A Good Kenyan is these: A Suggested Checklist

    A few weeks ago in an online discussion about the forgotten, neglected, unnecessary history of the Mau Mau, a very good Kenyan was kind enough to correct my oversight by telling me thus “…twitpic a photo of your PhD in History so we can believe you.” With that, I closed my Twitter account and threw my Minion, gadget extraordinaire, at the wall for committing the crime of not staying in my educational lane….and it is to that well-meaning Kenyan, a charming and charitable fella who took the time to pack a life lesson in less than 140 characters that I dedicate this..

     A Good Kenyan, trained in a certain trade, should keep within all set limits and lanes of only that trade. In fact, such a Kenyan should leave governing to the governors, and politicking to the misguided ones who do not care much for their lives. Such a well-meaning fella must never refer to anything beyond that which he has been trained for, and can provide proof of graduation from an institution, as an area of expertise. In fact, if you do not have a higher degree in say, political science, you should know better than to comment about the political process. Similarly, law should be left to lawyers with their ‘thereins and jurisprudences.’ All pure, and applied sciences graduates also need keep to their respective science, what is a chemist doing commenting about biochemistry anyway? Where is her ‘bio’ so we can take her seriously? In fact, on a topic of men, where are her relevant genitalia?…and, anyone trained in animal husbandry must never tire of fulfilling said spousal duties.

     A Good Kenyan who seeks to be taken seriously must always either keep to the moral values that he preaches, because the messenger is the message, or produce proof of instruction from a credible, accredited, institution, even if only for a weeklong training. The ‘African’ logic on which these criteria are based is ‘you have a point, yes, but are you:

1. Instructed in the relevant discipline to offer such an arguably strong and clearly accurate point.
2.  If the answer to (1) above is yes, are you educated up to, and including, such a level necessary to offer such an opinion?
3.  If no to (1), please take a seat and eat your crayons, you are retarded and should only be seen, not heard, unless you are ugly, then please go be ugly elsewhere.
4. If no to (2) above, please keep within the confines of what the educational system told you to be true. Do not question your teacher, or Malkiat Singh, or KIE, or KNEC, or KNUT, or KUPPET, or the BOG, or the PTA, or the PCEA…oh wait, a denomination.

A Good Kenyan, after a 0-16 years in this educational system that would make the deities induction program managers jealous, is trained to think and become an expert in only that which he has written a peer-reviewed, peer-validated, scientific dissertation. Any in the liberal arts do not count, in fact, the liberal arts are nothing but smoke, another one of our misguided investments when we could have been investing in science and engineering and competing with the Asian tigers. We coulda been the African Lions, we coulda been cheetahs, we coulda been giants!

     A Good Kenyan, in limiting his own opinion to that which he has firsthand knowledge in as printed in the media or textbooks, and by a black Kenyan no less, must make it his job to remind others should they stray from their designated lanes. Please, do not speak to me about religion if you are not a theologian, diviner, with a long title of what should be sequential offices meshed into one. Yes, papers, good friend, proof of education. That will take you places, the better if you have been to Harvard a week or so, or if you have MA, or MSc, or higher. 

     A Good Kenyan must only listen to experts and never anyone else even when a child of five, woken up early enough, can offer the same opinion for a much cheaper price (a lollipop should suffice). Even worse, such a child of five would offer the point in a language too simple to be as sophisticated as the language we need to believe an opinion to be true. However, any Kenyan who purports to wow us with their vast vocabulary, be they the scribe Philip Ochieng’ who surely cannot have a point amidst all that buffoonery, or the young budding Waga Odongo who also surely, must only be hiding behind a cloak of a good dictionary, must be notified of our busy schedule that does not allow us to look out for any deeper meaning of words, or prose, or poetry…and what is Gathara doing writing prose anyway, isn’t he a cartoonist? Shouldn’t cartoonists…cartoon or something?

      A Good Kenyan must never join the civil society, and should he misguidedly choose do so, and seek to tell us that we are not being governed well, then we have a public duty to insult him as a ‘stooge of the West, funded by the colonialist.’ This duty must be embodied in the spirit of the Preamble to our constitution, next to our assertion of how much we have loved our not-romanticized freedom fighters. Our government is funded by the West too? Well, that is different, we are with China now. No, wait, we are only still with the West because we will be with China soon. China likes us, China loves us, China only wants us to be happy, China will not ask not to kill each other, China will not come with any more demands other than that we give their companies tenders and host their overpopulation…oh, and not recognize Tibet or Taiwan, or some other T-non-important country, and probably not allow the Dalai Lama to visit. The West is bad, even nature knows, isn’t that where the sun sets anyway? Such vile people! The East, where the morning sun comes from, is the future, you can feel its love if you orient the window of your fabricated suburban gated-community house just right, or if your landlord was kind enough to have done so with the loan money.

