You have voted! Carlos the Jackal by Chrispus Kimaru is this week’s chosen story. You can read it after the Kenyan Conversations reminder. Congratulations Alex!

Kenyan Conversations continues. As announced earlier that we will be posting two photos a week on Tuesday and Thursday.

Comment  under the picture on the Storymoja Blog or Send in a story or dialogue that is not more than 500 words long. Send in your story or dialogue to blogs@storymojaafrica.co.ke. Clearly mark in the subject Contemporary/Kenyan Conversations (insert number indicated)

The prize details are as follows:

1st Prize: 2000/-, 2 Storymoja books and 1 complimentary day pass to the Storymoja Hay Festival

2nd Prize: 1500/-, 1 Storymoja book, and 1 Complimentary day pass to the Storymoja Hay Festival

3rd Prize: 1000/-, and 1 complimentary Day Pass to the Storymoja Hay Festival

3 complimentary day passes for best comments on the pictures.

Although we will not be accepting any more story/dialogues based on the photos posted on Tuesday 20th July and Thursday 22nd July, you can still comment on the photographs and stand the chance to win Kshs 2000/-, Storymoja Books and tickets to the Storymoja Hay Festival coming up soon. Be on the lookout for the photographs that will go online this week, comment on them and send in your story dialogues to participate in the contest.

Have a look at the contest guidelines here before you send in your piece.

May the best writer win!

This contest is ran in partnership with Generation Kenya.

Carlos the Jackal by Chrispus Kimaru

Photo by Jerry Riley. Click on image or Visit http://www.jerryriley.com/blog to see more pictures of kenya

“No, it can’t be, this can’t be me, not again, please Lord,” his self-pity was engulfing him. Kanga was seated in the empty Kampala coaches’ lobby. The usual hub of activity was no more; everyone was out in the streets drinking in the rumours. The sirens outside were at pitch high like angry chirrups. A well of tears threatened to gush out as he felt his helplessness. More bodies were being pulled out of the hotels and a lump of bile started burning up his throat.

***

The advert had asked for energetic, graduates to serve as messengers. Having tarmacked unsuccessfully, he had applied and funny enough, was called for an interview and clinched the job. The company explained that it dealt in security apparatus and the information was very sensitive. Being desperate as he was, he saw nothing sinister in handing in his authentic national documents and working under a new name entirely. The old Simon Karuma was gone and in came Carlos Kanga. He happily delivered the first package to a popular hotel in the outskirts of Nairobi little did he know that it was in fact his induction into a deadly odyssey.

***

“Kanga, we need to emphasize your utmost confidentiality at every point in your job. We pay you well and so, we don’t want you talking about your job out of these walls, is that understood?” the manager of Spec International had been emphatic when he requested to sign contractual documents. The change of didn’t strike him as odd. He however smelt something fishy and the horror of drug cartels manipulating jobless youths started trickling in. When he submitted his resignation letter a few weeks later, Bako’s reaction was swift and cool. He calmly threw a newspaper article on a grenade explosion at the hotel he had delivered a package to a month back,

“Does this look familiar? You happen to have delivered something there and later…boom! Three people died by the way,” the weight of realization hit the young man like a pungent gust from a sewer,

“Sir, what are you saying? You made me…kill innocent people? Why, why? I have to report this” he was frantic and his heart was almost stopping.

“Kanga, I told you, this is a job for strong, get my drift? You and I are now joined at the waist and if you try anything silly…you might be looking at the electric chair!” Bako had a wry smile but the evil beneath was obvious.

“And now, I have some packages which you are to deliver to Kampala Uganda, such a good town, are you watching the final game by any chance?”

***

“Why me, lord? What to do? Wait for another delivery and shed more blood?  Mahutini Hotel, Uhuru Park and now this?”As Kanga thought of Bako waiting for him back in Nairobi, he wished he had died in the blasts instead of killing innocent football fans.

©Chrispus Kimaru

If you would like this piece to be the Story of the Week, please vote below on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being weak, and 10 being excellent. The numbers will be tallied on Friday and the story with the highest figure shall be Crowned Story of the Week. Be sure to fill in your name and verifiable email. You can include your critique/comment after the vote.

You have voted! Illicit by Alex Mutua is this week’s chosen story. Congratulations Alex! You can read the winning story below after the reminder on the contest.

Kenyan Conversations continues. As announced earlier that we will be posting two photos a week on Tuesday and Thursday.

Comment  under the picture on the Storymoja Blog or Send in a story or dialogue that is not more than 500 words long. Send in your story or dialogue to blogs@storymojaafrica.co.ke. Clearly mark in the subject Contemporary/Kenyan Conversations (insert number indicated)

The prize details are as follows:

1st Prize: 2000/-, 2 Storymoja books and 1 complimentary day pass to the Storymoja Hay Festival

2nd Prize: 1500/-, 1 Storymoja book, and 1 Complimentary day pass to the Storymoja Hay Festival

3rd Prize: 1000/-, and 1 complimentary Day Pass to the Storymoja Hay Festival

3 complimentary day passes for best comments on the pictures.

Although we will not be accepting any more story/dialogues based on the photos posted on Tuesday 13th July and Thursday 15th July, you can still comment on the photographs and stand the chance to win Kshs 2000/-, Storymoja Books and tickets to the Storymoja Hay Festival coming up soon. Be on the lookout for the photographs that will go online this week, comment on them and send in your story dialogues to participate in the contest.

Have a look at the contest guidelines here before you send in your piece.

May the best writer win!

This contest is ran in partnership with Generation Kenya.

Illicit by Alex Mutua

Photo by Jerry Riley. Visit http://www.jerryriley.com/blog to see more pictures of kenya

(Mr. Njogu the mechanic read it. He is sited at watching the sky. His boss, Luke Markarius sees him.)

Njogu: (whispering to himself) Mundu, Ngai fafa, what are these clowns up to.

Markarius: Njogu what is it? You are not working and you are talking to yourself.

Njogu: Gatheti, boss, MPs are on it again, millioni imwe, tax free! Rehe gatheti iyo!

Markarius: We are used to that we business men…it is one of the old clichés!

Njogu: Crichi ni nduu, do you know the burden we are carrying? Mkenya  mdharendo?

Markarius: I know, I know. (Looks at the paper.)

Njogu: Dhukuru are being closed, thigari are asking for more, na university want more bread.

Markarius: Wait we see, treasury can not allow that to happen (thoughtful).

Njogu: Mani…Anything can happen ia, kwari, maize scandal, na anglo leasing. Na mwabatha – porti. Yaani guku, anything can happen, si they bought Ocampo na bia cia Kenya, where is he?

Markarius: Njogu, you know so much, where do you get all that?

Njogu: Media cia ghetto and they want too to control redio too…aguruki, MPs are mad…me ndiui! But in my life time I might not make a million…

Markarius: Its time to vote with conscious and conscience …for the draft Njogu.

Njogu: (laughing) ha! Ha! Ha! Boss… I am thinking twice this time, see what happen last time we voted.

Markarius: I’m proud to be a Kenyan…

Njogu: Eh! Good for you…Na we are now citizen ma East Africa…

Markarius: Yah that reminds me, we need to extend our wings, there is hope.

Njogu: Then you err… increase my Salo…boss. Maisha hii ya Kenya has sky rocketed.

Markarius: What…but I increased your salary last month to 12000bob!

Njogu: Mwathani!  Ksh12, 000 versus ksh1, 000, 000. Tell me, can’t you see some weirdness, boss?

Markarius: Me.  Luke Markarius. Add you more money! The budget doesn’t even recognize small time traders, Njogu.

Njogu: Al-shaabab are employing Kenyan bothi…see! I have an option.

Markarius: What are you saying, Njogu? (angry voice)

Njogu: Weeh! Si hata gava na kanitha wali intermarry na Mugiki… see boss ino ni Kenya njeru.

Markarius: Wait, this is not funny.

Njogu: Tunatesana, tunauana, tunapendana  na kura…tuna vote…that’s funny boss.

Markarius: That your head is bloody heavy, aren’t you afraid of dying of burden?

Njogu: I have a seven year old politician son and a four year old daughter who want to be a sexy model.

Markarius: Oh my gosh, Njogu!

Njogu: She said that to me, kartuni…cuando seas mia soaps…this TV is killing a young minds.

Markarius: Then ban the machine from your house. (Throwing hands up.)

Njogu: Have tried but my wife deprived me my conjugal err… rights boss.

Markarius: Ha ! Ha! Ha!

Njogu: Bothi. Mwathani…what is funny?

Markarius: Your wife…what is she?

Njogu: She calls herself the liberated ‘woman’ (laughing) and freed by the constitution rights.

Markarius: Go back to work; equality is knocking the door.

Njogu: But I punched her a little, muruthi wa nyumba it’s me! That African law stands!

Markarius: Haiya!

©Alex Mutua 2010

A Freshlyground Professor by Clifton Gachagua Antony is this week’s chosen story with a whooping 106 reader awarded points. Congratulations Clifton! Read the story below

As you may be aware, The Contemporary Kenya contest has merged into Kenyan Conversations. We announced earlier that we will posting two photos a week. You can comment on both photographs, tell us what you think is being portrayed. Come back to see what others have said and stay to have a conversation.

Although we will not be accepting any more story/dialogues based on the photos posted on Tuesday 6th July and Thursday 8th July, you can still comment on the photographs and stand the chance to win Kshs 2000/-, Storymoja Books and tickets to the Storymoja Hay Festival coming up soon. Be on the lookout for the photographs that will go online this week, comment on them and send in your story dialogues to participate in the contest.

Have a look at the contest guidelines here before you send in your piece.

May the best writer win!

A Freshlyground Professor by Clifton Gachagua Antony

“Good morning Sir!” the dogs barked.

“Good morning, Mr. Associate professor.”

They know you are up by now because they were all up last night doing forbidden things when your engine and headlights interrupted their ceremony. You came home late like you have been doing the last couple of weeks. They watched as you fumbled to fit the key into the lock and finally disappeared behind the rusty Iron Gate. Your wife snorted and turned in bed but that did not stop you from falling asleep immediately. You haven’t touched her in weeks. You think she has grown fat and cumbersome from her last two births. She always smells of baby milk and you are not one of those psychotic men who get turned on by baby milk. And, anyway, you are lactose intolerant.

The next day you wake up late and without a hangover. You learnt to avoid them with a little lemon in warm water and a long stay in the bathroom pushing out the remnants of the previous night’s illicit niceties, tricks you learnt back in your university days. Your mouth feels like a urinal in a backstreet bar and lodging. The overbearing stench of onions, nyama choma and Tusker lager still heavy in your breath you hurtle into the bathroom to brush your teeth, knocking over a Kasuku can filled with tee pee pegs.

The feel of squeezing toothpaste down the tube is the subtle catalyst you need to conjure up the images of her hands on you, arousing you. You have learnt to store pixels of her face and svelte figure laid out in the anatomical position like a body awaiting a posthumous examination. You are her loyal pathologist. You will make incisions in her; touch her where she has never been touched. You will stitch her old wounds and heart breaks and restore her trust in men. Her, the current project, the one that has proven impossible to snare, the one who doesn’t remind him of the past three wives he has had the misfortune to pay for their upkeep. Her whose palpable organs you want to rip out and do abominable things to.

