I’m wearing pants I shouldn’t be wearing. They are called dhoti pants. They aren’t even mine. I will report back here with this story when it’s all done. This is part of the reason why I’m having Eddy hold court here.
Good old Eddy is sending us down to his hood this week.
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By Eddy Ashioya
Kawangware is not a slum. Well, not exactly. It has its moments. Maina and his sidekick, King’ang’i would struggle to sell land here. But Gidi and Ghost‘s “Patanisho” have us on a stronger leash than Adani with Must…ama wacha tu.
If you must go, you must pass by the various watering holes in Kawangware. Take a #46 matatu at KENCOM House, the rickety blue KBS, or the Safaricom-green Citi Hopper—chaguo ni lako—which trickles through Ngong Rd. spilling onto Dagoretti Corner and floods into Naivasha Rd—Kawangware 46. Or route 56, which canters through Yaya Centre through Lavington, now annexed by the Sudanese, say hi to the UK in Kenya hapo Braeburn kwa mabarbie, then keep moving past Congo and Amboseli. Kawangware 56. Myers mwisho. Usipitishwe. You can also board a 4C or 4W but that will take the longer route, and it means you have to walk from Satellite, and who wants to do that in this rain? Not you for sure. Important tip: as an outsider, just walk fast. People will think you are very important, or have something important to do, or know something important. Nobody robs a man walking fast. This is an important detail that is only available to robbers (and me). Nani anakushow?
Me I grew up thinking I would want to move out of Kawangware but now not so much. As an ethically proud but not tribal—tribeless youth, mind you—this is where “my people” are, the Abaluhyas. A sea of nobodies whose sweat waters an economy planted on faith. It is the Luhyas and Kisiis who spill over to Lenana and Ngong Rd, who, always handy, work in the construction, hardware, and wood business—and who through the years, you can see the stars in their eyes get progressively dimmer as life asks questions of them which outlive their answers. Besides, there is something about the ghetto lifestyle that is hard to scrape off—harder still to wash away all the years of a dirty childhood in Wanyee Rd and high school at Dagoretti Boys. I first came to Kawangware when I was six or seven, my father then was living in a flat in Satellite or was it Riruta? And he owned a red bicycle, which he shared with his best friend Ali. It was then as it is now—a shanty town, mabati by mabati of organised unimagination. We weren’t rich, but we got by. When you grow up here, you learn to appreciate everything you get, because that might be all you get. I discovered the true value of money, which can only be known when you have none. It is an excellent foundation; people who know about such things tell me so.
Someone’s daughter quipped that you can tell new money easily. It is loud and brash and bawdy. I tell her when I make money, the people shall know. Shall, mandatory. Si they knew when I was hustling? But I won’t be like those cash-throwing, social media-swashbuckling Kilimani billionaire boys with the lifespan of a Gengetone rapper. No. I am a simple man. I’ll just hire someone to be opening my car door and follow me around, someone to replace my shadow. But I understand the boys, you see, in our “poverty is the enemy” culture, one does what one does to get ahead. It is what it is. Haven’t our ladies taught us so? Their dreams creaking under the unmedicated stroke-inducing weight of a 60-something-year-old mubaba? The elders say it better: Let the young man in his desperation go out and hunt. If he kills the elephant his poverty ends. If the elephant kills him, his poverty ends. Perhaps if you are not from where I am from you won’t understand what I am saying. You won’t relate.
