat on an empty bed which a teenage-looking girl in the next bed told her was his sister’s. He went ahead to busy himself by scrolling through his phone’s menu. He knew he was looking for nothing in particular but it was better that way. It would keep him busy up to the time his sister would be brought back from the theatre. It was not a hot morning but Beni felt his forehead start to burn. It started to burn at almost the same time he glanced at the wall clock and noticed that only twenty minutes remained of the visiting hour.
“Time inasonga haraka!” Beni said glancing at the clock and then quickly at the girl.
“Aaaiii!” the girl responded and then after a lengthy pause, “Ni wewe unaona hivyo. Hapa time haisongangi.”
“Who was on that empty bed? To the theatre too?”
At this question, the girl did not respond. She only stared into the space above her. Blankly. Before Beni could re-state the question, the girl sighed audibly and continued staring in the open as she had been. Then suddenly she began trembling gently and turned to face the wall. Then Beni realised that she was crying. Beni guiltily looked around the ward and noticed people looking at him accusingly. He wanted to move to the girl and say he was sorry but he did not have the chance.
“Which kind of question is that?” a woman asked. “She has been through hell and needs to recover. And the only thing you ask is why the bed is empty.”
“Hakujua,” said an elderly lady who was sitting on her bed in a corner, “Kijana yangu, kuna maswali mtu haulisangi kwa sipitali. Ni mama yake hiyo msichana alikuwa hapo. Na alituacha jana usiku.”
Beni made as if to move round the girl’s bed but the first woman’s voice rang out and caught him in his tracks.
“Achana na yeye. Na utoke nje huko!”
“I’m waiting to check on my sister. She is in the theatre.”
“That’s not news. Toka nje,” she glared, “she is not the first one to go to the theatre. Usitushibishe hapa.”
He moved out of the ward just in time to see a patient being wheeled out of the theatre. He waited at the door expecting them to come but they did not. They instead went to an adjacent block. Beni hastened towards the block. He was about to enter the room into which the group went when the door was shut in his face. He clicked and turned round. On turning, he came face to face with a nurse who huddled a number of bottles on her chest.
“Is that Bela?” he asked pointing at the door.
“No, that is ward thirteen,” she replied.
“I mean whoever is in there.”
“Many people are in there.”
“The patient,” he said patiently.
“Come at one o’clock. There is only five minutes to the end of visiting hour,” said the nurse. “She is still sedated anyway.”
Having no more to say, he sighed looking at his dusty shoes. The next thing he heard was the clicking of sharp heels on the hard surface. He looked up only to see a grenade-shaped behind disappear around a corner.
* * ** * *
TO BE CONTINUED.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
HE WATCHED THEM FLY
Wesonga Robert, August 31, 2011.
wesongarobert@yahoo.com
He let them pass. Or rather, he watched them pass. He watched them fly by because they had wings and he had not them. He stood down and watched as they drifted, afloat in the mid-morning sky. The sunshine reflected playfully on the white underbellies. They flapped their wings gracefully; effortlessly. On the gentle hillside he stood watching just because he could not have wings. How he wished he could fly like them. Maybe he would have flown only had he believed he could.
The ten year old Erasto was eagerly waiting for the day of the picnic. His neighbour, Beni, had promised him an outing on one free Saturday. So he waited. He had a slight idea of the mysterious character that Beni was. He knew Beni was a man who made a lot of promises. But at least he was better than his uncle. Although most times Beni would explain to him why what he had promised him had not happened, he fulfilled a good number of his promises. He was not going to ask him; or remind him; or pester. He would sit and wait whatever the degree of temptation to remind.
Erasto looked at the birds disappear several flaps later. He did not feel bad about it. He saw the three white dots disappear on the horizon as they made their drift towards Baragoi or Barsaloi. Or maybe to some other place beyond the solid greenness of the Kirisia Hills. It was a sight to behold in the rainy mid-August. He wasn’t jealous or even envious of them because they could fly and he could not. Instead, he elected to wonder and marvel at the varying fortunes and degrees of performance that nature bestows upon different creatures.
Others can fly but cannot swim; some can manage a double-existence in both water and on land, but can do nothing to stop the interference by human hand. Premised on these divergent fortunes of creatures, he decided to count himself luckier than the birds. At least he could not be slaughtered for a meal. While considering this power he had over birds, he reminisced on Beni’s tales of chicken chasing and slaughtering.
He was a boy with a steady assured forehead. His limbs had the appearance of a delicate pair of organs. When he walked, he did it with a blend of grace and briskness. Somebody had even remarked that he should have been born a girl. That way, it would have been easier to reduce the briskness and give the walk a more graceful catwalk. He had a unique way of looking at people without wasting too much time – he would cast a glance at somebody and with one sweep take in the image of the object of his look. He would then look away as if nothing had happened. Even when he was not happy, Erasto could still manage a serene and easy smile. These aspects of his person had made Beni to take a keen interest in the boy.
He was now ascending the sloping land that gently dipped into a pool of water. The size of the mass of water was no less than the size of ten football stadiums of world-cup proportions. For an area that was so far away from the nearest lake, Beni had once thought that this pool of water on the south-eastern end of Kisima town qualified to be called a lake.
The birds had long passed but yet again something came. It came from the North. A neat white trail of smoke was left in a long line in the wake of it. Erasto remembered that Beni had told him about a plane that left behind that kind of line. Such a plane carried the queen only. He had once asked Beni who the queen was and how she looked like. On that day Beni took from his wallet an old coin with a hole in the centre and showed him. Then he saw. The queen had a fair face and long hair that emerged from her head to her shoulders and beyond. Then he heard Beni read his name on the coin: Queen Elizabeth the Second.
“The queen must be very lucky,” the boy had said almost to himself.
“You think so?” Beni asked.
“At least she gets to travel many times in a week inside a big beautiful plane. She must be very rich too.”
“The pilot too must be lucky. He gets to fly the queen frequently,” Beni said, patting the boy on the head.
He remembered this day with a serene innocent smile writ all over his face. He soon thereafter increased his pace towards Kisima town.
The boy wanted to watch the plane for longer but dismissed the idea. He assured himself that later that evening the same plane would be traveling back the same way to the North; back to the queen’s home somewhere past the horizon. Somewhere after Poro Radar Station and beyond the Suguta Valley. In the evening, the plane would fly in the red sunset. Then, it would look as though it was blazing having caught fire. The thought of the plane blazing in a flame always made Erasto shudder with terror. He feared that the queen would get consumed in a fireball of the exploding jumbo jet above Maralal town. That would be bad enough.
Birds. Planes. White doves and the white queen’s plane. During his free time – which was not a short time, he would watch out for them. That is why he loved holiday. He felt almost sad that the August holiday was coming to an end in two weeks. Then, he would have to begin bearing the morning cold and the fear of going to school without finishing homework. On the other hand, there would be the thrill of meeting with friends and the football games. There would also be the fun of meeting Ntaini once more. This was the fine-looking girl who kept on smiling at him and hiding her face behind her exercise book in class. Ntaini reminded Erasto of Queen Elizabeth’s face. At least the way he saw it on Beni’s coin.
Before school opening, he hoped Beni would be back from his home in the western part of the republic. From what Beni told him, life in the village had to be interesting. His mind flashed upon the chicken chasing and slaughtering. It lingered there for a moment.
*** *** *** ***
That night, the air was dense with humidity. This heaviness appeared to be an extension of the slow day that had been. The wind that had been dominant in the preceding weeks had finally given way to a stagnation of air. And with such limited movement of the air, time hardly moved. If it did move, it did so in a latent fashion, oblivious of the gloom it imposed upon the minds of the half-sleepers. Beni turned in his bed. He had been turning for eternity. He did not want to look at his bedside alarm to find out what time it was. He suspected it was still about eleven though he felt he had been half-sleeping for a whole night. For the second night running, sleep was playing hide-and-seek with him.
This night it was not just the heat that betrayed him, neither was it just the lack of sleep. It was combination of the two, conspiring with the attitude of his neighbour’s four year old daughter. The girl seemed to be very keen on involving everyone in her nightmares – and she did have a pretty many of them. This night she was performing what sounded to Beni like the war songs he had heard the Samburu Moran sing.
He remembered his classes of old; the era of innocence in school. A time during which he began believing in the supremacy of academic pursuits over all forms of civilization. In his schooling years, he also learnt that what could be held in the heart could also find its realization in the practical world of difficult choices and hard realities…
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
FROM INSIDE LANDROVER
By Wesonga Robert
wesongarobert@yahoo.com
The driver was trying the best he could to stay the course. His determination showed in the veins and arteries that stood out on his wiry hands. He bit his lower lip, twisting the steering wheel in sharp tight movements. Even then, the Landrover swayed sideways, skidding as if moving downhill on two pairs of worn-out bathroom slippers.
