The day my 'killa swag' wilted in tar

As a young and adventurous village boy, I once did something foolish and lost badly. My naivety and sense of adventure cost me my precious worldly possession – a pair of marinas, or plastic shoes that were faked from Bata’s leather shoe line and cost the price of a goat.

No responsible father would barter a goat for leather shoes then; there were other important family issues waiting for money to sort out. So being shoe-less was the norm and marina a status symbol.

If you were lucky enough to own a pair, then you had plenty of what teenagers nowadays call a “killa swag” (from the words “killer” and “swagger”).

In them marinas, at night or at a distance, you would think poor me and my parents were actually clients of Bata or United, the only companies that then sold leather shoes. Other than being among the few proud to own them, marina was also a cut above the kinyera or as simply shoes made from old tyres.

The marina shoe had attributes the akala lacked – it burnt away the dirt and cracks in your heel and when you pulled out, they were as white as mzungu’s.

You did not fear the cleanliness inspection parade when you removed them because your foot would be literally bleached, the skin softened and tanned, and bad odour was not what prefects looked for.

Akala had three serious inadequacies to us. First the nails holding the straps to the base could loosen and hurt you while walking or running, unless you knew how walk without letting your thin legs knock each other.

If it so happens, the infection and pain from the wound down there had a way of giving you a swollen gland somewhere up between your legs where you would not, unless under threat of whipping, show your mum or dad.

Until you heal, with or without some traditional herbs or aspirins and some fashionable red and yellow capsules, the older boys would poke fun at you, claiming you had contracted VD, something that sounded like a good thing then, like PhD. Many years later, we learnt they meant we probably had a specific Venereal Disease even those toughies could not spell out – gonorrhea.

Secondly, teachers did not like the akala and chose a specific tree under the compound where you would leave them. But if you had Bata Bullets (rubber or canvass shoes!), and marina, you would be allowed to get into class with them, on condition you would not remove them because of something strange they called “pollution” then.

We learnt what the shoes held on occasions when one of us fainted and was being administered first aid. But as our teacher taught us, there are many things in us that are smelly but God made it possible for us to believe it is only smelly in others not you!

Why they did not allow akala, which leaves the foot well aerated in class still baffles me just like how we were each able to correctly pick our pair from hundreds under a tree. Maybe teachers felt akala were an insult to their own multi-patched shoes.

Girls would, apart from teasing us because of our torn shirts and shorts, which often bore hand-sewn patches of contrasting colour, also taunt us that apart from new marina, eligible “bachelors” must also have faced the knife, have Bata Bullets (canvass) shoes, and an electronic watched we called disco because they blinked like the disco lights we saw at agricultural shows.

On the scores of eligibility we fared badly, because even the marina some of us had, bore too many red-hot panga marks, because that was the only way we the village shoemakers would repair them when they got torn. Later in university, however, the word disco came visiting us with another scary meaning – discontinuance.

But I liked my marina, at least when I had them I didn’t need to hop from one fresh cow dung to the next in the dash back home for lunch from school, because of the burning sand.

Problem with these shoes is they did not last long and when a thorn drove through, you would literally cry as you tried to have it removed. Why? Because the thorn had to come out first before the shoe, since the thorn usually riveted the sole to your heel.

So on this day I was walking home after delivering milk to some roadside hotel, when an idea of a prank struck me. Under the moonlight, the tar from the freshly tarmacked section of Nakuru-Marigat road shone beautifully.

I decided to walk on it and enjoyed the gummy feeling as the tar threatened to uproot the soles of my shoe, which likely were glued to the shoe itself.

Then to shock my brothers at how much dad treasured me, I took a stick and smeared the tar on my black marina.  When I arrived home I called them out, and when they came near, they saw the sparkle and glitter on my foot were my “new” shoes. I could not let them touch them, so I ran behind our grass-thatched house and hid them on the roof.

At night I regaled them about my new ‘possession’ but in the morning I went to bring them over; and to date I mourn for my marina. You see the cold made the layer of tar contract, and the effect on the rubber was that it got brittle and cracked when you tried to squeeze your foot inside.

My prank backfired and for the rest of the term, like them I was shoe-less after pulling a one-night celebrity stunt.

For days I lied to dad I had left the shoes home as I did not want them to wear out fast. Until he found out the truth he was so proud of me.

By KIPKOECH TANUI

The writer is The Standard’s Deputy Managing Editor, Daily Editions. [email protected]