     A Good Kenyan should only hazard to contribute to topics in which he or she has a moral, contextual, education, religious, personal, and political interest, and training. All such qualifications must be corroborated for the contribution to matter. For example, in assessing the quality of this piece, shouldn’t the question be, ‘is the scribe a Good Kenyan himself?’ because here, one who speaks badly about the Mau Mau is automatically a Homeguard which, it turns out, is a bad thing. Weren’t the homeguards and chiefs the only learned people to whom we trusted our independence and arable lands? Haven’t they treated us well for the last five decades, like good lords of the manor, and feudal princes, by giving us jobs and letting us stay with our meager, worthless lives?

      A Good Kenyan must always demand that for a comment to be critically assessed, the commenter must have a personal bearing on the matter, interest in humanity does not count, and should never. In fact, anyone who says homosexuality should be decriminalized should be immediately disowned and branded a homosexual, because sexuality determines where you stand on the topic. Catholic priests, for example, should always be regarded as experts on contraception and safe sex, especially in their progressive ideas on condom-usage and moral uprightness….and of course, how to show young trusting males what happens behind the crucifix, the position in the tomb, the real Shroud of Turin.

An expert in swimming, but only in dirty rivers, and even then, only when nude. Get me someone who can swim in shorts, then we can discuss the Olympics.

     A Good Kenyan must never be critical of his government, unless it is fashionable at the time to do so. Such a Good Kenyan must never join a protest for which he has no familial links to, and should he find himself in a worker’s strike, then he is obligated only to learn the first line of the Solidarity Song, and hold hands while the worker’s ruin frisks all the protestors to make sure they are actually poor and indeed of a collective bargain to buy their trade union leader a new car. There are lanes that should never be crossed if we are going to achieve our many visions, such as that of being where Sweden is now in 2068, never mind that Sweden will have had 51 years to be somewhere else by then. Who cares anyway, Sweden can change addresses for all we care…

        A Good Kenyan, blessed with an education by a loving, caring, and honest government, must never ever deviate from said set path. A Good Kenyan must be a Good Kenyan, never bad, even when bad, should always be seen as a Good Kenyan. Any politician who hugs an adversary is to be immediately disowned for betraying the cause, and the community, and the socioeconomic grouping. In fact, were I the Lord of the Manor, Crown Prince of all Arable Lands, Landlord of the Nation, Mistaken Warlord, Prosecuted Prophesied Prophecy, Appointed Representative of the Omnipotent One,  I would declare that my government, in light of its role in protecting free market interests, is rounding up and shooting all petty thieves and freelance assassins. ‘Only the government should steal from and kill the people’, is the number one rule in this free market economy, and if a private citizen must steal, then he must steal enough to pay his dues to the government, and then atone for his sins by joining government.

If he kills, he must either own enough acres that would go to waste were he to be jailed for life or hanged to leave a hole in the economy, or make sure that the death somehow benefits the common good, national security, or the dalliances of the King or his men/women.

The government does not hate competition, as those unqualified armchair analysts might want a Good Kenyan to believe, instead, we believe that private citizens should work hard, pay taxes, love their families, copulate with their spouses, and most importantly, register to vote. It is not necessary to vote, we will do that for you….because we love you.

      A Good Kenyan must remember the cardinal rule, to be etched on the big Kshs 1 billion monument the British government is going to build for our freedom fighters, for pressing the testicles of our freedom fighters, and raping our grandmothers , that a Kenyan is defined by pedigree first, education second, unachievable dreams third, and the stupidity of ‘free thinking’ last.

     Any Good Kenyan who attempts to write satire must warn us that it is indeed satire because we are but mere Muggles, untrained in how to think for ourselves after reading the piece. Surely you cannot expect us to go find Platform 9¾ for we have not been instructed in wizardry. We are trusting people, trusting our mothers to guide us in how we should relate to deities, our teachers to impart knowledge that now determines who we are, politicians to govern and steal, as they should, the media to be upright and accurate, and such. So, we will get offended if we read through thousands of words only to discover you meant the exact opposite.