The lady with whom Beni was sitting in the driver’s cabin exclaimed slightly, “Wooiye, mungu.” Then still in Kiswahili she added, “When will we leave this part of the road.” With his eyes fixed on the road, the driver said, “It will be fine,” he breathed heavily, “provided we don’t slip into that ditch.”
Outside the vehicle it continued to rain. It was not the heavy thunder-laden rain characteristic of the equatorial region. It was a calm steady drizzle; almost silent. In fact if one did not look out through the misty and scratched windscreen, or the permanently stopped windows, they did not notice it was raining. Sitting in the relative comfort of the driver’s cabin Beni had to be forgiven for thinking that it was almost a peaceful rainfall. At the back of the vehicle it was different for the twenty or so who sat huddled in various attitudes of perseverance.
The passengers at the back squeezed themselves under the green canvas that could hardy keep the drizzle in check. Even then, they did not complain. They sat there quietly and tolerantly. It appeared to be a tolerance that their days and experiences had forced upon them so that nobody ever complained. It was perhaps a perseverance that only the unforgiving quality of their environment would have seasoned them to acquire.
If any sound came from the back of the vehicle, it was the not infrequent protestation of a bully goat that a man had. Beni recalled the look that goat had given him as he had walked to board the vehicle. Had he not been dodgy enough, he would not have evaded the cream-coloured jelly-like substance that the goat had pumped towards his legs. But that was fine. As long as he did not complain about the goat it was fine.
The vehicle was now making its way round a sharp bend, which was also just steep enough to cause jitters among the fearful passengers. This part of the road was not as slippery. On the contrary, it was stony and one had to hold on a part of the vehicle – any part – to avoid being tossed all over around. Beni suddenly felt a dull pain in his knee cap. “Pole, sana,” the driver mumbled almost unapologetically. It was the gear lever.
*** *** *** ***
He opened the single window on his house and sleepily drove his face outside. He brushed his tired hand on his face and eyes to get a better view of the outside. Momentarily, a curiously stinging wave of cold breeze splashed refreshing discomfort onto his face. At the same time, the smell of wet ash rushed to his nostrils. He was immediately reminded of the previous evening. The neighbour’s house lay before his eyes: roofless; windowless. It was but a shell of his neighbour’s modest-enough existence; an existence that had been the pride of him and his family until only the event of the previous day. A memory of the terrible thunder made Beni shudder, shift his gaze from outside, and shut the window.
*** *** *** ***
The residents had been informed about the meeting. Vehicles had gone round the shopping centres and told of the biggest meeting ever. People from the manyattas in Kisima, and in Lodokejek, and in Naiborkeju, and in Suguta, and in Nguroto were all told. There were even rumours that the announcements had reached as far away as Lodung’okwe and Wamba in Samburu East. More announcements were transmitted through Serian FM from a hill somewhere near Maralal High School. The voices in the loudspeakers were excited and confident. They were shouting to all and sundry that it was going to be the biggest meeting ever; the greatest crowd ever witnessed in the history of Maralal’s Kenyatta Stadium.
The stadium would be filled to capacity. So the voices said. The greatest female politicians from all over the country would all attend. That, the voices added. A lot of money would as a result be raised in the meeting. Such was the persistence of the loudspeaker voices. The fate of the Samburu girl-child would then be irreversibly changed for the better. The loudspeaker voices confirmed. And to buttress the message in the pleading voices was the voice of the only known local female politician. Hers was in the native language. She encouraged people to attend the meeting and finished by asking if they would let her down, knowing her not infamous generosity. Would they forget what she had been doing for them? And so the vehicles; pickups and even four-wheel drive vehicles had gone on and on. And the residents had since waited for that Saturday.
When Beni left Kisima for Maralal that morning, his principal objective was not to attend the meeting. In fact he decided he was not going to attend it. Regardless, he was sure to spend the most part of his day in Kenyatta stadium. He would be there but would not attend the meeting. His presence in the stadium would neither add nor remove a quality to the essence of the crowd. He would be a speck in a sea of humanity; a mere insignificant drop in an ocean of anxious people. He would be there with the determination to get rumours for his theatre of the creative. Thereafter, he would go to his room having made a mental note of the happenings and attempt to write. On such evenings, he would avoid any visits to Rangers Bar.
The Landrover made its way past AIC Moi Girls’. At a distance was the third police Landcruiser they were meeting that morning. The driver beside Beni did not waste his time. He dipped two fingers in his breast pocket and produced a crumbled fifty-shilling note. It was the third time he was doing this too. He straightened the note and inserted it in the middle of his ageing driving license. Beni looked at this from the corner of his eye and chose not to see it.
The driver pulled up at the gesture of a police officer ahead. A different police officer came to the Landrover and pressed his optimistic belly upon the door until it creaked.
“Kwa nini wewe nabeba excess?” he barked (Why are carrying passengers in excess?)
“Hakuna gari ingine mkubwa,” the driver replied (No other vehicle sir)
“License!” he spat out, his red eyes avoiding those of other passengers, except the driver’s.
The police officer took the license and went round the vehicle. On coming back to the driver’s window moments later, he handed him his license, and without looking at anybody slapped the side of the Landrover signaling the driver to move. The vehicle had moved for about fifty metres when the lady in the driver’s cabin spoke.
“Na hii hamsini mnagawagawa hamtamalisa pesa dei?” (And these notes you keep on dishing out, won’t you finish your money?”)
The driver did not reply. Beni on the other hand quietly took out his mobile phone. He began dialing a number and decided to make a call he did not intend to make.
wesongarobert@yahoo.com
The driver was trying the best he could to stay the course. His determination showed in the veins and arteries that stood out on his wiry hands. He bit his lower lip, twisting the steering wheel in sharp tight movements. Even then, the Landrover swayed sideways, skidding as if moving downhill on two pairs of worn-out bathroom slippers.
The lady with whom Beni was sitting in the driver’s cabin exclaimed slightly, “Wooiye, mungu.” Then still in Kiswahili she added, “When will we leave this part of the road.” With his eyes fixed on the road, the driver said, “It will be fine,” he breathed heavily, “provided we don’t slip into that ditch.”
Outside the vehicle it continued to rain. It was not the heavy thunder-laden rain characteristic of the equatorial region. It was a calm steady drizzle; almost silent. In fact if one did not look out through the misty and scratched windscreen, or the permanently stopped windows, they did not notice it was raining. Sitting in the relative comfort of the driver’s cabin Beni had to be forgiven for thinking that it was almost a peaceful rainfall. At the back of the vehicle it was different for the twenty or so who sat huddled in various attitudes of perseverance.
The passengers at the back squeezed themselves under the green canvas that could hardy keep the drizzle in check. Even then, they did not complain. They sat there quietly and tolerantly. It appeared to be a tolerance that their days and experiences had forced upon them so that nobody ever complained. It was perhaps a perseverance that only the unforgiving quality of their environment would have seasoned them to acquire.
If any sound came from the back of the vehicle, it was the not infrequent protestation of a bully goat that a man had. Beni recalled the look that goat had given him as he had walked to board the vehicle. Had he not been dodgy enough, he would not have evaded the cream-coloured jelly-like substance that the goat had pumped towards his legs. But that was fine. As long as he did not complain about the goat it was fine.
The vehicle was now making its way round a sharp bend, which was also just steep enough to cause jitters among the fearful passengers. This part of the road was not as slippery. On the contrary, it was stony and one had to hold on a part of the vehicle – any part – to avoid being tossed all over around. Beni suddenly felt a dull pain in his knee cap. “Pole, sana,” the driver mumbled almost unapologetically. It was the gear lever.
*** *** *** ***
He opened the single window on his house and sleepily drove his face outside. He brushed his tired hand on his face and eyes to get a better view of the outside. Momentarily, a curiously stinging wave of cold breeze splashed refreshing discomfort onto his face. At the same time, the smell of wet ash rushed to his nostrils. He was immediately reminded of the previous evening. The neighbour’s house lay before his eyes: roofless; windowless. It was but a shell of his neighbour’s modest-enough existence; an existence that had been the pride of him and his family until only the event of the previous day. A memory of the terrible thunder made Beni shudder, shift his gaze from outside, and shut the window.
