MY BOYHOOD DAYS if you were born and brought up in the village, you may have heard the phrase wageni wa Nairobi. There is that aunt of yours who came to live in the City, and only appears on 24th dec with his husband and children, eats all the good parts of the slaughtered goat and then disappears on 26th. The next time you hear of her is the next Christmas. I dont know where this notion came from, but people who come to the village from Nairobi are considered more equal than the rest. When they come, its when new cups are unleashed, special plates,clean beddings,the houses are repainted,leaking roofs are repaired,the mud walls are given a freash coat of cow dung. That day tea is cooked with alot of milk,food is cooked using onions and tomatoes and other exotic spices.tThat day even the dogs walk with a smile and change the barking style.They actually bark with an accent to march the accent of the swahili spoken by the cousins from Nairobi. I have told you severally that i come from MANGELETE, a very interior village in MAKUENI county.Growing up as a boy in the village is a very hard task.The most basic of things like shoes,toothbrush and showering are unheard of. Actually, i owned my first towel and tooth brush when i was circumcised. You can imagine how i had survived for 15 years. Boys are not allowed to drink milk,its reserved for the girls. But we had a way of surviving.we used to suck the cows when we were sent to graze. I remeber a time my grandpa almost killed us after we had eaten a small goat in the grazing. The old man owned like 200 goats so we thought if we eat one,he will not know. Satan is bad, the old guy used to secretly count the goats every evening and he knew them all. That night we were made to sleep on a tree next to a bee hive. Christmas in the village is a very big affair. A goat has to die. Aunt of Nairobi usually to come with a big loaf of bread which grandma used to guard with a sword. She would give us a slice and tell us to disappear. We were not allowed anywhere near the wageni wa Nairobi. The closest we would get is through peeping in the cracks on the walls. I never had the opportunity to shake my Nairobi aunts hand until late in my high school days. The cousins from Nairobi too never came close to us. They used to say we smell cow like goats. But surely,what do you expect from someone who spends most of the time with goats, and is only washed by God through rain?. When the goat was slaughtred on christmas,we never ate any sensible meat. We used to eat legs and the head. We used to roast testicles of goats, its a very delicious and soft meat. When it came to chapatis, we were given the hard,shapeless and overcooked ones. We were the last people on the food chain,we always ate the reject always competing for bones with the dogs. But i thank god we made it. I can now afford to buy half a kilo of roasted meat. I remeber those days and tears almost drop. It made us grow hardy. If you see a boy from the village who has made it this far, salute him and buy him a beer..he has seen alot.
Posted on: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 17:07:17 +0000
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