Sunday, October 31, 2010

Ten Things Women Never Knew about Men and SEX!

1. As he fucks you, that's the time he feels most like fucking another girl.
2. Three minutes of sex can satisfy a man, the rest is for your sake and he hates it!
3. No man despises prostitutes, they know their use
4. 80% of men are sex addicts
5. All men are in a permanent ogling mode. They drool over all the girls they meet from AM to PM: Boobs, legs, bums, lips...given a chance,he can fuck 'em all!
6.You can't EVER satisfy a man. You can give him all nite and in the morning after you have left for work he fucks the housegal. The rule of the game here is called VARIETY!
7.A man experiences a strong feeling of repulsion and shyness immediately after the first ejaculation. That's why he pulls the duvet over himself and faces the other side or switch on the TV or jump out of bed altogether. To him you are used tissue!
8.Cute woman to a man is the one he's never fucked. That's why they cheat with uglier women.
9. To a horny man, pussie is pussie is pussie! See, it is not about the dispenser, it is about the WHAT. If it is a housegal, cousin, disabled, cleaner...He presses OK without further ado.
10. A player is the best man to have in bed. By fantasizing with his other gals, he gets a faster hard-on.( in case of a delayed ejaculation, he fantasizes fucking another gal and voila, he comes!)

P.S
It took less than 10 minutes to write this article.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Memories of an African Childhood: Prologue to December Festivities

There were no happier days like the two last weeks of November. After sitting our end-of- year exams, known as ‘mocks’, we were free to roam the whole village as the exams were marked in readiness for  school-closing- day that marked the official beginning of the much awaited December holidays.

During this period, we played football all we wanted. At times, our class teacher would be generous enough to give us a real leather football to play with. Usually we played with our own improvised football, made of polythene. To kick the real thing was such a delight. We would play till we stripped off our shirts, drenched with sweat. (Can’t imagine how we survived with the same pair of uniforms for a whole week without changing or washing).

Girls too were busy skipping with ropes or playing netball. Imagine school without classes, day in day out for a whole two weeks! Wish you were there to witness the gambols and frolics of excited kids, excited with their newfound freedom from books and especially the much resented mathematics. Those were the days you never missed school for whatever reason. What an opportunity to escape the chores at home and still have fun in school! No classes, no punishments, no registers marked, nothing. It was total freedom. I only wished schools were always like that.

Fatigued from football, we would walk a mile to Kabeti spring to drink water and cool our bodies. After that, we went to the hill nearby to collect fruits and play with girls. We would go for lunch in different homes the entire period.

The mill nearby was busy grinding maize flour to be used for brewing local beer.  The echoes in the nearby hill were the sound of axes, felling trees and hewing firewood, to be used for cooking in the festivities.

School boys who were to undergo circumcision had since left school to build some makeshift houses (called ‘menjo’) deep in the bushes.  They were to be sequestered there for a whole month after circumcision. They too had their fun felling logs for their firewood and hunting. In the evenings, they practiced songs for the initiation night and after. By that time, they would have isolated themselves from us younger boys.

Their female counterparts would have quit school along time. To hew firewood, smear their homes and decorate them in readiness for the festivities. In any case, they were never to return to school. After initiation, girls became women and were married off immediately. In the evenings, as early as August, you would hear girls practicing songs and dance moves for the circumcision night.

The festive mood was setting in gradually with every new dawn.

A week to school closing, you would see smoke rising from the homes that had candidates for circumcision. All over, the aroma of roasting maize flour floated freely in the evening air. This was the main ingredient for brewing local beer. You know, after grinding, the maize flour was added water and covered with polythene to ferment. After three days, it was roasted to make small round balls, called ‘kelanik’. Kelanik is poured into large pots half filled with water and mixed with fermented millet flour ‘mermeruk’, and left for three days. After three days of occasional stirring and addition of more fermented ground millet that acted as yeast, you could sip the brew and feel your head heat up: alcohol! Real great potent alcohol that has kept December holidays special and memorable since time immemorial.

The village was a beehive of activities then.  The preparations would have exhausted one but fortunately, most of the work was shared.

