I grabbed a round of warm beers (no power meant no fridge) and sat down at a table with Mutisya’s dad and 80-year-old Moses, who gave me a huge toothless smile. Neither of them spoke English. Mutisya told me that Moses once had three wives and eighteen children, but all three wives and fifteen of his children were dead—more than half of them from AIDs. Also sitting at the table was Norman, a neatly dressed English teacher with bushy white sideburns. He was also one of the very few men in the room who wasn’t rolling drunk.
‘Our village has many, many problems,’ he said, opening the conversation on a high note. Norman then went on to list all of the village’s problems. ‘The total welfare of the village depends on water,’ Norman said. ‘There is only one well, which is twenty metres deep, and in the dry season people have to queue for up to twenty-four hours to get a few litres of water.’
There was also not much work in the village. ‘Most of the people in the village work in the fields as casual labour,’ Norman said. ‘The only other work is building roads, but it is very hard work and you do not get paid. You work only for food.’
‘The village really needs electricity,’ Willy said, adding his two cents’ worth to the village’s tale of woe. Willy’s village, which was only twenty minutes’ drive away, had electricity. ‘My father was very smart,’ Willy said, tapping his nose. ‘He organised electricity for our village twenty years ago. Now it is much too expensive for this village to get it.’
The list of problems went on. The village wasn’t serviced by any public transport and the roads were so poor that it was difficult to get produce to the market.
All things considered then, I wasn’t that surprised when Norman told me that alcoholism was another big problem. Some of the men in the bar were so drunk that it took them a few minutes of extreme concentration just to get their drinks to their mouth. Most of the men had been drinking chang’a, which is a lethal methyl alcohol concoction that is often supercharged with the added ingredients of marijuana twigs, cactus mash, battery alkaline and formalin. ‘Last year a batch made in Machakos killed more than fifty people,’ Willy told me.
‘We are always positive that we can make a change,’ Norman said with resolute confidence. Each week the menfolk held a meeting to discuss ways to develop and better the village. ‘It takes a long time to get anything done, though,’ Norman shrugged wearily. To even get their grievances heard, the village administrator has to present to the AC (Assistant Commissioner), who in turn goes to the DO (District Officer), who goes to the DC (District Commissioner), then finally to the PC (Provisional Commissioner). Sadly, it seemed like a lot of BS to get FA.
We all squeezed into Mutisya’s Shuttle Service after we left the pub. The car was chock-full of drunken uncles. One uncle couldn’t even stand up—he would have had no chance of walking, let alone finding his way home in the total darkness.
By the time we got back to the house and sat down for dinner it was after 10.30. Mutisya’s mum, who had been waiting patiently for the men to come home from the pub, served up a tasty dish of large slabs of ugali and cabbage mixed with tomatoes and onions.
My bed was in another house, because the newly renovated ‘couch surfing’ rooms reeked of paint fumes. I couldn’t give my new ‘couch’ a rating just yet, though—I couldn’t even see my room or my bed in the dark.
In the middle of the night I needed the toilet and, although there was a squat toilet outside away from the house, Mutisya told me to simply walk to the end of the corridor and just wee on the washroom floor. The ‘washroom’ was a small, empty room with a concrete floor. Finding the washroom, however, was more easily said than done. When I stepped outside my room it was so dark that I couldn’t figure out if I should go left or right. I think I pissed in the right place. Either that or I relieved myself on the lounge-room floor.
Mutisya knocked on my bedroom door at eight o’clock and I stumbled out rubbing my eyes. ‘This is a bit too early for me,’ I moaned pathetically. I felt even more pathetic when Mutisya told me that 96-year-old Grandma had been up since five o’clock and that she still worked in the fields planting or collecting maize. She even had to walk a few kilometres just to get to the fields. Grandma had already returned from her morning’s toil and was standing out the front of the main house pounding a long wooden pestle into a large mortar, transforming dried maize kernels into a fine powder to make the base for ugali. Just to absolutely confirm my place in the upper echelon of patheticness, I had a go and only lasted four minutes until my arms got too sore.