*** *** *** ***
The residents had been informed about the meeting. Vehicles had gone round the shopping centres and told of the biggest meeting ever. People from the manyattas in Kisima, and in Lodokejek, and in Naiborkeju, and in Suguta, and in Nguroto were all told. There were even rumours that the announcements had reached as far away as Lodung’okwe and Wamba in Samburu East. More announcements were transmitted through Serian FM from a hill somewhere near Maralal High School. The voices in the loudspeakers were excited and confident. They were shouting to all and sundry that it was going to be the biggest meeting ever; the greatest crowd ever witnessed in the history of Maralal’s Kenyatta Stadium.
The stadium would be filled to capacity. So the voices said. The greatest female politicians from all over the country would all attend. That, the voices added. A lot of money would as a result be raised in the meeting. Such was the persistence of the loudspeaker voices. The fate of the Samburu girl-child would then be irreversibly changed for the better. The loudspeaker voices confirmed. And to buttress the message in the pleading voices was the voice of the only known local female politician. Hers was in the native language. She encouraged people to attend the meeting and finished by asking if they would let her down, knowing her not infamous generosity. Would they forget what she had been doing for them? And so the vehicles; pickups and even four-wheel drive vehicles had gone on and on. And the residents had since waited for that Saturday.
When Beni left Kisima for Maralal that morning, his principal objective was not to attend the meeting. In fact he decided he was not going to attend it. Regardless, he was sure to spend the most part of his day in Kenyatta stadium. He would be there but would not attend the meeting. His presence in the stadium would neither add nor remove a quality to the essence of the crowd. He would be a speck in a sea of humanity; a mere insignificant drop in an ocean of anxious people. He would be there with the determination to get rumours for his theatre of the creative. Thereafter, he would go to his room having made a mental note of the happenings and attempt to write. On such evenings, he would avoid any visits to Rangers Bar.
The Landrover made its way past AIC Moi Girls’. At a distance was the third police Landcruiser they were meeting that morning. The driver beside Beni did not waste his time. He dipped two fingers in his breast pocket and produced a crumbled fifty-shilling note. It was the third time he was doing this too. He straightened the note and inserted it in the middle of his ageing driving license. Beni looked at this from the corner of his eye and chose not to see it.
The driver pulled up at the gesture of a police officer ahead. A different police officer came to the Landrover and pressed his optimistic belly upon the door until it creaked.
“Kwa nini wewe nabeba excess?” he barked (Why are carrying passengers in excess?)
“Hakuna gari ingine mkubwa,” the driver replied (No other vehicle sir)
“License!” he spat out, his red eyes avoiding those of other passengers, except the driver’s.
The police officer took the license and went round the vehicle. On coming back to the driver’s window moments later, he handed him his license, and without looking at anybody slapped the side of the Landrover signaling the driver to move. The vehicle had moved for about fifty metres when the lady in the driver’s cabin spoke.
“Na hii hamsini mnagawagawa hamtamalisa pesa dei?” (And these notes you keep on dishing out, won’t you finish your money?”)
The driver did not reply. Beni on the other hand quietly took out his mobile phone. He began dialing a number and decided to make a call he did not intend to make.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
THE SHIFTING SHADOWS OF SHARIF'S SHANTY
wesongarobert@yahoo.com
12th June, 2011 “Oh my body, make of me a man who always questions.” Frantz Fanon in the book: Black Skins White Masks.
He cleared his throat and continued, “Go on. You go on. Work very hard and turn yourself into punda wa serikali. After that, you will let me know if people will remember it is the work that will have killed you. Tell me that when you will be dead and buried.”
“And how do you suppose I will manage that?” Beni asked, successfully masking his incredulity.
Ignoring Beni’s question, he went on, “Many will come to your funeral and issue moving eulogies. They will say how hardworking a man you were and then wish God to rest your soul in eternal peace. And that will be that. And as they will send soil crashing onto your coffin, life will go on as if nothing will have happened. And each day, the shadows will shift from west, middle and east as the direction of the sun will dictate. It will be just as it is now. Young man, work but learn to live too. Learn to pick your moments when they come, for they are not many.”
Beni was seated with him inside the shanty. The owner had conceived the idea of naming it a shanty so a shanty it became. Its purpose and rudimentary outlook notwithstanding, nobody believed it was a shanty. But a shanty it was because Sharif, its owner, had said it. It was a humble construction. It stood about forty metres from the Nyahururu-Maralal Highway. This was one of the most notorious structures at Kisima Centre. Its notoriety partly stemmed from the fact that it always boasted of the biggest number of people around it regardless of the time of day (or night for the nocturnal type). On one side it bordered Village Connections Bar and on the other, Rangers Bar. Its door was directly opposite Kisima Airstrip. Above the door, a piece of wood suspended by two lazy rusted wires stayed hung. The wood had the writing: SHARRIF’S SHANTY: DEALER IN MIRAA AND ALLIED SUBSTANCES.
It measured about three by two metres. Its size meant that most of Sharif’s customers were served through a square window. A few privileged customers and friends like Beni enjoyed the favour of sitting inside. Whether or not he got a chance to get in, Beni liked going to Sharif’s any time he got a chance during the perennially idle weekends. From this unique haven of idleness and cheap entertainment, he would watch the shadows of worlds nature shift. On this particular day, he sat muted. Here he was, without choice, listening to a man compare his life to the shifting shadows he was watching.
Many a passer-by, be they in vehicles, on foot or on bikes saw it. They saw it whether they liked it or not. No one dared ignore it. If it was not its peculiar name that attracted onlookers, then it was the person of the man who owned and ran it: Sharif. Those who were travelling to Nyahururu, Wamba or Suguta saw Sharif’s Shanty when they looked out to the left through the car window. Even long distance truck drivers who ferried relief food into the district were sufficiently desirous to stop by Sharif’s place to buy miraa.
Most significant of all those who frequented to place were the miraa traders who went to and fro Meru in their daily engagements. Here they came to deposit the town’s daily supply of miraa. Sharif bought it and sold to the rest of the vendors. These other vendors appeared to be content with buying the miraa at a higher because they did not have the social standing to acquire the miraa directly for the Meru traders.
Beni came to regard Sharif as the most consistent man in Kisima. His consistency may not have been sufficient to be viewed in the serious things that human beings undertake, but it was consistency nevertheless. Of all the times that Beni was at his place, he did not see Sharif bargain. Besides, he was also always on miraa. As a consequence, his mouth had taken up a greening aspect that was only less green in the morning.
“Sharif,” called Beni, “how long have been in Kisima?”
“How long I have been here does not matter,” Sharif responded. Beni waited for him to go on but Sharif was not the man to predictably follow the stream of one’s expectations. He kept quiet and continued scratching rust off his ageing door using the blunt age of his penknife. At first Beni had found Sharif intriguing, even arrogant. However, he had learnt that Sharif was one of those people whose weaknesses you see first but spend the rest of your time with them seeing their strengths.
“What I have learnt here is what matters,” Sharif chose to complete his statement.
Beni regretted what he had said. It was not as if he had said something really regrettable but more because of the manner in which Sharif had interpreted and responded to his comment. He had come into the shanty and after greetings said how much he was tired. It was merely an afterthought. Certainly, Sharif did not think so. He had taken this chance to attack people he thought were driving themselves to old age and even death by voluntarily allowing themselves to be overworked.
Beni had seen few people who spoke with half such philosophic conviction. When Sharif said something, it not only showed the listener that he knew what he was saying but also demonstrated the idea that he believed in what he said. At such times, he would adjust his white skull cap so that one could clearly see his face. With his sheikh-like semi-grey beard gracefully trembling in the immediate air, he went on to deliver his statements with an optimistic wagging of his forefinger.
“Take care, the ground can shift before you know where you are,”
12th June, 2011 “Oh my body, make of me a man who always questions.” Frantz Fanon in the book: Black Skins White Masks.
He cleared his throat and continued, “Go on. You go on. Work very hard and turn yourself into punda wa serikali. After that, you will let me know if people will remember it is the work that will have killed you. Tell me that when you will be dead and buried.”
“And how do you suppose I will manage that?” Beni asked, successfully masking his incredulity.
Ignoring Beni’s question, he went on, “Many will come to your funeral and issue moving eulogies. They will say how hardworking a man you were and then wish God to rest your soul in eternal peace. And that will be that. And as they will send soil crashing onto your coffin, life will go on as if nothing will have happened. And each day, the shadows will shift from west, middle and east as the direction of the sun will dictate. It will be just as it is now. Young man, work but learn to live too. Learn to pick your moments when they come, for they are not many.”