 

 

A Society that Eats its Own: Tracing Cannibalism in Kenya’s History

Strait Times, October 10th, 1924

On 10th October, 1924, the Straits Times of Singapore reported that an elderly Taita man had killed and eaten one of his two sons. The two boys, as the accompanying screen grab reads, had ‘allowed the cattle to stray….the father decapitated the other, stripped the flesh from the bones and hung it inside his hut to make biltong. After eating some portion, he intended devouring the remainder.

Fast-forward to 2008 and Enter Godfrey Matheri, your every day lower class worker who lives in a mud hut and does his best to get by, like everyone else. Only Godfrey Matheri has a dark secret, at night he turns into the stuff of legend, akin to dark stories that should only exist in the mind of a deranged crime and horror writer. The Naivasha Vampire brought to light a previously unknown phenomenon in Kenya, that of cannibalism. His was not exactly cannibalism, hence the Vampire tag, because he used to cut open his victims’ veins and drink their blood (shove over, Dracula). He had buried one of his victim’s beneath his bed, both a symbolic and a deranged act.
It is likely Matheri had shown a streak of such vile crimes earlier in his life but in our society that tends to stigmatize everything, went seemingly unnoticed until he became Kenya’s first known serial killer and vampire.

Will the world be overrun by Kenyan Zombies? Are we evolving?

The ‘Mteita native’ in 1924 and the most recent cases of cannibalism have similarities that include some kind of spontaneity that makes one wonder whether the signs were there all along. What is the difference between the Kenyan government, 50 years after independence and 89 years since the Taita Case, that is any different? Any man found to have eaten another would be sentenced to ‘…imprisonment for life because his mental condition was abnormal’ (The Strait Times, 1924) which is exactly what would happen now in 2013. Although a psychiatric examination would be mandatory, there is virtually no information, no statistics, no psychological studies into why there seems to be a sudden hunger for human flesh, with some even taking the time to cook and roast organs and body parts.
Matheri was known as Foko, or Khalif if you were his accomplice. He removed his victims organs after butchering them and then buried their bodies in shallow graves.

Matheri, seen here totally not gurgling a virgin’s blood.

• He drinks it. He taps it into a cup, then transfers it into a flask and sips it in intervals. He kept his victim’s underpants, and the organs as trophies. Like the young victim who says he drew blood and when it was not enough he cut her up in some other place and drew more until he filled a cup. The he proceeded to drink it.
• On June 2nd 2012, Alex Kinyua, a naturalized US citizen born in Kenya, admitted to eating Kujoe Agyei-Kodie, 37. 
• On November 29th, 2012, Caroline Gatwiri was killed and eaten by her 23-year old husband, Morris Gituma Mutegi. He “…was said to have also forced his two-and-a-half- year-old son to drink his mother’s blood…In the morning, the couples child still had his mother’s blood smeared all over his face, oblivious of the shocking incident that took place hours earlier.

Does this sound eerily familiar? If it does then you might remember it as the plot in Dexter, the series about a psycho/vigilante/serial killer who is covered in his mum’s blood when she is murdered by a local gang.

The making of a Kenyan Dexter?

• The trail led to Kemeria’s house, where blood stains were on the ground and door. The smell of freshly cooked meat come from the house. The search team broke into the house and found a sufuria full of meat. Another group broke into the poultry house where they saw two polythene bags containing flesh and wondered why the herdsman was hiding the raw meat. “In the house, we saw clothes belonging to Mr Lodoket, so we hastily formed teams in search of the herdsman,” said Mr Tarkus. At last one search party arrived with the bad news — Mr Lodoket had been killed, his body sliced open and various parts cut out to provide boneless flesh. It was covered with a light blue bed cover after it had been cut open in the middle starting at the neck, down the chest to the abdomen. The left leg had the upper leg had flesh cut out, apparently to provide Thursday evening’s roast meat.
  

  Dramatisation

• On January 2nd, 2013, an unnamed man in Malindi killed and ate some parts of his five-year-old son. After committing the act, the man removed his son’s heart, liver and private parts, which he wrapped in a polythene paper bag and stored inside his house.
  The man later drunk his blood before wrapping his body in a white cloth and dumped it in a shallow pit about 400 meters from his house.

