If you are a cat lover, stop reading this article. Go on and do other things in your life that won’t upset you. Make a cup of tea and think of Christmasy things.
Because this post is dedicated to the egomania of cats. And the blinded cultic following of all cat lovers. Kind of.
I could never stand the arrogance of cats. Someone put it in their little heads this idea that they are the chosen ones of all domestic animals. That they were better than dogs or even ducks. That we should bend to their every whim, and serve them. I’m no cat server. Neither am I a cat lover. My life, I decided a long time ago, will not revolve around a feline narcissist. I will not be swayed by the online public relations shelling driven by the cat’s undergown PR machinery- this idea that cats are cool and loveable. Cats, to me, are not unlike hippos; nothing but great PR. I’ve never seen a cat or a hippo I’ve wanted to befriend. The founding fathers of gaslighting are cats.
I never grew up around cats. Where I grew up and when I grew up, nobody carried cats in their arms or named them, or hung little bells around their necks. Bells belonged to animals that actually brought something to the table; food. I’m talking cows and goats.
Cats were strays, they stumbled into homesteads uninvited and imposed themselves on us, and some households begrudgingly accepted them- but on condition that they earn their keep by catching something. And stay out of the way. Cats were not the accessories they have become now. There have always been good-looking cats, yes, but nobody took a great deal of photos of them. Before the onset of the internet, there were more photos of the colobus monkey than of cats.
Nobody named cats during my time. Supermarkets – there was only one, and it was all the way in town – didn’t sell cat food. Cats ate what humans had left over. There were no special cat bowls. Cats caught rats. And if they didn’t they slept hungry. Now cats think rats are acquaintances; they use rats as pacifiers. It’s all that Tom and Jerry stuff they spent their days watching. The entitlement we have allowed cats has truly left me bewildered. We seem to have built a narrative around them now, allowing them to get away with murder. The original slang for a cat is crackhead. Somehow cats turned it and now we have a cool cat. Cats are as cool as a nerve gas.
We never had a cat in our house because my parents weren’t big on pets in the house. We had dogs at some point, the usual kienyeji dogs, the Simba, Rex and Brunos. For security, not something you stroked for emotional balance. Some of our neighbours had big dogs, like the Kisiis at the corner. I forget their names, the Anundas or Ogetos, I think. German shepherds with long serious faces. Those were good dogs. They earned their keep. If you touched their gate, the dogs came rushing, attempting to climb over and kill you.
I kept pigeons for a while. Most boys did. Had a wooden box made for them which I hung under the roof of our house. Pigeons are beautiful birds. They bring beauty and calmness to the home. I have 12 or so pigeons in shags now. The sound they make with their wings when taking collective flight is therapeutic. Their cooing cools your soul. And even though they bring beauty, they don’t demand food like house cats, just a home with a door. Just protection from predators, like wild cats. I also have two guinea fowls. Lazy bums, those ones. All they do is eat and make noise. They are yet to reproduce. I will eventually get two dogs. Big dogs. One very friendly one and the other a killer. An unsmiling and muscular rogue who strains on the leash and has a devilish temperament.
I will never own a cat.
I don’t like that low creepy sound cats emit from their bodies. Like a hummin, purring sound, like the devil with a blocked nose. It weirds me out. I could also never bear to hold eye contact with a cat. Something in their eyes. Something sinister, corrupting. Also, cats expect you to blink first. That’s not the kind of energy I want around me.
And so it was quite disorienting when three weeks ago I went to shags and found a kitten in the boma.
A baby cat.
A skittish, tiny thing, not any bigger than a size 2 shoe. I was leaning on the balcony railing when I saw it lurking in the flower bed. Tiny thing. White with patches of brown. I thought to myself, “Is that…a cat?!” I don’t remember inviting any cat to come over, so I figured it must have been a stray just passing through and forgot about it. However, when I woke up in the morning, it was right there on the verandah, messing around. It looked at me and meowed. I didn’t say anything back because I don’t speak meow. It came and rubbed itself against my leg. It was so small I didn’t have the heart to dislike it.
I went down to the garden where the shamba-boy was raking the leaves. He was new, this shamba-boy. The last one slipped into alcoholism and became a problem, so I had to let him go. [That’s a whole blog post that I couldn’t be bothered to write about because I’m tired of these people]. The new guy is called Ken. Tall skinny but sinewy fellow with a bored-looking face. He wasn’t my first choice (horrible, that sounds like something a slave owner would have said in 1850) but I was desperate to get rid of his predecessor and so here was bored-looking Ken raking dead leaves with a faraway look in his eyes.
“Ken, habari ya asubuhi? Ulikuja na paka huku?”
“Ati paka?”
“Eh pusi.”
“Aii hapana.”
“Kuna paka hapa nimeona, kule juu.”
“Huyu paka alikuja tu hapa hata sijui alitoka wapi. Nilidhani hata mulikuwa na paka hapa.”
“Mimi sijawai kuwa na paka.” I wanted to say more but my Kiwahili was coagulated. It was clotting the moment I tried forming it in my head. I wanted to say that it was strange that a kitten would just appear here like this, surely the mother was here somewhere. That sentence in Kiswahili was already consuming 208 kcal in my brain to construct so I let it go and walked away.
