If you stood on the hillock formed by years of dip waste and looked across the road, you would see a path that disappeared into a bush of tall trees and canopies. That is the spring where we drew water for drinking and is also the source of a stream that feeds a swamp that extends downwards to the forest.
Standing on the same mound, if you glanced past the roof of the cattle dip, you would see a cemented area that slopped into a big round brick-and-mortar tank. The open tank collected rainwater to be used in the dip. It was such a feat for us to climb to the top of the high wall of the tank and it was a test of valor to walk round its thin surface, for the tank was full of water and it was so high in case you fell on the land. As we tended our sheep near the dam, we made nooses and trapped toads in the dam, swirl them round and threw them over the roof of the dip to the road. It is cruel but of course it was fun then.
Standing on the same mound and glancing across the roof of the dip to the left of the tank, you saw a hovel surrounded by bananas, three wild fruit trees, guavas and small vegetation. In this house lived an old man who went by a moniker Washobaa! The old dip, the whitened crush, the dam and the tank were solely his territory.
On Thursdays, very early in the morning, I used to hear him cough and exclaim washobaa! as he cleaned the dip, check the level of the dip wash and let in the water from the tank to regulate the dip wash in readiness for dipping cows the following day.
On Fridays and Saturdays, Washobaa! Could be heard coughing and exclaiming Washobaa! as he directed cows and goats in and out of the cattle dip. He would perch on the fence that formed the enclosure of the dip and let in and out the cows and goats, directing with his long herding staff.
All these he did for a pay from the Cheplelwa Co-perative Society that ran and owned the dip, tank and crush, inherited of course from the white settlers. I didn’t know how much he earned but his wife always collected the money on his behalf.
On afternoons, he sat on the tank, sewing and herding his cattle as he coughed and chatted with us.
During droughts, Washobaa! voluntarily cleaned the spring of mud and silt. On rainy days, he made drenches to drain the dirty water from the road to our farm so it does not flow into the spring and muddy it. The dip, crush, spring and tank were all synonymous with him.
Washobaa! was a squatter in the five acre dip farm and that must have accounted to his not being highly regarded in the community and by his peers. He was not despised openly but there was something amiss in his social standing. It was said he wasted his active life chauffeuring white men all over Africa that he ended up missing out on land allocation. Thus he was regarded as a failure and our society openly frowns on failure. Maybe it was this lack of peers that made him befriend us kids, or genuine love for us or maybe that he was simply senile. Whatever that was, he was genial and kind to us and I considered him a true friend. A love that never went unrequited on either sides, to his unfortunate dead.
His house was full of scrap metal and unexplainable metallic objects and contraptions. Apart from herding his borrowed cows, he did other odd jobs that men worth their salt could not touch. He repaired pans, cups, fixed handles for hoes and machetes etc A blacksmith of many years standing! My mom used to hire him for a few shillings to mend our fence and do whatever nobody else knew how to do it. Though not highly regarded, he had his place in the flow of village life. Somehow, he might have been categorized with women, children or morons. Nobody sought his opinion on village matters as a result. Without land or own cows, you had no claim to wisdom in that village.
It didn’t help matters that he was hen-pecked. His wife was haughty, pugnacious and loud. The old man was on her beck and call. They both had loud voices, the wife with shrill soprano voice, well adapted for nagging and the old man with a deep sonorous bass, adapted to hapless murmuring without the spine to stand any ground. You could hear his wife ordering him around and the old man just complaining and obliging. When things came to a head, he will shout ‘washobaa! This woman reminds me of a whiteman’s cow called chesinga that never gave anybody any peace.’ That marked his resignation.
That woman called him ‘old man’ openly. A deprecating term to call one’s husband. In that particular world, wives never referred to their husbands by name or even anything at all and vice versa. In fact, the norm is not calling each other at all. In rare occasions, when a wife is discussing her husband with others, she would refer to him as so and so’s dad or the father of the children. If you would wish to hail your husband and he is some meters away, you simply run to where he is without calling him. On the other hand, when a husband is discussing his wife among his mates, he would simply refer to her as ‘my kids’. The relationship between a husband and wife is a bit awkward and marked by fear, awe and distance.
In the mornings, Washobaa! plodded round the road surrounding our farm, grazing his cows on the road reserve. His wife just sat at home making her hair and drinking her tea endlessly. Three O’clock, he returned his cows home, milked them and the wife sold off all the milk in the market and pocketed all the proceeds.
It was on these rounds grazing his cows where we would meet the old man: us herding our cows in our farm, him herding his on the road. He told us stories of far off lands where he used to drive the white men all over East Africa. He told us of Tororo, Dar-Es Salaam, Bukoba, Moshi and Arusha. He told us of the cultures of all these peoples and many stories about the white men he worked for. The stories filled us with awe and urge to travel all over.