No, there is no time for that now. Instinct tells you that the wife is just about to wake up.

You clean up in a hurry and leave the house before sunrise, lucky to have avoided your wife’s routine interrogation about your whereabouts. It’s not as is she could stop you from coming late but you just prefer to start your day without threats of her leaving you alone with the kids, the same kids that haven’t seen you in a week. None of that matters. Don’t you provide for them like every man should? They eat Farmers Choice sausages and cereal for breakfast everyday for Christ’s sake!

You turn on the ignition in your turbo wagon and speed off to work making your way through the lazy streaks of virgin dawn and the howling of the street dogs and the croaking of crows. It is as if the ominous yells from the black beaks are sounds urging you on to your doom. They are spectators for the thing’s you do in the dark. They are urging you on with trumpets and horns: “Go Mr. Associate Professor, Go!”

“Someone needs to cull these beasts,” you say, to no one in particular.

You watch as the sordid sun rises above the hills. It doesn’t stir any emotions in you. She has told you so many times about sunsets and stars but you don’t really care about that celestial crap. All you can think of is her body under yours, her breasts orbs burning under your palms, creating little new tributaries that are a sorcerer’s foreshadow of plenty to come. The sum of your trysts is the catharsis you need to rise from your imminent nadir, the salvation from the crisis looming at your door. You have to get her. It does not matter whether you’ll need to build a church in the middle of Sodom and Gomorrah and burn incense and the tips of your fingers all night. You will light candles for her every other night.

So the sun sheds its shy rays on your daydreams as you negotiate the corner taking you into the institution. The guard at the gate gives you the normal “Habari yako, boss,” that means he has been sitting in that cold for hours and would appreciate some sympathy.  Understanding his coded language and, being a God-fearing, generous man, you leave him a hundred shilling note. “Ero kamano jatelo!” He thanks you, the gums of his wide mouth as red as a fresh wound.

No one is at the office. Good. You always like to have a head-start before the co-workers and interns come in and contaminate everything. You shuffle for the Nseries in your back pocket and browse to the music files. She got you two albums from Freshlyground. Ma’ Cheri is your favorite.

“Benga is for old people like your father,” she had said when you had told her about the kind of music you like. “You are so young, live life a little.”

The Afro-fusion fills the lab with the ambiance of a good dream as you measure milliliters of compounds and enzymes into micropipettes. This is perfect, you think to yourself. You are always happier when there is a younger woman in the picture. Zolani’s melancholic voice brings back images of the student. Now she is a witch under your belly, hissing, purring in psychedelic mourns, intonating spells to free her from the bondage of your erect corpus cavernosum.

FreshlyGround

You decide to call her. She must be still asleep by now; you know her schedule from Monday to Friday; you’re her lecturer after all. She mumbles a hello dear. Her voice puts you on the edge.

“Er…I just called to check up on you dear, I’ve missed you.” She has missed you to Mr. Associate Professor. After a while you hang up and send her Kshs. 500 worth of Safaricom credit. She sends back a message full of happy face and kissing face smileys, making your aging heart kindle with insecure warmth, waves of arrhythmia spreading into that core of your being that rises and falls like tide during the full moon. She is like your little blue pill.

Zolani Mahola’s voice abandons you in the solitude of your morning ritual until colleagues slowly start to pour into the lab where formalities are rarely exchanged. Some of them look at you with suspicion when they here the indigenous sounds coming out your phone.

It’s a painful dive into a routine from this point onwards: supervising interns, too self-conscious to hold still a test-tube; checking correspondence on your desktop; marking exams from students who still don’t know the four bases making up the DNA structure, and smiling to people you don’t like.

You call her again at tea break but she doesn’t pick up. It burns you like cirrhosis when she acts like a teenager. You leave her a long apathetic text message. Your colleagues are deep in conversation but you don’t really seem to be part of it. You are thinking about her. You leave her another desperate message. She doesn’t reply. You log into Facebook and leave her two more messages and decide to go through your previous threads, some dating as far back as December, four months since you started dating. The long conversations about your escapades, of course spiced with exaggerated content, makes you smile. She is also a wild character, always talking about fantasies too elaborate to exist in 3D.

“What’s your wildest sexual fantasy?” She had once asked you.

“Sex in the middle of a football pitch, preferably City Stadium, complete with a referee and spectators applauding,” you replied.

“No one‘s ever made me laugh this much!” she said.

What you really meant was that you were an old-fashioned man; all you wanted was to spread her legs apart and soil her beyond the limit of any industrial detergent, to rearrange her body pattern in an alien motif and do irreparable damage to her, send seismic waves down her spine with such magnitude that they’d find traces of his sperm in her cerebral spinal fluid. Plans are already underway to get her away into an expensive hotel in Kakamega with bed sheets rinsed in Stasoft -which reminds you about making reservations at the hotel. The thought of you two together alone takes you even further from the conversations in the cafeteria. Your ginger tea is already too cold so you take two sour sips and follow your colleagues back to the lab.

5 o’clock: Time for your molecular genetics class, the same class where she miraculously turns into your student. You drive the 20 kilometers between the campus and the institution in wild amazement anticipating the encounter with your impure Freshlyground goddess.

The students are all in their seatts by the time you get to the lecture hall. She sits at the back with earphones on. Her carefree hair a wild maroon; her sickly eyes lost in the expensive glasses you bought her with frames the color of her skin; huge turquoise earrings perched on her ears like dream-catchers; her skin evolving into a the lighter tone of her Suba ancestors. Her friend, also as beautiful, has to pinch her back into class. Startled, she looks straight into your eyes with a cunning stare, feigning some guilt. You both love to play these games, to pretend that the rules apply.

Like every other lecture you’ve had this semester, this one draws on like sluggish blood in the veins of a pregnant woman’s limbs. It’s the same routine; you introduce a topic, explain its relevance, dictate the notes with interruptions to spell the hard  words, make a few  jokes and expect everyone to laugh, and finally wish the students a good evening.

Today’s hard words: endonuclease, Huntingtin, Okazakki fragments. Some of the spellings you have to repeat because she keeps murmuring that annoying mmmmh? to see if you will dance to her beat. She toys with you as if you were age-mates. You will get your turn, no hurry.

You stay behind waiting for the students to leave as you pretend to be sorting out your lecture notes. Once the coast is clear you stroll to your turbo wagon and press play on the CD changer as you wait for her. You are eager to impress so you play Freshlyground instead of your usual Tony Nyadundo. She appears from behind the lecture halls and sinks into the passenger seat, always feeling at home in the riches that you provide her with.

“Aaah, Freshlyground! Awwww…this tune has been playing in my mind all day,” she lies. Damn these lies. You wish she could just quote her price and get it over with. But you have told your friends that you love to be the predator.

“Wow Dear! I love how you understand me, this is telepathy!”

More lies.

Exhaust fumes settle on the laminas of leaves as you both speed off the university lawns towards a club in a small town far from the curios eyes.

She orders bottle after bottle of fizzling, ice cold Smirnoff Black Ice, telling you how much she has missed you in between sips. As every iridescent bubble rises to the top and bursts you imagine annihilating her, spanking her bubbly buttocks like a percussion instrument, your arms like drum sticks ridden with leprosy, unable to grasp her. Oh good old telepathy, will let her know of my affliction?

The passing minutes are filled with irrelevant conversations just about anything. The bubbles still popping in staccato loops like beats from the music she gave you. Today you try to explain a concept about genetic vectors to her indifferent ears. You are halfway between the interaction of a restriction enzyme and the DNA molecule when she tells you she needs Ksh. 20,000 for a new computer.

“I’ll think about it,” you tell her, irritated by her impoliteness. Shameless bitch! You have to be mad you to think I’m giving you all that money without fucking you. You order more of her effervescent drinks, urging the arms of your Swiss watch to move just a bit faster towards bed time.

After six bottles she wakes up and fumbles to the rooms at the back of the hotel and like the loyal dog you are you follow behind, saliva dripping from your hanging tongue.

“We cannot share a room,” she tells you. Shit! You had only booked one room.

“I respect your decision.” A prostitute would have been much cheaper. The chase, remember, it’s the chase that you love Mr. Predator.

“Thanks for the company, you are such fun!”

Horny and frustrated, you have to drive back through 30 kilometers of bad tarmac and darkness to the cellulite thighs of your wife. You pick up Zolani and her friends and throw them out the window and play the music you like. Tomorrow will be another day. Maybe you will ask for her friend’s number, the darker one who always sits besides her.

©Clifton Anthony Gashagua 2010

Clifford Oluoch sets the bar pretty high for all of us. Which is why you voted his story DESTINY as the Story of the Week.  Thank you Clifford for shining the light on excellence!

Matatu named DESTINY...

Read DESTINY here…

You have a chance to be the next week’s author of the Contemporary Nairobi Story of the Week.

Every author who wins the Story of the Week, will have the opportunity to have their work in expedited review at the Storymoja Editorial Review Table. To win that spot, please send in a story that fits into the categories below.

-         Contemporary Nairobi setting

-         Has two or more young professionals as main characters

-         Can be either Crime/Detective Fiction, Romance or Life Crisis Fiction

-         Must be complete enough to stand as a story by itself

-         Has a running mystery; story must be short but the mystery should make it possible to develop the story into a novella (10000 words)

-         Should not be more than 2000 words

In addition to the expedited review, the winning author will have a Writer Profile on our site, as well as stand a chance to win KES 500 and one of the Storymoja titles.

May the best writer win!

Your votes are in and this week’s Story of the Week is… I am still reeling from the 187 points y’all awarded this story!

Strained choices by Karest Lewela! Read it below.

Congratulations Karest!

Would you like your story to feature here, please send in your work to blogs@storymojaafrica.co.ke. Go here to see submission guidelines.

And now after very many requests from all of you, Storymoja is pleased to announce that we will now have a Poetry exhibition here every Thursday. To have your poems on the gallery show, please send them in to us (blogs@storymojaafrica.co.ke) every week by Tuesday 4pm. We will be looking for themed poetry that could likely be added to our performance portfolio. For details see this page.

Do you have any other ideas about how to make your weekly reading more fun? Please send your suggestions to juliet@storymojaafrica.co.ketoday. Join us here on Monday for the next batch of stories and Thursday for the poetry, and be sure to vote for the next Story of the Week and the Poem of the week.

Strained choices by Karest Lewela

Hospital Here

He sat there in silence staring straight ahead, almost as if he was trying to formulate oblivion. There was no evidence of emotion on his face. He was not even flinching and his winking was at regular intervals as if he was making a deliberate attempt at regulating all his biological processes. He didn’t seem to recognize our presence in the room or the fact that darkness was beginning to set in. Sometimes when I remember that particular moment, I think that that must have been the face that peace would take if I were to paint it.

I could not tell what was going on in his mind, but serenity had nothing to do with it. It was as if he was willing fortune to mould fate in his favour. He was the perfect embodiment of an understanding of nothingness. His image was that of a living statue, a monument of loss beyond human comprehension. It was a look so full of purpose that it became hard to interrupt him. He hadn’t smoked a cigarette in the last seventy-two hours and the body seemed delighted for that chance to detoxify. His skin was responding in delight and I could swear his skin tone was lighter and fairer. If only he would smile it would reassure us he was still there. I have been told that in Oriental cultures, under extreme concentration people have left their bodies in the fashion I leave my clothes when heading to the shower.