To the utterly stupid…

The stupidly funny…

All the people who eventually ate someone or sucked another’s blood had displayed some related characteristic prior to committing the crime. Kimeria, for example, “He warned us about it. At one time he nearly sliced open a 10-year-old’s belly when he tried to use the path at around 6.30pm,” says a neighbor, Mr Francis Tarkus Loket, of the man villagers claim is a cannibal. On Alex Kinyua, The previous month, Kinyua had attacked and fractured the skull of another man within the university campus. In February, Kinyua had posted on Facebook asking other students whether they were “”strong enough to endure ritual HBCU mass human sacrifices around the country and still be able to function
as human beings?”
His behavior had been noted much earlier, in December 2011, when an instructor told the police that Kinyua was ‘Virginia Tech waiting to happen.’
Although not always, Morris Gituma was said to have “… never raised his voice, not even at a child…”

Alex Kinyua’s crimes are relevant to this discourse partly because his Kikuyu name ‘Kinyua’ means ‘drinker.’ Some actually tried to link it to some genetic effect carried down from the Mau Mau who were often portrayed as being “wild, bloodthirsty and cannibal black terrorists.” This version of the story did not take into account the hunger and the misery that had driven the Mau Mau to the bush. Rather, it focused on providing a simplistic description of cannibalism for the barbarism it represents. And some historians claim that Kenya’s Mau Mau  fighters  engaged in strange ceremonies that involved eating of human flesh and drinking their blood.

Imperialism in KE Maoriland Worker, Volume 13, Issue 29, 18 July 1923, Page 5

The Mau Mau cannibalism angle has been explored extensively, even as recently as 2003 by non-Kenyan media. In this article, Adrian Blomfield claims :
The young son of a chief who refused to join was cut in two by Kimathi’s men, who drank his blood before flinging the two halves of the body at the boy’s mother who was then killed
After being forced to drink human blood, semen and urine, recruits would in some cases be ordered to eat human brains, sometimes of their relatives, as well as the flesh of recently exhumed or murdered babies.
While the words carry the old-colonialist perspective that focuses on the suffering and deaths of white Europeans and makes little mention of events such as the Lari Massacre of 1954, the elaborate description of ritualistic cannibalism is interesting. It came up again after the Kinyua case, as the outside world tried to find a genetic link about why one African would eat another in a ‘civilized society.’

Could it be, also that in the concentration camps where millions of Kenyans were herded to prevent them from supporting the Mau Mau, had undocumented cases of cannibalism? There is a high likelihood, especially because we know the detainees were grossly underfed, overworked and psychologically tortured.There have been several documented cases of people being forced to eat the dead to survive. The most famous, the Survivors of Flight 571 in 1972, ate the dead before they were rescued a month and a half later.
In truth, cannibalism, like the Murder of the Innocents, is not a new phenomenon in Kenya. It is just that with digital media and a more news-hungry middle class, such stories now make it to the limelight. Ritualistic cannibalism existed even before the 21st century, with rumors of ‘devil worshippers’ killing and eating various body parts for ritual purposes. Most of the victims were children who were kidnapped and killed, their bodies discovered later missing certain organs such as the genitalia, the heart and the tongue.

A pattern in most of the recent cases of domestic violence, including other cases such as Samuel Wanjiru’s case has been that the spouses involved are both very young, often in their early 20s and 30s.

In the Murder of the Innocents, the pattern is further compounded by a low socioeconomic level and three or more children. Without comprehensive scientific research, it is likely this will not mean anything, but it indicates there might be some correlation between the age where people marry, their socioeconomic status and family planning (or lack of).

Peter Nguli posits: Therefore, the urgent issue is rather finding out the root cause of this disease called cannibalism. Is it an alien zombie from the cosmos that has invaded our countrymen to cause an apocalypse, as seen in Hollywood science-fiction horror movies? Is it a contagious zombie virus, psychological problem or a drug-related apocalypse?

While we focus on votes and politics, a man with at least one confirmed kill and one very gory witness account of vampire tendencies was convicted of wrongful confinement due to failure by the prosecution to avail key witnesses and documents”. Did I mention that instead of searching for evidence that would have been crucial to proving the Naivasha Vampire murder case, and would have provided scholars with vital clues about the man himself, the police demolished it?

Such news has become ‘old’, in a Kenyan sense, and no longer shocks the middle class in their suburban houses and apartments. It is quickly written off as an act of barbarism and a deranged mind, and when the victim is dragged to the police cell, society is deemed clean of such people…until someone else decides to eat his spouse. Look at Morris’ act, it seems spontaneous although by the description of those who knew him, he was probably the kind to keep to himself. Why, one might ask, did he feed his two-year-old son his wife’s blood? Why did he feel the need to make the child part of his heinous act?

