By Eddy Ashioya
It was ten to 11 PM when the lights went out. Close your eyes. Yes, that kind of darkness. Like that Kenya Power rogue monkey had cut off power. A cough here. A whistle there. A glass shattering. The parabola of tension. The air was heavy as if there were too much of it cramped in that classroom. A sharp scream punctured it. Then, pure, sweet rampage. Boys fluttered to get through the door, some escaping through the windows as stones were pelted from all directions. Like demons let loose on a holy rite. The smell of teargas. And my, oh my, the noise; an almighty, prolonged, ear-splitting roar, punctuated by the whimpers of one Form I after the other as they experienced their first high school strike. It was going to be a beautiful night and even those words leave you wondering whether that might be underselling it.
It always starts the same way. It always ends the same way. It’s the bit in between that still beguiles, the act of pure faith, the conviction—against all available evidence—that this ride will be worth the trouble. The strangest part was, there was no buildup. No one saw it coming. The ground did not crack. The air didn’t crackle. There was no sound of footsteps approaching through the woods.
I was in Form III, at the climax of high school life and I used evening preps with my half-brain then to write letters to girls from Alliance Girls, Starehe, Bishop Gatimu Ngandu, Kenya High (whose girls had those long flamingo legs that seemed to flow from heaven straight to earth) and on a bad day, for my CSR, I would do a district school, say, a Kabare Girls here and a Karoti Girls there, just to be in touch with, you know, kwa ground, the other 99%. “Beb,” I would quip,“I know you’ve heard this nauseating times from other men but you haven’t heard it from me. I’m different. It’s not news but because I said it, it’s fresh.” I would then pssshhh, pssshhh, psssssssssssshhhhhh spray my Limara Fresh eau de parfum (Romantic Fantasy, 100ml in case you’re wondering) and seal the letter with a kiss and hand it to Paul “Just call me Popo” Nalo to style with his calligraphy skills. Ah, the golden age of pen pals. This story is true, na ni me nakushow.
Back then we went on strike for anything: the Biology teacher decided to extend her lesson into Games’ time. Protest! The ratio of beans to maize was not equal in our kokoto (as we called Githeri then) or the ratio of maize to beans was not equal in our kokoto, trust me, they sound the same but are not the same.
I was in a high school whose version of average was most people’s interpretation of the spectacular. I was from Nairobi which elevated me from a mere layman to the council of elders. I was also a prefect, a teacher’s pet, a captain, chair of several defunct clubs, and a regular face in all the funkies. In short, I was an institution—the establishment. And I was from Nairobi. That means I was cool. I was a man with a Datsun among men with bicycles.
Kerugoya was a nondescript structure, long and hard, situated in (shocking) Kerugoya. We had a hardware as all proper high schools did. For tax evasion reasons. Our principal then, Mr K, moonlighted as a bodybuilder but who doesn’t know bodybuilders are just trying to hide the size of where it matters most? As we inched closer to the protests reaching fever-pitch, he went ballistic, taking matters into his own hands—literally—and engaging in a bare-knuckles fight with some of the students. I can neither confirm nor deny if I was one of said students but I can testify the man has a left hook that was both savage and educated, a slaughterhouse instrument with a mind of its own. To this day, I cannot pronounce the words“itinerary” “revolutionary” or “vulnerability” correctly. Mr K did not like being threatened and he called the GSU on us. GSU. Guza Serikali Uone. Unfortunately for them, we lived in the school and knew the terrain better than we could make our way around calculus and log books and algebra (yuck).
We ran rings around them till they either gave up or gave in. Guerilla warfare. Scorched earth policy. It was orphans running the orphanage. With bad boy bravura and attitude stuffed in our back pockets, we’d strut through the bush with the gunslinger gusto of Alliance Boys when they had just received the KCSE marking scheme. That’s right Alliance, we knew. We know. We’ve always known.
