If you visited Sabina Joy nightclub in the late 80s and had ten shillings to spare, you’d get a girl for the night. Ten shillings would also fetch you a girl from Modern Green Day and Night Club, on Latema Road, near Odeon Cinema. The “Day and Night” meant you could walk in any time and get a drink and a girl. It was a 24-hour rotating hedonism. Legend has it that it operated day and night, its doors remaining constantly open, even during the 1982 coup when everything fell apart. It was a phallic monument.
When I was 18, two of my older uncles took me there once. It was smokey and gritty, with tables covered with plastic and the barman peering from behind a high cage. A jukebox played in the corner. My uncles, who in hindsight weren’t that much older (25 at the very most) were drinking beers and smoking like grownups. Two dangerous-looking girls sat with us. I say dangerous because they were wearing red lipstick. Very scandalous dresses and, most of all, chewing gum. I believe Cardi B when she says she is a “bad bit*h” because she chews gum. Only truly bad bit*hes chew gum. It doesn’t matter if you can swing a club or get hosed by a water cannon, if you aren’t chewing gum you are far from being a bad bit*h. And Modern Green was the home of bad bit*hes. So, I’m acquainted with Modern Green.
If you felt like you wanted to treat yourself, you know, throw some money around, you could edge further downtown Nairobi to a discotheque called Kongoni* where you could get Pakistani girls. The Pakistani girls weighed almost nothing, had honey-glazed skin, and long hair that reached the middle of their backs. A Pakistani girl could set you up 20 shillings for the night.
“As University Of Nairobi students, we had lots of money to spend. We had Boom, the student’s loan.” James told me recently as he presided over his steak, knife, and folk in each fist. He had his white napkin tucked under his chin, holding court at the round lunch table at the Safari Park Hotel where I recently held their organisation’s Storytelling Writing Masterclass.
“We had 5,040 shillings to spend each semester, a lot of money at that time.” He continued. “We also had time to spend it. Some of us were coming to the city for the first time. Suddenly we had freedom from the watchful eyes of our parents. The campus was in the city center, the epicentre of all the action. Nairobi was a marvellous city for me having come from the village, and you wanted to prove to the world that you’re not a total villager. You wanted to dress well and talk to the city girls. You were young, you just wanted sex. You had your own room, with a big radio cassette. And you had Boom money. You could go to the Serena Hotel and have a beer. It was a good life, especially for a villager.”
And it so happened that often he’d find himself seated on a high stool at the counter of Sabina Joy, bobbing to the music, sipping his cold beer, and taking in the room in small gasps. (I wrote about Sabina Joy here once) He’d then spot a girl seated with a couple of other girls, sipping a Kingfisher, long legs crossed. Because he was a cocky young buck, he’d summon her with the crook of his finger and she’d sashay over in her high heels, her breasts spilling from her flimsy top, and then lean very close to him and croon, “ Hello handsome, my name is Sandra, what’s your name?”
“Forget my name,” he’d growl looking around her at their table, “it’s the other girl I want. The one with thick beautiful arms. You are too light for me. Eat some ugali.” She’d roll her eyes and head back to their table. The thick girl would sway over, displacing air with her beautiful volume. He’d buy her a beer and negotiations would kick in. Upon agreement, you would pay ten shillings at the counter and stand up to leave. “Let me get my things.” She’d say before walking over to their High Table (I just christened it because Ruto must go) and gathering her purses as she talked to her friends, probably telling them ‘If I’m not back at 6 am, come look for me at Nairobi University.”
“I would then cross over to the Hilton Square where the blue London taxis were parked. You know the taxis I’m talking about, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I think they were black?”
“Black, blue, does it matter? Those colours are related.” He waved his steak knife dismissively because why let a little fact get in the way of a good story? And anyway, he had a point; at night blue and black kind of look the same, especially when you have had beers and you have a girl in your arm and testosterone is coming out of your ears.
“We’d then take a taxi to campus.” In case you are wondering what a 19-year-old university student does with a prostitute in his room, then we have many years to mature as a democracy. Anyway, when he’s done with her he’d walk down the hall knocking on doors of his friends who are too shy to talk to a woman and tell them, “I have another one. Same terms and conditions.” They’d each pay 5 bob to have sex with the lady.