There is no simple answer, because he died a few hours later but let’s hazard a guess…could it be lack of food? Did he, like the fathers in Slaughter of the Innocents who have killed their children, feel inadequate because he could not feed his child? We might never know but since all the reported cases seem to be in the majority lower socio-economic class, something is definitely brewing.

Should we just accept cannibalism as part of society?

What would drive a man, save for a deranged mind, to eat another man? Hunger is the most obvious answer because food is the most basic of needs. It is also likely because the lower class is grossly underfed, with millions lacking food everyday while we turn arable agricultural land into gated communities. Will the lower classes rise up and eat the upper, more healthy looking upper classes? From the look of things, it is just a matter of time…or wait, am I the only one who has just discovered that we have been eating each other all along? Have you ever eaten someone (non-sexually of course, in context)? I hear the ‘small of the back’ is where the flesh is sweetest…

Owaahh

 

Murder of the Innocents: A Society that Kills its Young

A man walks into his home at the end of another long hard day at work.. He doesn’t know why he feels so on edge, or whether there is anything good left in his world. His five boys back at home, waiting to be fed. Their mother, an enigmatic character when she was a raw cherry, unhurt by the pains of life, now a mess of nerves and the backbreaking work of holding a family together. She nags, once in a while, like all women should, but tonight she pushes too much. Something is wrong, he knows, and the pounding in his head as she yells something about flour and cabbages as he walks into the house. Tonight he feels overly on the edge, the sound of her voice, all he hears is her condescending voice telling him he is not man enough, that he cannot provide for his family, like an African man should. It is not what she is saying, but it is what he hears…

A scream cuts through the otherwise serene air, the neighbors ignore the ‘woooii! Wuuuuwi! Usiniue baba Peter! Usiue watoto wangu’ –[screams] Please don’t kill me Peter’s father. Please don’t kill my children. They ignore it because the two are always fighting, there’s always a fight, every night, and she always screams the same things. Since the children walk out of the house, they figure it is just the usual spousal ups and downs. Who doesn’t go through them, really? Tethered by marriage, customs, a government that does not give a fuck, religions that only seek alms and tithes and a system that is rotten. The man in between with a wife he cannot allow to work because they have had so many children, and what can she do really, with no proper education in a world where one is judged by what they have read not what they know.
The next day, television viewers in middle class homes shake their heads at the gruesome and unnecessary deaths of five children and quickly switch to other channels they can watch without disgust. The crime scenes are gruesome, as one would expect from a bloodbath. “The lower class is eating itself,” the middle class tells his wife as they get ready to touch in for the night, “why can’t one just give up his children for adoption if he cannot take care of them.” Quickly, the discourse turns to politics and the plight of five is quickly forgotten.

• 11th April, 2009: Jane Wagaki (wife and pregnant), Scholastica Wairimu 15 Martin Muiruri 3 killed by Patrick Kanyi, stepfather.
• Early October, 2010 –  Bilah Omare (wife); 12-year-old son, Kinley Ogendi; and 9-year-old daughter, Ivyn Ogendi killed by Justus Ogendi Kababe in Vadnais Heights, Minnesota.
• 23rd March, 2012- Silas Kiprotich 10, Salome Chepkorir 7 , and Bethuel Kiplangat 5 and a three-year old  killed by John Tanui 37 in Rongena, Narok South.
• 25th September, 2012: Amos Kipkoech aged ten, twins Dominic Kiprop and Caleb Kipchirchir aged nine, Daniel Kiplagat aged five, and Gideon Kipng’eno aged two.
• 10th November, 2012:  Brian Misati 8, Robert Toto 6, Cythia Moraa and Mogutu Mun 3 are killed by their father, Misati Nyangwenchi in Egesa Village.
• 12th December, 2012- Elizabeth Ochieng, Wycliffe Odhiambo, Melvin Atieno, Walter Otieno and Moses Ochieng’  killed by Boniface Ouma Auka in Korogocho slums. He hanged himself on January 7th in a prison cell.
• December 28th, 2012: Unnamed two months baby girl is strangled by the father after her  teenage mother dumped her at the father’s house.
• 2nd January 2013- Kahindi Zero kills his four-year old son ‘to get healed.’