Time was running out and it was becoming urgent that a decision, nay, the decision needed to be made. Everyone was getting impatient and all hope was depending on the fast fading last hour. I volunteered to wake Curtis from this trance. No one else was willing to do it. So that history does not mistakenly remember me as the only courageous person at that moment, allow me to clarify that I was using the fact that I was his wife as my excuse. The idea was not mine either, I would have rather had his mum do the honours, and after all she has known him much longer than I.  To be honest I was full of fear as I had never seen him this way and I tend to shy away from things that I do not understand. As duty beckoned, I had no choice. I requested everyone to accord us some privacy, which I immediately regretted for security reasons.

I stared straight into his eyes and smiled with so much charm like a teenage girl trying to lure the attention of someone she has a crush on. I was pulling my surest punch, as I had never known him to resist that from me. There was an inherent risk as this always ended up in activities that in my part of the world could not even be conceived as public. The pressure for a quick solution left me with little option than to go for a quick kill, no pun intended. He did not react. My ego was shattered and the burden of the expectations from everyone waiting in the next room made me feel afresh the burden of the onerous task ahead of me. So I held his face in my palms. He was so cold that it made me realize how feverish my body had become out of the tension.

I called out his name: “Curtis?”

At first it was a whisper, growing in intensity to the point that I was shouting much akin to when I would wake him from deep slumber. He seemed to recognize me, or at least my presence. That was progress.

I then realized it was going to be difficult to go directly into the issue, especially considering that we hadn’t spoken in the last few days. I sought to understand what was going through his mind. He opened his mouth to speak, struggled to let out a few syllables as if it hurt to speak and when the words finally came out I could not understand any of it. I asked him to repeat what he had uttered. He did and the result was not any different. He continued to narrate with much anguish and I listened in both shock and confusion.

As a linguist, my mind was quickly working through the sounds and my understanding of phonetics, to try to establish the language. So far I could tell a mélange of lusophone and francophone tongues, which was making me absolutely desperate. Curtis had never had an affinity for languages, in fact his English and Arabic, both native to him, had remained as basic as he could get away with. Why was he speaking to me in a foreign tongue? When did he learn this language?

The door was swung open; long white coat blended with the white light in the background creating a surreal effect. The doctor said:

I am very sorry to pressure you Mrs. Curtis, but we need to decide now.

I replied:

Let me have one more minute and I will be with you.

He agreed and left, more out of courtesy rather than rationality. I said a prayer and asked Curtis to forgive me. Our son’s life depended solely on me. Curtis was not in the right frame of mind to make this decision. I kissed him on the cheek and immediately my mind alluded to Judas, and then to Jesus and then to the hackneyed expression of let go, let God. I left the room and as if pronouncing the final second in the life on a death row inmate waiting to be gassed, nodded my head once in the direction of the doctor.

There were no further conversations. The doctor didn’t need any further translation of the coded language; he had seen too much human suffering to not understand the weight and finality of a single nod. This was going to be the defining moment of my life. I hated the pity and sorrow in everyone’s eyes. I expected family and friends to understand that this was the only way. I was going to fight for my family.

I walked away with the doctor, down the hallway into a bright-lit room, our image fading from light to blindness. When the two huge doors met again, it was a salutation for the generations that would survive this kindness that would make people think life unfair, unjust and unkind. I went into the changing room, took one hard look at my naked self, dressed in the gown and lay on the bed. The transition to the operating table was as fuzzy as my mind was. I smiled, more from the anaesthetic than from conscious joy. They took out my second kidney, for the sake of my son and I had instructed them to give my heart to Curtis, my husband. It had been many long and difficult months, battling cancer and fighting legal battles to allow me to donate my kidney to my son. We couldn’t afford the medical costs for treating my cancer, and it wasn’t any easier that it was malignant.

I had a good bargain; in exchange for a potential life on drugs, I got two lives for the price of one. In my death, I was hopeful that the heart transplant for my husband was going to assist him with regaining both the English and Arabic languages. I hoped he would teach our son whatever language it is he had spoken that morning. I thank God for many mercies, especially for finding a chance to make our bodies compatible, even more than our family had ever been.

© Karest Lewela 2010

Your votes are in and this week’s Story of the Week is…

The Love of One Family by Mary Kariuki. Read it below.

Congratulations Mary!

Would you like your story to feature here, please send in your work to blogs@storymojaafrica.co.ke. Go here to see submission guidelines. We will be awarding one of our readers and contributors every month, so be sure to send in your work or comment on the featured stories.

Do you have any ideas about how to make your weekly reading more fun? Please send your suggestions to juliet@storymojaafrica.co.ketoday. Join us here on Monday for the next batch of stories and be sure to vote for the next Story of the Week.

The Love of One Family by Mary Kariuki

In a family of four boys, and being the only girl you would think that Elizabeth would have all the time in the world to look at herself in the family mirror, one that was stationed in the verandah right after the sitting room, it invited any one coming or leaving their residence to take a quick glance at their reflection. The verandah unlike all the other areas in the house was cool, because of the breeze that the endless trees that Mark had planted blew. At that point Elizabeth gazed at her image, she often wondered how the women on TV managed to keep such a sleek figure even after giving birth to children. It always baffled her, after every child she had, her body was never the same, and it just kept on changing.

Never the same

She had three children and her tummy had never been the same, it had gone from being flat, that had been one of the things that Mark had liked about her. When they had met in the market place, could not help but stare at the beautiful slim woman, who was wearing a skirt that almost fell over her knees, giving him the opportunity to glare at the beautiful long legs. Her breasts lay shyly over her chest, and her stomach was flat, he wanted to run his hands over it. And he did, after their wedding all he would do was touch her stomach, at first she assumed he was doing that to see if she was pregnant yet, a few months later when she actually became pregnant she realized that she had given him a lot of credit. He was just a typical African male, forever clueless.

Nonetheless even after the birth of their three sons, nothing ever changed for their family the love for each other increases.

After she gave birth to her second son, Elizabeth slowly began to realize that she might actually become the only girl in her family, and eventually she did, she loved every moment of it. Though her two teenage sons, Dan and Timothy actually treated her as one of the boys.

“Mom,” James would call her as she lay on the sofa, catching on some sleep, though she was pretended not to be.

“I am only closing her my eyes.” She would tell Jake her last born that had only joined class four that year. Naming her son Jake proved to be a mistake, especially in the Kenyan society, almost everyone, erroneously referred to her son as Jack.

“Kwani these people don’t watch TV.” She would roll her eyes in disdain.

Eventually she got used to it. Even Jake was now writing his name as Jack, after his class one teacher had caned him several times for not spelling his name correctly.

Maybe his name was Jack, after all, in his birth certificate, school registration, they had his name as Jack and from that day only his mother called him Jake.

“Mom.” James called his mother; they were watching a football match. She was sleeping on the sofa; the food was on the jiko in the kitchen, Timothy was cooking. They knew that if they wanted to know the food was almost ready, all they had to do was look at their mother’s nose, any sudden movement especially a twitch meant it was time to check on the food. Any sudden sound meant that the food was just about to burn, and any sudden body movement meant that the food was burnt and they had to get to it before she got up, otherwise, they would have to contend with a thirty minute lecture on ‘why you should not cook and watch TV at the same time.’ Which they hated!

She did not mind her boys watching football, anyway if she did not let them, they would hate her for life and they would keep on reminding her that she was always telling them not to watch TV, yet she was a number one fan of specific programs, namely: Soaps.

As for her husband Mark, he was never a football man, neither were his peers, he always came home from work immediately then alongside with Elizabeth they would spend the rest of the evening talking loudly from church issues to work, making it impossible for the boys to watch TV in Peace.

“Mom.” James and Timothy exchanged a naughty look with his brother. She looked at James.

“What is Wayne Rooney doing today, did you see he missed that shot.” He would give his mother a serious look like she understood what he was blubbering about.

“Who is that?” She asked with a quizzical expression on her face.

“Ah, Mommie!” he would pretend to be dismayed. “Who doesn’t know Wayne Rooney?”

His mother would roll her eyes and go back to her sleep.

“What about Nani?” he would probe further as Timothy would anticipate his mother’s response.

“Nani?” she would open her eyes, glance at the television. “The ugly man running after the ball.”

Timothy and James would burst out laughing. They love teasing their mother just for kicks.

“There is nothing interesting about these footballers.” Elizabeth would start. The two boys would look at each other with a resigned look, once their mother began talking there was no way of getting her to keep quiet.

“They look like gunias.” She would go on to describe the footballers. “Like that worn out crate that I use to carry my vegetables to the market.” The two boys would quickly burst out laughing.

“And yet young girls chase after them” she would sneer. “I don’t get it.” She shakes her head in disbelief.

“Mom you are wrong.” Timothy would finally have something to say. “The reason they fall for these men, just like James here.” He would whisper the James part. Both his mother and James would give him a doubtful look. “Its because of the lines mom, Mistari.” He would stress.

“If you aint got the lines.” James would add. “You won’t get the girl.”

“I did not give birth to a gunia.” His mother would warn him. “All my children are very handsome like Ramsey Noah.” They would both sneer. They thought that was an insult coming from their mother, but she was always serious.

Now that the three were away in school, she could get some alone time and look at herself in the mirror. Her body had changed a lot, especially her stomach, a fact that could be attributed to her bearing of three children, Sons to be more precise. The damage they had done to her body was irreversible.

Her belief that Mark would stop loving her because of her distorted figure changed with time. He seemed to adore her even more. Their loved had grown from sexual to that of great affection and respect, With the birth of each of their child, the love that they had for each other just seemed to grow in  depths.

She smiled, it was only during times like these, when Mark was away at work, James was in college, Timothy was in boarding school and Jake was safe in class at a nearby primary school that she could afford to steal a mirror moment and see the changes that her body had gone through. On an ordinary day, it all started with her Maasai husband, Mark, he would get up early and lit the fire like he had done all the while they had been married. It was like his duty, after dressing, he would immediately position himself in the mirror as he tried to tie his tie, eventually, he would either stop a passing tenant or call James to help him with his ties, he had been taught how do tie his tie several times but he just could not get the hang of it.

He would grill the poor tenant who would probably be tying his tie reminding him that his rent was a couple of days overdue, the conversation would usually end with an invitation to attend church with the family. After Mark, James would use the mirror to rehearse his lines.

“Girl your teeth are so white, they should have fired Mr. beaver and hired you instead.” James would smile at himself. Timothy and Jake would just watch in disbelief.

“Teeth are so white, that when you wake up and smile people think that the sun has risen.” He would go on.

“Your teeth are so white that I can see my refection in them.” He would smile cheekily. Timothy and Jake would join him in the mirror.

“You teeth, teeth, teeth.” Timothy retorted. “Kwani, you now work for Colgate or something.”

“You are just jealous.” James would respond. “Kijana.” He would point at his youngest brother. “Who is that handsome dude who is staring at you.” He would point at his reflection in the mirror.

“Oh, its me.” He would reply. “My God, I am so good looking.”

He would concentrate on his image. “When God made me, he must have thought. ‘David kando!”