Beni was seated with him inside the shanty. The owner had conceived the idea of naming it a shanty so a shanty it became. Its purpose and rudimentary outlook notwithstanding, nobody believed it was a shanty. But a shanty it was because Sharif, its owner, had said it. It was a humble construction. It stood about forty metres from the Nyahururu-Maralal Highway. This was one of the most notorious structures at Kisima Centre. Its notoriety partly stemmed from the fact that it always boasted of the biggest number of people around it regardless of the time of day (or night for the nocturnal type). On one side it bordered Village Connections Bar and on the other, Rangers Bar. Its door was directly opposite Kisima Airstrip. Above the door, a piece of wood suspended by two lazy rusted wires stayed hung. The wood had the writing: SHARRIF’S SHANTY: DEALER IN MIRAA AND ALLIED SUBSTANCES.
It measured about three by two metres. Its size meant that most of Sharif’s customers were served through a square window. A few privileged customers and friends like Beni enjoyed the favour of sitting inside. Whether or not he got a chance to get in, Beni liked going to Sharif’s any time he got a chance during the perennially idle weekends. From this unique haven of idleness and cheap entertainment, he would watch the shadows of worlds nature shift. On this particular day, he sat muted. Here he was, without choice, listening to a man compare his life to the shifting shadows he was watching.
Many a passer-by, be they in vehicles, on foot or on bikes saw it. They saw it whether they liked it or not. No one dared ignore it. If it was not its peculiar name that attracted onlookers, then it was the person of the man who owned and ran it: Sharif. Those who were travelling to Nyahururu, Wamba or Suguta saw Sharif’s Shanty when they looked out to the left through the car window. Even long distance truck drivers who ferried relief food into the district were sufficiently desirous to stop by Sharif’s place to buy miraa.
Most significant of all those who frequented to place were the miraa traders who went to and fro Meru in their daily engagements. Here they came to deposit the town’s daily supply of miraa. Sharif bought it and sold to the rest of the vendors. These other vendors appeared to be content with buying the miraa at a higher because they did not have the social standing to acquire the miraa directly for the Meru traders.
Beni came to regard Sharif as the most consistent man in Kisima. His consistency may not have been sufficient to be viewed in the serious things that human beings undertake, but it was consistency nevertheless. Of all the times that Beni was at his place, he did not see Sharif bargain. Besides, he was also always on miraa. As a consequence, his mouth had taken up a greening aspect that was only less green in the morning.
“Sharif,” called Beni, “how long have been in Kisima?”
“How long I have been here does not matter,” Sharif responded. Beni waited for him to go on but Sharif was not the man to predictably follow the stream of one’s expectations. He kept quiet and continued scratching rust off his ageing door using the blunt age of his penknife. At first Beni had found Sharif intriguing, even arrogant. However, he had learnt that Sharif was one of those people whose weaknesses you see first but spend the rest of your time with them seeing their strengths.
“What I have learnt here is what matters,” Sharif chose to complete his statement.
Beni regretted what he had said. It was not as if he had said something really regrettable but more because of the manner in which Sharif had interpreted and responded to his comment. He had come into the shanty and after greetings said how much he was tired. It was merely an afterthought. Certainly, Sharif did not think so. He had taken this chance to attack people he thought were driving themselves to old age and even death by voluntarily allowing themselves to be overworked.
Beni had seen few people who spoke with half such philosophic conviction. When Sharif said something, it not only showed the listener that he knew what he was saying but also demonstrated the idea that he believed in what he said. At such times, he would adjust his white skull cap so that one could clearly see his face. With his sheikh-like semi-grey beard gracefully trembling in the immediate air, he went on to deliver his statements with an optimistic wagging of his forefinger.
“Take care, the ground can shift before you know where you are,”
Friday, May 20, 2011
AND THEN, IT RAINED
wesongarobert@yahoo.com
He felt that there was something unusual about that morning. This peculiarly uncommon thing may have been witnessed in how late people had woken up. Or perhaps in how unusually neighbours shouted greetings to each other. He realized it was Saturday because that morning, his neighbour’s six-year old daughter was not heard screaming her lungs out and stumping her petit feet inside a washing basin. She always threw such tantrums when was being prepared for school.
The regular dogs that normally scurried out through the gate once any of the neighbours opened the door were not in any particular hurry to repeat the routine. These stray dogs (a pair of them) instead wore a perplexed visage as they gazed eastwards at the horizon overlooking the Kirisia Hills. Beni noticed that it was already seven in the morning yet the morning was not as bright as it otherwise would have been by six thirty. The dark clouds covered the sky, reaching the whole extent of the western horizon.
At that moment, Beni did not know what to make of this apparent change in the atmosphere. The notorious chickens within the compound did not do their usual squawking. They got out of their pen and hardly did more than stretch and mildly flap their wings. They then folded their wings and hunched themselves on the eaves of the houses. Anyone would have even imagined that they observed the goings on through their transparent eyes. Beni watched as the chicks kept going in and out of their mothers’ underbellies through the fluffy feathers without the slightest sound. Maybe the chickens knew it was coming and so decided to wait for it apprehensively.
He rubbed his eyes, still trying to get fully awake. He had slept late after lingering in the region between sleep and wakefulness. This way, he had been forced to half-listen to the Samburu hyenas gallivanting around Kisima town with greedy intentions. Beni recalled how, as a result of the resurgence of hyena activities, the nocturnal engagements of the perennial drunkards in the town had reduced. Beni would have liked this turn of events if he himself did not like going out on Friday evenings. Because he could not go out most evenings, he resorted to playing scrabble against himself at the time when he would be having one or two at Jere’s.
This marauding pack of hyenas had forced Leren, who lived in the neighbourhood, to stop staging his rather uninspiring performances of the national anthem in Samburu language. Beni considered Leren’s attempt at being patriotic as something sacrilegious to the state. His Samburu version of the national anthem often went hand in hand with insults to people he did not like. Recently, Beni had heard him singing while punctuating it with unpalatable words to the effect that Jere was a good-for-nothing foreigner who was not bright enough to take up the responsibility of selling him beer on credit.
It was getting darker as the hue of the cloud cover intensified but Beni refused to be tricked into believing that it would rain. He had got used to the teasing clouds that came, darkened and went. The clouds would soon diffuse and give way to the lasting dryness. Anyone who had witnessed this mockery of a people desperate for rain by nature had to be forgiven if he gave up imagining it would ever rain. In fact, rain was real rain if it threatened to fall in the afternoon, or in the evening. It was early morning and he was not going to be taken into circles again; he was not again to be made wishing and silently begin imploring the clouds to turn into rainfall.
Stop! Flash! Wait. Weighty flash! The flash was so blinding that it left Beni blinking rapidly in a bid to regain his usual sight. Silence. Thick, concrete silence. Beni knew that there had been silence. But this was of a different aspect. It was a silence so real that it could be sliced into tiny shreds on the closest kitchen table. The wind that had been causing the creaking of iron sheets above seemed to stop; the weaver birds that had been covering Beni’s TV antenna with nests paused in their tracks. For the briefest of times, the birds maintained a speculative moment of what appeared to be a mixture of wonder and fear; Pastor Lesaat who had been praying three houses away may have finished his prayer or not, but his voice was not heard again. Beni held tightly onto the frame of his door and waited for it. His neighbour’s wife got out of the house opposite Beni’s. One hand on the door frame and the other slightly touching her parted lips, she said weakly, “Mtoto Wangu!” (My child). It did not wait for her to finish.
Beni knew it was coming. At first it came like the sound of drumrolls in a play depicting the setting of an African ceremony. Just at the time when Beni was about to sigh with relief and dismiss it as a weak one, it graduated into what he had feared it would be. A cold, deadly, calculating and rapturous sound tore the silence. It erased all thoughts from Beni’s mind and shook him to the core of his being. He watched in a daze as the neighbour’s son bolted from one of the latrines and raced. The khaki shorts he had gone to the latrine with were lying on the ground at the door of the convenience. He rushed forward with his mouth wide open, giving the indication that he was screaming. Beni was deaf for the moment.
The mother went out of the house for his son. The naked boy went flying into the mother’s arms and swung his legs, circling them around her mother’s waist. The weight being troubling and the mother unstable, the pair descended to the ground, scattering the unwashed utensils nearby. Then the smell and the smoke caught his senses. First it was the smell of dry timber burning, then smoke followed. Plumes of smoke were issuing from the neighbour’s house. Beni dashed forward, met the coughing girl and yanked her from the house. At the same time, the worn out woman and her son collapsed just inside Beni’s house.