Before this, you would have witnessed the initiates-to-be visiting your homes. Some were known relatives, some were neighbors, and others were clans mate from as far as the neighboring district of Trans-Mara. It was easy to spot them, boys would walk with a club tied to the waist or a staff and his hair was shaved and tied with a scarf. Girls wore nice clothes, with new head-kerchiefs, a whistle hanging from their necks, a myriad of bangles on wrists and spotting some free-flowing robes.

The initiates-to- be would enter our home and the conversation would be:
Initiate-to-be: “kokile tun obwan tumin” (“it’s been said you attend a circumcision ceremony”)
Mom: “komwoe ng’o? (“Who says so?”)
Iinitiate-to-be: “komwoe baba/mama” (“dad/mom says so”)
Mom: “wendi ng’o tumto?” ( “Who is to be circumcised?”)
Initiate-to-be: “ane!” (“me!”)


 Year in year out, the conversation took the same pattern. My mom would ask them where they belong if she didn’t know and request them to join us for tea or supper as the circumstances may be. Many declined, some accepted. By this time, the initiates-to-be have adopted some quiet demeanor to reflect their impending status as men and women. Mom would finish off the conversation by telling them she will attend and thanking them for the invitation.

 Depending on the number of relations and friends who were to initiate their children in a particular year, one received as many invites as there were relations and friends. When the time came, dad decided which to attend and which not. The priority was relatives, then friends and neighbors.

Thursday night of the week of closing day, it was the night of ‘kipsirgoot’ translated loosely to mean ‘the house writers’. It was simply a night for decorating the interior of the homes that were to host the festivities. The exterior would have been smeared and painted with terracotta and drawn pictures of flowers and caricatures of people. Our job was simply to hang old newspapers and leaves of exercise books on the ceiling and cover the walls with wall papers. (There was some wall paper that was common in the village then, procured from a milk factory 18 kilometers away. It had drawings of children drinking milk and the words KCC KCC KCC… all over)

The gramophone would be playing loud; there was tea for us kids and beer for the older people. There was nothing much to be done, I think it was a day simply for sampling beer and to make sure that everything, most importantly, the gramophone was working. Apart from the wall paper, we also hang cypress branches on the ceiling. Whatever aesthetic qualities cypress branches had, I have no idea but all the same, it was a very common practice then.

We spent the night dancing and making merry. At 4 am, it was time to wake up for some of us would have dozed off on the seats. (No sofas, just some armchairs called ‘jumatatu’ -Monday in Swahili and some foldable seats made of leather). 

4 am found us in the bitter cold, yawning and plodding to our next task. If the initiate-to-be was a boy, we went shouting to the bushes by Kap Elibut dam to collect some sacred plants, ‘Korosek’ ,that was to be used by the initiates. They are thin perennial plants that grow on the side of forests and in swamps. Surrounded by a bevy of young village boys and girls the initiate-to-be led the way to where he had initially found the plants. We uprooted as many as possible and carried them to his home.

Still bellowing and singing like mad kids, we would arrive and place the korosek by the wall on the right side of the house. We would be treated to tea and loaves of bread. Bread is actually the sole attraction to participate in the exercise of pulling plants in the forest in a very chilly morning.

 (If the initiate-to-be was a girl, the job of collecting korosek fell on a Saturday morning. There was more fanfare when it was a girl than for a boy. The crowd was bigger and the singing was more intense, accompanied with whistles and flutes. )

After tea and bread, the party of sleepy but cheerful boys and girls broke up and each left to his/her own home, to prepare to go to school for the closing ceremony. As we left for school, men and women would flock to the home of the initiate-to-be to drink ‘the beer of korosek ‘. It is not a lot of beer and would normally end by ten am. Those parents who were passionate about school would join us in the school closing ceremony while those who were more enthusiastic about beer would go round drinking beer in the various houses.

After singing the national anthem, we went to the jacaranda trees nearby and sat. By then I would be dozing. A handful of parents would have arrived. It would be 11 am. Teachers and parents would be seated on the desks, us on the grass. Caroline Cheptoo or her sister Anna Chepkorir would lead us in some Christian songs, Christopher Siele would pray for us. That was the only day I closed my eyes, ostensibly in prayer but in reality, I was catching a catnap.  