It does not make it to the front pages, there are more important things than the deaths of five children in a poor family. The normally overactive, adrenaline social media lynch mobs do not bay for anyone’s blood even after it happens again and again. It does not matter, it would seem, if it does not happen to you or anyone you know.
Stabbing is a very personal way to kill someone, or something, in this day and age. When you combine it with the fact that the murderer here is killing his or her own, the personal nature of this crime becomes even more evident. They might also choose stabbing because it is convenient; every household, the economic position notwithstanding, has ‘sharps’ such as knives and machetes. Unlike the US where gun control is thought to be the solution to the constant bloodbaths, one cannot ban the use of knives and other such tools and cutlery.

• The children aged between two to 10 years had deep stab wounds all over their bodies. (AfricaReview, 2012)
• The gushing blood and twitching bodies of his own children could not stop Kirui, who earns a living brewing busaa and distilling chang’aa in the village. “The tragedy happened at around 3am this morning (yesterday). The man used a panga and slit their necks, killing each one of them,” said Wambua. (All Africa.com, 2012)
• …Nyangwenchi who has since gone into hiding, killed the children by stabbing them in their necks.
• “The body of the eldest daughter was discovered on the door step, while the rest of the bodies were found in a plantation nearby,” Nyaboke said.

“After killing his children aged 10, seven, five and three, he went and hanged himself with a rope and died on the spot,” he said.
The gruesomeness of these crimes bespeaks of an underlying psychological and socio-economic problem; the occurrence indicates that something is rotting in this society of ours. What do the crime scenes tells us? First, these crimes happen in low-income households, or rather the ones that make it to the news. Most are perpetrated by the father/husband, and often after a fight with the wife or family. The perpetrator, in most cases, kills himself or herself by hanging or some other such method. Why does he not stab himself?
Stabbing, even while being both personal and convenient, and fast, is still not a consolation that the innocents do not suffer. Think of it like this, one man cannot kill five children at once, so he must kill them in some order. Does he start with the strongest? Or the Eldest? Or with the lastborn he so much loves? One murder might be an accident but most of these murders are well thought out acts of savagery.
What do these murders indicate? Are the social fractures now showing? The socio-economic pressure on the father who does not feel like he can sufficiently provide for his family? Or the mother who feels frustrated by the strain and burden?
“The man slit throats of his five sons aged between ages 10 and two with a kitchen knife and then hanged himself in the same room. (Capital FM, September 25th 2012).

Another common factor in these bloodbaths is that the victims are often three or more, and often of the same sex-male. Does the number matter? Combined with the other factors in the crimes, a pattern emerges. The families are typical low income households where family planning is unheard of, and myths subsequently made to justify this need. Such households, whether in rural areas or in urban slums, are feeling the brunt of the socio-economic strain that results from the growth of a capitalist and seemingly selfish- society. In the one case that was thought to involve the mother, the Korogocho Massacre (December 20th, 2012), she told the police that she had separated from her husband and left the children in his care.

Amos Kipkoech aged ten, twins Dominic Kiprop and Caleb Kipchirchir aged nine, Daniel Kiplagat aged five, and Gideon Kipng’eno aged two

The looming crisis will probably catch us all flatfooted, unjustifiably so. While we are a country desperately in need of a social revolution, as opposed to a political one which we think we deserve, the children of low income families continue to live in such acrimonious households where they have to fight for their own survival. We shake our heads when we hear the murders occur ‘…because of food…’ as if food does not matter. The most basic of needs, food is the universal representation of parental responsibility. It is why we say ‘put food on the table’ and not ‘ fuel the car’ or ‘pay rent.’

• Residents claimed that the man was bitter after his wife criticized him for failing to provide food for his family. (SomalilandInformer.com, 2012)
• The suspect quarreled with his wife over rent and killed the children after she stormed out.
• Yegon had an argument with his wife whom he  accused her of having an affair before committing the heinous crime.
•  Nyangwechi’s wife Hellen Kemunto said they have had quarrels in their 10-year marriage but never knew their arguments would up in tragedy. “I did not know that the quarrels will one day lead my husband to kill our two sons and daughters. I did not know his intention for chasing me away,” Kemunto said tears rolling down her cheeks.
  
• She returned to her matrimonial home on Sunday morning only to be welcomed by the body of her last born daughter the doorstep http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/?articleID=2000070431
• Maelo said that at the time of the incident, Tanui’s wife was admitted at Tenwek Mission Hospital where she was expecting to deliver a fifth baby.
  

