I once attended a local disco also called disco matanga — and what I witnessed made my hair to ‘stand’.
Imagine a constellation of men, women (some of them pregnant)and children dancing the night away with their noses facing the sky as if in search of elusive oxygen! Occassioanlly you will see them point their mouths towards the sky — as if to compliment work done by that thing they call nose.
I can’t tell what motivates this — but I suspect they have been smoking something illegal. The dance happens in the open. The only tent is reserved for the DJ and his machines. The dance floor is open to the skies — which means it receives no mercy whenever their is a downpour, and the skies are always pregnant with rain in this part of the country.
That means mud is part of the dancing attire. The dancers proceed unperturbed. Who cares?
Most of us rural folks wear plastic sandals — commonly known as CDF — which ideally are meant for the bathroom. The good revellers can be seen removing their priced CDF sandals before hitting the dance floor — barefoot.
It’s cold, but this natural feel helps to maintain a good grip on the slippery ground.
Cracked feet hold the ground better than any known shoe sole. The foot accumulates mud, but the unattended lawn in front of the house will eventually wash them clean.
Once back home to sleep, all you have to do is swing your foot on the grass, left, right and the dew scrubs all the mud. Next you fold your trouser and jump on to the bed, or mat.
The fulls-cap sized blanket normally does the rest of the cleaning. Come morning, which is normally a few hours away, the village reveller is spotlessly clean.
A few have female dancing partners. This lot dances gently while holding tightly to their treasures with both hands for fear that they may get snatched.
The tussling maize plantain adjacent to the homestead comes in handy — should the dancing couple get overwhelmed by those devilish feelings. It’s the devil remember!
Such discos would start with an announcement from the host about a duck brooding by the edge, and which must not be stepped on! A few villagers with itchy fingers are also warned in advance not to steal her eggs — here thieves are know by their surnames.
That and such stories would describe life in a typical Kenyan rural village.
The serene rural aura has since been interrupted by two phenomenons that may change life for good for the rural folks. One is fragmentation of land at a rate that has created rural slum everyone — transforming some rural areas into congested shit holes.
Everyone is in a race to sell land to buy boda boda — and the SI unit of land in this locality have since been shrieked from an acre to “pointi moja”.
In many families you will hear so stories about children of the late mzee selling land you could think it is a village sport. Many have moved out of their ancestral homes and are living in rented houses in the small village trading centres.
They behave like mad town birds, often using their own form of language to discuss serious matters like buying meat from the butcher.
You will hear them shouting instructions to a butcher thus: “kata point” — because the brain now thinks everything is land.
The other phenomenon to interrupt the rural serenity is devolution. Recently while travelling from the headquarters of the county about 100kilometres away, a governor arrived in a convoy of over 50 cars, driven, fueled and bought by the tax payers money, in a journey to open two incomplete classes of a newly established secondary school.
The blaring siren cuts the serenity of the rural morning with urban noise, clearing the road for the His Excellency the Governor yet we all know the only obstacle in the road is a malnourished cow tethered by the roadside.
The cost of the event supersedes the cost of putting up the two classrooms in what is called bringing services to the people.
Lest you forget, the other vehicle to feature a siren in the rural paths is montezuma monelisa while bringing home that Kibera man who left 20 acres of arable land in his rural home to go and look for a job in the city.
As roaches dance on his land, the man is pillowing his head a few centimetres from the railway-line and had refused to come home for a decade and now he is brought home by force in a hearse — to a disco matanga.