Some boy will nudge me and I will wake up to the headmaster‘s address. Then Mr. Towett arap Chepkwony, the chairman of the school followed next. More pep talks would follow. The message, year in year out was: discipline, diligence and respect. You could skip a closing ceremony and miss nothing. I didn’t like it; not least because I was anxious about the evening bacchanalia but more because I was exhausted from the previous night’s partying.

Priscilla Baliach and the late Rusi Maritim never missed the closing ceremony. So too my mom. She never addressed us, for she is reserved but always sat anonymously in the crowd, awaiting her time of glory. It always came.

The only time I looked forward to; that of calling out the names of the best pupils. It was dreaded by many and loved by a few.  The top three of each class were called in front and given gifts. Pencils, pens, books, exercise books, and so forth. The fourth up to tenth were told to stand up and were clapped for

Four claps for boys and three for girls. Sometimes the last two were also called and told to stand up. Most of the tailing pupils were absent during school closing days so no one stood.

 When it got to my class, our teacher, Mr Joseph Kosgey, would stand and make a few remarks on the general performance, the number of pupils who sat exams, those who have dropped out and etc. he was so thorough and serious, though I am sure his mind also strayed to the pots of beer awaiting him in some house immediately he finished with the job at hand.

“Alfred Kiprotich Barusei, come in front, this is the boy who managed to top his class with …” that was me and I would walk in front of the gathering and stand with my hands folded across my chest. I would steal a glance at my mom, a smile played in her lips. Mr.Kosgey would shower me with some plaudits and a pencil or pen or an exercise would be proffered to me. He would go on to call the other two top pupils. We would be clapped for and told to sit.

When all the top performances have been recognized and rewarded, it was time to go to class  for  report forms, bearing our results, to take to our parents. Some who performed dismally would tear or munch the results and swallow them.

We would break for home as our parents remained behind for a meeting.

On the way home, the boys who had vowed to fight each other would do so. If they looked jittery, we would make sure they did so via a combination of chiding and scorning. We would tell a boy, “You mean this thin and scraggy fellow would beat you?”  And another, “you don’t mean you are a coward boy!”  If that did not work, we would place some grass on the wrist of one of the combatant, and tell the other boy to dare touch ‘his cow’. If he touched it, the other boy would hit him and a delectable fight would ensue. We would cheer on and on till the victor emerged. Another pair will step in. It was fun seeing boys fight.

The best part was to see girls fight. They would tear each other’s clothes, curse, call each other names, strip each other (thereby affording us a chance to see the elusive sweet panties) and scratch each other’s faces. More girls will be sucked in and soon there was a free-for-all. The scuffle would go on till our parents finished up their school meeting, caught up with us on the road and chased us home. The fights were curiously named ‘closing-the-school-with-someone’.

On our way home, you would hear music floating in the air. Some early drunkard would be screaming on his way home, another would be sound asleep on the side of the road. Celebration was already underway. It was palpable to your ears, nose and eyes; everywhere you turned.

At home, we had a late lunch cum early supper then we left to the grazing fields to herd as well as make some clubs. We also repaired our tire sandals, popularly known as ‘kinyira’ or if you were lucky to have shoes (plastic shoes called ‘chombelea’ a corruption of Swahili that meant ‘burn and go’. It actually arose from the fact that when torn, you just seal the torn area with a burning object) you repaired them in readiness for the long night full of thorns and sharp objects.

This was one of the few days we had the license to shut our cattle up in the barn at 5 pm.  The atmosphere was full of a cacophony of noise from dogs, drunkards, boys, music, songs and even drunken brawls.  The December festivities have started in earnest. Woe unto you if you were a Christian!  Many renounced their faith and joined in the carousal.
 (to be continued)

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Memories of an African Childhood: Village Delicacies


If the scary part of the Reality TV ‘Fear Factor’ is the food, then you haven’t ever seen anything yuck or tasted it for that matter. To a Rotik village native, that is mere hors d’oeuvre.  The food considered delicacies in that part of the world ranged from weird to outright wacky.