Recently I was listening to “Mo Money, Mo Problems” by The Notorious B.I.G. and he was groveling…let me take that again…Biggy was humble-bragging about how being rich was troublesome, although it kind of seemed like the problem with being rich was that others weren’t, which seems okay to me. I have an ostentatious claim to make. Can I make this ostentatious claim? If 2Pac lived in Africa, he would stay in Kenya, in Nairobi, in Kawangware. What is more California than Kawangware? Kawangware is so gangster it has Kawangware 46 and 56. You can’t contain all that gangsterness in one Kawangware. It is too much. Our cup runneth over. We even had an MP called Simba Arati. I don’t know about you but when your MP identifies as a Simba, everyone else is a sheep in your eyes. If that’s not enough, what if I tell you that in Congo, and Amboseli, there is a strip club that, in a nod to patriarchy, hails and allows only men inside? I know this because I’ve been there once. Okay, twice. Sawa. I have been there several times. Only God can judge me. It’s a place that seems to exist in Meja Mwangi’s dystopian novel, Down River Road, here in Kanairo, the kind of place where German cockroaches have colonized. But germs don’t kill Africans. The place oozes sleaze: scantily clad women linger around the bar, choking the air with cheap perfumes and fruity body lotions. Nameless women. Sex objects. Male fantasies. They are vipers—looking for some man to devour or someone to devour them. It’s the lowest of the fucking low, but any self-aware bastard knows that shame is a mindset. The men cuss and fight and the women are all bitches. It’s a pretty banal paradise. A tonic for the soul. I wonder what would push a man to visit a strip club. Is it freedom…or loneliness? I decide the reasons don’t matter. Just as all Muslims have to visit Mecca, all men of a certain age must eventually visit a strip club, cultivating the vices that will launch them into manhood.
Yesterday, I stumbled on a Louise Elisabeth Glück poem: “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” Kawangware is where my childhood innocence gave way to rugged adulthood. I learned we don’t eat chapatis with forks, like those oligopolies and tenderpreneurs. Chapati should be eaten like how God intended, with one’s hands, tearing it apart like a terrible love letter.
Where was I? Oh, yes. I visited my friend Wyban in Mathare, (he now works with (for?) the government—that traitor!) and he introduced me to mushogi. Mushogi, in Mathare is chicken head stuffed with warus and nyanyas and vitunguu. Eaten hot. In Kawangware, kata kata is all the rage: chicken legs, chicken heads, chicken liver. From as low as Ksh 20, you can taste meat without breaking the bank. The other usual culprits can be found dotting the town everywhere: the mayai pasua, the chapo smokie (smocha) and the ubiquitous mutura. All these are preferably served by a man who looks like he has done some time, a man you wouldn’t discuss Pan-Africanism with, a man with dirty fingernails—whose hand you probably don’t want to shake. It is common wisdom that these men make the best street food, h-pylori be damned.
But for every school, there are at least three Wines and Spirits, next to a chemist and an M-Pesa shop. If you go further, dingy drinking dens rise like hosannas across the streets. Here, you will find Mama Pima serving cheap alcohol in all its various forms: chang’aa, busaa, keroro, gauge. Young men shout orders for ‘more gauge’ because they cannot afford mortgage. There is a church beneath my balcony, a Dini Ya Musambwa, who have made it clear that I shall learn how to pray. Mrs Nani’s faith diplomacy is diplomaticking well. If the Protestants don’t get you, the Adventists will. Contrast that with the posh areas where the hum of pearly gates opening is what ushers you in, where the cacophony of the city is kept out by terrestrial walls and signs of “Controlled Development” silencing even the most fervent of evangelists. Gentrification makes noise silently.
This is an estate of Cs—congested, callous, chaotic, cosmopolitan, cantankerous, captivating, etc. I get it. Nani is still president and with the way Kenya’s economy is baring its fangs, it is only fair to short-wire things. Everything is negotiable. Just like our foreign and economic policy, which, distilled to its basic molecule is simply: “Kuja tu hatuwezi kosana.” The other day, someone crossed the wrong someone and was burned by everyone for suspected theft. It was even on the News. It’s mob justice, but it is justice. Growing up here, you understand justice is administered instantly—but rough-looking obohos will not harm you, it’s the police you should be worried about. If not, then there might be a case of mistaken identity leading to a stray bullet in the head—who doesn’t know that policemen in the ghetto seem to always have more than enough bullets to shoot stray ones?