Mutisya kindly organised a large bucket of warm water so I could have a wash and set me up in the small, empty washroom—but thankfully not the one in the house that I may or may not have pissed in. Actually, the room wasn’t empty. The walls were crawling with giant ants. ‘Watch it, they bite,’ Mutisya warned.
‘I left my towel in Istanbul, do you have one I could borrow?’ I asked.
‘You can use this,’ Mutisya said, handing me a dusty and somewhat smelly piece of crumpled-up cloth.
It was raining sheets when we headed out for a guided tour of Mutisya’s relatives. Our first stop was Uncle Edwin’s ‘butchery’, which was housed in a wooden shack with no refrigeration and no glass in the shop windows. Uncle Edwin was inside, busily hacking up meat that was covered in flies. Fresh goat meat, with blood dripping onto the floor, was hanging up in a cage behind him while chopped-up delights such as cow brains, livers and pigs’ feet were laid out on wooden shelves that were open to the dusty road outside.
Although we’d just eaten breakfast we headed to the back room for a ‘morning snack’. I almost brought up my breakfast when I saw our morning snack. It was ‘African sausages’— otherwise known as goat’s intestines. The boiled intestines, which were grey and slimy, came out dangling daintily from a stick. This was accompanied by a mug of soup that I’m pretty sure isn’t in the Continental Cup-a-Soup range: Hearty Goat with Fat Globs and Grey Sludge. I will try to eat most things, but after the first sip left a thick layer of grease on the inside of my mouth I sheepishly (if that’s the word) pushed it aside.
‘Because you are a special guest we have a surprise for you,’ Mutisya said, rubbing his hands together excitedly. It certainly was a surprise. Mutisya’s uncle plopped a rather grotesque-looking boiled and blackened goat’s head down on the table. At least we didn’t have to eat it by ourselves, since a crowd of men appeared and began something of a feeding frenzy as they pulled off ears, eyes, cheeks and lips. Being the special guest, I was handed the ‘choice’ portions, but God knows what I ate. I sampled all sorts of squishy white, brown and pink chunks of meat. And something that looked like grey jelly. Admittedly, some of the bits were quite tasty, but others tasted not unlike rancid shark meat.
When the skull had been picked bare, Mutisya’s uncle produced a huge machete and smashed it open, splattering bits of goat’s brain onto my face and clothes. The rest of the grey mush was devoured in less than three minutes. All that was left on the table was the skull, jawbone and teeth.
We spent most of the afternoon driving from house to house through heavy rain and thick mud on The Great Relative, Cow, Goat and Chicken Tour. With an ever-changing entourage of relatives joining us in the car, we visited a brother, an aunty and a third cousin and they all seemed to have large broods of humans, goats and dogs.
On the way out of Nairobi we’d passed shop after shop selling couches and now I knew why. Our last call was on Uncle Peter, who had five couches and six lounge chairs squeezed into his living room. Peter needed plenty of space because he had nine children and fourteen grandchildren, and he himself was one of ten brothers and five sisters.
The most comfortable chair was reserved for Nzioka, Peter’s 103-year-old father. ‘He has lived so long because he had three wives,’ Mutisya told me. Nzioka, who still looked incredibly sprightly for a centenarian, had served in the British Army during the First World War then worked as a butcher until he retired at 89. Peter was also retired after working as
a policeman for 36 years.
All the men were kicking back in the lounge room while the women scuttled about preparing dinner—which I guessed would be chicken after I’d spotted aunty chasing one around the yard as we’d arrived. That chicken may have also been past retirement age. Although it was tasty, it was a bit like trying to eat a rubber novelty chicken.
After dinner, the men discussed village politics. Or rather Mutisya did all the discussing while the others listened. Peter told me later that Mutisya was a budding politician and that one day he would be Prime Minister.
I was having a lot of trouble staying awake. I’m pretty sure I was in the advanced stages of CSFS (Couch Surfing Fatigue Syndrome). It wasn’t even eight o’clock and I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I even tried to write some notes, but I dozed off mid-sentence. I woke up almost an hour later with a long black pen line scrawled down the centre of my notebook.
‘Have you got a gun?’ I asked Mutisya.
