Gor Mahia

What is unequivocally male? It can’t be a beard because there are women with hair on their chins. And knees. It can’t be a deep voice either (you should hear the “lady” at the fuel station I fuel at speak). It’s also not physical strength because there are women who can lift you off the ground if you give them a good enough reason (hint: Nyeri). It could be ill mannerism, like peeing on a hedge or farting in public, but then again you can’t really say that’s the province of men anymore, not after Beijing.

And it certainly isn’t being a football fanatic.

I don’t care too much about soccer. I care for Manchester United and Arsenal as much as I care about the price of medicine for athletes foot. I don’t start reading the newspaper from the back. I don’t go to Goal.com or The Sun to get bristling updates. When I’m in a bar and my pals start to frothing at the mouth about which team has bigger balls I normally try to drink faster.

And the women I have met and dated before have looked at me differently based on this. Most thought it was peculiar, weird or a bit gay (in the defence of gays; I think gays love any game with balls) but even more surprising some seem to take a shine of me because I didn’t love football. They loved the fact that I wouldn’t lose my libido because we were a three points down in the league.

Nonetheless, I admire guys who are passionate about football. Guys who literally live the sport. Every man needs a passion, even if it’s butterfly farming.

Last week, one of my closets friends – and a football fanatic to boot – called Sande gave me a ring.

“What are you doing Sunday 3pm?”

Now Sunday late afternoons are when I sit down to write this blog. So I told him I would be doing some writing.

“Well you can’t.”

“Why the hell not?” I growled.

“Gor is playing.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. We are playing the lunjes and we are calling out on all Luos to come out and beat the drums.”

“But I don’t have a drum.”

“It’s a figure of speech.”

“Right.”

“I have two tickets. One is yours. See you Sunday.”

And that was it. How do you say no to Gor? How can you turn your back on Kogelo when they are facing kina Wafula? Would you live with yourself if you were called upon by serikal to “beat drums” for Gor? Eh, would you? I wouldn’t have looked at myself in the mirror again without throwing up if I said no.

Here is the thing with Sande. Now there is nothing he doesn’t know about football, within and without this continent. He is stark raving mad about the game. He has tons of jerseys for Man U and for Gor. His missus long resigned to his madness. He never misses any Gor match because he feels like it’s a national duty to support them. It’s heritage. He always says that if you can’t support what is closest to you then you are nothing but a boat without a sail. The boat pun in the imagery is not lost on me.

Whenever he goes for Gor matches (and he goes to all of them), he rolls with a bunch of very loud and hilarious chaps who beat the same drums as he does.

So on Sunday, Sande (get it?) got a handle on the itinerary. We – together with four of his Gor friends – meet at 1pm for fish at some Godown place along Lusaka Road and I – miraculously – don’t choke on any fishbone. They all have green or white Gor jerseys praising their mothers, grandmothers, sisters or their shags on the back. We eat and they trade preposterous war stories. We later park behind Nakumatt Mega, that road along Kachoi? (By the way, by a show of hands, who still goes to Kachoi?) Then we walk into Nakumatt and out from the front and pass Uhuru Highway and into Nyayo Stadium compound now swarming with blue and green jerseys. Swarming with men chanting and dancing and taunting and beating drums…literally. One of Sande’s mate has a Gor flag on a stick that he waves about to stop traffic… or an AFC fan. Serikal, apparently, will also control traffic.

This chap with a flag is called Odhise and Odhise smuggles a whole bottle of whiskey into the stadium. When I ask him how he managed to get it in (we were all frisked) he tells me wryly in Luo, “Bwana, ma’ Narobi.” Someone pulls a plastic cup from their hats like a magician would a rabbit and the whiskey is poured and shared around. There is no mixer. Mixers are for girls and AFC Leopard fans. So we take it neat.

The stadium is split into half. One side is a sea of Blue, the lunjes and the other side is the green army, the Gor battalion. There seems to be a general agreement that all sanity is folded nicely and left at the entrance of the stadium for safekeeping. So is class system.

The class system turns to dust at Gor matches. Nobody walks in feeling that they are more superior financially or socially. Nobody cares. We have all been brought there because of ball, which we all have anyway. And so, the ball is the lowest – and the only – denominator.

Gor matches are not even about the game. It’s about the people, the camaderarie, the purpose. And they come from the dusty corners of Eastleigh and from the burgeoning madness of Dohnholm and Umoja. They come from Mlolongo and Mavoko and those areas that are riding off the back of the new four-laned Mombasa Road. They come from the “pearly” gates of Gigiri where dogs apparently bark using i-bark applications on their ipads. They come from Kinoo and from Ngong and Ongata Rongai. And in their hundreds they troop in from the sprawling wattles and hamlets of Kibera, Baba Ndogo, Mukuru… Heck, they even come from Kileleshwa where status and class is on its deathbed, coughing through an oxygen mask. And some come from as far as Kondele in Kisumu, the land of the infamous Baghdad Boys.