The two younger boys would just laugh. No doubt James was a good looking boy, he was not bad to look at, but the shy Timothy was pleasant to look at, the fact that he was quiet added to his mystery that made girls always wanted to talk to him. He feared them, he thought that he had all the time in the world, hence girls were the least important, KCSE topped. And boy wasn’t he working hard.

After James, Timothy would stand in front of the mirror brushing his teeth, the only part of his body he gave much attention to. He was a hard worker and everyone appreciated that, the girls gave him a hard time because of his looks.

That was until after sitting for only two papers, his head began to ache, he had had the headache for a while but it was becoming worse. By the time of being sent home, he could not even sleep, the next day he was in so much pain, his head was swollen all the way to his neck. The whole family was scared as they rushed him to hospital. Scans revealed that there was a tumor just outside his nasal area of his right eye; they needed a biopsy to find out whether it was a cancerous.

A few days later, he could not breathe, he could not eat, and he was screaming in pain. The whole family watched helplessly as the love of their life drifted away.

The love of their life

Is slipping away

They’re losing the fight

For another day

The life that they’ve known

Is drifting away

A sonless home

A brother less home

A family’s broken heart.

They were losing their son…

© Mary Kariuki 2010

Your votes are in and this week’s Story of the Week is…

Tell me your Thoughts by Savvy Kenya. Read it below!

Congratulations Savvy!

Would you like your story to feature here, please send in your work to blogs@storymojaafrica.co.ke. Go here to see submission guidelines. We will be awarding one of our readers and contributors every month, so be sure to send in your work or comment on the featured stories.

Do you have any ideas about how to make your weekly reading more fun? Please send your suggestions to juliet@storymojaafrica.co.ketoday. Join us here on Monday for the next batch of stories and be sure to vote for the next Story of the Week.

Tell me your Thoughts by Savvy Kenya

I spend so much time on the internet during work, telling myself I’m working or studying. I am doing my masters and have some classes online. Mostly though, I’m usually reading blogs, leaving comments on Facebook or chatting with someone. Work or study is the second last thing on my mind when I’m on the internet. I’m sure I could be the reason why they started blocking social sites at work.

All of them.

Work, yes work. It’s a long process just getting to work in the morning. First is the struggle to get water. This morning, the tap ran dry as I rinsed myself in the shoilet. That is my term for the tiny cubicle that is the shower/toilet. Apartments have gotten smaller as days go by, and every tiny space is utilized. Which is why the wee compartment that is my shoilet (Okay, I confess the phrase is not original. I picked it from some sitcom on TV) rarely has running water. I live on the fourth floor and the pump does not have enough pressure to pump the water that high. That is what the landlord told me after I had moved in. When I was searching for a house, he told me it had running water. It’s not his fault the pump does not have enough force. It’s too much to expect the building to have an elevator so I have to climb four flights of stairs to get to my apartment.

And I am one of the lucky ones. Most families with three or more children live in houses my size. I am a single woman of twenty six and considered successful. I have a job, a car and I pay my own rent. I’m also taking any extra classes and attending conferences and seminars whenever I can. I can’t resist taking a break from work to represent my company in meetings where I get to eat sweets, drink water and doodle on the free stationery while pretending to listen to the speakers. I also take numerous tea breaks, I confess.

So as I was saying, this morning, the water stopped running as I was rinsing myself. Who was I kidding? I knew there is water rationing going on, but in my wisdom, I thought luck would hold out this time. Even when I know I am not a lucky person, I mean I am yet to win anything in any lottery. This is the capital city right? But water and electricity are actually more available in a smaller town. You would think the capital would get some priority after all? It seems there are more people than the city can handle. I know you are thinking, “She has got such a grasp of the obvious.”

Of course, in the tiny space outside my bathroom I have this plastic tank that I spent the weekend hauling water into from the tap four floors down. When I figured I had had enough exercise, I paid Johnny 5 bob per jerrican to haul it up. He does odd errands for anyone who needs his services in the compound of about 40 tenants. I suspect he more than services Miss Yellow’s car, but whom am I to judge? All this lifting of jerricans does something to the biceps.

I tune to my favourite station on the radio on the way to work. My Toyota Corolla is well maintained, which is what people say when they want to sound like they know about cars. I keep it clean and shiny, and call the mechanic when it breaks down, which it is fond of doing these days. I really have to get a new car. Perhaps I should just take that car that one James is offering. Except of course, it comes with such strings attached it could be a cobweb.

Soon after leaving the gate, I join the jam. I am used to spending thirty minutes each morning in traffic jams. I see the newspaper guy walking nonchalantly among the cars. He usually sells out at this section of the jam in the morning. I get my paper and glance at headlines, politics. Back page, sports. I take time to note who scored in what game. In this competitive world, I have to show I can talk football. Things like I think Arshavin is great for Arsenal, and34 declaring a stand against some football teams earns you some sort of respect.

Contrary to most women, I actually enjoy football. Both playing and watching. I could have played in the high school team but I was too busy reading novels and getting into mischief. In college, let’s just say there were other ways to spend my free time. So though I wish to be out there on the field, enjoying the fresh air and running around, I haven’t come round to it.

Crawling along in the jam, I notice one of those sales guys selling brightly colored thingies like USA flags, footballs, tennis balls, key-holders and  such like stuff approaching. I quickly roll up my car window and pretend not to notice. The moment you give these guys an inch, they take a kilometer. I always end up with a load of stuff I don’t need. Already, my keys cannot get lost amidst a crowd of wedding or funeral guests.

I must admit though we have adopted many western ways, some things like wearing some theme color to a wedding or black to a funeral haven’t really caught on. This is the chance when people get to wear their Sunday best, and they will be damned if they will be restricted to some colors, or to no color. Of course, I always try to dress carefully but those fashion trends in magazines only exist in the magazines. I am yet to be congratulated on my choice of dress except when I wear a loud colored kitenge.

Where was I? Yes, still crawling along at snail’s pace. There is this dangerous section of the road where some guys pluck side mirrors to be sold as spare parts when you go to replace them. I have this fantasy, of taking a gun out of my glove compartment (assuming I can get a license and directions to a gun shop or some underground deal), waiting until the guy has his hands on the mirrors, then rolling down the window and pointing the gun at the guy, “take. Just take it.” You cannot understand the road rage some doctor had when he shot a matatudriver until you have driven on Nairobi roads. Or perhaps the doctor had an uncontrollable temper.

At work, I find a flier for Children of Africa left on my desk. I know who left it. It must be Steve, the new head of the department that has just been created. He is the head of Corporate Social Responsibility in the company and he lets everyone know it. He is very enthusiastic, much to the chagrin of most people at work. Every Friday afternoon he hands out fliers for social activities during the weekend. I have rarely attended any. Most of them involve visiting children’s homes and I am one of those young Kenyans who expressly state their dislike for children. It’s the cool thing for any upcoming professional. The ‘I don’t relate well with children’ part gets you out of this social responsibility Steve never tires of preaching. Of course, that does not stop him from dropping fliers on my desk every so often. Or everyone’s desk for that matter.

I don’t know how Steve convinces me to go with him this time. Could be because he said he was willing to do those tedious loan reconciliation details that were due a month ago. Could also be that sometimes I too, feel obligated to help the entire world. I do have my wishes, if I was to get a genie in a bottle, one of them would be to end world suffering. That is how Saturday found me in the green and yellow company t-shirt and a white tennis cap, crawling once again in traffic to the children’s home.

We are finally at the Children of Africa orphanage, for abandoned children. Here I am expecting toddlers, sad faced and yearning for love but what we find was confident kids happy to play with anyone. I find myself searching the sea of faces for anyone friendly enough to let me play with them. A young boy of about five catches my eye. There is just something about him, it could be his confidence or easy but naughty smile that reminds me of someone I know.

After the usual speeches about giving back to society, and a few pictures that may or may not make it to business pictorial (who reads that part of the newspaper anyway? But later I know I shall scan the business pictorial section, and if I happen to appear in any, I may just frame that picture. It’s not every day someone appears in the newspaper), I search for the child who captured my attention.

I hand him some sweets which he eagerly takes. I’m trying to find out why he attracted my attention in the first place. He strongly reminds me of…Jay. No, it can’t be, I tell myself.

I am now in a near panic. There is one way to find out. I stand up, having been crouching to talk to him for so long, I can hear my knee joints pop and he laughs at me. I laugh back uneasily. I walk to the offices nearby. The Sister in charge of the place looks up and asks if she can help me. I reply and tell her I want to find out more about their organization and that I have a donor in mind. I need to use her computer for a short while. She trustingly leaves her desk and well, here I am now at her computer.

In the short time it takes her to exit the room, it all comes rushing back.

*                *                      *

College, the good old days, most people say. Actually, most people reflect back on their lives to see the good and not the bad. So of course, if you had bad days you skip over them. One such day is 12^th December, 2004. I do not want to think about it, I don’t want to remember it. But how can I forget?

It’s not easy being pregnant in college. It’s not the fact that you are always broke, unless of course you are a girl who does not mind having a boyfriend older than Adam with lots of dough. I remember Miss Weaves once asked me if I wanted hookups. I asked her if she didn’t think he was a bit too old for her. She scratched my face, literally. That in itself is a story altogether.

As I was saying, pregnancy in college is not a nightmare because I was always broke. Or because people gossiped and stared when my stomach started to bulge. Or the fact that I had to sit sideways to fit at a desk in class. I did not get to do exams that semester, and the reason I gave is financial difficulty. The dean stamped my request even when he could see I couldn’t bend or see my toes. He was friendly like that. Pregnancy reasons tend to bring lots of questions.

It was a nightmare to be pregnant because nobody wanted me to get a child at that time, least of all me. I do not want to go into details of how it happened. It’s rather obvious. Of course, the father of the child was kind enough to give me some 7K in cash and the number of a certain doctor in town. After which he absolved himself of responsibility. Shouldn’t I have known better, he wondered? After all, I’m the one who gets pregnant so I should take the appropriate measures. Well, look where my appropriate measures got me.

Giving birth is the only thing in life which has no shame. There you are, lying on your back with not even the decency of a thin scrap of hospital gown. Your legs are at the widest they can get and about five people are peering down there wondering if the baby is ready to pop. One of them is in fact poking their hands in and out to determine the position of the baby. The pain is killing you and your screams of profanity are hitting deaf ears. There is no loving husband to hold your hand, or at least pace outside the room sympathizing with your pain and eagerly awaiting for his child.

There are no friends who will come to visit me when the child is born. And most certainly, there are no proud grandparents bearing gifts for the child to be named after them. I gave birth in shame. I covered the child as best as I could and left him on the Nuru junction. That was on the 12^th.

I did toy with the idea of abortion. If you have ever watched those films that go round being shown to high school girls, then you can imagine how the abortion thought brought shudders. The film can actually be xxx-rated for all the blood and gore, except those images are not manufactured with tomato sauce and special effects, they are real. (Still on the subject of educational high school films, anyone remember watching the venereal disease one? I almost didn’t eat for a week. Note, I said almost.) That was when I decided I would give birth, which was fine, but bringing up the child?

*          *          *

Palms sweaty, I try logging in to their system. It asks me for my password. I pull out the top drawer and sure as I thought, she has the password taped to the top of the drawer. I key in “marymotherofjesus”, such a long password. I enter the name of the boy, David. Under circumstances that brought him into the home, I find there that he was brought into the home by a good Samaritan who picked him up from Thika Road, at the Nuru junction. The date was 12^th December, 2004.

