Satan knows, Kenyans will give God hell in heaven

I have heard angry people screaming, “You will rot in hell!” The really angry ones hiss, “Go to hell!” while those who have endured difficulty sigh and say, “That was hell!” Just where and what is this hell?

Like everyone else, I occasionally sit down in my dark African skin and think about hell. From what I have gathered from a couple of furious pastors, hell is a terribly hot place where bad people will spent eternity gnashing rotten teeth and screaming their sinful heads off when the world ends.

Pastors dutifully remind us that as the sinful pay for their evil sins, nice people will be chewing honey and washing it down with milk amid soulful tukutendereza hymns.

I love milk and honey, much as I suspect that a diet of pure milk and honey could cause one severe constipation. But heaven being heaven, I doubt the handful of sweet souls that will make it to that magical place will need to go to the toilet. I say “handful” because having lived on this earth that the Lord made with His bare hands for four score years and more, my intuition tells me that the crowd of Kenyans at the Pearly gates might end up being way smaller than the nervous people at the waiting room of your average VCT centre.

But let us be honest. It will be in everyone’s best interests if God invokes the power of mercy and pardons all Kenyans. Don’t be surprised, however, if it turns out to be a case similar to what the son of Jomo encountered when he set a man who had been in jail for 41 years free, only for the old man to mumble, “I don’t want to leave prison. I have nowhere to go!”

So God may pardon Kenyans and say, “Wananchi watukufu, much as you are corrupt, lying and thieving fornicators and scoundrels, you are my children. You played excellent rugby and I loved what your athletes did (although I know a god number were using drugs). I have, therefore, forgiven you. Go forth and eat honey and drink cold milk in heaven.” It wouldn’t surprise me if a few Kenyans told the Lord, “No, Mighty God. We don’t want to go heaven. We belong in hell.”

That announcement would not be based on a miraculous sense of goodness but the understanding that they wouldn’t have fun in heaven. A place with so much order, where people don’t fight, have sex, overlap in traffic, (over)speed, insult each other, drink and drive and eat goat meat 24/7?

A place filled with poor widows, orphans and the Godly wretched of the earth? Which Kenyan would want to go to a place without loudmouthed politicians, matatus with loud music and wild pubs where women with multicoloured lips, skins and dresses prance around like peacocks with mchele hidden in their handbags and smeared on their breasts?

I say this because if a good woman goes to Facebook and posts, “A dishonest man spreads strife, and a whisperer separates close friends (Proverbs 16:28), she will get three “likes” and two miserable “Amens”. But if she posts six photos of her bum in tantalising poses, the Internet will crush!

Still, God would gnash His teeth if indeed all Kenyans wound up in heaven. First, there would be an immediate shortage of milk and honey. And only after St Peter had carried out spirited investigations would it emerge that a few Kenyans were pinching the goodies and smuggling them across the border into hell.

Second, in a short while, heaven police would discover that a bunch of Kenyans had rigged up a tent and were yelling like madness and promising all within earshot that by sending Sh310 to a specific number, they would receive imported honey and that their milk would be coated with sugar.

While they were still coming to terms with that, a Kenyan trade unionist would emerge and promise the mother of all strikes, if the ration of milk and honey was not doubled and the embargo on conjugal rights not lifted. “Haaki yetu! Haaki yetu!” chants would fill the air.

But that would be nothing compared to news that yet another shifty-eyed Kenyan was stealing honey from the heaven kitchen. With formaldehyde smuggled in from hell through connections with crooks in hell, they would be employing old skills to concoct a lethal brew of kumi kumi.

Suddenly, it would become clear that the Kenyans pretending to speak in tongues were actually not filled with the spirit but a bunch of drunken louts singing dirty circumcision songs.

Not that sending Kenyans to hell would be a good idea either. But the acrobatics they would engage in that dark place of gnashing of teeth is a story for another day.