A Call On My Birthday

Where do you find the true soul of a city? Where does it live? Who do you talk to when you seek an honest insight into the life and behavior of a city – what it does when the sun dips in the horizon and its lights come on, what its idea of, say, a good life or success is and all? Where? Do you walk up to a random couple cozying up on a lazy Sunday afternoon in a park, looking for happiness in the eyes of each other and drop the question at their feet? Or do you pick a travel magazine on the lobby of a swanky hotel where guards in silk and dainty laces and ruffles, and white velvet gloves bow and say “hello sah!” to you when you walk in, like you are some knighted medieval landlord, and peruse its pages? Or do you sit on a tall stool by the counter of a seedy bar and chat up a tipsy patron caressing a sweaty bottle of whiskey over a loud tune? It's hard-small but..what do you do?

I recently had my birthday (the yuppie in me would love to say “celebrated my birthday”, to seem important. See, it can be so phony (and vain) sometimes, that part of me...but I will tell the truth). I simply had it. You know I was raised in a tradition that acknowledges birthdays, like most people elsewhere do. You often remembered what date it was or if you forgot, someone else (usually your mama) did it for you. Those who cared too much for it spared a few minutes, at the beginning of the year after a new calendar for that year had been hung on the wall, to turn over a few pages and mark that date on it as a reminder - a seal that that was not a day to be passed over like a faded shirt at the flea market. It was fine, for do we not all pursue happiness in the grand scheme of things?  Yeah we do... but perhaps I should also mention that the acknowledgement was as far as it went. There wasn’t the elaborate fanfare and lights and candles and toing and froing that many here associate with birthdays, okay? People occasionally sung for you alright but if they didn’t you couldn’t hold it against them. They just weren’t programmed to give a monkey’s squirt about birthdays. It was a luxury, an acquired taste (like cheese), that not everyone got around to acquire. I was in the herd of those who never did.

The morning of my birthday I get a call. I’ll back up a little here and try not to jump ahead of my story. My phone rings just as I am getting ready to go for a bike ride at a public park not far from where I stay. I almost ignore it but today is my birthday so I reach for it and pick it…and guess who’s on the line…I can’t freaking believe it. Alfayo! Alfayo is my cousin and just in case you are wondering why am all over this like white on rice, well, it's because I hadn’t seen it coming. Alfayo is not the guy who will call you on your birthday. Who are you, the Duke of Yorkshire? Keep your cool man, he is not corky (that’s me hehehe). He breathes into the mouthpiece like those male late night presenters on fm stations, those cats that will annoy shit out of you. Anyway, Alfayo breathes into his phone like the villain in that chilly movie When a Stranger Calls when he calls the babysitter. Weird…and am like, “Damn, you hadn’t told me you were gay; look at you son of a gun!” He ignores that, maybe he didn’t hear it.

“How’s Barrack doing man?…Barrack Obama!” an Obama fan. See the first thing he asks? He doesn’t ask how am doing. The place he's at turns suddenly noisy, a crowd I think.

“Obama's still up in the house. What can I say?” I reply to which he cackles like a wild dog amid the din.

“ Wuo Mathe!” he always calls me Wuo Mathe, “Swag man, swag. Now you agree, right? I tol…Hold on one sec. One sec please.” Then he shouts to someone in the distance, “Waiter! Waiter! Goat meat…Yeah, that’s what I ordered.” A little quiet. “Right, right for two…sawa. With bor...eeh” He then gets back to me, “Wuo Mathe am back. Regal me with tales from the West now; am all yours.”

I  ignore that last part on purpose and charge right ahead. It is a path he will be impossible to steer from once taken.

“Where are you balling at now? You seem to be eating life with a big spoon, man!” I ask.