Then as sudden as the flash and the deadly sound had been, it began to rain. It was a sure and insistent downpour. It was heavier and more confident than any he had ever witnessed in his time in Samburu. Beni shut the door and the windows, enveloping himself and the three neighbours in the humble safety of his room. He locked the terror of the water and the oppression of the smoke outside. And then, it rained.
He felt that there was something unusual about that morning. This peculiarly uncommon thing may have been witnessed in how late people had woken up. Or perhaps in how unusually neighbours shouted greetings to each other. He realized it was Saturday because that morning, his neighbour’s six-year old daughter was not heard screaming her lungs out and stumping her petit feet inside a washing basin. She always threw such tantrums when was being prepared for school.
The regular dogs that normally scurried out through the gate once any of the neighbours opened the door were not in any particular hurry to repeat the routine. These stray dogs (a pair of them) instead wore a perplexed visage as they gazed eastwards at the horizon overlooking the Kirisia Hills. Beni noticed that it was already seven in the morning yet the morning was not as bright as it otherwise would have been by six thirty. The dark clouds covered the sky, reaching the whole extent of the western horizon.
At that moment, Beni did not know what to make of this apparent change in the atmosphere. The notorious chickens within the compound did not do their usual squawking. They got out of their pen and hardly did more than stretch and mildly flap their wings. They then folded their wings and hunched themselves on the eaves of the houses. Anyone would have even imagined that they observed the goings on through their transparent eyes. Beni watched as the chicks kept going in and out of their mothers’ underbellies through the fluffy feathers without the slightest sound. Maybe the chickens knew it was coming and so decided to wait for it apprehensively.
He rubbed his eyes, still trying to get fully awake. He had slept late after lingering in the region between sleep and wakefulness. This way, he had been forced to half-listen to the Samburu hyenas gallivanting around Kisima town with greedy intentions. Beni recalled how, as a result of the resurgence of hyena activities, the nocturnal engagements of the perennial drunkards in the town had reduced. Beni would have liked this turn of events if he himself did not like going out on Friday evenings. Because he could not go out most evenings, he resorted to playing scrabble against himself at the time when he would be having one or two at Jere’s.
This marauding pack of hyenas had forced Leren, who lived in the neighbourhood, to stop staging his rather uninspiring performances of the national anthem in Samburu language. Beni considered Leren’s attempt at being patriotic as something sacrilegious to the state. His Samburu version of the national anthem often went hand in hand with insults to people he did not like. Recently, Beni had heard him singing while punctuating it with unpalatable words to the effect that Jere was a good-for-nothing foreigner who was not bright enough to take up the responsibility of selling him beer on credit.
It was getting darker as the hue of the cloud cover intensified but Beni refused to be tricked into believing that it would rain. He had got used to the teasing clouds that came, darkened and went. The clouds would soon diffuse and give way to the lasting dryness. Anyone who had witnessed this mockery of a people desperate for rain by nature had to be forgiven if he gave up imagining it would ever rain. In fact, rain was real rain if it threatened to fall in the afternoon, or in the evening. It was early morning and he was not going to be taken into circles again; he was not again to be made wishing and silently begin imploring the clouds to turn into rainfall.
Stop! Flash! Wait. Weighty flash! The flash was so blinding that it left Beni blinking rapidly in a bid to regain his usual sight. Silence. Thick, concrete silence. Beni knew that there had been silence. But this was of a different aspect. It was a silence so real that it could be sliced into tiny shreds on the closest kitchen table. The wind that had been causing the creaking of iron sheets above seemed to stop; the weaver birds that had been covering Beni’s TV antenna with nests paused in their tracks. For the briefest of times, the birds maintained a speculative moment of what appeared to be a mixture of wonder and fear; Pastor Lesaat who had been praying three houses away may have finished his prayer or not, but his voice was not heard again. Beni held tightly onto the frame of his door and waited for it. His neighbour’s wife got out of the house opposite Beni’s. One hand on the door frame and the other slightly touching her parted lips, she said weakly, “Mtoto Wangu!” (My child). It did not wait for her to finish.
Beni knew it was coming. At first it came like the sound of drumrolls in a play depicting the setting of an African ceremony. Just at the time when Beni was about to sigh with relief and dismiss it as a weak one, it graduated into what he had feared it would be. A cold, deadly, calculating and rapturous sound tore the silence. It erased all thoughts from Beni’s mind and shook him to the core of his being. He watched in a daze as the neighbour’s son bolted from one of the latrines and raced. The khaki shorts he had gone to the latrine with were lying on the ground at the door of the convenience. He rushed forward with his mouth wide open, giving the indication that he was screaming. Beni was deaf for the moment.
The mother went out of the house for his son. The naked boy went flying into the mother’s arms and swung his legs, circling them around her mother’s waist. The weight being troubling and the mother unstable, the pair descended to the ground, scattering the unwashed utensils nearby. Then the smell and the smoke caught his senses. First it was the smell of dry timber burning, then smoke followed. Plumes of smoke were issuing from the neighbour’s house. Beni dashed forward, met the coughing girl and yanked her from the house. At the same time, the worn out woman and her son collapsed just inside Beni’s house.
Then as sudden as the flash and the deadly sound had been, it began to rain. It was a sure and insistent downpour. It was heavier and more confident than any he had ever witnessed in his time in Samburu. Beni shut the door and the windows, enveloping himself and the three neighbours in the humble safety of his room. He locked the terror of the water and the oppression of the smoke outside. And then, it rained.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
BENI'S UNG'OMBE IDEOLOGY
Beni’s story continued…
By Wesonga Robert
wesongarobert@yahoo.com
It is a good path, that which allows the walker to walk it in peace. A walker looking for peace of mind would fancy walking on a path like that; perhaps trying to piece together the broken pieces of his life into one significant piece. Such a path permits its walker to get harmony in the glorious appreciation of nature. In fact, a path like that enables the walker to become one with nature.
You unite with the little acacia shrubs as you walk along the path. You commune with the no less hardworking bees of the semi-arid ecosystem as they go about their business among the rare flowers of succulent cactus plants. As you walk trying to avoid the dusty tracts left behind by herds of goats, sheep and cattle, you get constantly reminded of the presence of life. You walk on carefully here; slowly and musingly. You might even freely choose to allow your heart to join the hearts and spirits of other beings in this celebration of life.
Beni badly needed the loneliness of the path as he did his usual walk home from work. It is with silence and a calm sense of awareness that he enjoyed witnessing the sublime innocence of the environment in Samburu. This day had been long. His job, which had been steadily becoming a burden to both his body and mind, had gone a notch higher in attempting to destabilize his self-esteem. He was having more arguments at work than he considered safe. Each morning he left for work promising himself never to participate in the controversial discussions at work. He would leave his house intent on keeping his ideas to himself. So far, this efforts had followed by no success.
Many times he had been accused of being abstract and theoretical. Not a few of his colleagues and friends now believed that his ideas were impractical and could only find functionality in the non-existent utopian world. Beni felt that if his accusers were right, then he was not to blame. If he ever thought that these accusers were right, then his experiences were to blame. It was in the lecture halls that he began having his mind. At first, it appeared to be a mere working of his mind towards the satisfaction of his academic curiosities. But, like all good things, this thinking held him hostage. It held him a slave in the somewhat futile thinking that the theoretical world of the academy could find its full realisation in the practical world. Even now, he wondered why courses like Critical Thinking were being taught when thinking critically was never really readily acceptable anywhere he had been.
She was beginning to slacken her pace. Beni noticed that her strides were growing shorter with each successive stride. When he had got out of the gate, she was about two hundred metres ahead. She had glanced back and seen Beni moving towards the main road. At this point he began imagining that she would reduce her pace. And now she was doing it. She was a new addition to their workforce. Rael was one of those ageing ones who refused to accept the reality that age was finally catching up with them.
The top of her head was a maze of the natural and the synthetic. Where the natural Samburu hair would have held sway, overused artificial hair dominated. And this artificial hair made her cut the image that had induced a friend of Beni to remark that head looked like the mane of an ageing lioness. Misled thus that she looked younger with her head, she had the habit of swaying her head periodically when she talked. I think by this she meant to place her hair behind the ear. She did it not with the finesse in Hollywood movies; hers must have been a practiced move copied from a Nigerian movie of the lowest calibre. And Beni fell short of telling her that if she did it out there, she would be made to feel out of place in five seconds.
Rael was the reason why Beni decided to start dressing badly. She had one morning smiled, exposing two browning metallic teeth at the corners of her upper teeth, and told Beni that he was very smart. At that time, Beni almost thought her mouth was a masterpiece of dental genius imposed upon her by a film director. That was until he realized that she was not the creature he had seen in the movie, Nightmare on Elm Street. Beni decided to punish Rael by showing her the greatest contempt expressed in his poor dressing.
