By Ted Malanda
Kenya is an amazing country. In the early 1990s, a lion got fed up with chewing gnarled zebras in Nairobi National Park and strolled into Buru Buru in search of tender prey. Everyone was frightened to death till the Kenya Wildlife Services people came and carted the toothy thing away.
A few years later, an elephant swaggered into Rongai Township for a meet-the-people tour. But if you expected local residents to scamper for safety, shaking in their boots, you were mistaken. Knowing how desperately the Government wanted to promote domestic tourism, they gathered in droves and ogled at the beast for hours.
But an incident in Limuru a few years later demonstrated that ogling at elephants at point blank range has nothing to do with domestic tourism. When another jumbo got lost and found itself in the middle of a village in those parts, locals set out an elaborate welcome party.
With machetes held aloft, they sang mwana wa mbeli and danced around the hapless beast for hours. When cops arrived and extra-judicially executed the jumbo with automatic weapons, frenzied villagers set upon its carcass with machetes. The only thing that spoilt the bash was that they couldn’t squeeze muratina out of the darned thing.
Frothy stuff
And now, there is a leopard taking casual strolls around Buru Buru. For obvious reasons, there is no welcome party. Everyone is frightened, with the drunks who stagger home singing circumcision songs in the wee hours of the morning taking a sabbatical from the frothy stuff. By the time of going to press, journalists had not yet established the cat’s exact mission in Eastlands. But as we speak, the leopard is burping on seven goats. Lucky rascal.
Still, I can’t figure out why everyone is frightened of these cats. Personally, I would rather be eaten quickly by a leopard than be trampled upon and my remains flung up a tree by a rampaging elephant. But that’s neither here nor there.
What I find ironical is that carnivores are migrating from the serene Nairobi Park, where their usual diet is supposed to be in plenty, to noisy Buru Buru. Well, truth is that antelopes are becoming extinct in Nairobi Park while the population of chickens, donkeys, goats, sheep and cattle in the city is rising steadily. So what are the carnivores to do other than seek these sitting ducks?
Domesticated fools
But the wild cats may be in for a surprise. The goats in Nairobi are urbanised and street-smart, very unlike those docile things that lions and leopards seize from Maasai manyatas at Olosirkon in broad daylight.
In fact, yesterday I had a chat with a man who knows quite a bit about these city goats. "Forget about those domesticated fools that were eaten by that lazy leopard in Buru Buru. On Jogoo Road goats are so sophisticated that they know how to cross roads. They actually look left and right before sauntering across. You’ve seen clever human beings hit by speeding vehicles, but have you ever seen a goat carcass on a city highway?"
I thought he was stretching it a bit, though. The absence of livestock carcasses on our highways has more to do with good Samaritans spiriting off their mangled meats, don’t you think?
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But he wasn’t done yet. "Those goats are so advanced that their owners don’t need to take care of them. They even know their way home. They don’t eat grass, twigs and such rubbish. Chapatti, mutura and meat — that’s their diet. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they started picking pockets soon!"
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