“Oh stop it bro. You are always talking smooth like that but you know how it is. Every day a different fight. We are still slinging stones at Goliath.” Now that’s some deep way to answer a question. We talk about the usual stuff: family, who’s graduating from high school, college blah, blah and I realize how fast time flies. I ask if he still likes Papa Wemba or if he's into Lil Wayne now but he says he likes Atommy Sifa. We talk about the village and all the crazy people in there. We laugh so loud. I ask him who is seeing the chief’s daughter now and he laughs. He knows why. Back in the day, in the circa 1990s BC (before cellphones), he had been one of the village’s top dawgs. He often kept the company of some of the biggest kids in school (whether they were kids is debatable here; this is an open forum. They were more like grown-ass adults in kid’s uniforms, okay? I once walked into one of them shaving his chest…and most had their simba. Tell me if those were kids).  It was a small band of hoodlums, a mafia of sorts and they terrorized the other kids (the real kids). They never came to school on closing days because they feared embarrassment. This is when the smaller kids shone in the light of achievement; when the whole school assembly – students and teachers – gave them (the smaller kids) a standing ovation, a round of applause. On this day, the mafia bosses, also having long solidified their foothold at the bottoms of their classes (otherwise known as BOTTOM or BUOTO), also got mention for their dishonorable showing. Books weren’t their strong suit, these cats. Their strengths lay elsewhere. They at times imposed on the weaker members of the food chain some sort of a tax. They had them bring to school roasted maize, boiled maize, boiled peanuts, nyoyo … a whole lot of varied edibles during the harvest season, which they often feasted on at break time, then spent the rest of the day spewing belch, acting mighty. Indeed they were mighty. They got the prettiest chicas in town – girls in tumbo-cuts, girls in pams, girls that had been places, those that showered and applied tip-top then made trips to the trading center in the evening in the latest denims and hairdos to die for. It was all game, man. It was game and my cousin was in the thick of it. He was the smartest of the lot. It was around then that he was making advances at the daughter of the chief, an ancient-looking man whose word was 'law'. The girl, then a princess of sorts and a beauty to boot, and who had caught a serious case of the hips-ass-chest, was the object of many a suitor’s desire, the who-is-who in the food chain. She was the fire of their loins. That she insisted on speaking Swahili whenever she went to the market raised her standing several notches, to a league of one. She had been to Kisumu…that’s where she learnt Swahili (hehehe). Trouble with macking on the chief’s daughter was that it required cajones. Guts. The chief was Hitler himself. He had his secret police (the village gestapo) that watched the village like a hawk and reported back to him – a band of lousy loyalists, otherwise known as Youth, that ran roughshod with their antique-style policing, knocking everything that dared raise their heads above theirs. There were no cell phones then (remember it was BC). If you desired to mack on Akinyi, you had to step out of the shadows and dance but it helped to cover your nuts while at it because you were dancing in a shark pool. It was quite a risk but, hey, my cousin was ready to jiggle. He is a grounded cat, I have to say. He believes in hauling home the best kill. He is not the cat to live his life in halves. He was smart too. He could talk so effortlessly about ideas and places that the rest of us had only heard mentioned on the radio during Habari. His words were rock solid; he could lean on them. He often paused and allowed them room to breathe. And this is when you heard their pulse flutter inside them if you listened closely, which is to say that they came alive. You went from Dar es Salaam to London to Tokyo to Kuala Lumpur with him when he spoke. You met important people.  And Akinyi was biting his bait till word got round to him that the dreaded Youth squad had got wind of his Rico Suave stunts and was looking for him. Hahaha…you should have seen how he nearly soiled his pants when he heard that (some of my cousins say he did but I doubt it; he’s brutally honest. He would have admitted it). Luckily for him, one of the two buses that passed by our village twice a week from Uyoma to the city was due to pass by the following morning. He took his bag, stuffed a few clothes and took off early morning. He escaped to Seme, to one of my aunties’ and lay low there, kept his head below the surface till the issue died down at home. He was an asylum seeker of sorts, in Seme Kombewa. An exile of love.

Anyway, back to my story. He laughs when I ask about Akinyi Nyar Chief but I press on. Seeing that I ain’t letting him go he says, “My girl is here with me. We are waiting to dig into a goat’s ribs. Want to say hello? Scale on a ritcher maybe?” Damn, that was a fast one he pulled. When you are with Alfayo you’ve got to watch your back because you don’t know when the sucker will trip you. I could hear him giggle slyly. We both know the code – when a brother is with a girl, a new girl, you don’t start conversations that could potentially put him in an awkward position, one that he would have to offer explanations to get out of. I offer a lame excuse for why I cannot speak with the new catch today. It’s noisy out there; I won’t be able to scale properly. I want to be able feel the cadence in her voice, how she pushes the air on her p’s. Isn’t sound the only thing I got? I want to do it right since I can’t see her legs. I win there (we are even).

“Tell her this is your barber calling to demand payment for the other head. Remember you’ve always paid double the price” I joke. We burst out laughing like lunatics. My stomach aches when we finish. We always made fun of his head. He had the biggest head I ever saw growing up.

“She noticed my head first bro. I was in a crowd but I had an edge. I stood out.” I believed him. He is hard to miss.