To us then, as it is now, it was not sufficient simply to win; we had to win with spite; to advocate and emote, to demean and chide and impugn and repugn, to scream about conspiracies and corruptions. This is what representation looks like, this was our constituency—discomfort is comfort. The school administration had to listen. Injustice to a comrade anywhere was a threat to comrades everywhere. Later on, when we got back to school, something happened during Games’ Week. With hormones running riots and the cherished purity of childhood receding like a midnight dream, I had my first kiss in Form 3East. I had never kissed a girl before (or boy—in case you are wondering). Terrible, it was, if you are asking. If she were any wetter, I’d have drowned in the litres of saliva she produced. But that’s neither here nor there.
Protesting and standing up for your right, for what is right is sort of like trying to find a cheap apartment with running water in Kilimani: it’s impossible. And yet…every single day somebody manages to find a cheap apartment with running water in Kilimani. Scratch that, there is no running water in Kilimani, people run for water in Kilimani, people run after water in Kilimani. But the general point remains true. I can’t tell you how to do it. I can only tell you—through my example—that it can be done.
I have been in protests since high school, and though the wheels of change turn slowly, they do turn. I eventually paid the price for being expelled from school, our entire class, in September 201–, a few months before the November KCSE examinations, after we led another protest against the administration for reducing our entertainment time. Man shall not live on books alone! But if anything, it made our resolve stronger—the expulsion, not books. And yes, I still passed and went to university where I bagged baddies with my revolutionary experiences in high school. “Aki we ni m-tough.” Turns out, girls love that shit.
This is also what I remember. I am reminded of the late Professor Wangari Maathai standing up to Nyayo, and telling the late President Moi who was lusting after Uhuru Park, haiwes mek bro. I see Field Marshall Muthoni Nyanjiru at the Kingsway Police Station (now Central Police Station) while agitating for the release of one of their leaders—Harry Thuku—lifting her dress over her head and asking the men to strip and give them their trousers because she was more man they ever would be. Badass. She refused to be silent or silenced. Or Muhammad Ali saying, “Just take me to jail.” This pretty man, at the apogee of his youth, a sexy fighter on the cusp of fame and fortune, was willing to march off to prison to protest an unjust war.
Alfred Kazin writes that war is the enduring condition of the twentieth-century man. Perhaps. Methinks, war is the enduring condition of man, period. Men have gone to war and protested over everything from Helen of Troy to Jenkins’ear to the ratio of beans to maize not being equal in our kokoto. The truth is, the reasons don’t matter. There is a reason for every demonstration and a demonstration for every reason.
So here we stand. They have killed our past and they are busy robbing our futures. Tax the poor so the rich can spend. They promised change, but now they have changed the promise. There is a Serbian proverb that an idled priest would baptize a goat. Why I’m telling you this, I’m not sure. It’s not probably something you need to know. It’s probably just my volcanic emotions erupting in this Webuye pan paper product. Back then, I just wanted my maize and beans to be equal. Now, I take to the streets because I want to know I have the same opportunities with that MP’s son, or daughter. That I am a shareholder of this country, whether I voted for this government or not. That I am a hustler, not someone’s hustle.
On campus, I chanced upon a thesis of Milton Mayer’s 1955 book “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45” which explains the pain of hindsight of moments leading up to the holocaust when the Third Reich might’ve been opposed, but wasn’t:
“Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.”
It is easy to imagine men somewhere, in a dark room, or at a corner of City Hall Way, with brown envelopes and mustard coats, made mad and cynical by privilege and power; being the locus of society’s malady. You hang on to this image. Then, it makes it easier to swallow that you are a coward, that the truth is bad things happen because ordinary people—the ones who drive red Jukes and honk their horns and hug their children are capable of doing terrible things to other ordinary people. It’s them, not us. It’s them that do bad things. It can’t be us, right? Because if it’s us, what does that say about me? That I am just like them? That perhaps, I, am them. So it’s easier to hide under us. Because it’s them that do bad things. Look, this is not a fight against them, in government. This is a fight for us. Our future. We, the people. A kamikaze mission? Perhaps. It’s like a demon seeking to possess my soul. And I refuse to be silent or silenced.
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