The likely cause is some social fracture, some element within the sanity that one would expect from the social institution of a family that is exhibiting itself as infanticide and other ‘household’ crimes. What is the risk then? One cannot remove knives and other sharps from the households, no can you stop all parents who can harm their children from doing so, so a compromise of sorts must be made. How is the rest of society to make sure that children are safe, even from their own parents?

Still, one must wonder what is missing from society to make the parent who cannot provide for his or her family seek to end the lives of his or her children. Is it economic? Is it social? Is it, by some far chance, political? I posit that our society is breaking from the base because we focus on things that should not be our ultimate priorities. Politics, our infatuation with political structures, has taken away any mention of social crisis. You have a low-class that has to wake up every morning, or every evening if you work night shift, to face a host of socio-economic issues.

The five children in the house need food, and education, and shelter, and the one man to supply all that is paid peanuts for back-breaking work. When they fall sick and he takes them to the public hospital, the nurses and doctors are on strike because the political class will not relent in its own selfish rape of the national coffers. Public schools are full, and understaffed, while we build big roads to nowhere. Food, the most basic of human needs, is prone to get even more scarce as we turn perfect agricultural land into gated communities for the middle class and the upper class. Then a slum will mushroom next to it to supply an army of workers to wipe our shoes, guard our gates, wash our clothes, provide cheap labor, watch our children and most of all, vote every five years.
It is only a savage society that will kill its own children, and that is what we are. The discourse revolves around political apathy, the notion that he who does not vote does not care. Consider social apathy, the amnesia you experience whenever you hear of a husband killing his entire family and then hanging himself, or waiting until he is incarcerated to commit suicide. No one wants to know why one would do such a thing, no one cares anyway. Each time it happens, it falls several columns into obscurity until the only mention of it is three lines in the Occurrence Book at the local police station listed as ‘Domestic Violence.’

The base of the pyramid is chipping, and when the cascade comes, for it will, it will take us all down with it. To think we are a civilized generation is to merely massage our own egos. We are still primal, instinctive, brutal animals. All that we have done, to rephrase Groucho, is to learn how to pretend we are civilized. Our only advantage over the cavemen is that this is our time, and unlike their lives which we can only hypothesize, we might actually have a chance to  make the ideal society.

Owaahh

 

Going Bananas: Making a Case for a National Fruit

“Dawa ya Mende! Ya Panya! Ya Mende! Ya Panya! Cockroach Murderer! Cockroach Killer! Ya Mende! Ya Panya! Ua Mende! Ua Panya!” the man standing outside Muthurwa market screams all day. Unlike his colleagues in the business who have acquire a small public address system and then recorded themselves so they can just stand there as the pitch loops all day long, he likes to play it old school.

To him, what he does is more than just a business to fend for himself and his family, it is a service to a growing middle class that has little or no time to clean the house. The house helps entrusted with the duty are also entrusted with nursing babies and a whole house alone, and have little or no time to themselves. Except if they are random like this one who decided there was no better time to engage in self-pleasuring activities than when taking care of a two-year old, or this one, who decided that the boy does not have to wait years to know coitus. But I digress…

The mama mboga is no longer a monopoly for agriculture products in the estate. She no longer has a single kibanda made of twigs, sticks, a few nails , a polythene roof and a lot of sisal rope. Instead, she now has a full kibanda next to the M-pesa guy. She deals in greens and other kitchen vegetables, and the fruit-vegetable of Kenya, the avocado. Her product differentiation was occasioned by the emergence of the fruit-seller, an independent vendor who specializes in fruits. The most captivating fruit here, from afar at least, is always the banana. Suspended from the roof of the kibanda at different points, bananas are the ones that are most likely to send subliminal messages to your brain as you walk past and tempt you to eat a melon or some other ugly fruit. Melons are ugly, and they are crunchy; they are like wet waffles with seeds.

When the mutant bananas shall rise….

Okay, where was I? Oranges are too random, they seem undecided as to whether they want to be ripe or otherwise, sweet or sour. Grapes are easy because you can pop them like pills, but they are a waste of would-be wine, even those that are not used for wine. Grapes in Kenya are also ridiculously expensive, and you can tell the people who sell them make money by the fact that they almost never sell anything else. It’s always one guy, or lady seated on the same gunia (sack) on which the grapes are placed. He or she never sells anything else, and the grapes are placed in descending order and have random prices like ’35, 52, 78, 99.9” and so on depending on the size and health of each bunch.

