Eight to nine years is the cultural limit for a boy to spend nights under the same roof with his mom. Aged about the same, I bade goodbye to nights in ‘our house in the middle of a maize farm’ with both nostalgia and excitement. A kilometer or more away from our home, deep in the bushes, stood an old shack of mud and reed thatch. This shed was to be my next night lodgings for some years to come. It was such a hastily build house with little regard to comfort, aesthetics or security. It had gaping holes in the walls and under normal circumstances; it was not fit for human habitation. But we were boys, and boys are supposed to be tough.
This shack was a temporary shelter for some workers who were making bricks in our farm some years back. It was devout of any luxury, including doors and windows. Without improving its situation, we embraced it with gusto, for it gave us some freedom from our mothers, albeit at night only. It also gave us a sense of manhood.
Together with our cousins, who were older than me by a couple of years, the ten of us and sometimes other village boys made up the proud if not devilish occupants of that house. Not that it was much of a house in the modern sense of the word. It was a space surrounded by four walls and a roof. The logs of wood that made up the fireplace and the heaps of sugar cane peelings and general dirt interrupted the emptiness. There was a rope along one wall that hoisted our clothes. Dust was prominent on the floor and if you stood long enough in one spot, a hundred fleas could climb your feet in a minute. I used to imagine they were climbing to my heart and used to hop from one spot to the next to prevent them from climbing all the way. I have never seen any bigger fleas than those in my life again.
A normal child would have contracted colds in the prevailing conditions of that shack but not us, we were just so adapted. Looking back, I am sometimes nonplussed.
Our beddings were bare cow skins that we spread round the fireplace which was in the middle of the house. Occasionally, a boy could roll in sleep and get burned by the naked flames given we just slept on the empty floor without beds. In the morning, making our ‘beds’ was a very easy affair, you just pick the thread-bare blankets, shake the dust a bit and hang them on the wall. That done, you fold the cow skin and depart for wherever you were going. When you enter that house, you could hear startled fleas jumping on the skins. That house was rather eerie in the dark silence but the sound of jumping fleas occasionally interrupted it.
Subsequently, jiggers were not infrequent in our feet and we therefore made it a habit of dipping our legs in the cattle dip wash when we took our cattle there on Saturdays.
Our other companions were the giant rats that ran all over the roof making some quirky sounds as they did so. They were brown with long tails. We christened them ‘Geoffrey’ after a certain old man who made a living trapping moles in people’s farms and surviving entirely by eating them. He never ate anything else and kept all his money in a hole in his house. Without his knowledge, a rat bore her young ones in his little piggy bank and ate all the money. One day, he wanted to count his money and put his hand to pull out his bounty but instead pulled out baby rats and shreds of all his savings. He went to the local shops, bought rat poison and committed suicide. Could it be that whoever liveth by rats died by them? Anyway that was Geoffrey and the ‘geoffreys’ in our god forsaken hut.
Since that hovel was without doors or windows to keep away the cold, and neither did we have adequate beddings for warmth, we made up with lighting a big fire every evening. Wood was abundant for we literally lived in the woods. When maize was green in the farms, we would go stealing to roast in the evenings. In spite of all the discomforts in that house, which apparently I did not notice at the time, we had fun. We competed in all sorts of stuff. Some funny, some dangerous. One regular competition was the amount of extra food one could steal from the neighboring farms. We went stealing sugarcanes, bananas, sweet potatoes, pineapples and any edibles from the neighboring tribe of Kissii most nights. It was dangerous but then boys should not be scared.
We ate all these in that shack. I remember a boy could eat more than ten roasted cobs of maize and live to tell the story, albeit with farts and nasty belches. Whenever we went hunting or fishing, we would cook the food in our little house in the bushes. We called that house ‘ikulu’, Swahili for ‘State House’. It was a State House indeed.
My mom hated the smell of fish, which meant we had neither place nor pans to cook our fish whenever we caught them. So we would steal her pans at night, since they were kept outside her house, cook with them in our shack, thoroughly clean them of any telling smell and stealthily return them at night. You should have seen us tip-toeing back home in the dead of night with pans in hand!