Nothing excited me more than when asked by my dad to round up our young bulls to the crush nearby as he gave our kitchen knives some sharpening on the revered whetstone.( revered because it was said if you sat on it you became stunted and two, because it was a curse to break it. Thirdly, in case you had such a terrible stomachache, you lied with your belly on it and you were cured.)

When village boys are excited, they scream and ululate. That was us rounding the hapless bulls to the crush to be rid of their masculinity. I would have felt for them, but then, my appetites overwhelmed my pathos. A castrating specialist, our neighbor Mr. Baliach and our uncle Cheseret went about the business of tying up the bulls in the crush with routine ease as they whistled some non-existent tunes. Some things like castrating bulls or cutting the throats of animals during slaughter left me cringing but not these two. They never grimaced nor stopped talking and laughing during the whole exercise.

One after the other, the young bulls moaned in pain and peed as their masculinity were ended with aloof dexterity and thrown in a pan nearby. An hour later, six bulls were reduced to bullocks and left to absorb their pains alone. Two men worked on six pairs of testicles, washing, skinning and voila, we had six white balls ready for the saucepan. By a big shade in the cattle enclosure, a fire was lit and two stones placed parallel to form a hearth. I dashed home for salt and cooking fat. My brother darted to my grandma’s for onions and pepper.

When cooked, the white testicles turned a yellowish green color (bet it was the sperms that turned yellow) and that meant they were ready to be eaten. The testicled occupants of our household had an exclusive party of testicles! Not even a young girl could taste it. Women neither touched, cooked nor ate it.  A taboo like no other!

When served on a bowl, the burst balls looked like mashed potatoes. There was something powdery about it but the taste was unimaginable! If all the rave I read about caviar in food magazines is true, then caviar might come close but not quite. If you think I am lying, ask someone who has ever had the balls to try it. Suffice to say it is the most sumptuous meal your money can ever buy!  

With a big left-over ugali  (a cake made of maize flour) on ma left hand and a bowl of balls on my lap, I relished my food in a savory quiet. When eating with my dad, I was better off quiet because I had no one to talk to anyway.  After the food, a lecture from my dad would follow. First was where to graze our cattle that day and two on general behavior especially in relation to women. He would question us as to why we ‘’guffawed’ with women as if we didn’t know that women are bad people, my mom included. He would caution us to keep away from women so they could freely fart all they want. He would add a rider that if we enjoyed women farts, then we were free to hang around them. The sermon would end with that note.

After that, we would leave to the grazing fields with renewed motivation to herd and a futile attempt to keep away from women. The gospel hardly lasted a day for we reverted to playing football and leaving our herd to wander and of course be close to mom in the evening.

The testicles made us special and different from the female folk because they were eaten as brunches and during lunch we would still claim our share of the food. Unless a female cow was slaughtered, there was hardly any food that excluded men from partaking in it.  A cow’s tits and vagina were the only parts that were exclusive to women.

 I imagined the tits to be white with milk and thus taste yuck and the vagina to be slimy. Eating them was one boundary that my naughtiness never crossed. If the spasms of repulsion that the mention of cooked vagina and udder evoked in me were the same as what women felt at the mention of cooked testicles, then I am not surprised at all as to why they never even wanted to taste it. But then, I believe ours was tasty and theirs so yuck. I don’t know whether a bull’s dick was eaten. I am not talking about edible, of course it is! What I am not sure is whether there was a taboo against it. If there wasn’t any, then somebody might have cooked and ate it pink and whole like a sugar cane!

I hope you haven’t vomited yet because I am about to serve you your second course. If you lacked the balls to eat the first, hope you won’t miss the brains to eat this.

When a cow is slaughtered, I think it is only the skin that is spared. When all the other parts of a cow have been devoured and done with, the head is broken into two halves with an axe and the brains are extracted. The white matter with red veins connecting them when placed in a bowl looks like white clouds with impurities of blood. Wait till it’s cooked, they turn into meat spaghetti!  Naturally salty and slimy. My elder brother would tease us that it was snot so as to scare us from eating the rare delicacy but who would be hoodwinked to leaving the rare food?

