6:35am.
At dawn every day he wobbles on the desolate beach. At dawn every day for the past 6yrs he sits at the same spot. He removes his sandals, and places them aside. He then lights a cigarette and stares at the sunrise. His name is Samora Machel. He is names after the Mozambican revolutionary leader. Do I have to tell you that he is Luo going by that name? He smokes and sits in rapt silence, staring into the horizon at the shy sun climbing into the sky reluctantly, even after 6yrs, he still finds the sunrise spiritual.
Samora makes animals for a living…from sand. He digs out sand into a heap and with his hands he makes sea animals. While I watched he made a crocodile. The day before he made a hippo. It takes about two hours to create these animals. If tourists pass by his creation and sees art they hand him some money. He makes Ksh 1,000 during high seasons, this figure drops to a few hundred shillings during low season. Samora doesn’t ask me for money even when I take his picture. He doesn’t tell me some sob story that you always hear on the beach. He doesn’t mention his disability. He works with his hands. He is a proud man.
Fortune seller:
This old man walks up to me and starts a conversation. He looks shifty. First I think he wants to sell me pot, but then I start thinking that he might be selling something worse. In his hands is this black polythene paper which he ruffles in and fishes out this sea shell. Yes, a shell. He tells me that the shell will bring me good luck. He tells me the shell will change my life. I want to ask him why the damned shell hasn’t changed his life, but I’m afraid he might cast a curse on me and make me impotent or something, so I shush. He is selling the damned thing for a bleeding Ksh 300! A simple shell! You got to be kidding me! So I tell him I’m not interested. “You aren’t interested in good fortune?” he asks. I tell him, I’m fine. He stares at me for a while then mumble something and returns his expensive sea shell in his little polythene bag and walks on. Good fortune my ass!
Born free:
We met them when we nipped into a mall to buy water…and beer. They aren’t blood brothers, but they are like brothers. They live their lives on skate boards. Their lives revolve on the skate boards, literally and figuratively. Every morning they wake up and grab their skates and their days roll by on wheels. They love it. They looked happy when we saw them, gliding through the mall with little care. At 10yrs of age, this is their life. This is the only life. I mentioned to them that they will outgrow the skates when they hit teenage and discover other things (like girls) and they laughed at me and one of them said, “Not a chance, when we hit teenage we start wind surfing ,” In essence they were saying that when they have skated over every possible land surface they will try the sea.
The said skating wasn’t as easy as it looked, that it was dangerous and that one kid from their school (Braeburn, Mombasa) almost broke his neck once while skating. They giggled at that. Yes, they are men, and men love to embrace danger. They proudly (and competitively) showed me marks on their legs, wounds caused by skating. Wounds that they regarded as feathers in their caps. At night they slept with the skating boards under their beds. These kids were born free and I hated them for that.
Football. Life.
This is the greater joy. Look at him; sandy, innocent and without a care in the world but that ball and the sea behind him. This is how life should be. He told me he was a Spain supporter. He told me he loved football because it was played by men. I repeat; he said he loved football because it’s played by men. Turn that over in your mind some.
The beauty of childhood is not even in the innocence, it’s in the untamed spirit. These boys played on the beach as the sun prepared to turn in. They fell and sand stuck on their bodies. They laughed and they teased each other other. Occasionally they fought but they always reconciled fast because they seemed to realize that their friendship was bigger than the ball. When they got tired and dusk inched on the beach like ink on cotton wool, they briefly jumped in the sea and washed off the sand. Then they walked home with their shirts flaying in their hands. They continued kicking the ball on their way home.
Perfect balance:
I don’t know why I took this picture. Maybe I loved the yellow against the blue. Maybe it was the paradox of it all; the young girl walking for miles to fetch water when before her in the sea was trillion of cubic meters of water. Or maybe it was h0w she balances the vessel on her head, reminded me a little of my shags. I don’t know why I took this picture.
The guy in red? He sells coconut juice and mangos. He slices your mango with this rustic knife and then rubs this masala chilli thing in the incision. It’s the best thing I ate down there. He sells something like 100 mangoes in a good day. At Ksh 3 a pop that’s Ksh 300 a day. I bet he supplements it with something else, i mean going by his size.
