I have been observing social and economic distance like a good citizen. (Especially economic.) But yesterday, my owner dragged me to New Nyanza where a promotional sale was on. She selected about 10 pieces of track suits and asked me to try them on. I walked to a cubicle that had a curtain for a door. Then my problems began. You see, when you are in my age bracket, dressing and undressing are not simple activities.They are complete ceremonies. For instance you have to trace the zipper without actually seing it. A large mirror on the wall proclaimed my geographical problems. Large speakers nearby boomed the song ‘Tetema.’ I touched my belt, and my fingers froze. Dozens of feet were busy shopping just a few inches outside the cubicle. The last time i was clotheless in a public place was 1986. It took some time for the courage to return to my fingers. With enough hissing, panting, sweating and regretting, I finally managed to liberate myself from my trousers. Never mind that I hit my elbow on the mirror, causing a little crack. The first track suit I tried on made me look like an Eskimo. The second one made me look like Abdul. The third made me look like a traditional circumsizer. The fourth convinced me that whoever invented track suits did not have people like me in mind. I was stepping into the fifth when suddenly, long fingers with thick cutex pulled the curtain. I will describe the sound that came from the owner of the fingers another day. As for myself, I am appealing for help from anybody who offers free counselling services to traumatized pot-bellied men.
Posted by Mark M. Chetambe on Sunday, 31 May 2020
I have a gentleman who just turned 3. He calls me a million times a day, forces all of us to watch Sponge Bob Square Pants all day, closes everthing we open, opens everything we close, undresses when we want him dressed, dresses up when we want him washed, runs away when we need him, sticks on us when we need to work, snatches our phones, cries like its a hobby, demands for popcorn at midnight and drives us crazy. But today, I got an excuse to run away from his oppression: I decided to go to the cybercafe and get helped to file tax returns. I put on shoes for the first time in a month and realized that I had forgotten how to walk in shoes. I bounced out like a freed slave, and walked like a penguin all the way. I whistled a patriotic song to celebrate the fact that unlike other Kenyans, I had remembered this tax filing monster long before the deadline. At the cyber, I queued like a Jubilee voter and happily waited for my turn. And when I finally faced the young man, he asked me, “what is your KRA log-in pin?” Fellow Kenyans, it is at that point that I discovered that looking clueless is very painful when you have a bald head and a big belly. Why do small things always oppress innocent people?
Posted by Mark M. Chetambe on Monday, 25 May 2020
A man wakes up determined to write at least one Corona short story after weeks of procrastination. After a one hour search, he manages to trace the laptop at the north pole and its charger at the south pole. But the mouse is nowhere. Frustrated, he asks, “do we have any mouse in this house?” “We do have some rats,” comes the reply from one of the inner rooms.
Posted by Mark M. Chetambe on Sunday, 17 May 2020
While he is asleep, a man’s mind makes important decisions. Like what tshirt to wear tomorrow. You see, a man’s clothes exist in a hierachy. What you wear to the goat market is superior to what you wear to visit a son-in-law who has not paid even a cat for dowry. There is a reason why Wafula still keeps the shirt he was wearing when Caren believed his best lie, twenty years ago. So on some rainy night, your mind runs through the hierachy and settles on a blue tshirt. You have an appointment with a guy who owes you 30k. This blue tshirt has worked miracles in the past. It has once won you a smile from somebody who, previously, only offered you historical injustices. In spite of your bald head and the big stomach that can accomodate the entire tea budget of the health ministry, the tshirt has won you sweet lies like ‘you look young and cool.’ So by morning, you have decided that it will be the blue tshirt. You jump out of bed heroically, wrap the ageless towel around your physical problems, whistle your way to the bathroom and bathe like a duck. Then you start the great search. You see, the biggest problem in Kenya since independence is knowing what is where in your own house. Not even Vision 2030 will solve this problem. Kenyan men are always late for meetings because they spend three hours searching for something in the house. Anyway, what has to be done must be done. So you check the wardrobes. Nothing. All the suitcases. Nothing. You stumble on prehistoric boxer shorts with a rat-shaped hole at an indescribable point. By this time, you are angry. You want to ask mama watoto, but she is outside, quarreling with the chickens that are eating her grains. In any case, having a bald head does not give a man permission to ask stupid questions about stray tshirts. You want to ask the housegirl, but you fear going to the kitchen. The last time you peeped there, she was sitting in a manner that does not bring honour to this country. After a moment of deep Aristotelian reflection, you step out of the house. At the door, you see your precious tshirt, wet, dirty and sad, sitting like a retired general on top of the doormat.
Posted by Mark M. Chetambe on Friday, 8 May 2020
There is a certain way one of my many young friends, Dan Kutiri
scratches his beard when he is hungry. Some day in 2017, we were driving to Nairobi. Dan was keeping me alert by repeating the stories of his escapdes in Webuye, but with fresh exaggerations. At Timboroa, the stories died suddenly, and then came the familiar scratch. I have travelled with Dan long enough to know how many cobs of roast maize he can consume before and after lunch. So, we stopped, and the sellers swarmed around us, waving hot cobs, obese cabbages, naked carrots, twisted bananas and irish potatoes in our faces. (Let me not say what else they waved..story for another corona day.) I don’t remember whether I bought five or eight cobs for Dan, but I remember him giving me half a cob from the entire harvest. We were about to resume the journey when a tall, hefty gentleman begged for a lift. Being big bodied and begging is a very comical combination. I gave him one look and decided that not even the biblical Good Samaritan would give this one a lift. He looked something between an alumnus of Kamiti Maximum Prison and Lwanda Magere. You know those men who look as if they have just murdered someone and they are looking for their next victim? I wanted to ignore him but a group of women intervened. They said that the man was a policeman and the most helpful cop around Timboroa. “Ni mtu mzuri sana,” the ladies said, their hawker eyes surveying him from head to toe, with a noticeable stopover at his belt and Great Legs Region. I looked at the ladies. They appeared to be honest Kenyans, not professional spreaders of rumours and legs. We allowed the man on board. It took less than ten minutes for us to realize our mistake: If you combine Magoha, Matiang’i, Manduli and Atwoli, you know the kind of company we were now enjoying. We decided to play mute and allow his verbal engine to rev itself to exhaustion. A little distance up the road, we came upon a great traffic jam. An accident had blocked the road. You know how such things on Kenyan roads can cause more frustration than Jezebel? Our Trumpet jumped out. “Nitaongea na hao askari watufungulie lane tupite,” he crowed, in the voice of Iddi Amin, and disappeared. Two hours later, the road cleared, but Lwanda Magere had not returned. We waited. And waited. (We would have driven off, but the dinossour had left some luggage on board…a carton that looked as if it contained the kind of witchcraft that makes beautiful girls to be married as wife number 9.) We waited. And waited. Just before we fainted due to impatience, we noticed a telephone number on the box. We called the number. The voice that answered was that of Iddi Amin’s wife. That voice has left us traumatized all these months. “Huyo mjinga ako wapi? Mwambie leo ataniona. Nilimwambia afike nyumbani saa ngapi?” To circumsize a long story, we reunited with our fat problem, but the closer we got to Nairobi, the more he melted. At Limuru, he was already looking like a puppy that had been soaked in rain. Fellow Kenyans, niko na swali. These homes in which Lwanda Magere lives with Jezebel….what prevents the start of the Third World War?Posted by Mark M. Chetambe on Monday, 4 May 2020