There was something better to look at. This thing was happening fifteen kilometres north-east of Kisima. It was above the forest on Kirisia Hills overlooking Baawa. The semi-darkened cloud was so selective; it was severally selective, sometimes for weeks or even months. It was doing this again. What reached Kisima and the surrounding areas when this happened was only the exceptional scent of soil held in the resultant cold breeze that wafted from the hills. The scent reminded Beni of the months of January and February in his childhood.
Back then, this smell would come after weeks of hard sunshine. At first the smell was not there, but it soon came after the spattering fall of the rain on the ground. When the singular drops turned into streamlets and began flowing collectively, the smell disappeared and left the people and the land bathing in the healing aspect of the rain. The misty picture above the hills was further illuminated by the six o’clock sunshine. Beni decided to catch the image using his camera phone.
The image was a little hazy but with some editing could suffice to be a screensaver on his desktop. He turned round and captured the sun. The image of the sun was clear but harsh to the eyes. He regarded it for some time and decided that he did not need it. He deleted it. A good photographer is one who captures rare and romantic images with freshness of style, he thought. The sunshine in Samburu was not something one could write home about. It was what everybody expected to hear.
By the time he resumed walking, he noticed that Rael had given up. She was hurrying ahead of him. She cut the corner at the Kisima Catholic church without as much as glancing at the approaching lorry. It was the same lorry Beni had seen selling timber and posts in Kisima. The dark smoke emanating at the back as it laboured on spoke more than a thousand words. He wanted to think about it but dismissed the idea. He had to stop his ung’ombe ideology from resurfacing again.
………………………….. TO BE CONTINUED.
By Wesonga Robert
wesongarobert@yahoo.com
It is a good path, that which allows the walker to walk it in peace. A walker looking for peace of mind would fancy walking on a path like that; perhaps trying to piece together the broken pieces of his life into one significant piece. Such a path permits its walker to get harmony in the glorious appreciation of nature. In fact, a path like that enables the walker to become one with nature.
You unite with the little acacia shrubs as you walk along the path. You commune with the no less hardworking bees of the semi-arid ecosystem as they go about their business among the rare flowers of succulent cactus plants. As you walk trying to avoid the dusty tracts left behind by herds of goats, sheep and cattle, you get constantly reminded of the presence of life. You walk on carefully here; slowly and musingly. You might even freely choose to allow your heart to join the hearts and spirits of other beings in this celebration of life.
Beni badly needed the loneliness of the path as he did his usual walk home from work. It is with silence and a calm sense of awareness that he enjoyed witnessing the sublime innocence of the environment in Samburu. This day had been long. His job, which had been steadily becoming a burden to both his body and mind, had gone a notch higher in attempting to destabilize his self-esteem. He was having more arguments at work than he considered safe. Each morning he left for work promising himself never to participate in the controversial discussions at work. He would leave his house intent on keeping his ideas to himself. So far, this efforts had followed by no success.
Many times he had been accused of being abstract and theoretical. Not a few of his colleagues and friends now believed that his ideas were impractical and could only find functionality in the non-existent utopian world. Beni felt that if his accusers were right, then he was not to blame. If he ever thought that these accusers were right, then his experiences were to blame. It was in the lecture halls that he began having his mind. At first, it appeared to be a mere working of his mind towards the satisfaction of his academic curiosities. But, like all good things, this thinking held him hostage. It held him a slave in the somewhat futile thinking that the theoretical world of the academy could find its full realisation in the practical world. Even now, he wondered why courses like Critical Thinking were being taught when thinking critically was never really readily acceptable anywhere he had been.
She was beginning to slacken her pace. Beni noticed that her strides were growing shorter with each successive stride. When he had got out of the gate, she was about two hundred metres ahead. She had glanced back and seen Beni moving towards the main road. At this point he began imagining that she would reduce her pace. And now she was doing it. She was a new addition to their workforce. Rael was one of those ageing ones who refused to accept the reality that age was finally catching up with them.
The top of her head was a maze of the natural and the synthetic. Where the natural Samburu hair would have held sway, overused artificial hair dominated. And this artificial hair made her cut the image that had induced a friend of Beni to remark that head looked like the mane of an ageing lioness. Misled thus that she looked younger with her head, she had the habit of swaying her head periodically when she talked. I think by this she meant to place her hair behind the ear. She did it not with the finesse in Hollywood movies; hers must have been a practiced move copied from a Nigerian movie of the lowest calibre. And Beni fell short of telling her that if she did it out there, she would be made to feel out of place in five seconds.
Rael was the reason why Beni decided to start dressing badly. She had one morning smiled, exposing two browning metallic teeth at the corners of her upper teeth, and told Beni that he was very smart. At that time, Beni almost thought her mouth was a masterpiece of dental genius imposed upon her by a film director. That was until he realized that she was not the creature he had seen in the movie, Nightmare on Elm Street. Beni decided to punish Rael by showing her the greatest contempt expressed in his poor dressing.
There was something better to look at. This thing was happening fifteen kilometres north-east of Kisima. It was above the forest on Kirisia Hills overlooking Baawa. The semi-darkened cloud was so selective; it was severally selective, sometimes for weeks or even months. It was doing this again. What reached Kisima and the surrounding areas when this happened was only the exceptional scent of soil held in the resultant cold breeze that wafted from the hills. The scent reminded Beni of the months of January and February in his childhood.
Back then, this smell would come after weeks of hard sunshine. At first the smell was not there, but it soon came after the spattering fall of the rain on the ground. When the singular drops turned into streamlets and began flowing collectively, the smell disappeared and left the people and the land bathing in the healing aspect of the rain. The misty picture above the hills was further illuminated by the six o’clock sunshine. Beni decided to catch the image using his camera phone.
The image was a little hazy but with some editing could suffice to be a screensaver on his desktop. He turned round and captured the sun. The image of the sun was clear but harsh to the eyes. He regarded it for some time and decided that he did not need it. He deleted it. A good photographer is one who captures rare and romantic images with freshness of style, he thought. The sunshine in Samburu was not something one could write home about. It was what everybody expected to hear.
By the time he resumed walking, he noticed that Rael had given up. She was hurrying ahead of him. She cut the corner at the Kisima Catholic church without as much as glancing at the approaching lorry. It was the same lorry Beni had seen selling timber and posts in Kisima. The dark smoke emanating at the back as it laboured on spoke more than a thousand words. He wanted to think about it but dismissed the idea. He had to stop his ung’ombe ideology from resurfacing again.
………………………….. TO BE CONTINUED.
Friday, April 8, 2011
BENI’S SPEECH: “SINS OF THE FATHERS”
By Wesonga Robert
wesongarobert@yahoo.com
He had to be a little silly. That is what he thought of himself. As long as he still thought about the trees and the dust and the dried grass, and the abrasive dry winds, and the absentee rainfall, he had to think of himself to be little nuts. In the face of his own personal problems, the heat and dust and dryness of Samburu were issues that deserved to be always left alone. Those were problems of the environment. Problems he had neither created nor commissioned anybody to create.
And for all he cared, the residents of Samburu should have been left to their own devices if at the time they still refused to see the relationship between the dry winds and the dry bones, protruding under the skins of their cattle.
He had his own problems back home. Beni had his own district hundreds of kilometres away from Samburu. And his district of birth too had its own peculiar problems. In fact he thought it was a little unfair of him to think in a manner by which he risked an interpretation by the natives that he treated the problems in Samburu as though they were the only problems in the country. For the case of Samburu, the results of the conflict between human beings and the environment had become too stark to be ignored. Even then, still, nobody listened to The Professor. Forcing distractions out, Beni let his mind concentrate on the speech. He had been obligated to make a speech on the World Environment Day. So he went on writing:
“For the rest of the country, a sense of complacency that hurls environmental fears through the window still dominates. These rare fears of a future in which generations to come will be incapable of sustaining their own development because of the sins of their fathers are needlessly cast from the halls of human concern, out to the darkness; to the hounds and wolves. And this attitude still reigns. Only few like The Professor now retain a tender spot that entertains these fears. They are, to say the least, fears concerning what everybody else seems to have failed to start worrying about.
When you travel to the North-Eastern part of the country, you will not meet this kind of disregard. You will find that the winds of the Northern Frontier have done their bit in this widespread degeneration of the essence of nature. As a consequence, you are to find a people resigned to the brutality of nature; a nature that seems to paying back for an equal measure of brutality it has received from man. And here you find a people whose faces show hardly more than their resignation to this unfortunate arrangement. Perhaps it is this brutality of nature that – in a somewhat magical way - manifests itself in the mercurial temperament of some members of the population. Who can blame a man for being harsh when everything around, ranging from the sun to the wind has little intention of letting up a lifetime beating it has inflicted on a people for ages?