‘What for?’
‘So I can shoot whatever was making that “ERRRGGG-OOOHHH” noise at four o’clock in the morning.’
‘That is the cows.’
‘If William does marry Jasmine, you can keep the cows,’ I said.
The moaning cows did bring the couch rating down a fraction:
Couch rating: 6/10
Con: The room was dark
Pro: The room was so dark that I couldn’t see how dirty the sheets were
It was still raining, so we dropped into the ‘hotel’ in the main street of the village, which was run by Mutisya’s brother Francis. A ‘hotel’ in Kenya is traditionally a teashop. Because of the rain the place was full of men drinking milk tea and eating chapatis. Francis’s wife served us our tea and Mutisya told me that she got up at 4.30 every day of the year to milk the cows and then worked at the hotel all day serving tea.
‘Milk was our incentive to go to school when I was young,’ Mutisya said as we sipped our hot tea. ‘We were given milk at the end of class and all the kids would come to school because not many families could afford to buy milk.’
Mutisya, Willy and Francis had a funeral to go to, but because it was still raining they decided to go to the pub instead. Although it wasn’t quite midday, the pub was full of drunk men, including a few who had already passed out slumped in their chairs.
Just as we sat down, the chief of the village arrived. When Mutisya introduced him to me, he took off his hat. ‘It is a sign of respect to take off your hat,’ Mutisya said.
‘Oh, should I take off my hat? I asked, reaching for my cap.
‘No, no,’ Mutisya said, shaking his head. ‘He is taking off his hat as a sign of respect for you because you are a world-famous author.’
When the rain finally cleared we headed out in the car to see a ‘much nice view’ from the top of Yatta plateau. As usual the ‘we’ also included an entourage. Joining us this time were a young lady named Catherine and some old bloke from the pub. We drove for 40 minutes up a steep dirt road and then continued by foot up a narrow track through a eucalyptus forest that smelt just like the Australian bush and, very tentatively on my part, along the edge of a steep precipice with a sheer drop down to vast brown plains running away to a far-off horizon.
I was even more cautious when we shuffled out onto Thui Rock lookout, which hung precariously over a jagged rocky outcrop. It was worth it, though. The view was spectacular as the late afternoon sun cast long shadows that seemed to stretch right across the continent. We were so high up that hawks were circling far below us in the thermals.
‘This is not in any guide book,’ Mutisya said proudly.
Mutisya pointed out a series of caves below where ‘men bring women for to have them’. These women were usually someone else’s wives. ‘The women say that they are going out looking for firewood,’ Mutisya said with a wink.
The old fellow said something to Mutisya who translated: ‘He told me that the last time he came up here was in nineteen-sixty.’
‘To help a woman look for firewood?’ I said, returning the wink.
On the way back to the village we dropped into the Backyard Bar for dinner and cold beers. The bar was chockfull with locals watching an English Premier League match on a big-screen TV. When we went to sit down there weren’t enough spare chairs, so Willy grabbed a seat, then grabbed Catherine and sat her down on his knee.
‘We call him Mr Smooth,’ Mutisya said. ‘You know he once had sex with one of my couch surfers.’
After dinner Mutisya stood up and announced, ‘You must see a Kenyan nightclub.’ I would have passed if I’d known getting to this Kenyan nightclub meant a 50-minute drive in pitch darkness on a rough dirt road, all the while getting tossed around in the back like a rag doll. I was exhausted by the time we got there just from holding on for dear life.
The busy main street of Machakos town was crammed with bars and nightclubs, including Hot Babe Nightclub and one rather subtly named ‘Drink Here’. Since there were plenty of menacing-looking youths milling about, we opted for the one place that I figured should be safe from any trouble: the Peace and Love nightclub.
Inside, a Kenyan UB40 cover band was bouncing around on stage while a big-screen TV was showing a video of various African animals copulating, or ‘animals getting married’ as Willy described it. The old bloke from the pub immediately fell asleep in the corner.
I was tired and didn’t really feel like partying, but I ended up having a fun night after a few beers and quite a bit of dancing. At one point I noticed someone staring at me. And no, it wasn’t my terrible dancing. It’s funny, but I hadn’t even noticed that I was the only mazungo, or white man, in the nightclub.