We were very comfortable with Washobaa! because he didn’t have the patronizing airs of other old men. In our Kipsigis culture, old men don’t have time for kids whatsoever. It is even a taboo for a grandchild to touch his grandpa. It is presumed to hasten the grandpa’s death. In fact a grandchild cannot bear a coffin of his/her grandparents.
Washobaa told us fascinating stories about the white men’s culture and habits. That they ate rice,(we ate rice only on X-Mas) beef and drank coffee every day. That their dogs ate meat and biscuits. We thought they were lies but we never doubted Washobaa even for a moment. A dog to eat biscuits and be bought for meat? We wished somehow we could be the white men’s dogs, if only to eat biscuits and meat. That was not all, he told us the white men’s dogs fell sick and were taken to hospital and that they slept inside a house unlike our dogs that slept outside in the cold. He told us they mourn and bury their dogs. Our impression of the white men was a mixture of admiration and disbelief. Our dogs had no houses, ate left-overs and meats of diseased cows and anything dead. I could not get myself to imagine our dog John Boss living in our house, leave alone stepping in there. It is a measure of a dog’s decorum not to go inside the house! Our John Boss was one of the few that met this standard.
The other reason why Washobaa! didn’t have his place in the table of gentlemen had to do with his having spend a long time with white men, a behavior regarded as unmanly. My own grandpa was employed for a brief stint by a white man to cart coffee. His friends had told him that the word ‘boy’ meant ‘a bitch’ in English. A bitch in our Kipsigis language means an uncircumcised woman. An insult without a close equivalent, when hurled at a grown up man. When the white man called him ‘boy’, he slapped the white man, hacked his horse and ran home. Everybody imagined Washobaa! was called a bitch everyday of his working life and he withstood it for money. Worse if you were a chef, your reputation died a natural death in the village. A man sweating in the kitchen, cooking for another man was considered effeminate without an equivalent. In colonial days, a father could commit suicide at the mention that his son was a white man’s cook.
A wizened old man with a bald head, white moustache, grey eyes, tall, fat and clumsy. That was Washobaa! He had a bulging tummy that never receded though his wife fed him on a mean ration. He wore a short and a raincoat without a shirt, however the weather. His old sandals were made of old tires. His clothes were dirty and threadbare and would take you a year trying to trace which was the original color of his short and rain coat. He had patched his clothes with all manner of rags and a collage of threads they looked like a surreal work of art. He walked with a ready thread and needle. Whenever he found a shade, he added a patch to his clothes over another patch even when not torn. His clothes were in a permanent state of disrepair and repair.
Whenever our clothes were torn, he would mend them for us. Much to the chagrin of our mom who detested his misplaced threads. He could mend a white shirt with a read thread, his favorite color. Our mom warned us not to let him sew our clothes but he never could stand us walking with torn clothes. Either it was out of the love for sewing or the love of us or even both. He was particularly fond of me. Whenever his guavas were ripe, he would bring some for me to the grazing fields. Whenever his wife was away, he would let me climb the fruit trees and eat my fill. His wife never allowed anybody around her fruits. He even gave me a banana sucker to plant at home, secretly, for his wife was jealous of letting anybody have a banana in the village. I therefore became the second person to own a banana grove in that village.
Washobaa! was terribly by his cruel wife. Made to work and robbed of all his money. But when he had some money and could afford some hooch, he brought it to the grazing field. His wife could not let him drink any. We would share the hooch with him. How kind! Washobaa! also smoked some of the longest home-made cigars you will ever see in your life. He had a golden lighter that he brought home from retirement; he would roll his cigars meticulously and smoke amidst coughs and more washobaas! He never allowed us to smoke even a puff. No. He told us smoking was for old retired people who had no use for their chests anymore.
His raincoat served as mattress and blanket in his house and therefore Washobaa! had a lot of body lice. Grinding his tobacco stained teeth, his greasy long staff by his side, he would sit in a shade hunting lice and killing them. I helped him at times to spot the bloated red lice in his coat. He snapped life out of them with such finesse I admired him. I wished I had lice of my own to crush them like he did (nauseating to think of it now). Next, he would remove his short and cause a bloodbath to the lice that hid in the hems of his old short. His thumbnails were always red with blood from the lice massacre.
My mom liked him though for he bore no ill against anybody. Whenever there was a beer party at home, she invited him. The proud men of the village would want to chase him but my mom always protected him. He never asked for a stool to sit on, his rain coat was sufficient for the task. His face would drop when drunk and he would pick his staff and tell me to show him his way home. He was my friend so to speak.
