By Eddy Ashioya
It’s me. Again. By now I should just have my own guest bedroom with the SpongeBob bedsheets. I am like that half-remembered ex with main character energy, who, as everyone’s greatest girlfriend—Beyoncé—once said, ‘bado niko soko’. And while that isn’t usually a sign of progress, I am that kind of ex who still calls your mom and dad and sister, which puts us back in the glass-half-full container. Kudos! I also like how you have feng shui-ed the hacienda, finally replacing the wall cabinet, and removing my photo albums that served as the piñata of this home. Boo hoo.
If I am displaying narcissistic tendencies, it is because I like to consider myself a brave, bold and beautiful man. I have applied for jobs that the only qualification I had was that I was breathing. I have been sad and still said no to drugs when furaha was kulewa na marafiki. Heck, I have even dated in Nairobi, which if we are being candid is akin to converting an alcoholic in a bar.
Speaking of, I was at one of those dingy Nairobi joints the other day, where girls with stomachs flatter than an Ukambani rock python would saunter in and out. It is a wintry July, and despite them looking hot, I don’t think that’s how you fight the cold? Anyway, the point is, someone sitting on a stool as their WhatsApp DP texted me: “Do you want to make between 20k to 30k per week, working from home. All you need is your phone.”
I have had my phone since 2013 and the only time I made 20k in a week was never. It’s not that I didn’t want the money. No. Money is Jesus in Kanairo. And this Kanairo is some sort of grand social experiment, whether the people are a refracted image of the city or the city an inverse of the same, it feels like this city is always becoming something, never something.
That’s how I became a hustler. I hustled in order to avoid being hustled. You don’t know hustle until you’ve sent your CV to everyone in this city. Everyone. And later as the ‘We Regret to..’ stream in, you realise, instead of ‘Curriculum Vitae’, you wrote, ‘Curriculum Vaite.’
I’m telling you, boy, you’ve not sold your soul to the devil till you’ve earned your day’s keep then got mercilessly robbed in the thick traffic of Thika Rd (Superhighway?). See, you’ve not hustled until you’ve been Eddy in the streets, and Edith on the sheet. Heck, I don’t know how many CVs identify me as a Catholic, a Mormon or Dini ya Musambwa. I can be anything you want, Mr. Richard of Sahara Ventures. You want a light skin woman? I’ll bleach and be a light skin man, just under ‘woman’ in the gender appropriation pecking order. There is a CV that identifies me as Rashid Ashioya. Heck, my nickname was once Salim. I mean. Mboka ni mboka. But you don’t know rejection until a company tells you, “We can’t hire you. Your talent is bigger than our organisation.” You don’t know rejection until you buy those 10 bob njugus in Nairobi streets. As you unwrap the white sheet, you wonder, how come these njugus taste so familiar? You read the sheet—alas! You realise it is your CV that you sent to Sahara Ventures.
But here’s a fun fact. I never even wanted to be a Nairobian boy in the first place. I always wanted to be a charismatic preacher with a kasmall church in Kakamega, and my kasmall boda boda and my kasmall family. Okay I’m kidding. We don’t do small families in Kakamega. I liked how the almighty men of God (never the men of the Almighty God) could hold a mic and just tell you to do things. Evangelist Eddy Ashioya of Jesus Christ Ministries of Young and Upcoming Angels. My (earthly) father would never allow us to miss church. Never. He is a Rastafarian Anglican, one of those Anglicans who knows everyone and whom everyone seems to know. Here’s the thing about Anglican churches. You know how Catholic churches are gangster? Anglican churches are gangsters in a suit. If the Catholic church is Goodfellas, then the Anglicans are The Godfather.
And why not? Like The Godfather, the Anglicans are extremely orderly. There is a structure. A sequence of events. The cufflinks, the steady hand, the pistol inside the furled-up newspaper. Being in an Anglican church service feels like the sequence in ‘The Godfather’ where Michael, Don Corleone’s scion, wipes out his sclerotic mafiosi rivals inch by inch, each after the other; and puts the world back in the way it used to be, and some would argue, the way it should be. I am one of those people who hold ‘The Godfather’ as their Gideon. Remember the film’s iconic axiom? “We’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse”.