Mutisya drove back at breakneck speed. And it wasn’t because he was in a hurry to get home. He was just drunk.
‘The Kamba people are the best woodcarvers in the world,’ Mutisya boasted. ‘Not just in Kenya, but the whole entire world.’
We were driving through hot dusty plains near the village of Wamunyu, which is home to what looked like just about every woodcarving workshop in Africa. ‘Most of the wooden giraffes in people’s homes around the world comes from here,’ Mutisya told me as we passed a fourth large gang of woodcarvers sitting just off the road, on top of a mountain of yellow wood chips, carving out wooden giraffes. In fact, all four workshops we’d passed were full of folk knocking out wooden giraffes and nothing else.
We stopped at the region’s largest workshop, where around 40 old men were squatting in front of a long, open-sided tin shelter roughly chiselling out entire herds of giraffes (or corps of giraffes, which is apparently the correct collective noun). ‘Older men do the first and most important part of the carving,’ Mutisya said as we negotiated our way over the wood-chip minefield. ‘It’s because they are the most experienced and fastest.’ Inside the shelter, long lines of younger men were sitting cross-legged on the dirt floor fervently filing and sandpapering. Although it looked like incredibly delicate work, they were extremely quick. Right at the very back of the shelter a giggling group of young women was painting the giraffes. ‘The longer and harder you work, the more money you make,’ Mutisya said as we stepped around a massive pile of giraffes waiting to be painted. Everyone was so diligent because they all had a stake in the business. Each artisan was a member of the 3000-strong Wamunya Co-operative Society that owned and ran the workshops.
They certainly were devoted. Although it was Sunday the workshop was full and most of the workers had started at 6.30 in the morning and would work for twelve hours or more. Mutisya asked one of the carvers why they were so busy.
‘A huge order from America came in,’ he said.
In the adjoining co-op shop was a large display of just about every animal you can think of carved out of wood, ebony and mahogany. There was also a small army of 2-metre high African Blackwood Masai warriors.
‘You can get thousands of dollars for one of those on eBay,’ Mutisya whispered. ‘I’m saving up to buy a few.’
Mutisya really w
as quite the entrepreneur. On the drive out to visit his brother Vincent’s farm he told me that he owned the farm. ‘The farm was empty when I bought it,’ Mutisya told me. ‘But local people began moving in and cultivating the land, so I built a house for my brother to live in so he could run the farm for himself.’
I asked Mutisya if he was considered well off in Kenya and he said, ‘I am very lucky. Compared to other Kenyans I have a very good life. My family has a house, we eat very well and I have a car. The people in my village are shocked that I even buy a newspaper every day. Many people could feed their family for the day for the price of a newspaper.’
Mutisya had worked hard to get to where he was. After finishing his O levels in high school, he took a course in tourism before landing a job as a waiter in a Mombasa hotel. After two years he was moved to the travel desk and also began studying marketing part-time. This led to a job as a marketing manager and eventually general manager of a travel and tour company. In 2004 he set up his own travel/safari company and subsequently hired three of his relatives to work for him: a brother and sister in the Nairobi office and cousin Willy as the company driver.
Mutisya’s brother Vincent, on the other hand, didn’t have much work. He had planned to grow maize and beans on the farm, but the land had been too dry to plant. Instead he was hunting small animals with a bow and arrow to sell at the market. Vincent told me that a few weeks earlier Mutisya had sent him an Irish couch surfer who stayed for two days. ‘He went hunting,’ Vincent said. ‘And he killed three doves and two hares. We had a very nice dinner that night.’
We had a huge lunch of ugali with cabbage and onions while sitting under the shade of a tree overlooking the parched yellow dust bowl that Vincent was hoping to cultivate. After I’d barely touched my meal, Mutisya gave me a lecture. ‘You don’t eat enough like an African man. Your metal is much bigger and harder when it’s heavy,’ he said, gesturing towards his groin. Thankfully, before Mutisya could go into detail about his heavy piece of metal, he changed the subject.
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