The skinned jaws and skull are hacked to smaller pieces, dipped in an earthenware pot and given a thorough boiling. Even the nose is never discarded. Eyes were the only organs spared the ordeal.  When cooked it was added some wild vegetables and the pot-pourri was ready for the table. The meat always had a spicy smell because in most cases, the meat had stayed for more than four days and was almost decomposing. The smell of staleness added a unique flavor to the hotchpotch. My favorite part of the mixture was the rough palate, yummy! The head of a cow, goat or sheep make the best soup in the world.  I won’t hesitate to gobble it if offered again, anytime!

The head of the house exclusively ate the tongue; of course I pinched it once in a while. Women again were exempted from this. It was rough in texture but soft to chew. I am tongue-tied trying to explain how a tongue tastes like. Suffice to say, it is yummy!

I hope you have not taken to your feet yet. Wait till you are sample even a foot.

The limbs of a cow, sheep or goat are the very last parts to be consumed. The hooves are cut off and the skin removed. Hard boiling in an earthenware pot follows. After three hours of boiling or so, you added your wild vegetables and salt. Tomatoes, onion, spices are not necessary, maybe some fat.  Pepper is ok. After that, you repair to a table and have a meal of your life. Apart from the numerous colored hairs, floating in the soup, dinner would proceed without a hitch. A pepper may choke you but when all is said and done, you would have had a delectable meal. Please note that the meat is hard and muscular so watch out lest you knock someone else’s teeth off with your elbow trying to bite off some meat. Basically, you would have to do with soup and the rest goes to the dogs.

My friends from the neighboring tribe of Kissii would eat the heads and feet of chickens too but hey, we didn’t do it ourselves. I imagined a cock would crow in my stomach if I ate its head or would scratch me with its claws if I ate its feet. Our cowboy Peter, who was a Kissii would listen to my fears and still go ahead and boil the yellow feet and head, eyes seeing and all. Yuck!

I hope you are not naïve enough not to know that the first meat to go to the cauldron when an animal is slaughtered is its entrails. Everything in there inclusive of the dirt in the intestines. The soup is believed to be medicinal. You should taste the bitter soup; you will apply for a resident visa. I forgot to tell you that the bile is mixed with the black liquid dirt of the small intestines to make some bitter sauce called ‘churu’. When churu is mixed with blood and added to meat, it is a treat of a lifetime.

Or did you imagine that the blood of an animal is left to wet the soils? No. I warned you earlier that the only thing that is not eaten in animal is its skin. The rest is either eaten or drunk. I am sure if animals had a tear bank, those villagers would have found a way of consuming it. That I am sure they would.

A little blood is left to drip to quench the thirst of ancestors and the rest is collected in gourds. At breakfast it is added to tea. Yes. Added to tea! It tastes a bit salty but again it is tea. At meal time, when mixed with churu, you add it to meat and you get a bitter taste than pepper. This is the old men’s favorite. Old people drank the blood raw, red and steaming. Jesus!

Blood could be cooked in a flat earthenware pot called tabeet and eaten with ugali. It turned black and caked. This was my favorite. It tastes more delicious than anything else I have ever eaten. I won’t think twice before grabbing a bowl of it even now. God, I am drooling! Christians did not eat anything with blood but the population of real Christians was less than 1%. So this food had an overwhelming approval rating as the best food in the village.

Whenever a woman gave birth to a baby, heifers were rounded, tied and some blood extracted from them. Village men would get some special arrows, tie a heifer, and pierce a vein in the neck. Everybody knelt in that procedure. Women, as usual were banned. My dad would kneel by the hapless heifer with his arrow on the ready, tap on the vein a bit, pick some grass, throw at the heifer and release the arrow. I would look the other side as the arrow hit the vein at the same time holding the gourd that tapped the blood. I was wary of my dad observing this because cowardice is a crime in our community. I would stir the blood to avoid clotting till it form one round ball and some separate liquid. Some old men would eat the ball of clotted blood, otherwise called ‘nagetiet’ and swallow it raw. Just like a dog would.

The blood is then cooked and mixed with sour milk. After two days, a calabash full of the mixture would leave everybody belching out of satisfaction after an evening meal. It was so scrumptious it has even inspired some hunger pangs in me.