What perturbed me though were his eating habits. He put salt and pepper to his tea and everything that he ate. Bread, fruits, anything was not complete without salt and pepper. Consequently, he grew a bush of all sorts of pepper around his house. His was the pepper capital in the village. He made some pepper curry and gave it to out to whoever trusted his hygiene for free. Occasionally, he burned pepper in his little house, to suffocate cockroaches, bed bugs, rats and snakes out of his house. As the whole village sneezed and coughed from the acrid smoke that billowed out of his and blanketed the whole village, he just sat there stoking the fire saying washobaa! after every sneeze. Unmoved. He belonged with pepper.
You can’t understand fully how arcane his eating and drinking habits were till you taste the concoction of juice that he used to make. Whatever fruits were on season, he could not bring himself to eating them as they were. He crushed and blended all the juices however their tastes. He would mix passion fruits, guavas and pineapples etc add sugar, salt, water and of course his pepper. Even wild fruits made it to the brew. Bottled in the myriad of ‘7-Up’, ‘Tarino’ and Schweppes bottles that filled his house, it was ready to drink. He said he never got sick on account of his magic drinks and we believed him because, apart from his signature cough, he was never taken ill, not even once. However my mom’s protestations, we partook of his magic drink whenever we got thirsty in the grazing fields.
One windy afternoon, his house was blown off like chaff. I just heard him shout, “washobaa! My house is gone!” Strewn all over were his few worldly belongings. I feared he might leave for another village, but no, he just built another simple house that afternoon with my help. His wife was away on a drinking spree.
Washobaa! never fell sick but one day, he became bed ridden with an unknown affliction. I visited him often taking him food from mom but he never improved. I wished he would just get well but no. As he was our joint friend with mom, we entreated him to be taken to hospital and finally he agreed. See, he feared that hospitals are places to die and so he feared it. We sought help with a bicycle and he got treatment. His wife did not participate.
The doctor said his ill health was of respiratory nature. Tending cows in the cold and rains seemed to have caught up with him finally. The community was outraged that his wife did not care for him when he was sick yet he had spent all his life working and providing for her. In retrospect, it became evident that the arrangement was not marriage but slavery. It was such a disgrace, unheard of before. A wife to abandon her sick husband? Nobody could bear it.
In spite of the fact that Washobaa! didn’t occupy such a pedestal in the social strata of our village, the ethos and pathos of our people could not allow anybody’s rights to be usurped in such a callous way. Least of all by a woman who is supposed to be somebody’s wife.
Since Washobaa! slept on the floor with his raincoat as a blanket and all, the community built him a descent house and bought him new beddings. His health worsened with each passing month. His wife connived with her stupid sons to bar villagers from seeing him when his health deteriorated. I sneaked in one day when his vixen of a wife was away drinking and what I found was shocking. The beddings we had bought Washobaa! had been taken by his wife and he slept on the floor with his old rags and raincoat. I was distraught. I tried talking to Washobaa! in the dark corner he lay sprawled on the floor but he just lay, occasionally grinding his teeth but could not see me or recognize my voice. I cried and ran home to report my findings to my mom. She went to the village elder and all the villagers were immediately gathered in his house.
The house was by then locked from the outside. Men broke the door and Washobaa! was brought out in a modified stretcher. To everybody’s shock, he was infested with jiggers all over: legs, thighs, tummy, head, neck, mouth and everywhere. He was so emaciated his bones stuck out. Of course he was unconscious. His eyeballs were twisted to a corner. I cried my heart out for him (my eyes are clouded with tears now on this memory I can hardly type).
An ambulance was called for immediately and my dear friend Washobaa! was taken to hospital, siren blazing. Unfortunately, that was to be the last day I was to see him alive. He didn’t make it to hospital and was brought back home, dead! That was the saddest day of my childhood. I had never seen a dead person before and I feared it but the elders told me to see him one last time. I never knew till then that they had noticed my friendship with Washobaa! After the brief ceremony of some prayers as the grave was dug, Washobaa! was tied with a blanket and lowered down his grave by his bananas. No coffin.
His wife was ordered out of the village before night fall and he obeyed. One prominent old man told his wife, eyeball to eyeball, that she won’t live to see the next year for mistreating Washobaa! As she left the village that night, she was bitten by a rabid dog and she died the following week. Nobody mourned her in the village save maybe her kids. I didn’t forgive her, not even now.
I planted a tree at home in Washobaa’s memory that evening. I miss Washobaa, his love and kindness to date even though I know death is no respecter of nostalgia.
For real? this is touching!
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