“Wait, who would be paid the 5 bob?” I asked him.
“To me.”
“So, essentially you wouldn’t have paid for anything.”
“I paid for her beers and the taxi. I’m the one who has brought her. But then before dawn, we would count the number of boys that we had that night we’d share the spoils with her.”
I don’t have the nerve to call him a pimp to his face, mostly because I’m not sure if he would know what that is. Plus, I was afraid he would shout at me. He possessed the voice of a street preacher. Those nights they would make about 40 to 50 shillings or so which they would split in the middle. Everybody was happy. This was the modus operandi on most weekends. They weren’t using any condoms because “Pope John Paul had successfully launched a campaign against usage of contraceptives. It was seen as a sin.” He said. So all they worried about was gonorrhoea and syphilis and for that, “there was one old Muhindi doctor who would invite people every Friday to pick drugs before we went for the weekend. If you were lucky and you got a woman, you would swallow your drugs and go with her.”
“Prophylaxis,” I said.
“Something like that…” He grunted, chewing his steak. He chews like Idi Amin Dada. Not that I ever saw Idi Amin chew but I imagined that’s how Idi chewed.
They completed university in 1991. They started dying in 1992.
Because a band of mutinous soldiers had tried grabbing President Moi’s lunch in the 1982 attempted coup, he became quite jumpy after. In his paranoia and need for absolute control he had, through The University of Nairobi Chancellor Professor Mbithi, allegedly devised a method where students were housed in alphabetical order; according to the first letters of their surnames. “This is how the O’s – Omollos, Otienos, Onyangos – all found themselves in Hall 11,” James said. “That way, perhaps we could be better managed. And this is the hall death visited with gusto because we had shared women.”
Opiyo, “Ja Nyakach”, went first. His hair fell off, his cheeks sunk in, his eyes became as white as a ghost’s, then he became a bag of bones, then he died with his teeth jutting out of his mouth.
“Then Anyano followed him,” he said. “…then Obunde “Riu rií.”… that was his nickname, Obunde Riu rií. Then Obare, then Obala….aiii….what’s happening? Odhiambo is gone…Ochieng wuod Chula, gone…one by one the boys of Hall 11 are dying. We are dying.” He cried. “We’d travel to bury Obiero and then come back and hear that Okello was on his deathbed. Then Okello would die. We wouldn’t go to all the funerals. Some would die without us knowing, we would only know later. We were young men burying each other. AIDS was unknown, we couldn’t connect the deaths to it immediately but here we were, all the men who had shared women dying one after the other. AIDS, as we knew it, was so high level that only people who were infected were long-distance truck drivers and wazungus who were coming to Mombasa, not us. Whatever the case, I knew I was next. There was nothing special about me surviving. It would take a year to die after you started coughing, and if you did an HIV test and found you were positive, most would die faster. So, I didn’t dare do a test. “I was studying Literature and I remember we had a mzungu in our class from the exchange program. He died too. There was a Nigerian lady, dead. I waited for death, worried sick. We would ask each other, who do you think is next? If you coughed you would wonder if this was it, if your journey to the grave had commenced. It was mental torture. I started praying. I begged God to let me live for 30 years only. I just wanted to live to 30, not a day more. “Give me a chance to have children and a wife.”
Hall 11 housed about 200 students and by 1994 everybody from the hall had been wiped clean except for him, and a classmate called Bob. So by 24, when I found myself still alive against all odds, I quickly got a wife and quickly got her pregnant. “She did tests and she was negative, I was suspicious. Our firstborn came and we got two more children fast because remember death was right behind me.”
When he clocked thirty and he was still alive he promised that he would be a good man, a faithful man to one woman.“You change your ways.” He said, “Because you have been spared. I can’t explain why I survived from all my friends from Hall 11, it can only be God.”
He’s 58 years old now, a real firecracker of a man; highly opinionated, raucous, funny, and unapologetic. “Now I don’t care anymore, I’m just living my life. I have to remind myself of the past. I learned that ignorance is blind to danger, and truly one’s destiny is premeditated.”
He has since added a second wife with three children, the last born being a one-year-old.
His second wife is younger than his firstborn. He retires in three years. Life is for the living.
***
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