Kenya knows no cold yet

The hardy type who is used to sub-zero temperatures in the freakishly cold lands he hails from, the expatriate, is always confused by the annual July-August complaint from his Kenyan colleagues that ‘Ooooh, it’s sooo cold!’

Back in the expatriate’s country, truly cold days are so cold, that if you were to open your mouth to say ‘Ooooh, it’s sooo cold’, your tongue would probably freeze and fall off.

Because he always wears only shirts in Kenya, even when others are sporting scarves, gloves and multiple fleeces, the expatriate is asked, ‘Aren’t you feeling cold?’ He is tempted to reply, ‘Of course not, you pathetic wimp; this is high summer in my home country!’

But he doesn’t.

Instead, he says something like, ‘No, I think I’m fine, but it is a little chillier than usual, isn’t it?’ Or else he offers advice: ‘The best solution is to wear a number of thin layers, rather than one thick cover’, or ‘The best thing is to relax your body into the cold’. No one believes him. Some suspect him of witchcraft.

Contrary to the belief that it’s tourists who buy those red ‘shukas’ from a Maasai Market, it is Kenyans who actually purchase them. Every Kenyan house has hundreds of them in wardrobes, which go unused and forgotten for the better part of a year, but suddenly find use in August as additional bed sheets or an unstitched coverall to ward off the cold in the evenings.

Peep through any Kenyan’s curtains on a ‘cold’ day, and you’ll see him or her sitting on a shiny sofa, mug of tea in hand, ‘shukas’ wrapped up to the neck and legs folded up inside, as if they’ve been plonked on a polar ice-cap rather than the equator.

The expatriate, meanwhile, is strolling about in the chilly evening, a light T-shirt covering his back, thinking: ‘Mmmm, this is pleasantly warm for the time of the year’. Not only is he a witch, therefore, but because he is the only person in Kenya out of the house at this hour of the evening, at this time of year, Kenyans often mistake him for a nightrunner.

But, seriously, why should the expatriate night-run and steal clothes from other people’s gardens when he’s already warm enough? It doesn’t make any sense.

Occasionally, the expatriate will meet a Kenyan who has returned from a European winter, who will say ‘How do you people live there? It’s FREEZING!’

Which makes the expatriate happy. For his other Kenyan colleagues, he wishes he could, when he returns to Europe in the winter, pack some ice and post it back to Kenya in a box, so they can truly understand what ‘cold’ is. Sadly, this is impossible.

The next best bet would be to remove all the caviar from his Karen freezer and make his Kenyan friends sit in it for a few days. Well that’s not going to happen either, the days of putting Africans in the fridge during the reigns of ‘supreme’ leaders like Idi Amin and Emperor Bokassa are long gone.