Later he came and asked, “Unataka tuifanye nini? Naweza itupa.” I was surprised to be horrified by the idea of it. The idea is that we would turn into those cruel people who put animals in sacks and hurl them in the bush. We weren’t those people. I didn’t like cats, but I didn’t want to kill a cat. Jesus. Or throw away a cat. Much less a kitten. Which, if I was honest with myself, was sort of pretty. But only in a way we are told that the devil is very attractive. I looked at the kitten lurking around the rock garden, sniffing with its tiny pink nose, cautiously peering into the bush and rocks, testing the grass with one paw before it took a firm step. How could we?
“Aii, hapana, achana na yeye. Pengine atarudi penye alitoka” I told him. Ken is 40 years old. The oldest I’ve had. Ha-ha. I’m trying to give the older ones a crack now seeing as the younger ones are too restless and have their heads elsewhere.
Over the next two days, I’d see the kitten around the boma, murking around as kittens do. I watched it chase a butterfly. Tried climbing a tree, the back wheel of my car. It followed me sometimes, at a distance, stumbling through the grass. I ignored it. I came back to Nairobi where one morning, my doorbell rang and when I answered it I found John, the apartment manager standing there. He said, “I come with bad news. The apartment block has been sold, you have to vacate in a month.”
I said, “What?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry. Everybody has to leave.”
He didn’t look sorry. He looked like he was doing a job. So that greatly disoriented me even though this has nothing to do with the cat. I wish it was, though. I wish I could blame it on a cat. Anyway, I have been searching for a house since. Something with a balcony because I have plants and they are doing very well.
House hunting is not for the weak at heart. Houses are a metaphor for dating in Nairobi. You will see all manner of houses. You will find yourself in dilapidated houses that think highly of themselves when they tell you what the rent is. You look at the kitchen and think, no way anybody is paying that much for that. But someone always is. Some houses have no work done in them. The landlord has never fixed one item in them. Some houses look good from the outside but astound you with how ruined the insides are. Damaged houses. Really damaged. There are houses with doors you are hesitant to open because the occupants locked things in there they never want to see but can’t throw away. Dark houses that don’t get enough light. So they are dark even when the sun is out. Houses carrying great trauma from their previous occupants. I saw a house that I was told some Sudanese lived in. It bore great testament of abuse.
Some houses don’t need an occupant immediately. They need to stay vacant for a while and have someone air them, paint them, work on everything broken inside. But the landlords want someone in immediately so you will move into a house that isn’t ready to be inhabited, and that house will remind you.
Sometimes you will walk into a just vacated house and see the lives of the previous owners on the floors and walls. I have seen children’s doodles on walls. Stickers that were left behind. Crayons running on a section of the living room wall. And I wondered who lets their children draw on the living room wall? Either they didn’t care for the mess or they were the WOKE parents that encouraged children to express themselves in whatever way. Parents raising children to appreciate their freedoms and feelings. You can tell parenting styles from the walls of these empty houses. Those kids were now gone, taking their lives to other houses where they would tell their stories on more walls. I saw a house where they had left a plant, a succulent. A forlorn plant in a pot. The owners had simply told it, there is no space for you in our next phase of life. That made me sad. I felt sorry for that abandoned plant. I really think plants have feelings. And we will never know until we go to hell and we meet the plant we abandoned or mistreated and the plant will run to our face and shout, “You are a bitch for what you did!” If it’s a cactus it will proceed to prick you in the stomach.
I have seen ghastly houses with dark broken tiles. Horrid kitchens. People lived like animals with chaos all around them. These, perhaps, are the chaps who skip lights, reverse into main roads, and overtake on the inside lane. I have seen houses that I couldn’t afford, with polished brass handles for doors and tiles that cost an arm and a liver.
Anyway, I drove down to the Bay Area last week for some work and took the opportunity to slip down to the village to check out how Ken was fairing on. Was he watering the grass well? Had he built the small bamboo perimeter I had asked him to do? What surprised me the most was to find the kitten still there because I had completely forgotten about it. The kitten had grown slightly bigger, its torso longer. It no longer stumbled through the grass. It climbed everything. I felt something weird seeing it there; warmth and protectiveness. I felt a reluctant affection building inside me, like liking the kind of girl you shouldn’t like. Those femme fatales with temptress eyes. I heard a voice that sounded like mine asking Ken, “unampatianga chakula?”
Each night I’d walk around the boma with a torch before I retired to bed, shining at the fence for no reason at all other than to feel like I’m the man of the boma, the kitten would follow me in the darkness, jumping about, like this was all a joke to it.
When I came back to Nairobi I told the kids about this kitten over dinner. “It just came from nowhere,” I said. Kim asked what its name was and I said, “It just came from nowhere.” What did he think, that it came with a lanyard with his name hanging around its neck?
“We should give it a name,” Kim said, meaning, he should give it a name.
“Is it a girl or boy?” Tamms asked.
“I didn’t check,” I said.
“Let’s call it Oatmeal,” Kim said. “Because you love oatmeal.”
I love oatmeal, that’s true. And Oatmeal sounded like a pretty decent name for a cat as well. So there, I have a cat. I think. And its name is Oatmeal.
That’s all I wanted to say today. I could have said it in one paragraph but what fun is that?
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Will you leave town? Will you go on a road trip this holiday? Or just sit under a lemon tree in shags or a lounge by the pool in Diani? You need a book right? My book. Get it HERE.