Lemons are fruits only in definition, very few people buy lemons just to eat lemons. I suspect the majority of lemons are bought as herbal medicine for colds, hangovers and sore throats. A good number are bought for culinary purposes, and a few sadists but them as the best sour/bitter thing with which to wean a baby. A typical Kenyan mother can be a savage at times, although I again suspect it is a mother instinct coupled with some dark sadism-where the mother weans the baby off breast milk by applying pepper or lemon juice, or basically anything a toddler would think is disgusting, on the nipple. I do not think it is effective, because most of us go back to ‘breast-feeding’ when we become adults.

The fruit seller is a master advertiser, perhaps only beaten in Kenya by the guy who sells cockroach paste and the one who sells mtumba clothes and yells “BRRRRRROOOOOUSSEE NI FEFTE, BROUSE NI FEFTE, BEI NI YA REO! NI YA REO! NI YA REO!’ When you get to buying you realize he only mentioned the clothes from the cheapest bunch, but since you are too embarrassed to place the item back after rummaging through a pile of imported bacteria, you just pay the 100 bob and leave.

Conductors used to be masters of this art but the price-sensitive, tongue-lashing passenger has forced them to get disciplined. The modern conductor is most likely to make sure you know the correct price by the time you get comfortable, or to delegate the work of lying to you to one of those ‘jaza jaza’ conductors who hang around at bus stops. They are an interesting bunch, this breed of erstwhile jobless Kenyans. They are almost always high on cheap liquor but the pungent smell from their clothes masks the would-be refreshing smell of ethanol. They always have scars, or open wounds on their faces and run to ask you if you are boarding the matatu even when you have clearly just alighted from one.

One was planned, one was unexpected….the bananas, not the conductors…

Back to the kibanda and modern elements of advertising, the fruit-seller has mangoes, which are messy when ripe and boring when raw, and random fruits which he will always claim are from Tanzania. The banana is perhaps the only fruit you can trust him to  know the origin and African name because it is a fruit that bespeaks ‘Africanness’.

It is easy and inviting, warm perhaps, and probably foolish. It always hangs out in crowds, ripens there even.

When you remove it from the bunch the insects attack, and you peel it and leave it in the open and it starts to oxidize. It is sensitive inside but has a yellow color just to exude fake machismo.

Its over-sensitive nature means that it has scars from fights with other bananas, and from random groping by other customers and the fruit-seller.

The banana is African to the core, with its inability to survive outside its core ethnic group without changing color or withering. It does not demand anything from the person who eats it, the few things it requires are accidental. The payoff is lost because the eater takes his time, and every time he bites and peels some more, the banana just sits there as if it enjoys it. Its apathy is legendary, and perhaps disastrous to its own survival. Where the mango would be staining the shirt of the eater, and the melon or pineapple would be stinging the wounds of anyone with buccal wounds, the banana is the fruit anyone, including the toothless man, can eat without help.

The banana hides behind the cocoon of its own grouping because it figures there is safety in numbers. Some hide below others, as if shy, but support them by keeping them in the same position even when they rot. They figure they will survive any invasion, any violation, because the assailant will be too tired, or will have reached the point of satiety, by the time he or she reaches for the fruit under. It allows itself to be used by all and sundry, and provides a haven for insets seeking to hide from the sun but interested in a fruit that does not ask much in return.

The banana is an easy fruit that makes very few demands when you are having it. All you have to remember to do is to remove the peel, even halfway, and if you are the meticulous type, to peel off the fibers before eating. It requires very little of your attention and almost always lets you have another fruit. It is one of the few fruits you can have at any time of the day; it has no liquids so spillage is kept at zero and its scent is not strong enough to follow you all day. It just sits there and waits to be piked, unless it is too ripe when it simply hangs on until it falls off and is forgotten.

Its an African herd mentality that does seems to operate on the same primal instincts as wildebeests during migration; that the weak and sickly, and elderly, slow down the herd and can be left behind for predators. The banana does not seem to care much for individuality, it seems to just want to get by with its day without harming anyone but itself, unless others want to harm, when it will just hang there again and allow them to grope it and move it without any furore. Other fruits are sure to leave a stain on you or the napkin, but you can never go wrong with a good banana, and all bananas are good, except the few that decide to rot first and must be removed, with the passive support of the other bananas.

His ripe personality was not enough to save him from the severe bruising he got in round 2….

The only thing you should never do, even at the pain and threat of death, is to make eye contact with another person while eating a banana. There’s no way of eating it without looking like you are practicing for activities that waste vital seed we need to propagate our species.

Owaahh^©