I am in shock. I don’t believe in karma and all that mumbo-jumbo in some inspiration books, positive energy coming back to you and such like language. But this can’t be a coincidence. The life I have so carefully built for myself is crumbling down. I know of course, that I can walk away from all this, go back to my Facebook life pretending all is fine. I also know that not an hour will pass by without me remembering David’s face, and wondering if Jay will eventually come back to ask what happened to his son.

I walk out of the room in a daze. The kids are making a racket, Steve is signaling me over for a soda. (Does he have any idea how many calories that soda has? And why are mundane thoughts running through my head? Like that time back in college when Dan texted a roommate asking her if she was not tired from running around his head the whole night. I’m sure you’ve heard of that pick-up line before.)

I find a cool spot under a tree, away from all the noise and activity. It is time to weigh my options. Leave and never look back. Or adopt my son and start life with him. The right thing to do, is of course the hard thing. I look at the people I work with playing with the kids and wonder what kind of secrets they are also keeping, and if they will ever come to light. I remember the words my aunt told me when I was reporting to campus, “Everything you do in the dark will eventually come to light.” At that time, anyone who knew I was going to college was giving me what they thought were wise words of wisdom. I pretended they were going in one ear and out through the other, but I was really listening and took it in. You don’t want to lose the teenage cool.

The decision is not really that difficult. I simply ignore nothing has happened. Or maybe I open the can of worms, and who knows, the fabled happily ever after could be waiting for me.

I stand up and walk towards my son. My mind is already made up.

*          *          *

Suddenly, I feel someone shaking me…and I look up. I am not seated under a tree at some children’s home but rather in the Lover’s Park in campus. So called Lover’s Park not because couples come to hang out here (which they do), but because of the benches that someone thought to have a love heart-shaped design. I look beside me, Jay (let’s just say we are going out) is giving me his concerned smile asking if I’m fine. I tell him I have just had a strange reverie. He knows I am a day dreamer, and sometimes I drift so far away into my thoughts. I ask him just what day it is, to make sure. It’s April the 10^th, 2004. And I’m not twenty six, but twenty one and in college. I pat my stomach just to make sure I’m not pregnant, or am I? Later, after leaving the park as dusk approached, I went to my room to confirm my suspicions.

I just have a premonition about this daydream. It was so real. I know a roommate who keeps a stash of “appropriate measures and assorted paraphernalia”. I help myself to a pregnancy kit. Funny enough, I am not surprised when it turns out positive. I do some quick calculations. I am sure you’ve guessed the due date, December 12^th.

Just then, Jay calls. He wants me to tell him my thoughts. I tell him it’s a long story. That’s the polite way of saying, “leave me alone, I don’t want to tell you my story.” But actually, this time I literally mean it’s a long story. Lucky he loves to read, and I love to write. I tell him I’ll write down my thoughts instead. That is why I am sitting down typing this.

© Savvy Kenya http://savvy.blog.butterfly.co.ke/blog

Your votes are in and this week’s Story of the Week is…

Sword

Revered Servant of the Sword by Gideon Chumo. Read it below.

Congratulations Waga!

Would you like your story to feature here, please send in your work to blogs@storymojaafrica.co.ke. Go here to see submission guidelines. We will be awarding one of our readers and contributors every month, so be sure to send in your work or comment on the featured stories.

Do you have any ideas about how to make your weekly reading more fun? Please send your suggestions to juliet@storymojaafrica.co.ketoday. Join us here on Monday for the next batch of stories and be sure to vote for the next Story of the Week.

Revered Servant of the Sword by Gideon Chumo

Admiral Brutus Street isn’t what you would call an admirable street—well, there are tired-looking buildings parading in unclean pavements and smelly sewages. There are haggard-looking shops, bars tickling with glasses, and have never closed its doors for the last half century and counting, lodges creaking with beds, that lie awake from indecent lives within them, weather-beaten iron-roofs that clatter-clang and gaze at one another with black collected countenances. There are also reprobates who monitor everything that happens in that street, as if they possess it, or perhaps possessed by it.

The pot-holed tarmac, an occasional sparkling fuel-guzzler arrogant with road monstrosity, loud-mouthed hawkers, weighed down by huge hoarded goodies, competing here with impatient hooting, and there with street preachers, old tilted taxis, and stranded passengers, pedestrians, drug peddlers, idlers, and the playful scatter of street urchins make the street a visual and an oscillating concerto of confusion.

This chaos climaxes every Sabbath Day, when spirited lips chew chants and sing sacred songs while the revivalist irritates every open space with verbal diarrhoea. The street pays no attention, for an anthem of hullabaloo from the madding crowd, hustles noisily upon its ear, and drenches the whole hallowed hum. Even when the ‘brother’ proclaims like the prophets from his Ararat podium, eloquent as Luther King but boiling with braggadocio, and, his hand on the open Bible, of the ‘revered realities of our religion’, and of angel-like lives and vicarious sacrifice, and of endless bliss or indescribable gnashing of teeth, its eyes darkens with restless dust, agitated, in case the heavens up yonder should rumble and smite those speckled lips busy spewing forth sacrilege.

An old dark man, old as the sea, with the most depressing looks and a face that reminds one of Rufus, but on second thoughts, of Hannibal dusts the windshield of his London cab for an umpteenth time. He has the most curious raincoat that has its rightful place in the war memorial museums. It covers his spurs, barely concealing his shining army boots and had once been a confederate grey in colour. But rain and sun and age has so speckled it that Caesar’s rabbit-fur coat, beside it, would have discoloured to a pallid monochrome. A despondent descendant of kings is this old man.

The old man stands majestically by his dark cab that is so old that Lot himself might have asked for a ride in it after he fled Sodom with his two daughters and wife blindfolded in the boot, lest she should be tempted to look back. Although the street itself is already worried by the ominous presence of this old man of the hills by his evil looks, the old man touts for would-be passengers, and as they approach, he draws the fly whisk, waves without using, and proclaims like Noah, in deep, rumbling tones: ‘Zion Train express! Get on board sire, spotless—no dust, jus’ back from di funeral, suh.’

An Undertaker’s hat conceals his white wig but still reveals a wee-bit of his parched face and also shows some secret forces of despair and shame that pull it earthwards. He assumes the most revered expression to match his outrageous overstatement of the weight his burly figure carries. His sharp eyes join the other million-dollar Zimbabwean eyes curiously detained by a revival meeting that is just starting, conducted by three sisters in black, and a brother.

A sister waves and strikes the tambourine against her hand in attempts to silence the crowd. She gives up as no one pays attention to her listen-to-di-servant-of-the-word cries. Aah! It’s her sorry figure; darting eyes from the crowd seem to confirm. She’s in a shapeless black robe and white shoes, had starved her face of make-up, and thus would be a miracle if forty-nine out of fifty men dared to look at her twice!

Like the old street, the old man too, is not impressed by the enacting scene, now pregnant and anxious with clamoured chants of Miserere Mei Deus, for they are like, the reception room of an undertaker’s office, a cold ambience motioning toward the mysteries of ethereal raptures: a place painted with reverent images of immortal proportion, disturbing odour, flower vases, sketches of soaring swifts and gloomy misty mountains.

The brother glances sternly at the mortified faces of his listeners, swings with swaggers his Bible as he preaches, his powerful voice resonating with threats of repentance. Two sisters clasp their hands in harmony, nodding their consent at his testimony with mismatching refrains of HalleluJahAmen, the third sister stalks around with a tambourine extended charitably for the congregation to give what’s the Lord’s. When the brother’s testimony ends, the tax-collecting sister deposits the Caesar’s coins into her palm and—with a zeal that would embarrass Zacheus—transfers them to the pocket of her long black robe.

She shakes the tambourine in a rising crescendo like a lead percussion military band player, and strikes it against her left hand. The brother starts clapping his hands and prods the other two sisters to join her. They sing in a husky, dehydrated tone the well-known worship hymn,

‘Di Spirit of Jah,

Pour down di fyah!’

Their rasping voices and phrasing literally hypnotize the sisters and seem to transpose them to the Day of Pentecost. They beat their chests, shake their heads, their black robes spin from the gyrations, and the brother stretches forth his right hand into the sky, eyes searching the clouds, and blinking like a light indicator, no wonder seeing visions of Ecce Homo hanging upon the cross.

The sisters seem to see a different apparition—their Lord’s blood gliding from his veins down the trunks and onto the base of the cross. They tremble with mortal dread, seem out of this world and even the old man of the pyramids has to agree, this is no ordinary revival.

The old man’s eyes searches the faces of those who stand there and gawk blankly into the sky—for signs of lunacy. He only sees gaping eyes arrested by a likely spectacle of torrential brimstone and fire. He realises too, that for once, the street is unattended, that eyes has stopped watching the street, and focussed on the heavens, looking out for miracles and signs. He sees doubting Thomases, impatient to watch, yet stand still—like the sun did for Joshua—gazing at the azure horizon and scorching the roofs of their mouths, then take back their eyes to watch the street, shaking their cricking necks, cursing, ‘I told you silly goose, this is just another impostor.’

They watched and watched and listened too, for a rumble, that is, but all they heard was another urgent hymn:

‘Di voice of di Lord a-callin’

Di las’ train soon a-goin’

Come all git on board

Don’t be left behind.’

But every soul that stood and watched seemed determined to be left behind as none stepped forward when the brother made a last call. His keen eye only met the most unwilling stares of the would-be passengers, suddenly reluctant to plant their cold feet inside his Zion Train. Perhaps he had not scared them hard enough by intimidating threats to book a one-way ticket to Zion. What could unmask ‘an adulterous and wicked generation’ and turn their stone-hard hearts to heed to the tender pleas of free ride to Zion? His once Martin Luther voice changed into an upsetting tenor—no wonder his Lord hadn’t hesitated to use a whip!

He didn’t seem to notice that behind those empty stares were discerning souls which especially had no faith in his ability to chariot the Lord’s Train with the crew of his three sisters, for they knew everything about them, knew where they lived, and how.

The tax-collecting tambourine sister, whose voice governed the air, whose voice was intense with ecstasy, shared a lot in common with the woman who stood watching her, throwing knowing looks from her scarlet eyes, obviously after a khat chewing session, blowing puffs of smoke like a tractor with a defective carburettor, darkening her stone-face that was already cursed and blemished by scars from countless extra-marital escapades. This was why when they bumped into each other in the street, a polite title of ‘sister’ escaped from their pursed lips.

When the music saturated the air, the faces that stood watching seemed to be elevated to another plane, transformed even and started struggling like the Djinn trapped inside the bottle that was found by an Arab fisherman. The music seemed to unveil new possibilities, a new horizon unseen before by those gazing eyes and breaking the walls of their existence, shattering into splinters what held them back, lifting them higher out of their present state, as if, once the bottle was opened, allowed only a split of a second scurrying from their first condition, into a worthy next.

A beggar came along, stood for a moment to weigh the prospects offered by the large crowd at the revival, but hesitant to try his luck, then his face lit up when the first man he desperately stretched out his hand for, dug into his pockets for loose coins. Nothing came from his effort, for he reflected for a second, his hand still inside his pocket, and started walking away, as if some unexpected emergency had occurred. At this, the old man half shook his head and smiled, adjusted his undertaker’s hat and went back dusting his cab.

