Nostalgia: ‘Duf mpararo’ was swimming uchi wa mnyama

 Untreated brown waters somehow made your body resemble someone who had been washed with jivu! Photo: Courtesy

There’s no childhood worth it that had no contact with the earth as British philosopher, Sir Bertrand Russell, told us in, Portraits from Memory. Today’s urban kids hardly have childhoods worth remembering. What with indoor video games, manufactured toys and kuchungwa kila saa?

Back in the day, Saturday was not Saturday without going to Nairobi’s Gitathuru River — that snakes behind Utalii Hotel — for a splash in its brown waters which commuters sneer at while stuck in traffic along the Thika Superhighway.

It was called ‘kuduf’ (to swim) from the kuduf sound made by flapping legs in river waters. You had to leave your clothes in a nearby thicket before splashing in uchi wa mnyama. To swim naked in a river or stream is to have raw contact with nature.

Duf mpararo was so called as those untreated brown waters somehow made your body resemble someone who had been washed with jivu!

Funny how there were no water-borne diseases in Gitathuru River — which is said to have emanated from Kitisuru, but Okuyus massacred that — with the only grouse being looking from neck-up, only to see your mother standing akimbo, one blue sleeper on the right hand, her face, a portrait of stilled violence.

Then you went to collect your clothes, only to find that ‘Mwas,’ the neighborhood bully hid them elsewhere and your mother is shouting,“Vaa twende...leo utaniona!”