Hippos are bastards. True bastards. Little fat things with big mouths. Bullish and thuggish, these animals can snap a canoe in half, snap a human like a toothpick. These lake lords are fast, which is surprising because they have short legs, not longer than a child’s arm. They might have great PR on TV, dancing, dawdling, belching, but don’t be fooled, they are the demons incarnate, the animal kingdom’s most dangerous animal. The level of violence of these animals is senseless, and truly unprecedented. You don’t have to mind your own business; hippos will mind your business for you. In short, never trust anything, anyone, who doesn’t sweat. (PS – Don’t believe that pink sweat hogwash. It’s just more PR)
When I’m in the village, I can normally hear them, their ghastly yawns and greedy grunts as they chomp and chew plants through my neighbours’ farm. One time I saw a hippo. Two hippos actually. It was 9 pm, we were seated by the fireside out in the garden, under a bamboo tree that has done better than I thought it would. Whenever I’m in the village, I light a fire (OK, Ken does), and I sit by it, whisky in hand, pretending to be Hemingway. Unbeknownst to us, these two devils had breached my compound and were wobbling in, looking around with their big heads. With my drink still in hand, I stood up and shone this terrific torch in their eyes, and they scampered off running (the fastest sausages you ever saw) down towards the lake. I was frightened, to be honest. Quite. I was shocked at how colossal they were; the size of a plague. Later, looking at the CCTV footage, you could see them walking in majestically, a bit cautious, but also full of the hubris of hippos. Just terrifying.
However, there are more fun things to do in the village than shine torches in the eyes of beasts. Like running. I often do a five-kilometer run every other morning. This is in Mbita, not Kendu Bay where I hail from. Mbita is in Suba, Homa Bay County, an 8-hour drive through Narok, Kaplong, Sotik, Chepilat, Chebera, Oyugis, Rodi K’Opany, Homa Bay, Mbita. If you have never been those sides – yes, you from the Mountains – come visit us. We have great roads and beautiful hills. We have hippos, yes, but we also have fish.
Anyway, I usually run through unfamiliar village tracks just after dawn. I just pick a track and I follow it, and often I get lost, which I love, because then I get to see different things and discover even more interesting routes. At that hour, the village rises leisurely, soundlessly. Time moves like molasses. Through the shrubbery, I can always smell the young leaves, and the tiny flowers that came into bloom at night. Bird chirps, and the smell of wood smoke. Lone women, dragging sleep behind them, carrying last evening’s dirty utensils on their heads, headed to the lake to wash up, trailed by a pack of skinny mongrels, heads bowed, sniffing their path. Little children walk to school in pairs, holding hands. Men, heading towards the lake – everybody faces the lake at some point in their day – twigs as toothbrushes stuck in their mouths.
I discovered a new route that goes over a challenging stump of a hill then runs right alongside the lake which, at that hour, is usually flat as glass with long-necked Egrets gliding over it. I greet everybody I run into as the slowly rising sun starts to boil bright from behind distant hills. It’s usually more than a run; it’s a shared spiritual experience with nature and my environment. Each time it re-aligns something in me that the city frequently bends. I never run with music. I think when I run. I romanticise things. I recall old feuds and long dead romances. I pray. I smell. I listen to sounds. There is pain often, on treacherous hills, but there is always gratitude…for life, for love, for health, for time. During those runs I also think of truly silly things that I can’t even write here because you guys imagine I’m a serious, well-readjusted individual, and I don’t want to ruin it for you.
After the run, I will stretch and strip down to my bikers and walk down to the lake, not awfully faraway, where I will dip inside the cold morning water. Every villager takes a bath in the lake. There are designated points for men and women. Boys bathe with men. Girls bathe with women. Everybody bathes naked. (Don’t you?) And everybody is skinny, dark and sinewy. And so it’s only when I go to the village that I see so many penises. All manner of them. A pageant of penises. But only for the first day. After that, it becomes normal., Like seeing, and not seeing clouds. Because the lake seems to strip one of their nakedness. It resets your natural factory settings to homo sapien.
Last Monday, after my run, I started chatting with this man who was taking a bath. We were just the two of us because it was very early, and schools had also just opened, so traffic was low. He was middle-aged like me but looking considerably older because his life is understandably tougher than mine. We struck a natural conversation as he scrubbed his foamy crotch. I pointed at the horizon and asked him what on earth that was. There was a black curtain rising over the lake in the far distance. He said they were flies we call ‘sam’; seasonal. I knew them. Pretty annoying; attracted to light at night. If you leave your whisky uncovered, you might find a couple drowned in them, dead drunk. They die very quickly, though, after three days. You will wake up in the morning to find your balcony turned into a landscape of dead sams.