What do you do with a cow’s colostrums? Pour to the grass? No. it is a taboo to discard milk. (In fact you don’t hold a cup of milk with your left hand, always the right hand!) The first two days after a cow gives birth, the milk is poured to dogs. The third day up-to a week, the dogs are forgotten. The milk is kept in calabashes. After a week, it is mixed with cooked blood, stirred to mix properly, back to calabashes and after two days, you give out the surplus to neighbors and drink the rest. I am not sure whether I will taste this kind of milk again. Gosh! I feel like puking!

Even in ordinary circumstances, milk is never drunk white as it is. If you want it fresh, you make some coal from a special tree called ‘itet’, crush it inside a calabash with a bended stick called ‘sosiot’ into very fine powder called ‘wosek’. The process of crushing the coal into wosek could take thirty minutes or so. The screechy noise made by the friction of a calabash and sosiot threw us into a dance. Add to it the singing of my mom and we had a perfect orchestra.  On a sad note, the hardened stick also served to knock your head in case you messed around when mom was cooking. One knock on your head was enough to silence the hard-headedness in you.

The milk is then poured into the calabash containing the fine black powder. When poured into a cup after shaking, you would have some black spicy milk. I miss this black milk! Alternatively, the milk could be left to ferment in a calabash for three days and the sour milk that will be formed would be blackish, granular and tasty and satisfying. Black milk? Yes! It is called ‘mursik’ and it is my favorite drink after beer.

The only issue I have with village food now in retrospect is the lack of variety. Milk and ugali is the constant but the rest is seasonal. If it is the season of pumpkins, then the meals were ugali, pumpkin and milk. You could eat pumpkin for lunch and supper for a whole two months. Same to a season of beans, kales, cabbages etc.

Beef was rare unless maybe you have visitors or it was December festivities or a drought. In droughts, many cows would succumb to it. You are mistaken if you think that a cow that dies out of hunger is thrown away. Why throw it away when people are hungry too?  If a cow showed signs of succumbing to the drought, you slaughter it and sell it to neighbors. A phenomenon called ‘Soko Chogo’ translating to ‘a barn market’. Most of it was batter. You gave out some maize for a piece of meat. There were no weighing scales, the seller just cut a piece, weigh with his hands by juggling it and gave it to you. Most took it on credit to be repaid years later. Often, the beef was hard and would be cooked for hours.

Nobody died from these dead meats either. The vets were nowhere but an ant filled their place. You simply cut the throat of a cow, get an ant, if it eats it, it was safe from anthrax: the only fatal disease that could kill humans. The rest of the diseases that killed cows then were unimportant. A human being could get away with them all except anthrax.

The rainy seasons were eagerly awaited for all sorts of reasons. For us kids, it was for mushrooms. We collected all sorts of mushrooms during the rainy season and ate them by boiling or roasting. I miss a roast mushroom! In the evenings, we collected flying termites and roasted them for supper. Some gutsy fellows ate them alive!

My childhood stories though cannot compete with my mom’s experiences. For them, they ate ticks and grasshoppers.  You pick a fat tick from a cow and place it in hot ashes till it explodes then you eat.  

We got close though with the mole rats. We would pour gallons and gallons of water in their holes till they tried to escape out. We skinned, roasted them and oh! What a meal they made!

We also ate hares, aardvarks, porcupines, antelopes, birds and many other animals. The weirdest is a tailless monkey that used to make a lot of noise at night near our home that we woke up one day at 1 AM, killed it and ate it by dawn for breakfast.

 Next time you visit me; I will treat you with tea mixed with animal’s blood for breakfast, fried balls for brunches, a sheep’s brains for lunch and a cow’s limbs and head for supper with a lot of soup. Bon appétit!

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Memories of an African Childhood: a Special Friend

If you walked across the road from our home past the single twisted cypress tree, and you glanced to your right, you saw an old cattle dip that was black with age. Further right, there was a crush whose posts were white with lichens you got the impression of grey hair for old trees. The cattle dip was surrounded by a bush of stinging nettles and in one end was a heap of manure. On Saturdays when we brought our cattle to the dip, we would throw puppies into the nettles in the belief that it makes them fierce. Women collected the green nettles for vegetables while old men collected them for herbs.

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.