But no matter where they come from, they come wearing green and that colour makes them one.

The only thing close to a class system is the fact that there is a section in the stadium that is for guys who have paid 200/. It’s called Russia, or Rasia, as it is pronounced aptly. Rasia is not somewhere you want to sit in if you cringe easily. If the VIP is full of guys who truly don’t give a shit then Rasia is full of guys who are beyond giving a shit. And it’s Rasia where the fault lines will show first before it spreads to the VIP section. Rasia is the heart of the support machinery; brash, unforgiving, loud and hysterical. Don’t carry any valuables there; just your underwear and your fare.

The VIP section is loud yes, but you can tell these are guys who see violence as something they need an excuse to engage in because their disposition normally doesn’t allow them to. The VIP section is full of professionals whose alter egos come alive during those matches. A Gor jersey is armour that protects you from yourself. And you will see posers. I saw some cat take pictures using a tablet, and on closer look I realised to my horror that I went to high school with him; Opere!

There is song and dance. The Vuvuzelas blare endlessly. Oh the cacophony. You won’t hear someone speaking in Swahili, but when you do it will be something like, “Asayi bwana, usimwage huyu pombe wangu.”

There is a choir that sometimes sing dirty songs, songs that can make a truck driver blush. And that choir will get filthy when they want to. There was a guy seated on the upper row who, when a chic with a big ass passed, would hold his head then scream out, “Yawa Kristo atimo ni ango yawa! We kete e gombo kama yawa! Tho!” Then he would literally wail as if someone had set his shirt on fire. And everyone would die laughing, including the girl in question. (By the way, it’s not my intention to lock out other tribes by not translating all these jingo quips. It’s just that they really get lost in translation, they become dull. But also I really believe it’s time you all learnt a foreign language. Hehe).

Before the match starts we all rise for the anthem. Every last green colour rises and with one hand on the chest and the other pointed to the sky in a fist they sing:

“Gor Mahia, Gor timbe duto yuagi”

Surely, you must have heard it. It’s thunderous when they sing it. The whole stadium shakes on its hinges. You feel your liver quiver. It’s heady. You feel like you are a part of a movement and believe that Gor will eventually be the final saviour of humanity, as we know it. The belief in the team is astonishing, so astonishing that even the odieros in the crowd will gladly change their names from Gordon McKenzie to Okoth McKenzie.

And when the whistle goes for the start of the match, the choir starts singing a ridiculous song that goes, “ Taya ni kithoe piyo mondo wanyamie ngato,” (Don’t bother asking for the translation to that song if you were once in a Christian Union club).

The lunjes are great supporters too; you got to hand it to them. They – in a large crowd – dance around the stadium throughout, but then again those guys perhaps ate ugali for three guys before they came

to the stadium. Then washed it down with tea. You are no match to a man like that if all you had was bhajia and a Coke.

But the match seemed clumsy; there were no threatening shots to any goal that warranted busting a hernia over. But every time AFC’s Wanga touched the ball, the Gor fans booed and heckled in fear. That’s the one guy who shivered their timbers. But the Gor goalkeeper was in his element; agile, confident and mercurial. He was the man of the match.

Second half, a Gor player is handed a red card. Now, that decision is met with such protest and heckling that I know for sure someone was going to harvest the ref’s heart. Across at Rasia, what this did was that it created a crack in the fault line. And as they stood in the bleachers, yelling and saying, insert luo accent “Akuna bwana, ref lazima tuchoma nyumba yako. Afadhali hii game iise saa hii!” the crack developed into a large crevice and when a handful of cops walked into the pitch with wooden guns, a stone followed them from somewhere. Then stones started raining. Then a teargas canister exploded in the stands and Rasia scattered. And at that point I wondered where those stones came from all of a sudden. Look, Jesus might have turned water into wine, but Luos can turn pretty much anything into stones.

Sande, a very genteel man on any day, protested the red card with a naked fury that even took me aback. I’m sure if his wife and daughter were shown a recording of him n that state they would say the video was tampered with. He was furious! He and his friends hurled insults at the pitch and the cops and every time one of them reached for his phone I prepared myself to hear the words; “hawa watu wanacheza na sisi, ngowa hiyo reli saa hii!” But it turned out they were only updating their twitter accounts. The standoff lasted a while but the match resumed and the score ended in a goalless draw, or what the jaluos will say, “nothing nothing.”

I remember seated right behind me, was a very incensed guy who kept shouting, “Huyo ref ni Mkamba! Huyo ref ni Mkamba!” I wanted to turn and ask him to stop shouting in my ear but I was way over my depth. But I swear he chanted those words so many damn times that I remember while I was driving home I busted out loudly, “huyo ref ni Mkamba!”