I asked the naked man about hippos. He told me what I already knew, that they were dangerous. That during the seasons with crops in farms, like now, you’d find them around villages a lot. He told me that traditionally there were families, witchdoctors, who “owned” hippos. That they’d ride on hippos like one can ride on a donkey. That they had been spotted walking at night with hippos next to them. And if they had a bone to pick with you, they’d send a hippo to bite you. I’d heard of this legend from many other sources…but don’t quote me.
There are only two of those guys left around here, he said. One is in Rusinga Island, and the other is in Mfangano Island. I stood there staring at him with great consternation, the water lapping at my thorax.
“Adiera!?” I exclaimed. As in, for real?
“To’ an da’ wuondi na’ango?,” he chuckled, scrubbing his neck. “These guys are there. Most have died, but they exist.”
“They send a hippo to you?”
“Yeah. If you are in a boat, the hippo will nose and topple the boat and eat this one person it has been sent to kill. People have been known to settle differences using hippos,” he said.
Talking of which. I remembered that my neighbour and I had beefed over some boundary issues for so long, and I had, on several occasions, sent the police and NEMA fellows his way. I eventually got letters from authorities sent to him, ceasing his illegal activities. He tells everybody that I’ve taken away his livelihood. He dislikes me greatly, and we have since stopped the pretence of small talk, which is odd, because his young daughter is in my employ. This is the kind of guy who could easily send a hippo my way. A hitman hippo (I’m sure Tony Mochama can come up with a phrase for a hippo like this at a moment’s notice). It occurred to me that that hippo could, at that moment, be gliding underwater, coming at me, as I stood in the water chatting with this fellow.
I quickly waded out of the water and continued chatting with my new friend as he scrubbed his armpits violently, his penis bouncing in the process. He wasn’t circumcised. We chatted about other, less violent things, as I sat on a boulder, keeping him company. He said he worked at some construction site, but construction had since paused. Now he did this and that. In the distance, fishing boats glided over the water, the sound of their motor soothing. When he was done, he squeegeed water from his body with his hands, retrieved his clothes folded neatly on a stone and slowly dressed up. He looked like a different person with his clothes on. I told him to give me a missed call; I’d send him some little breakfast. “Nyasaye o’medi,” he said as we parted ways.
I didn’t set out to write about naked villagers today. I didn’t know what to write about, seeing as it’s my mother’s anniversary. She died thirteen years ago today, on a Sunday afternoon. She is missed so much. She has missed so much.
One night two weeks ago, just before Tamms went back to boarding school, we were all in the living room chatting after dinner. I was seated on the yoga ball, bouncing like a child. “Planning to see your mom before you head back?” I asked her.
“She’s in Thika,” She said. “She went to take care of cucu.”
“Yeah, I heard she was unwell.”
I bounced on the ball a bit more.
“I miss my mom,” I said, and they all lowered their phones and stared at me. I felt a bit shy and self conscious.
“Yeah?” She asked.
“Yeah.”
Small bounce. Small bounce.
“Yeah. She was very nice,” I said.
“I didn’t see her,” Kim said.
“Really?”
“No, he wasn’t born,” Tamms said.
“Wow.” I stopped bouncing to think. (I can’t think and bounce.) “I always thought you saw her.”
“No.” Kim shrugged. “I never saw her.”
That made me so violently sad suddenly, for whatever reason. There was a brief moment of silence where they watched me, expecting me to say something more. Not knowing what to say, I said, “her fingers were curved slightly, like this…at the knuckles…” My voice threatened to betray me. I couldn’t bear it. I thought I was going to cry. So I stood up from the ball and went to the kitchen, and stood before the opened freezer; the cold numbed those emotions. Later, when the emotions had settled back down, I went to the living room and touched Kim over the head and Tamms on the cheek and said, “OK, guys. I’m off to bed. Goodnight.”
I could feel them watch me go. I could feel the weight of their gaze.
That’s grief.
It’s better today than it was yesterday, yes, but it’s never truly the same. How could it ever be when your mother is no longer alive?
Love and enjoy your mothers today, for tomorrow may come with a shitstorm.
May mine continue resting in peace.
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