I’m in Mwingi, Eastern Kenya. I’m not here as a part of a fancy caucus to evaluate poverty. I’m not en route to Garissa town, up the road. I’m certainly not here for holiday either…obviously. I’m here to write about goats. Yes, you heard me, goats. And I don’t even get to eat them after writing about them. This is how my career has trickled down to, this is exactly how I saw my life turning into. When growing up I envisaged a fulfilling life of combing the countryside writing about farm animals. But look, even in the animal farm there is a hierarchy. All the posh writers write about dairy cows and get to watch artificial insemination in progress. The rest – like me – write about goats and poultry. But the only thing worse than writing about goats is writing about a goat derby, so yes, I have a burning ambition to graduate to a cow…I mean, write about cows. One day.
But still further in the nomenclature of goat writers there is a division of writers who write about the local juakali goats and the noble writes who write about hybrid goats. That will be me. Yes, I’m not doing too badly off you see. The goats I write about are called Togenbarg or something. They come from Europe. They are huge. They give more milk and meat. If you come to Mwingi you will know why all these is key because poverty in Mwingi is heartbreaking. You think people in Kibera are poor? Look, as compared to most households in Mwingi, Kibera guys are living large. Kibera guys drink tea. They watch television. The only thing that perhaps Mwingi guys beat Kiberians with is that they don’t have to walk around wearing “flying toilet proof helmets”.
To write about goats we had to drive for an hour deep in the bowels of Mwingi where poverty actually hangs in the air like mist. Bare feet children walk in strands of tattered clothing, all which are brown. When a cloth grows old they turn into brown color. So everybody walks around in brown, the color of poverty. Eating one meal a day is a privilege here. And by one meal I don’t mean grilled Capone, vegetable rice and some juice. I mean porridge, no sugar, which is fine because sugar just makes everyone sick. The children look like most men in Nairobi’s Tamasha bar, not because they have fathered them but because they have potbellies. People live in shacks that don’t have doors, houses where you can see the stars through the roof when you turn in to sleep.
And so some NGO tries to help them by importing these goats to breed with the local goats so that their production can increase. These guys actually change lives in a huge way down there. I mean back at home you allow someone to cut before you in traffic and you feel so proud, so full of goodness that you decide that you have done you good deed of the quarter. You want to see good deeds? Come to Mwingi…but leave your self-righteousness in Nairobi.
So anyway there is a goat I have to see and perhaps interview (if his PA will allow me). This goat belongs to some woman who lives like down three valleys, two (dry) streams into the bundus of Mwingi. It takes us a whole hour to get there; I don’t have to tell you how bad the road is. This woman is the beneficiary of this hybrid he-goat that is meant to, er, “bring the funk back” in Mwingi village, if you will. When we get there I realize two things immediately about the woman, although poor as a church mouse by many standards, she is quite rich in this glum setting by virtue of owning this hybrid He-goat in a 100km radius. She wields power.
We rock up with some fellows who are from the Meru and Kikuyu tribes so that means I’m the only one who can’t understand a word the woman with the prized goat is saying because these folks can understand Kikamba and she flatly refuses to speak Swahili to me. You see how discriminated against I was? You see how low I have sunk as a writer, so low that a woman who keeps a goat won’t bother to speak to me in Swahili?
Anyway this goat landed from the UK a year ago, so I could immediately tell that he had an
attitude problem, he thought he was the best thing that ever happened to Mwingi. He had a chip on his horns. He had this overbearing arrogance, like he felt like we were all shady and backward. A racist goat. He felt like I had to kiss it’s ass to get a story from him. What was I meant to ask him, “So now that you are in Africa, how do you get the shampoo for your goatee?”. Please.
But here is why this he-goat was conceited. He is hybrid, which means most goat farmers in Mwingi needs his posh genes to create cross breeds that will increase productivity levels of their local goats. That means goat farmers travel for miles with their she-goats to come and get them to meet this posh Brit from Chelsea for a roll in the hay for Ksh 50. Oh yes, it’s not free. Good pedigree comes with a price folks. But Ksh 50 is a lot of money in these impoverished villages of Mwingi, it can support a family for three days. So yes, Ksh 50 is damned exorbitant. That’s like going for dinner date at Carnivore restaurant and leaving behind Ksh 7,000 for a meal and drinks!
I don’t know whether you see something unfair here. Let me put it in perspective. So this Brit goat checks into Kenya and unlike other local goats who have to forage for food in the dry landscapes of Mwingi, this goat from Chelsea gets fed with the best fodder and clean water and if that’s not selfish enough, he gets women clutching hard earned money lining up with their she-goats so that hot shot Londoner here can procreate with them and bestow them with some of his aristocratic pedigree. I can’t think of anyone who is living a better life like that in Nairobi or anywhere else; getting fed to have sex. But what the good people of Mwingi are really propagating is prostitution. Indeed. How else would you call it, this arrogant He-goat is getting paid Ksh 50 to make these poor village she-goat pregnant. The fuzz should raid that joint and capture that fancy goat because he is running a brothel!
When we checked into the boma, this goat got really agitated. The owner, the lady who refused to speak Swahili to me, explained that he gets agitated when he sees men. Well, why wouldn’t he be, he is an insecure prick! What did he think we would do, jump the bones of one his village girlfriends? All these put me off to be honest with you, spoilt my mood. So I decided not to interview this conceited bastard of a goat. That hurt his pompous feelings (good!) because I could tell he was disappointed, I could tell that he wanted to impress me with his cockney accent. I could tell he wanted me to ask him if he ever attended a Robbie Williams concert while back in the UK. What a show off, I bet he is the kind of goat who would do anything to get his picture into Pulse magazine!