Why I want to be a preacher is simple. Not the offering, although it helps, but mostly because I would have to speak in public. You know how preachers get lost in their own trance, drunk from the word with that look, that look of defeatist contentment, the look of a person transported into ecstasy? My passion for the word burned hotter than the sun in Kakamega in January, the same word I would deliver colder than the new KFC caramel ice cream on a hot Friday in Kakamega. It was like watching the sky dance.
And the songs. Oh my, how I loved the songs. There was this one that had a lot of us Kakamega kids in a chokehold (who thought we could ever use that word in a Christian manner?). Thitima! That was the time when electricity was cheaper than your 10% tithe before someone somewhere shocked us with increasing bills. Can I digress? Allow me to digress. Kenyan ladies, please you need to move with the times. A Kenyan lady would switch on the shower and wait for it to get hot. The problem is, while she is waiting, she will put tea on the cooker, set an episode on Netflix and then get shocked when she sees your furrowed brow. Ati ‘babe what’s wrong? What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ When the tokens are disappearing faster than your leave days on a hot January day in Kakamega!
Everyone has a thing. My thing is that I loved Tanzanian Gospel. Like Faustin Munishi. Bonny Mwaitege. Zabron Singers (before Sweetie Sweetie). Emachichi. Hold up. Emmanuel Emachichi had a sultry, silk voice, a soft lull, like a wet plumber’s handkerchief. His voice was criminal smooth. He was gospel’s Loverboy, with a cadence that plateaued but made you feel like he was riding a crescendo. It was like listening to your best friend sing beautiful songs about girls and loneliness and wasting time—if your best friend was a smooth criminal.
Ahhh…and on Saturdays, I’d purposely wash my clothes outside in that metal karai just to hear SDA girls take their lemon water and unleavened bread as they sang “Sweetie, Sweeties haikuwa rahisi..” which naturally lends to the credence that if you have not dated an SDA girl, you just might’ve missed out on seeing the Kingdom of God.
Suffice it to say, I didn’t make it to evangelism. Girls, man. Girls. I met girls on campus and my injili changed. I was shown thighs, brother. Yellow yellow thighs brother. I saw girls with stomachs flatter than my wooden Kariokor chopping board. I met girls with skin as clean as rain, girls who touched the nape of my neck and accessed a spirituality I didn’t know I had. Girls with boobs. Girls with nyash. Girls with boobs and nyash. I started singing “Adhiambo Adhiambo, Kisumu City, Adhiambo C!” “Kuna kabinti binti kamenisimbuuaaaa! Kuna kabinti binti kwa mtaaaaa!”—remember that one? Or this one? “Nasema moyo wadunda roho yauma dada ukipita wanipa hatchu! Fever! Fever! Hatchu! Hatchu! Fever! Fever!”
But everyone with half a brain cell will tell you that girls are expenses. That’s where the real fever is. And so, I started working. I started looking for jobs. Because the ugliness of a man is in his pocket. I tarmacked so hard they called me a mlami. No?
And then, when I was just about to give up, I got my first job. But it wasn’t just any job. I used to sell awards. Yes, awards. It was not a job I wanted—just one I could get. Nairobi shamba la mawe. To rise from a small-town intern to a small-town hotshot, it requires charismatic deceit. I made Faustian bargains with the devil. And the further one rises in the career rungs, one must learn tact (as the rich call it) or ass-licking (as the rest call it), and align with issues one does not give a duck’s tail about. We know this. You know this. Ducks know this.
At least I have meaning, I figured. I didn’t want to be a statistic, one of those guys from the ‘Global South’, whom the UN and their white suburban males wanted to give an opportunity to a child in Africa. In post-apocalyptic Kenya, the vijanas are left to vibandas, vinyozi na kusaka views online. I was ready to do anything, with an up-and-at-em attitude, including even taking one of those “We-Are-a-Family” kind of jobs, the ones where they have days where they talk about ‘anxiety’ and ‘wellness’ and ‘toxic spaces.’ I mastered how to sound ‘authentic’ and ‘passionate’ and ‘balanced.’ These are facts that no Kenyan can pretend not to know.