The meeting came to an end. The three sisters and the brother, waving their hands sadly, sang, ‘May the sweet airs of heaven, be with you till we meet again.’ This had an effect on the faces; caused upsetting expressions, and one by one, they left, dispersing unwillingly and dejected. The music stopped, and the brother put the Bible into his big pocket and gathered his flock of three to leave.

The old man watched the three women and the one man walk up slowly the street. He gave them a second or two, then started the cab and made towards them, caught up, threw open the door of his cab, got out, flourished his duster, and began his depressing formula: ‘Zion Train express! Get on board sire, spotless—no dust, jus’ back from di funeral, ma’am.’ The 49-50 sister smiled when she recognized him—the old man who had dropped crisp new bank-notes into her collection, but the other sister, whose long black robe looked designed in wrath and worn in a rage, was restless not to get trapped in any talk that might impede her voyage—to Zion.

‘Please, step in. I am off duty, and I shall give you a lift to your place.’ The old man offered again, waving impatiently at them to get in.

‘You done seen him before?’ the brother whispered. The sister nodded. And for a moment, they meditated between silence and speech. Then the brother after studying the air to the left and to the right of the street, seemed to agree with the proposal, entered and sat in front. The three sisters sat in the back.

‘Know De Klub House?’ the brother asked him.

‘Oh, yeah,’ the old man swallowed and adjusted his Undertaker’s hat, without taking his eyes off the road, ‘so, you live by the Klub House, huh?’

‘No sire, I live by the monastery.’

‘Are you monks and nuns, then?’

‘Not really, I’m not a monk and definitely they are not nuns, but I’m saying I live next to the monastery because our house is next to the monastery.’

‘So you’d say the General lives by the beggar if a beggar lives near him?’

‘You have a very strange way of twisting words, old man. You waste your talents driving this cab—you should be with the FBI!’

‘I’m just pulling your legs.’ The old man jokes, his teeth luminous like a lighthouse and his laugh coming up out of him like the beginning of an earthquake.

‘Your voice is so strangely familiar, ol’ one.’ The brother muses.

‘I’d have almost sworn by God that I’ve heard that voice before.’ The sisters looked at each other, and then shake their heads in unison.

‘Oh, come on now, I’m everywhere in this little world, riding in this taxi, and this town is so small, when a cab driver buys a bag of peanuts in the street, they compose a little song about him.’ He threw a grin and started tuning the car stereo, searching for a suitable station. He settled for one. He hummed to the song.

Dem waan I fi come to deh burial

But dis man a no come a no one funeral

Yet deh man claim say him a di general

‘Yeah, General Brute!’ the 49-50 sister exclaimed. ‘You have his voice.’

‘Hahaha..!’ the old man guffawed. ‘I’d almost believe it myself, about this General, Conqueror of the British Empire, Last King of Scotland, the one and only president of this country, but riding in a cab? Funny thing, isn’t it?’ he grinned, and from his voice he could have been pointing out the shortest way to get to get out of town.

‘Yeah, very funny indeed,’ the brother observes, ‘the General’s life is shrouded in mystery. We don’t know if he’s dead or alive. It’s only when he fools around that we get to know that he’s still in charge of this country.’

‘You’ve heard the rumours about his ruthless killing? They say that, two days ago, he drowned all cripples and street beggars into the sea. That he lured them that he was going to entertain them at the State House, and poor souls, bundled into trucks and tossed into the sea for the fishes to feast on!’ the dressed-in-rage sister explains.

The old man tensed a moment, but attempts to defend what he felt were necessary evils. ‘Perhaps it was because the Queen of England, her brother Briton Hood, and international AMF visiting the country and the General didn’t wish his ‘extinguished’ guests to witness ten million underbelly crooks pretending to be beggars.’

‘Killing innocent souls?’

‘The means justifies the end.’ The old man went on. ‘I myself decry the soaring number of children in our streets, I will personally recommend a statue to be set up, and a title, the Knight and Preserver of the Kingdom, to whoever can invent a painless way of turning these brats into useful members of the commonwealth.’

‘Brutal and gullible General!’ the brother went on, ‘couldn’t even address the queen properly with dignity at the state dinner. Just listen to his speech last night on State TV: “thank you disgusting guests, ladies under gentlemen, Mr Queen sir, before I undress you, may I open the windows for the fart climate to go out.” and when they were opened, the fool cracked his sick joke about Edward de Verre, the 17th Earl of Oxford, who was so embarrassed after he passed wind when bowing before Queen Elizabeth I that he left England and travelled abroad for seven years. When eventually he plucked courage to return, the Queen welcomed him and said, ‘‘my lord, we had forgotten the fart.’’’

It was such an uproarious joke that their faces turned a little lighter, and they all screamed with amusement. The dressed-in-rage sister cracked so hard she had to hold her heaving chest as a trickle of tears squirted from her eyes and emptied down into the raised corners of her cheeks.

‘And we Africans say British his-story is boring?’ the old man cut in, humming to the refrain coming from his car stereo.

Dem want I to come a dem funeral

Dem claim say dem a di general

‘And how about the one that the CNN journalist asked him, whether he was cannibal, as reported by the western media, and he replied that he didn’t like eating human flesh because it tasted too salty!’ the sister added to the general mirth.

The brother goes on, ‘I love the one that when he heard about the Russians going to the moon, he directed our leading astronauts to invent a rocket that would take them (and our country into the light of scientific advancement) into the sun. And when he was informed that, the rocket would melt under the sun’s intense heat, he advised them not to travel during the day, but fly by night, that way, the sun would be sleeping and cold!”

‘I think the great things happen at night, in the moonlight, including scientific advancement, because the moon is more important than sun; it gives light at night when light is needed; but sun gives light during the day when light is not needed!’ the old man added.

They stopped to let the lights change at General Brutus road junction. A cocktail of humdrum din and clamouring voices, dashing pedestrians, eager to cross the street, idlers watching everything in the street, and inside the car, the scents of body sweat and polluted fumes from the exhaust made the atmosphere in the street almost visible.

A Hummer, driven by a very sophisticated looking youth, stopped next to them, and is playing very loud Wailing Souls song Mass Charley Ground. It’s an ear-splitting statement that leaves them to re-assess society’s anxiety with the youth and loud music. Perhaps they heard too much wailing souls in music their parents danced to before they were born, and by playing loud music, were declaring what their parents missed.

This noise juxtaposed with what was on other side of street, two mass choirs in black and white robes. They sang hysterically, their wailing voices like wounded angels, pleaded to the wrath of God to smite a sinning universe. The attempt was glorious, but all around them, people were preoccupied with pressing earthly cares, looking trodden and weary of feelings.

‘Com duon Fadduh, com don!’ begged the preacher. ‘Dis world-o na be my home, I’m jus’ passim by!’

‘This poor people, who, who…,’ the old man mused, ‘who’re so busy worrying about the next world that they can’t live in this one! Just see all these idlers and hypocrites in every street.’

‘Brother, man!’ the brother admonishes, ‘your talents are wasted as a grumbling taxi driver; you really must join the army of our Lord.’

‘The Army of the Lord?’ he smiles, ‘but I’m the General in the Army of the Lord, only on undercover assignments!’

‘You must confess, and declare publicly, brother.’ The brother forcefully puts in, his Martin Luther tone having come back.

The dressed-in-rage sister says, ‘this is more than a spiritual warfare my brother, you must declare to the world that you’ve booked an express first-class to Zion!’

‘We desire eternal life—but most of us want it here on earth, not in heaven.’ The old man replies.

‘We can build our little heaven down here, if we allow the Spirit of the Lord to dwell upon us,’ the 49:50 sister offered. But the old man half-shook his head, still unconvinced why the word Lord shouldn’t be kept within the precepts of a church like other words inside the bedroom!

The preacher then waved his hand and called to someone in the crowd, ‘You mustn’t let the doors of heaven shut upon you! You must plant a seed! You must give generously! And yeah, nobody leaves here till we have a hundred dollars!’

The old man watched, and no longer speaking an unnecessary word to his passengers. ‘No wonder He didn’t hesitate to use a whip on those who were defiling and turning His house into a den of idlers.’ He mused, his eyelashes twitching, they couldn’t tolerate seeing wolves in sheep clothing with a cosmetic tongue designed to confuse the gullible. Yet he knew where the carcass was, there will the eagles be gathered. He turned back to his music and hummed to it.

Let deh dead bury dem dead

I’m a living man, ‘ave got work to do

‘The light has changed, brother.’ The brother nudged him.

‘Oh, has it?’ He said, as if he had not been conscious of it. To evince surprise at his passenger’s impatience was part of his PR benevolence.

Before a fly could blink twice, they were at their 4th Brutus Street destination, their car appearing round the corner with noisy threats of speed. ‘Here we go,’ the brother breathed briefly, ‘behold the monastery and the house!’ He pointed with finality, indicating with his finger, first to the left and then to the right like he was giving the positions of two new planets.

‘Thank you very much, may you be blessed abundantly.’ The brother wished him and they turned to go. There was an embarrassed moment from the 49:50 sister who thought the old man deserved more than just ‘blessed abundantly’. She couldn’t bear the thought of breaking an old heart like the way one would throw a cigarette you were through with.

‘Perhaps you’d still pray for me, my most excellent accomplished sister, for heaven to rain sweet odours on me.’ The old man, as if reading her thoughts, suggested to her as she were leaving.

They delayed their voyage again, and for another moment, they meditated between silence and speech. Then the brother after studying the air to the left and to the right of the street, seemed to be in agreement with the suggestion, that there was no harm in throwing an old man a few left-over blessings.

And they all disappeared into the big house from another century, the old man tagging along, deliberately and with measured steps. It did look like a monastery, but only in age and simplicity about it. They made through the main door, there must have been more than five bedrooms in that old house, judging by the space the hallway boasted of.

There was an old prophetess sitting in a raised chair in the middle of the sitting room. Her countenance changed as soon as her eyes met the old man’s. ‘I don’t like surprises, children,’ she observed. ‘And from the look of things, I can see fear.’ She looked at them. Her eyes went quick and fast to the old man, darting as if she was troubled there wasn’t time to look, for without moving her head at all, she looked at them—at all the three of them at one time.

Someone knocked loudly at the back of the house. Before the prophetess could stand, the 49:50 sister had sighed a soft excuse and was gone to investigate the noise. She returned shortly with a cheered up face, a faint flush on her cheeks, and sixty years lifted from her shoulders. She was fondly holding the hands of the newcomer, a man, whom before he could properly be introduced; the gun stared at his face.

The old man had pulled out a revolver. He used the other hand to tear off the mask on his face, and warned brashly at the new arrival: ‘Don’t even dare!’ Their initial shock instalment was the sight of the gun; the aftershock was when they finally realised who he really was. Mortal fearful faces full of OMG followed and filled the room. They stood arrested with fear and fright and for a few moments, remained still, looking down in that gloomy direction where all dreadful faces looked for respite.

‘Holy Moses, General!’ A sigh escaped the prophetess.

‘What the …!’ cried the new entrant.