Sometimes on one of your travels – voluntary or otherwise - you have left the Northern frontier and moved to the centre of the country. Here you sometimes find the succulent breeze invitingly wafting past your eyebrows; leaving you with a feeling as if you have been touched by a Greek enchantress. On a lucky day, when the air is not being chocked by the teargas smoke, you will walk into Uhuru Park taking in this breeze. And the breeze will caress your inner sensibilities so that anyone appreciative of the co-existence between nature and modernity will not stop to draw comparisons between Tokyo and Nairobi as two great cities. Sometimes you will stand, or even sit under the tree planted by The Professor and witness the artistry of the elevator as it moves upwards to the eighteenth floor of Anniversary Towers.
If you went to the university somewhere around the start of the millennium hitherto, you will know you have been in that lift as you rose with bated breath going to check the status of your university loan at HELB. If you were there much earlier, you will remember how many a time and oft you had to descend after being told that your loan would be approved the week after. Maybe you were once one of those who had appealed for an additional loan. And so as you savour the shade under that tree planted by The Professor, you remember how you descended in the elevator having been assured that your appeal had gone through.
And the breeze would help you invite a question to your mind. How many of those now descending in the lift from HELB ever thought about being like The Professor? Or had they become those who left The Professor become a prophet disregarded at home?”
He stopped. Beni was almost through with his speech.
And as he went on, almost summing up, he also remembered the many who said that The Professor was their heroine and role model even as they, in the same breath as their words, threw filth and food remnants out of moving vehicles. But he decided he was not going to include that in the speech. This is a speech he wanted to raise the least eyebrows. Beni had to go on writing the speech, moderating everything so that his passions about the issue of the environment remained only implied. In fact, he said he would go through the whole speech and edit it so unemotionally for it to remain detached from him. He discarded these thoughts that were going through his mind and bent down to finish the speech:
“From Uhuru Park, you moved to the inner core. There you would constantly be reminded that all was not well. You saw the gaping gushes that spewed the filthy contents of the gutter into the Nairobi River. The inner core, considered the citadel of order, knowledge, class, reason and all the things that can be mentioned in the same breath as the phrase: Modern Civilization …”
Beni stopped writing again. He was unimpressed by the direction this speech was taking. What needed to worry him was the lack of his own person. At this time, this thought hit hard. He thought about the bills he had to pay; the school fees he was obligated to provide, and the total sense of presence and direction required from him by family and relatives. These, he mused, were the real things he should solve before he moved to what concerned the universe. This came to Beni because he thought he was a man who believed in the charity that must begin at home.
“I don’t have to give this speech!” he said to himself loudly, folding the writing pads he was drafting on. He went out of the house, locking the door behind him. “A cold Pilsner at Jere’s might help me arrive at a decision,” he thought loudly.
wesongarobert@yahoo.com
He had to be a little silly. That is what he thought of himself. As long as he still thought about the trees and the dust and the dried grass, and the abrasive dry winds, and the absentee rainfall, he had to think of himself to be little nuts. In the face of his own personal problems, the heat and dust and dryness of Samburu were issues that deserved to be always left alone. Those were problems of the environment. Problems he had neither created nor commissioned anybody to create.
And for all he cared, the residents of Samburu should have been left to their own devices if at the time they still refused to see the relationship between the dry winds and the dry bones, protruding under the skins of their cattle.
He had his own problems back home. Beni had his own district hundreds of kilometres away from Samburu. And his district of birth too had its own peculiar problems. In fact he thought it was a little unfair of him to think in a manner by which he risked an interpretation by the natives that he treated the problems in Samburu as though they were the only problems in the country. For the case of Samburu, the results of the conflict between human beings and the environment had become too stark to be ignored. Even then, still, nobody listened to The Professor. Forcing distractions out, Beni let his mind concentrate on the speech. He had been obligated to make a speech on the World Environment Day. So he went on writing:
“For the rest of the country, a sense of complacency that hurls environmental fears through the window still dominates. These rare fears of a future in which generations to come will be incapable of sustaining their own development because of the sins of their fathers are needlessly cast from the halls of human concern, out to the darkness; to the hounds and wolves. And this attitude still reigns. Only few like The Professor now retain a tender spot that entertains these fears. They are, to say the least, fears concerning what everybody else seems to have failed to start worrying about.
When you travel to the North-Eastern part of the country, you will not meet this kind of disregard. You will find that the winds of the Northern Frontier have done their bit in this widespread degeneration of the essence of nature. As a consequence, you are to find a people resigned to the brutality of nature; a nature that seems to paying back for an equal measure of brutality it has received from man. And here you find a people whose faces show hardly more than their resignation to this unfortunate arrangement. Perhaps it is this brutality of nature that – in a somewhat magical way - manifests itself in the mercurial temperament of some members of the population. Who can blame a man for being harsh when everything around, ranging from the sun to the wind has little intention of letting up a lifetime beating it has inflicted on a people for ages?
Sometimes on one of your travels – voluntary or otherwise - you have left the Northern frontier and moved to the centre of the country. Here you sometimes find the succulent breeze invitingly wafting past your eyebrows; leaving you with a feeling as if you have been touched by a Greek enchantress. On a lucky day, when the air is not being chocked by the teargas smoke, you will walk into Uhuru Park taking in this breeze. And the breeze will caress your inner sensibilities so that anyone appreciative of the co-existence between nature and modernity will not stop to draw comparisons between Tokyo and Nairobi as two great cities. Sometimes you will stand, or even sit under the tree planted by The Professor and witness the artistry of the elevator as it moves upwards to the eighteenth floor of Anniversary Towers.
If you went to the university somewhere around the start of the millennium hitherto, you will know you have been in that lift as you rose with bated breath going to check the status of your university loan at HELB. If you were there much earlier, you will remember how many a time and oft you had to descend after being told that your loan would be approved the week after. Maybe you were once one of those who had appealed for an additional loan. And so as you savour the shade under that tree planted by The Professor, you remember how you descended in the elevator having been assured that your appeal had gone through.
And the breeze would help you invite a question to your mind. How many of those now descending in the lift from HELB ever thought about being like The Professor? Or had they become those who left The Professor become a prophet disregarded at home?”
He stopped. Beni was almost through with his speech.
And as he went on, almost summing up, he also remembered the many who said that The Professor was their heroine and role model even as they, in the same breath as their words, threw filth and food remnants out of moving vehicles. But he decided he was not going to include that in the speech. This is a speech he wanted to raise the least eyebrows. Beni had to go on writing the speech, moderating everything so that his passions about the issue of the environment remained only implied. In fact, he said he would go through the whole speech and edit it so unemotionally for it to remain detached from him. He discarded these thoughts that were going through his mind and bent down to finish the speech:
“From Uhuru Park, you moved to the inner core. There you would constantly be reminded that all was not well. You saw the gaping gushes that spewed the filthy contents of the gutter into the Nairobi River. The inner core, considered the citadel of order, knowledge, class, reason and all the things that can be mentioned in the same breath as the phrase: Modern Civilization …”
Beni stopped writing again. He was unimpressed by the direction this speech was taking. What needed to worry him was the lack of his own person. At this time, this thought hit hard. He thought about the bills he had to pay; the school fees he was obligated to provide, and the total sense of presence and direction required from him by family and relatives. These, he mused, were the real things he should solve before he moved to what concerned the universe. This came to Beni because he thought he was a man who believed in the charity that must begin at home.
“I don’t have to give this speech!” he said to himself loudly, folding the writing pads he was drafting on. He went out of the house, locking the door behind him. “A cold Pilsner at Jere’s might help me arrive at a decision,” he thought loudly.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
BENI AND THE MIDDLE-FINGURE PHILOSOPHY
By Wesonga Robert
I have never been to heaven. I can swear upon any religious book that I have never been there. If, in Dr. King’s fashion, my hitherto absence from heaven can be likened to poisoning, then part of the postmortem will read my failure to die. He stopped. Maybe dying should not have been a good example, but the manner in which Beni said it made it the perfect anecdote. As he went on, anyone would have realized that Beni’s words could not at any time be reduced to the ranting of a man frustrated on his birthday.
He rose up and served two other cups of rigid Nescafe’. Kenny Rogers was once more persuading people to become sentimental at sunset. His performance of “The Gambler” was in tandem with the reddish-yellowing element of the sun that was now fast disappearing in the western horizon. While the coffee was tantalizing, the setting sun inspired a feeling of nostalgia; a nostalgia emphasized by the thought that when a day ended it ended.
