You must travel to understand Kenyans

By TED MALANDA

Last month, I received summons to appear before a court of sorts in my village of birth.

No, no — stop getting ideas. I’m far too old to break someone’s daughter’s leg, having long retired in the public interest.

Anyway, I picked a shuttle in an alley someplace opposite the railway terminus on Haile Selassie Avenue. I noticed a tree of the ficus species — botanists call it the strangler fig — growing between two buildings. That tree is about three metres long, and I wondered why no one has bothered to cut it before it grows up, falls down and kills ten people.

The alley stank of stale urine, making me muse that it is easier to piss in the city in the sun than light a smoke. And while I was thinking about it, a young woman, barely 20, arrived and fished out a plastic container laden with fruit salad. I went, “Wow, don’t I just like her entrepreneurial spirit?”

Pounced

But she had hardly sold two pieces when city council askaris in plainclothes pounced and placed her under arrest, instead of the noisy street preacher who was saying nothing, in very many words, very loudly. As they led her away, I prayed that she had a few coins to bribe her way out and get back to peddling her stuff.

My only worry is that if they keep arresting her, they will break her spirit. And then she will discover that it is much more acceptable and profitable to peddle her flesh than sell vitamins to poorly fed travellers. Of course, when she becomes a hooker on Koingange Street, we, the moral police, will spit in her direction and shout, ‘malaya’.

Bladder

Anyway, in a short while, the shuttle was packed. But just as the driver was revving the engine, a woman seated at the front discovered she had an urgent need to eat chips and chicken and ambled out at a trot.

The man behind her discovered his bladder was packed and fled up the alley to draw patterns on the wall. And the young lady next to me realised she had to have airtime.

Both the hungry woman and the one who needed airtime had been sitting in that shuttle for one hour. The man who fled up the alley to irrigate a wall had walked by countless hotels. But never mind.

Half an hour later, our driver discovered he had absolutely no idea where Kinungi, where he needed to pick a passenger, was.

Blimey! This man, who seemed to be in his early 50s, drives up and down this road twice a day and he doesn’t know where Kinungi is. How so Kenyan!