When you find yourself in a backstreet building at the beginning of the year and see faces that are not as other faces, you can bet your million dollars that you are looking at faces that have come face to face with the face of General Brute. That is what happened back there, as soon as they registered and digested who the messenger of wet news was, now standing in their sitting room, with a pointed gun, and face to face with three sisters, a brother, an old prophetess and worse, the Rebel Chief of the Lord’s Liberation Army, a religious rebellion that kidnapped babies still suckling and strapped to their mothers backs, to go fight in the forest in the name of the Lord!

A deathly silence fell over the room. The brother and the three sisters are obviously in despair over their careless chit-chat back in the car, behind the back of the General, even when he had been right in front of them. After a while the General turns matter-of-factly to the Rebel Chief: ‘how many bodyguards are out?’

‘Seven.’ The Rebel Chief says, and then goes into a silence like that which saturates a cathedral after a service. ‘But they’ll swarm all over this place if I don’t show up in ten minutes.’ He added.

‘Don’t worry about your soldiers; do you think they know their behinds from the holes in the ground? I doubt there is a brave one in the bunch.’ The General dismissed. ‘But just in case, push comes to shove, no one moves, no one gets hurt, am I clear?’ he went on in clear as day orders. The silence of the next few seconds must have been louder than the sound of all the music ever played by the youth since time immemorial.

‘How foolish was I?’ the prophetess cried, like a maidservant remembering half-an-hour too late the water tap that she left running in the bathroom tub.

‘Old woman, your guardian angel didn’t warn you in your visions, did he? Your world just coming to an end this way!’ the General mocked. ‘I’m sure we can all come into some understanding. The gun I’m holding is just to remind you who is in charge.’

They stood in respected awe and listened without answering back, for to contradict the General was a death sentence in itself; he was rumoured to have killed more men in a year than a mortar could do in a decade.

‘The scriptures say,’ he went on unheedingly, ‘“reap what you sow, for thou shalt eat thy bread by the sweat of thy brow”, because, if you always eat bread not from your own sweat it’s just tasteless. Brothers, why are you reaping where you never sowed? Brother, you have been measured, weighed and found wanting.’

The prophetess starts shaking but after a second she restrains herself and proclaims, ‘this is not how it ends, General, for the cherubs have spoken to me, in visions and they don’t make mistakes. They’ve chosen me to have a blessed birth to a reincarnation of St. Elizabeth who’ll usher in our Lord to fight the Armageddon and end the times. You wouldn’t wish to meddle with that eternal plan, would you?’

The General smiles, ‘if all men could have power to strike like lightening, as the heavens does, then the skies above would never be silent, for we’d abuse our skies for nothing but strike vengeful lightening. It’s consoling that that power is only vested in the hands of lenient heaven, which with its fast and furious force, tears to shreds the unbreakable and bulky rock, as swiftly as a soft siltstone. But man, mortal man, dressed in a diminutive power, doesn’t even know what he claims he knows, his naughty nature, like a bull in a china shop, amuses himself in such subterfuge and sham before high heaven, and causes the cherubs to weep, who, if they had our faces, would all have laughed themselves mortal!’

‘If what I hear is true of you General, then I’m afraid good wombs have borne bad sons.’ The prophetess said sadly.

The General agreed, ‘not only have good wombs borne bad sons, indeed, not only have the rains from heaven nurtured the ear of the corn and nourished the scent of the rose, but also strengthened the thorn and fed potency to the poisonous nightshade. That’s why the hypocrite who supposes they can have the best of both worlds, by assimilating good and evil is merely feeding the virus in their heart, for they are false already, and there’s no truth in them.’

Finally the Rebel Chief cleared his throat, ‘we are in a war General, I fight beside the Word, and you, with the Sword. The blood we aspire to shed is mutual. By the Word of my mouth and by the Sword of thy hand, whoever gets the other first, I pray to high heaven, and even I, to forgive them. And if there is such a place prepared for those that die in honour, I pray that when he falls, his weary soul may merit such a right to be with the seraphim.’

The General was prepared for this outburst: ‘How cowardly men crawl under the long arm of the law, while hypocrites play hide and seek with eyes of heaven! How some men devour into other’s narcissism, while egotism abstains in their impiety.’

But the Rebel Chief wasn’t giving up: ‘If you have come to cut a deal with me, then I must disappoint you, for I’m not up for grabs. You can take me in. You have me. You can finish me off. But the Lord’s Army is bigger than just me. For every one of me, there are hundreds of them,’ he pointed the sisters and the brother, ‘the Lord’s my Shepherd!’

© Gideon Chumo http://myroundsquare.blogspot.com

Your votes are in and this week’s Story of the Week is…

Made in Somalia by Waga Odongo. Read it below.

Congratulations Waga!

Would you like your story to feature here, please send in your work to blogs@storymojaafrica.co.ke. Go here to see submission guidelines. We will be awarding one of our readers and contributors every month, so be sure to send in your work or comment on the featured stories.

Do you have any ideas about how to make your weekly reading more fun? Please send your suggestions to juliet@storymojaafrica.co.ketoday. Join us here on Monday for the next batch of stories and be sure to vote for the next Story of the Week.

Made in Somalia by Waga Odongo

I was going to Eastlands. It comes from Eastlands. It is manufactured and disseminated from Eastlands. Its heart is here: creative vibrant and often deviant. Fast changing, unstructured aural graffiti. It awaits shipment to the suburbs. Its eagerly assimilated edicts usually delivered via the pervasive medium that is urban music. Genge.

Eastlands is the lexicographical authority of the new generation in all that’s Sheng. Language stopped expanding. Like the economy it is shrinking. The part of it we use at least. More communication less words.  The average teenager’s ramblings sound like a karaoke mix of popular songs choruses. Imitative and incoherent to the point of inarticulacy. Less personal effort, more interaction. But I wasn’t going to that Eastlands.

Eastlands also happens to have the misfortune of being the site of an army airbase. That’s right an army airbase.  After the heroics of 1982, the air force was reincarnated as an aerial division of the army that specialized in aerial acrobatics for entertainment. A sort of Jester up there, in the air.  The only worse idea than that is putting gas canisters outside a supermarket store. In case of war, it is a prime target and with the large civilian population just adjacent to it there will be blood.

Which genius decided to put a secondary school in an Air force base? Or is the Air force’s main defence against enemy attack a civilian shield? Our air force’s insignia interestingly is a bull’s-eye. I have no military experience outside the realm of videogames but I tend to think that in a dogfight* it will be easier for enemy pilots to aim for a plane that has been marked with a target.  What is the point of trying to camouflage a plane then painting a target on it? But I wasn’t going to that Eastlands either.

I was going to Eastleigh. Not the one in Hampshire UK. But the one in Somalia. Somalia’s commercial capital.

The baby in the matatu was screaming. Again. She had lungs like Michael Phelps. And made a sound like a cat thrown into a posho mill. Even in a number 9 matatu most of which offer an enhanced audio experience you could hear her. I was ready to pay her mother with Taxi fare to get off the bloody Matatu and get a cab when an ingenious idea hit me. Can’t someone just start a transport company that does not permit children under the age of twelve? They will have a customer for life in me.

I hate children and we got there just as I had finished reading doctor Mengele’s guide to self sterilization. The conductor got out. They always do. To direct traffic. No self respecting Matatu tout sits through a traffic jam in Eastleigh. It is professional negligence of duty. Punishable by cold stares from the paying patrons. To be a number 9 matatu tout you must be an amateur traffic policeman who can untangle this Gordian knot. Traffic in Eastleigh slow. Continental drift is actually faster than traffic in Eastleigh.

Eastleigh has all the pretensions of being a city with none of the conveniences of one. The sewerage system is overflows when it rains. The road network is imaginary in the crucial areas and crime is through the leaky roof. How did the first Somali settlers here convince their brothers to follow them here? It must have gone like this: My brothers we have found the perfect place, the planning is a mess, water is a luxury, roads are sparse, and the government stopped bothering about it. It is just like home!

Somalia has problems. Not like ours. It is the poster child for failed states. The chart topping, ever present disaster from whence only bad news flows from. A locus of economic, political and social fault lines that regularly give in. The problems have become so interconnected with their neighbours that they are irresolvable alone. Of course none of this is Somali’s fault. You would be hard-pressed to find a more honourable and dignified grouping in Kenya. It is the Italians.

The Romans were great administrators but their larger province of Italy was totally rubbish at it. The British were the best at it. The French were between extremes: one minute they were bizarrely malevolent (they declared that everyone in Haiti was a slave and saddled them with a 106 year debt) and across the pond they were benign to Senegal. Israel is still practicing on the Palestinians.  Belgians were the worst. Violent, oppressive and extremely petty. Poor Zaire might never recover from her mad scientist experiment in administration. In fact Belgium was so bad at colonization that Germany occupied them twice in the twentieth century to show them how things ought to be run. Colonies basically copy their owners approach to administration.

The Italians have had so many rulers last millennium and more administrations than Uganda within the same period. Coalition governments are a house of cards. Thus they rarely respect authority. What really is the point of obeying the new rules if Hannibal is coming across the Alps to impose a new set of commandments? Why listen to Il Duce Mussolini when the Allies are coming from Sicily to hang him from a lamp post? What is the point of haranguing Berlusconi on his mistresses when he is just a fleeting prime minister? They passed on this disdain for authority to their subjects. That does not however mean that the Italians do not respect all authority. They respect the Mafia who have neatly filled the void the government left.

The part of Somalia that is broken is Italian Somalia. British Somaliland has frequent elections and a working government. French Somalia (Djibouti) also seems to be running with only occasional hitches. The Italian part is a warzone, which is the world’s favourite litter box for toxic waste an ungovernable, unforgiving and barren wasteland. A place where the cruelty of Mother Nature is only surpassed by the cruelty of Man. Guns here are the national symbol.  A place where children spray you with magazines before they can actually read one.  It should change its name to Pistolvania. And I was in Eastleigh its commercial capital.

Dust. Everywhere. Clings on everything. When it rains it forms mud an even bigger nuisance. Eastleigh is sight of eco-terrorism. Scorched Earth policy. There is no tree in sight. The only green in sight is from the greenback of the money changers. And Khat of course. Khat is to Somalis what Vodka is to Russians what guns are to Americans:  dangerous obsession that adversely affects the community yet no one will ban it.

There are rumours that Osama has his fingers in the Somali mess. Iran possibly. Taliban probably. Two decades of civil war, dislocation, drought, disasters, and degradation have made Somalia a Petri dish of the fungus that is terrorism and recently piracy. Only when al-Qaeda stepped in and begin training Al-shabab did Somalia stagger back to our collective consciousness of the world. Trapped between nowhere and nothing the people have taken to the ocean.

These pirates are entrepreneurial terrorists. The ocean is an escape a ticket out of this desolate place that claims millions. It is an Eldorado where riches abound in plenty, a chance at decent life a chance to escape Somalia.

Most of the ransom money finds its way to Kenya. Faced with an influx of unchecked Somali immigration the collective and vindictive Kenyan knee jerk reaction has been overwhelmingly racist. No one dares mention that Biashara Street looks like the cast of a Bollywood blockbuster. But everyone talks of checking Somali Immigration. They forget that the largest direct foreign investor to Kenya now is probably Somalia. Dollars are dollars whether they come from Mogadishu or Washington.  In fact Somali dollars are better; they come with no strings attached. Plus they do not even need infrastructure before pumping the money in. Look at Eastleigh. It has all the conveniences of an outside toilet in Afghanistan yet the money keeps coming. It shows how overwhelmingly Xenophobic we are, forgetting that a section of our population are ethnic Somalis. In fact when it comes to Somalis Kenya has conducted a dreaded campaign of extermination in the sixties and seventies.