In a country where many tasteless things seemed not to want to end, you felt nice with the assurance that at least there are some good things that ended. Where bad politics was endless, a beautiful shiny day in the Samburu plains always came to an end. It did not just end; you also remained assured that there was another day coming on the following day.
He was once more doing one thing that he really disliked doing in the evening. And this thing he was doing was now stopping him from savouring his devotion to KBC’s Sundowner. He was thinking. The ending of a day is not a lie. In fact, a day is not even political. In this African Savannah of which Samburu was part, a day began at six in the morning and ended at six in the evening. And he began to speak.
“When the mayor’s son called, I thought that he had something important tell me. I didn’t expect him to conjure up a threat.”
“What did he say in particular?” asked Njoro.
“That there are so many things I ought to know about Samburu,” Beni continued.
“Like what?” Njoro pushed.
“Well, he didn’t say it quite openly. But I guessed he wanted me to understand that the forest I was complaining about had not been planted by anyone. He seemed to want to make me understand that there is a limit to the things I should talk about in this district. I find that middle-fingure kind of philosophy most distressing.”
“Middle-fingure philosophy,” Njoro said with a chuckle, “I like the sound of it. However, if I were you, I would listen to that timely advice. Especially now that it was offered free of charge.”
“I don’t need his advice. I may not know exactly what to do with my life; but I know exactly what I don’t want to do with it. And that is listening to such fellows.” Beni declared with a clear note of defiance in his voice.
That somehow brought an end to that bit of conversation. The two men sat in silence and seeped their coffee. Even in this silence, they understood each other perfectly. To them, silence did not mean any tension. It meant a rare moment of reflection. As Beni moved to a corner of his room and switched on his secondhand HP desktop, Njoro picked up Beni’s poetry manuscript from a stack of books at a level under the table and began flipping through the pages.
Beni had initiated an idea to write environmentally conscious poems. Besides, he had sent invitations to friends he knew telling them of his project. The result of the venture was that he now had countless pieces.
He was a little disappointed. Some of the pieces he had were actually what one of his friends had said were paragraphs forcefully turned into verses. They lacked conviction though it was clear that their writers insisted more on the message. The effort of the writers notwithstanding, Beni felt that art should not be sacrificed on the altar of preaching in support of social causes. Regardless, it was good way to start doing something important.
As he sat in front of his computer, he began creating a Facebook group which he had conceived to name: THE SAMBURU INITIATIVE ON ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS. Then the thought of the morning heat came back to him. It had hardly been eleven but the heat outside had already started to build. It had been the morning of this day. No, the heat had not just started to build, it had begun to walk.
On some afternoons the heat became so real; so palpable that it could be sliced into tangible bits with a knife. Even this evening as he went on doing his work, a minor heat wave wafted into the room. He wanted to believe it had to do with the coffee but it was not. It was minor heat wave but it carried the essence of a heat-inspired brutality that was always there in the latter part of most afternoons.
Shuddering at this junior heat wave that came in and left as suddenly as it had entered, Beni felt nothing other than disgust for anyone who came up with narrow middle-fingure philosophies in the face of the tragic onslaught of man on the environment. It had to be a constricted middle-fingure philosophy that told people to mind their own business just because you were thought to be aliens; visitors who must not go poking their nose into the affairs of a district in which they were not born.
Njoro interrupted his line of thought when he started reading, rather loudly, one of the poems Beni had written. Beni was almost embarrassed that it was his poem Njoro was reading, but he thought it sounded good:
POOR GREY FOREST
You yawn in crackles of fire; and go grey
Poor Grey Forest, once dark in your day
The gaps in your mouth send shivers
For long dried and gone are the rivers
Rivers that once flowed gracefully
From your rich bowels incessantly
I won’t feed you grey hungry forest
You’ll yawn and yodel to your own rest
You ask them what they do; what they did.
Ask them where they got that deed,
The deed they brandish as you bleed.
I will watch the red western sun set on you,
Die! Go home; for you, I won’t live in rue
I too, will follow you, Poor Grey Forest
I too, starve, Poor Once-Dark-Forest.
You yawn in crackles of fire; and go grey
Poor Grey Forest, once dark in your day
The gaps in your mouth send shivers
For long dried and gone are the rivers
Rivers that once flowed gracefully
From your rich bowels incessantly
I won’t feed you grey hungry forest
You’ll yawn and yodel to your own rest
You ask them what they do; what they did.
Ask them where they got that deed,
The deed they brandish as you bleed.
I will watch the red western sun set on you,
Die! Go home; for you, I won’t live in rue
I too, will follow you, Poor Grey Forest
I too, starve, Poor Once-Dark-Forest.
………………………….. TO BE CONTINUED.
Friday, March 4, 2011
GOD, ALWAYS MAKE ME BUSY
He got out of the vehicle and began walking to his house after mumbling some greetings to a trio of middle aged men. One other man who had a filthy dark-green affair around his mouth sort of blocked his way and held his hand before him. His hand remained outstretched while his eyes refused to lose contact with the polythene bag Beni was carrying. He had got used to such acts. What he did not do is enjoy such intentional gazing at what he considered was going to be his livelihood for the rest of the month.
Beni would have fancied describing the affair around the man’s mouth if it had not looked so disturbing. He decided to neither talk about it nor describe it. Had he chosen to describe, he would have said that the man’s mouth resembled that place in the slaughterhouse where the green and partially digested insides of the slaughtered animals are deposited. But he did not describe it. He did not because the dark green affair that assaulted the mouth and turned it into a mess was another man’s food - if miraa can be so termed.
The man, his red and sleepy eyes threatening to shoot into the nearest space, still held his hand before Beni. He made as if to go round the man but the latter still managed to block his way.
“Nini wewe (what is it)?” Beni asked hiding his deepening irritation.
“Toa chai bwana. Si wewe ni mtu ya pay slip. (Give me tea man. You earn, you know.)”
Then the thought came to Beni. It told him to kick the man very hard in the region below his belt. Maybe the pain in the man’s balls would help him remember that he was a man energetic enough to go out make his hands dirty to get what he now called chai. Another told him to request the man to turn around after which he would kick him in the behind and remind him that he was not suffering from any disability. No he would not do any of this.
The crowd was always at the stage at this time of the month and the last thing Beni needed was any form of embarrassment. He had enough problems with his landlord which he needed sorted out. He had rent arrears in the upwards of eight thousand shillings. Even if he were silly, he would have to solve one problem before being desirous enough to create another. Seeing such acts replayed month after month made him wish that the pay dates were something that could either be hidden from the lookers and the hookers, or even better, made unpredictable to them.
To him, it was not just a coincidence that the Kisima Stage witnessed large numbers of men who could not claim to be any busy between the 29th and 5th of every month. This, he thought, was a reflection of the fact that the men had long understood the relationship between the date of the month and economics. They knew when to strategically wait for you and demand money that was not theirs. They waited for you and they would politely force you to let them carry your luggage, however small, to your house. After helping you carry what you had the ability to carry on your own, they would again politely demand that you give them money for tea.
Knowing that you had been forced to accept their offer of assistance, you would imagine that anything you offered was enough. That would be your thinking until you witnessed them decline your twenty shillings and lecture you on the need to respect other people even if they were unlucky not to have a pay slip like you. Thinking of it made Beni imagine of men who at the beginning of the season had gone to their farms to plant maize, but at the end of the same season went to the very farms expecting to harvest fish.
He was happy when the distraction came. This would help. The idling men had such a short attention span that could not last for more than five minutes. So when the goat appeared, he was sure all of them would turn their attention to it. It is this goat that had made Beni come up with the idea of writing a verse: THE HE-GOATS OF SAMBURU. When it appeared, he at first thought the owner had made it a headgear. On getting nearer, he also noticed a woman in wild chase of the goat. She was telling people to help her recover her garment from the wild goat.
By some trick or the other, the goat had managed to fix the woman’s underwear on one of its horns and began running around town with it. The woman should have been cleverer not to pursue the animal. By chasing it a round, she only made it known to those who would not have known whose garment it was. But one could not blame her. It was better for one to protect what rightfully belonged to her rather than let pride make it get lost.
Beni was suddenly relieved. All the energetic men that had been standing started giving terrific chase. Perhaps there was something in the offing for the one who would help recover the garment. Beni shook his head and walked away fearing to think about why such people could not find something useful to do with their lives. He prayed: GOD, ALWAYS MAKE ME BUSY.
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