This is the silent undercurrent in the ghetto: if mine doesn’t come through, I’ll come for what’s yours. This is what people think when they see young men huddled together, wakipiga seti, kamageras, juu ya mawe, or in a shack. We sit here doing nothing—nothing to do, nothing to be done. Foreign correspondents love that shit. I mean, who can miss the chance to “break” the news with the creative headline: Rival gangs clash in running battles with police in Kawangware. For some reason, it is always a running battle. A walking battle sounds too unserious, a bit lazy. Foreign correspondents don’t like that shit. It is not, erm, “sustainable”. Unfortunately, you’ll have to take my word for this.
I sometimes go to such places to play pool at the creatively named “Jonte’s Pool Baze”. Jonte is a hard man to forget, not least because he has a panga scar running from his left eye down to the chin, a simulacrum of his crime days. He is an even harder man to steal from, precisely for the same reason. I think about that Mapangalee craze that has hit the country. I wonder what Jonte thinks about it. I am not very good at pool, I have pathetic hand-eye coordination but I still come here when I am not cycling. This is the nerve center of Kawangware youth. You come here when you want insider information. Native intelligence. My friend Marto is the one who introduced me to Jonte. Martin was born here, in Kawangware, and “I have seen it grow”, he says. Martin owns a butchery—Bettyz Nyama Baze (ha!)—and he always throws in a few more pieces of goat fat when I buy meat from him. This will perhaps show up later in my gout in my 50s but fuck it. Kama mbaya, mbaya. Every man I know of considerable means has a beer belly from nyama choma, pombe na siasa. Living the life. Anyway, Marto told me that to be an insider, to get the knowledge of the world and its mysteries, these are only revealed to a patient ear and a sealed mouth. So, I won’t tell you what goes on at Jonte’s Pool Baze, because I am a good friend, and an even better secret keeper. The point I am trying to make is that you should be careful what you write. Whom you talk to. Don’t just go saying things fwaaaah. Or else.
Let me carry on.
Do you know the difference between the rich and the poor? Noise. Or more accurately, silence. Sylvan peace. Perhaps it’s because when money talks, you have to listen. The noises of Ungwaro—matatus blaring, nduthis honking, children shouting, a gunshot here or there—these were the melodies of my life, the music of my childhood, the echoes of my identity—delivered in surround sound. When I visit my much more affluent friends, I am gobsmacked by how quiet they are, everything is whispered as if words scorch their throat if spoken too loudly. Silence, I then discovered, is something you can actually hear.
As the rain beats against my window in slanted curtains, I think about the difference between the rich and the poor. I am at a crossroads. One good cheque and I move to Kilimani, Kileleshwa, or Lavington. One bad move and I retreat further into Kabiria or Sokoni or Waithaka. There is no relativity to wealth, you see. It’s only absolutes. It’s either the best, the rarest, or it might as well be Uchumi or Powerstar Supermarket.
I find it hilarious, how a road, or a fence, or a beacon divides the inheritors of the earth and its wretched. Nonetheless, the rich also cry because yesterday in Lavington I saw lorries—water bowsers like critters skittering around the estate like cockroaches when you switch the light on. It is said that these lorries during the day offer ‘Clean Water Services’ and at night, they undergo a reverse Damascene conversion, from Paul to Saul, offering ‘Exhaust Services’. Yellow gold, if you may.
The Dini Ya Musambwa are up and that means I am going to pray. From my window, I can see Kilimani stretching into the sky, just out of reach. Kilimani iko cardi. I just need deal moja safi. Shida ni DCI. I think about the billionaire boys. I wonder if I can survive in a Kenyan jail. I decide I cannot. Pretty boy things. Dream ya kutoka block. That song by Dynamq lulls itself into my head, beating itself against my eardrums: ‘I know Kawangware used to be so rough, Kona Mbaya was the place that was so tough.’ Knowingly or not, a man chooses a home because of who he is. Yet I know it is easier to leave Kenya than Kawangware, as I think Marcus Aurelius once remarked. I also know Kawangware may not love me back, but it certainly has feelings for me. Lazima iwork. I can leave anytime, I tell myself, deals ni mingi. Shida ni DCI.
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If you ever find yourself on the way to Ungwaro, or driving through Lavington, read something from our Marketplace place HERE. In case you want to join our next Masterclass, travel HERE.