The Shifta war was largely ideological war with Kenyatta and Selasie using British tactics of concentration camps and state of emergency to terrorise the communist backed Shiftas.  They wanted all Somalis under one country. Same thing Hitler wanted with all German speakers. One nation, one people all united by the Kalashnikov with Khat as the staple food.  The ideals of the war were lost and most Shiftas resorted to petty banditry. Our military was attacked again last week in the north eastern border. I’m beginning to think we need to hire a militia to protect our military.

Eastlands is where cultures meet. Where interest free Islam meets conscience free capitalism and somehow in an inexplicable merging of what appears to be polar opposites and succeeds at it. It is where the minarets of Eastleigh gently yield to steeples of Pumwani.  Where the east, Muslim, nomadic united and Somali, meet the west, fractured and Kenyan and co exist in an uneasy peace.

Eastleigh dresses a large part of Nairobi. This is interesting because majority of the women doing the selling hardly bother to keep their Fashion ala mode. They all prefer the black veil, clandestine and discreet. They offer you choice which themselves they cannot choose from. Like drug dealers they rarely use their product. Strictly for selling, not for personal consumption.

But I was here for the food. The glorious, palate savoring, mix of cultures food. Food is the most fun you can have fully clothed.  Eastleigh being the labyrinthine mix of culture is the perfect place to get good food.  Exotic food.  I was here for the goat Biriani. This goat Biriani is for my money the best, nectar and ambrosia fit for a Greek God.

To be honest the Goat Biriani I ate that day deserved to go out and hold public addresses, meetings get-togethers, where it would be the keynote speaker encouraging all other fledgling chefs to be all they can be. Yes you can. It was all that good food is supposed to be messy, lean and exotic. Eating something else is under utilizing your taste buds. Honestly after this meal you feel like everything else tastes like the swab from a pap smear of someone with advanced ovarian cancer.

And that’s the point of Eastleigh. It may lead to an increase in proliferation of guns, smuggling of goods, increased crime, buying up of all our property but we ought to keep them. For the goat Biriani if for nothing else. The secret of the Biriani? The goat is from Somalia. Made in Somalia. Or as my host told me “Mad in Somalia.”

©Waga Odongo 2010

Your votes are in and this week’s Story of the Week is…

Daughter of Man by Alex Mutua. Read it below.

Congratulations Alex!

Would you like your story to feature here, please send in your work to blogs@storymojaafrica.co.ke. Go here to see submission guidelines. We will be awarding one of our readers and contributors every month, so be sure to send in your work or comment on the featured stories.

Do you have any ideas about how to make your weekly reading more fun? Please send your suggestions to juliet@storymojaafrica.co.ketoday. Join us here on Monday for the next batch of stories and be sure to vote for the next Story of the Week.

Daughter of Man by Alex Mutua

Emmy, she was six and half foot tall. Her skin, soft and fair, such that one would think it was chocolate in a texture of cotton. Her long, silky and shining black hair reflected the bright, large eyes. Her soft, tender lips, that any man would lust to kiss, bulged like two smokies walking simultaneously on a face plastered by God. Her long legs and mango like breast were exaggerated by her hardly 20 centimeters waist. She was a moving shadow of unbeatable beauty. She looked at the lethal tokerem revolver; drained of emotion and feeling placed it on her sky soft cheek and pulled the trigger.

-

The dusk of November 1989 came with a blessing. As the sun dawdled in an old man pace to finish the routine of a day and cross a cloudless summer sky a small angelic cry pierced through the door of a remote local dispensary in Chache village. Mutua rose to his feet and applauded in whisper, ‘I’m a man.’ Then he walked toward the counter. He was carrying a bundle of clothes and a small flowered bag filled with baby’s clothes. At the age of twenty four he was declared a father.

‘Congratulations Sir.’

‘Oh.’

‘You are father to a bouncing baby girl.’

‘Thanks.’

‘We are sorry the caesarean affected your wife’s womb.’

‘What?’

‘That might be the only child.’

He broke down and wept for the love, the despair and the deep rooted sorrow that gripped him. He wanted more children.

From that day on, he placed his daughter under strict surveillance.

-

In 1940 there were three transgressions any African woman would do, at least four punishable sins. One, make a decision. Two, question the fathers. Three, be a woman. And four, give birth to girls only. This was such a grevious  sin that would sentence a woman to divorce or return to her people.

-

The decision to take Emmy to university was not received well by the members of the clan and Mutua was called to explain in detail why on earth he was sending their daughter to Nairobi to school and exposing her to civilization.

-

Sadly, I live in a society that feels threatened by a civilized ‘woman’, where marriage is seen as the one ultimate thing a woman should strive to achieve. In this society women follow a predictable pattern stair of life. Traditions against women are rife; from Female Genital Mutilation, wife battering , sexual assault, professional discrimination, office mistreatment, domestic violence…

-

Brimming with a fierce vengeance, nothing could stop the old man, not even torrents that were pounding on the earth mercilessly. He took his stuff, placed it on the back seat of his aged Audi and sped toward Nairobi Women’s Hospital. His mind drifted back two decades ago, and a lonely single tear strolled lazily down the wrinkled old face. He had lost many things, but the loss of his wife was a blow that left an open scar in an old man heart. His love was now entirely focused on his one and only daughter. He had vowed to give his daughter all the education and that he did. He could not believe that his daughter attempted to take her beautiful life.

He knew Emmy as one of the strongest soul, a character she had inherited from her mother Rebecca. That emotional part of her was concealed beneath her elegance and serious round face. He had not seen her cry for a long time. He wondered who had broken his daughter to the point of her attempted suicide. He wished death to that son of Satan!

-

24th August 2009 was the precise day Emmy reported to start her internship at VBS (Voice Broadcasters Station). Vibrant, proud and radiant, a smile emanating from a blameless face. There was this desire to live, to win and to conquer that ignited a fire inside her. That day she first reported and found the Managing Editor at his desk he applauded her for the good spirit. She was briefed and deployed to the Bureau Office in Kibera. She was to work with Otieno a.k.a Otti, her camera man and she hated him at first sight.

-

Civilization has brought with it gender accidents and on a war zone trying to fight for equity and equality, a section of beautiful women have found themselves victims of unworthy harassment or brand discrimination at work place or decision making.

Anyway…

Otieno a.k.a Otti the vulture, was an ugly coal black stout man filled with garish pride, a creation blunder of some sort. He was slow, filthy mouthed and respecter of no woman. He had a tiny head, big slanting eyes, red lips and a mountainous bulging chest due to the many years of going to the gym. His small legs protruded out of a deformed body and from far he looked like a walking stature of a charcoal sack. The only reason they kept him at VBS was due to the reason that he was a good camera man. That made him more arrogant and overly proud.

‘Gosh, am I gonna work with this freak.’ she thought aloud.

‘Who are you calling freak? Ugly moron!’

‘What?’

He looked at her with spite, that was enough insult to the pride of Otti the vulture. No woman had ever insulted him and gone scot free, none! Something was in Otti’s mind, and from then on he stalked her through the station, waiting for the right moment to teach this daughter of man a lesson.

-

VBS is a large Media House situated in the outskirts of east Nairobi with over  500 employees who reported daily, some for duty , some to pass time and do their things and some too catch up with dead lines so when Otti slipped into the offices on the evening of 29th November no one noticed. On register he was off duty and Emmy driven by an innocent desire, had decided to extend her time and research on a matter she was interested and thought would make a story. As she walked toward block F, Otti saw her and followed her.

-

Diplomacy is a language of thugs, a politic of deceit and creamed corruption of lie hidden in sweetness of words. I like guns, the only remedy to diplomatic blunders of all times. In a world like I would propose, women especially beautiful women would be granted the right to guns…but before you judge me ….wait!

-

Emmy closed the door only to see Otti smiling behind the creaky door.

‘Did you miss me bitch?’

‘Otti, what do you want?’

The clenched teeth said a dangerous story. Red fiery eyes declared that this man’s intention was mired by the darkest of wickedness. For the first time she felt intimidated by a hopeless situation. He hit her, knocking her unconscious, then he tore her clothes off and raped her.

Five hours later when she woke from the death sleep, she yelled and attracted a crowd of fifty night workers of VBS in a critical mess of bad time. As she walked away ashamed and angry, she felt haunted by a killing quilt mixed with an horrible degrading feeling of worthlessness. She wanted to shut her self down like a robot but death came closer and whispered.

‘You are dirty Emmy, commit suicide.’ Two weeks later she was still not dead.

-

On Friday, 15th December, a case was filed in Makadara courts but Otti had pulled some strings and mobilized a family of witnesses who proved that he was in Kitale the hour of the incident.

Law will never consider an affirmative narration of the whole truth unless proved to the judge to no doubt. Emmy had taken a shower on the night of despair destroying strong evidence. She was only armed with word of truth. The judge could get a grip of this case because he was another man guided by written words of law. In his conclusion ,the evidence was too circumstancial for him to judge and convict Otieno. He was set free.

With loss, a first grader in a cruel world, Emmy slipped quietly underground with a terrible feeling, a feeling that haunts violated mortals and lingers on like a wrong smell that belittles. Only God , who has keys to the deeper shelves of a woman heart would champion the healing of a tigeress… a shot staved tigerress. To her assets she added a Mexican Tokerem revolver. Guilt was killing her so she tried the Mexican fire baptizer on herself on the night of her twentieth birthday.

-

When Mutua walked inside Nairobi hospital he was trembling not from the low freezing temperature outside but from a fiery rage. He broke at his daughter bedside and wept. Emmy looked at her father, the old frail man, and remembered the tender loving day, the sun looked golden and the moon always paraded between the chorated patterns of galaxies emitted hope.

Her father would hold her and speak lovingly.

‘Emmy you are all I’ve got.’

A strong anger boiled and she sat up  to talk to her father. Her father looked into her eyes and in tears he shook her violently.

‘Dotty this is not your bullet…’’ he used her childhood nick name.

She looked at the old man and felt some sense in those words.

‘Get well quickly.’  She felt the anger.

-

Emmy boarded Matatu via route 34 toward Eastlands and when she showed up at VBS, it was unbelievable. The editor in chief was taken aback.

It was a hot afternoon and every body was still talking in whispers. The meeting turned to a welcome party. Emmy remained composed trying to figure out range and the perfect gift. She was watching every body and looking out for Otti. She saw him squeeze himself behind the Magazine Chief. The party was over as Emmy walked toward Otti the vulture. He saw her and smiled.

‘Miss me Otti?’

‘Whhaat?’ he closed his eyes laughing, when he opened them he was looking at the nozzle of the Tokerem. He froze.

‘Do you know how to use that?’

‘Yes.’

Bang! She shot him between the legs. Every body  else fell to the floor frightened by the blast.

Bang! She shot him on the shoulder

Bang! Another bullet flew toward his left leg.

‘That for my father, and my life.’

The hall was dead quiet. Emmy threw the gun to the floor and walked out undisturbed, toward Central Police Station. Her soul was appeased and her dignity restored by one percent.

© Alex Mutua 2010