STORYMOJA

We are driving home from a party when my teenage daughter Zawadi points, “Look, Mummy, Daddy’s new car….oh, oh,…” and then starts to fidget with my skirt, trying to distract me. It is 9 PM. I slow to a crawl.

Sure enough, there sits my Lucas, in his beloved-above-all-else black BMW. He’s smooching a High Hairstyle. A style where wet hair is saturated with ultra-gel before a bushy horsehair chignon is plonked on top. When it dries, the hair is so hard it can dice unwary fingers….or lips. Nasty hair. Obviously nasty woman.  Up to nasty business.

Lucas took me to a place like this.

Once.

It is the kind of lowlife joint open 24-7-365 where you’re greeted by the happiest party of houseflies in the world. You then walk past the bar to a counter to select your chunk of raw meat. Behind this lies an enclosure euphemistically called KITCHENS.

God forbid you should ever study the hardened miniature stalactites hanging under the wire mesh over barbeque fire pits inside.  Or see the dank water used to wash utensils that is collected in plastic buckets from the slum bathtub of a Nairobi River. Or hope to enjoy the aroma of roasting meat over wafts of toilet stench. Or listen to resident drunkards shouting over an asthmatic jukebox spewing Lingala tunes that clash with the Willie Nelson classics favoured by those in neighbouring joints.

Wealthy patrons, like my adulterer-husband Lucas, wait in their cars overlooking the River. Attendants bring out the cooked meat spread on a wooden board, along with a plated wet mess of kachumbari salad, and white anthills of maize-meal ugali. It’s held out for lengthy inspection, as though you could recognize the meat, and you want to ask, ‘Hey you shrivelled up carcass, are you really the same juicy specimen I selected raw?’

Said attendants balance the board on the window ledge and then with knife flying a hair’s breath from your earwax, flashily slice this lump. Voila! The grand picnic is ready for Bwana and his Mistress.

The pain is expected, but the coldness of my anger takes me by surprise. I drop Zawadi home, reassuring her that all is fine, fine, FINE, then double back and find the BMW. But Lucas and his High Hairstyle have gone inside – possibly to check on their germy meat, possibly to use the stinking toilet, possibly to rent a filthy room.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am an all-Kenyan, educated and hardworking woman who met political-degree student Lucas Githinji at New York’s Syracuse University. He was the activist head of the African Student’s Council who was going to bring democracy ‘back home’ to the ‘motherland’.

At our white wedding in Nairobi’s All Saints Cathedral, I promised to be as obedient as he promised to be faithful.

Fifteen years later, money and power from within the establishment and all its attendant flattery had changed Lucas into a womanising, hard-drinking, pot-bellied, Alfa-male icon of our modern African society.

Not that I’m perfect, but I’ve played the role expected of me. I’ve maintained a clean home, raised two children, kept in shape. I’ve lowered my expectations and raised my threshold for pain. When he beats me in places that don’t show, I sulk in a way that only he knows. When he says, like his father and his father’s father before him, “Women are called atumia because they are supposed to tumia (shut up)!” I choke down my anger with extra strength paracetamol.  For him, I’ve kept my legs open and my mouth shut, in other words, I’ve been a GOOD Kikuyu wife.

But this stinking business being played in front of me is the virus-laden straw that’s breaking my back. How can I let this be the future expected of my daughter?

I gently ease my fortified-for-Africa Peugeot station wagon forward so that the safety grills caress the BMW’s expensive rear end. I press my accelerator, vroom, vroom, VROOM.

Voila! Into nasty black bathtub of a river glides in the equally nasty black carrier of, of, of nastiness. For, hopefully, a permanent wash.

With freedom tears coursing down, I sing Aretha Franklin’s R.E.S.P.E.C.T as I screech out of there, exhilarated, and momentarily satisfied.

It’s not enough. It’s not even the right thing to do. But it’s a start.

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