At some point I tell him that my friend is coming to Nairobi, first time visit. What would he recommend?...I want something authentic, something unequivocally Nairobi. I want my friend to feel the soul of the city, the real fabric of life of the city. Alfayo knows this country, this city, like a spider knows her web. I sometimes use him as my yellow pages. He knows the right people, people that know the right people. He is easy to like because he is believable and good-humored. He knows what’s happening where and when. If you want 50 bags of cement, or a car, or a driver’s license, or an autographed picture of Otieno Kajwang’ talk to him. He looks you straight in the eye and listens when you speak. He sweats for his bread. He doesn’t pack a revolver in his jacket like many young people do. He says that’s vanity; a wrong place to seek value. People do not respect a man with a gun; they fear him and fear is nasty. He is not a pimp.

In his apartment house is an album of photos, some from way back and some (the more recent ones) showing him posing with various influential people. There’s one particular one that he framed, which featured him shaking hands with Barrack Obama. It was taken in 2005, when Obama (then a senator) paid a visit to the University of Nairobi and Alfayo met him, am told, as one of the leaders of the Muslim Students’ Society.

Alfayo is a Christian.

When I posed that question, he paused a little as if in thought, then asked somberly, “Is your friend a man or a woman?”

“My friend is a dog sir.” I shot back. He chuckles.

“Silly! You know what? People that speak like that on their birthdays should be turned into potatoes. Wuod Mathe, I have a girlfriend; I won’t hit on your friend. I promise.” I told you this guy can spot humor dressed in a pajama in the dark.

He tells me to hold on. I think the goat meat has arrived. I can hear him talking with the waiter in the background. He comes back suddenly, “Hey Wuod Mathe! I was saying that I doubt if this city has any soul left. Bro it’s long dead and gone. Perhaps little fragments of it could still be found lying in the hearts of the people that live in it if you look hard enough.” I listen. He clears his voice, “Bad politics and classism is choking this city.”

“So you say authenticity is lacking. Is that it?”

“To a large extent yes. You know Nairobi is edgy. She’s a bit brash, like a teenager. She experiments, with drugs, sex, ideas. She’s fascinated by fads – clothes, gadgets blah, blah. The cats that drive her are the supposed middle class – those fellahs that live on Twitterville and complain about bad roads and corrupt cops and tribalism and the weather. And how the system is irreparably broken.” I was secretly smiling, listening to how this guy dissects his city, “You will find them walking designer dogs on leashes in the evenings in gated neighborhoods where everybody seems to live these days, or watching rugby at Impala Grounds during weekends, spotting red-and-green colored jerseys, sunglasses and holding cans of soda. Super pretentious people, I tell you.”

It’s pretty obvious he harbors a seething contempt for the Nairobi middle class.

“Any way you do it, avoid people that wear their image on their sleeves. Tell your friend to take a matatu. Nothing tells you what Nairobi is than a matatu. Leave the rest to me bro; we’ve come a long way.” We cackle again.

 I’d want us to continue but his goat ribs must be getting cold now, and his girlfriend must be wondering what sort of a barber talks that long on the phone so I tell him he’s got to get to his food (and his girl). He tells me that he had told her about me – stories from way back (when we slept naked in granny’s house) and all; that we hadn’t talked in a long time and that it had been her idea to make a surprise call on my birthday. It was totally fine with her, he said. I liked her instantly but I still insisted he goes back to his food. Well, before he hang up, he wished me a happy birthday and told me something to the effect that I should look at my life five years ago and my life now, and evaluate them – see how much I have grown in that space of time and say a prayer, giving thanks for my gifts, and unsaddle the things that rob me of happiness…and walk into my new age a happy, smiling, lighter person. There was something about how he said it that gave it so much power.

Priceless! Do they come any better than that?

That morning when I rode my bike through the windy paths of the park, I thought about that statement. It kept looping in my head. It was obvious a lot has changed over the last five years. I expect less from people now than I did five years ago. Now I question less why people act a certain way, I simply stop acknowledging them when they do. I don’t try too hard to win arguments. I believe love is nature's gift to humanity. And how do I love?...you might ask. Like Eliza Acton wrote. I love like I love the tone of some soft-breathing flute whose soul is wak'd for me alone when all beside is mute. I long stopped believing in the kind of love that has to be wrestled to the ground, though. I think the greatest virtue is compassion; that one might observe all the rules in the book but without compassion all that trouble is as good as deodorized shit. I don’t care much for pleasing people today. I let go easily now, of people, of emotions, things that drag me, which means am much harder to hurt now than I was five years ago. I might anger faster now but I cool off faster too. I read more, voraciously, hungrily. I take my time, because words mean more to me now than they did before. I cling on them, like a jealous lover. I stop and think about them.

Here’s the kicker: I believe that friendships go a long way. I do value and appreciate the people that are close to me. I want to be able to know that someone will help me up when I fall or hold my hands and urge me on in moments when am down and weak. 

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