How it worked is I was working for a few CEOs. Well, sort of. They called me many names. I refused to winnow. The money was good, and besides, it was either this or I buy detergents to wash wash. I figured I’d survive. I was earning Ksh. 1500 per day, plus transport, and free lunch. Honest to God, I would have done it for the free lunch because I was always hungry like a pack of Roysambu ladies.
I was technically a banner boy. What would happen is we would come up with awards say “Best Dancer of the Year” or “Most Improved CEO of the Year” and nominate a few people and ask them to pay gala fees, as a show of ‘support.’ You could get away with anything in this city if you called it the right name. Corruption suddenly seems more palatable when you call it ‘lobbying.’ Prostitution, sex work. Conman? No. How about businessman?
This Nairobi is a front. What people show you is a mirror, because what you see is yourself in it. That’s what I learned. I’d stumble and mumble and glare menacingly through cryptic pronouncements and elliptical explanations, standing in the theatrical Kanairo manner, the professional pause of any Nairobian when he starts to tell a more-or-less true tale, trying to figure out whether anyone present is going to refute him.
This is Nairobi, soulless and bland, and you gotta have an attitude to survive here. I was a banner boy—like a PA-without portfolio, flashing a smile that is more plastic than my fake interview voice. One CEO, with a smirk and condescending look, like a Nasa scientist patiently explaining to the world’s media how they had accidentally managed to lose Saturn—provoking my animus—said our shoes (with my female colleague) were dirty which was like a dagger across my heart. And the crazy thing is, our shoes were dirty. I left in protest, not least because I suffer from bouts of claustrophobia. There was no way we would fit in there with all of us. It was crowded. I mean, me, him and his massive ego?
Febrile with nervous energy, I met the whole CEO shebang. Lithe and wiry, svelte and zaftig—the whole lot, a tailor’s nightmare. Money doesn’t care. It can pronounce juice as ‘juus’, and you’ll laugh. Oh, by the way, it’s juice.
Listen, CEO’s, don’t have time to smile. They say ngwashe, and cheese and all brouhaha with a stoic face. Men who finish every statement with a comma, the punctuation of the wealthy. Men who look like they just want to give out strokes but are more likely to get a stroke.
Being unemployed is dehumanising. Especially as a man, having nothing to do, nowhere to go, no meaningful work? It’s the fastest concoction to depression, and if not checked death. It is the belief—the faith, even—that work is not life’s product, but its currency. It’s the curse, and blessing of man to work. I blame it partly on our empty religiosity where money is touted as the devil’s jerk hand. I was angry at society. At the government. At my youth pastor. C. S. Lewis says “Sit long enough with your anger until she tells you her real name is grief.”
That’s when I smoked my first blunt (Mom you can stop reading now). My youth pastor had drilled in my head and tattooed in my heart that I was a puff away from going cuckoo. My father told me that it takes seven years to get weed out of your system! Seven! Is that how this works? Why I really smoked, is that I was reliving my childhood dreams of being a preacher, if I couldn’t speak about the most high, at least I could be the most high?
I wouldn’t have made a great preacher anyway. The devil would have converted to Christianity just so he could no longer listen to my dad jokes, and that would render me out of a job, because if you are leading and no one’s following then you are just taking a walk. But that was not on offer, as the saying goes. The ugliness of a man is in his pocket, I learned. I learned that it is money, and not religion that is the opium of the mass, and that superstition is only but a shadow of it. That we might be hustlers, but we are also the hustle. Thank God I can feed a Roysambu lady. Or two.
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Biko is caught up with some pressing writing. Not that this isn’t pressing, but he just let some deadlines accumulate now he’s hunkered down to do what he told me was “serious writing.”