The only consequence of eating fish in our shack was attracting red ants at night. Whenever we cooked fish, they visited us the following night. They were such a menace. What do you do in case ants visit you at night in bed? Simple. You just sleep still. No turning, zero movement. They will crawl all over your warm body thinking you are just another dead log of wood. That is what we used to do and they would not bite us.
In those days, there was nothing as homework or assignments. We spent our evenings getting spoiled and warped by our older brats. When we were home with mom, we used to make some cigars by rolling ash in old exercise books or newspaper and smoking them. Ouch! The ash in the cigars could choke badly. When we graduated to State House, we also graduated to real cigars. Not Havana cigars, no. There were some tobacco growing wild in a part of our farm and we would pick the leaves, dry them and make our own cigars (in our culture, it is a taboo to steal tobacco, yeast or honey. You simply die if you dare). We smoked these cigars in the evenings as we chatted by the fire just like any English gentleman would. Whenever we had some little money, we would buy real cigarettes and smoke, but this was reserved for days when we went out dancing with girls. (A story for another day)
Drinking traditional hooch was not much restricted for kids. Whenever there was a function, food and drink was the order of the day. Every other gathering of more than three individuals was an excuse for a pot of beer, otherwise called busaa in that side of the world. Even in fundraisings, however rare, busaa was served in tins that earlier packed cooking fats. Us kids drank ourselves silly, cried and soothed ourselves to sleep. Nobody had time for us, everybody was tipsy. Whenever there was too much hooch and likely to get expired, the treat was extended to cows, donkeys and goats. We would pour gallons upon gallons of hooch in the manger and they would drink. You haven’t ever seen a drunken cow! They moo, run, jump, fight, sleep, break fences, roll on the ground… drunk cows are such a crazy sight! As if not enough, milk would smell of hooch for a whole week.
We also made our own busaa in State House whenever we itched for a little party. We would drink and dance the whole night by beating improvised drums. We would also learn some new dance moves to be shown off at the next village jamboree.
There were lumberjacks in our small forest some years back. Those guys smoked bhang for lunch, supper and breakfast. They fell trees and lumbered them with such speed I was surprised where they drew their herculean energies from. Holy weed! I learned later. When they were done with the trees, they were magnanimous enough to grow some hemp where they had smoked them. My older cousins knew this for they were recruited to the pot smoking business by the crazy lumberjacks and hence tended the evil crop long after they left.
I remember this well. It was a hot Saturday evening when I decided to pay a visit to our State House. There, I found two of my older cousins and a neighbor dragging on some cigar which was bigger than usual. It was loosely rolled too. They smoked it as they muttered some incomprehensible words. They were quiet and sat in a circle smoking the curious contraption in turns. I was so enthralled by the new breed of cigar I immediately requested to have a puff.
Sitting down, I held the fat cigar with trembling fingers. My cousin told me to inhale it deep as I tap my forehead saying, “animal, be gentle on me’’. I did as instructed. Instantly, I felt my eyes pop out and my head got hot. I touched my head but my hair was stiff and hard and produced some sounds. I rose to stand but I was so dizzy. The world was moving round in circles. I went inside State House and lay down covering myself but the blanket was heavy and I could see some sparks when I touched it. I bolted out and made for home. I could hear the sound I made with my feet loud in my head and the path I was following stood in front of me and blocked my way. My heart was throbbing wild and I fell down. Where I lay I could see some cow dung and I dragged myself to it and started feasting on it. The whole lot. I was going nuts.
My cousin came for me and brought me water in a 5 liter jerry can. I drank it all. I wasn’t getting better. He gave me a piggy back ride to State House and left for home. He came with milk in a kettle. I drank it all. I must have passed out for I woke the following day, still in a daze.
That was my encounter with hemp. Touted to give energy, courage and happiness but it made a cabbage of me.
My mom visited our State House one day to collect the skins that doubled as our mattresses to dry maize. She was shocked of our living conditions but that was not all. Unknown to us, we had slept on a young snake dead. She saw it beneath one of the skins I used to sleep on. On closer scrutiny, it was found out to be a young mamba. The most poisonous snake in the whole of Africa was a biting distance of our naked bodies in our sleep. And its mom and dad could be sharing house with us! I was shocked.
That was the last I saw of State House before petrol was sprayed all round and a match lit. In less than ten minutes, our dear house that almost proved our dead bed was a smoldering heap of ashes!
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