Kukuru Kakara

I found myself sinking deeper into what I describe as the 'mimi ndio mnoma' era (Swahili slang - called sheng - 'I am the cool one').  Most young people in Nairobi City were desperately funnelling efforts - usually which ended up as futile - to being better than the next person.  An activity akin to a puppy chasing its tail in circles.  I released a single track a month ago and a couple of days later it was reviewed by a popular socialite radio presenter, Papi Pato, on Nairo-fee FM who said this about the track, "There are hits and misses, Mimi Ndio Mnoma by J is not a miss ... what is worse than a miss? Tell me Nairobi, what words can be used to describe what is worse than a miss?  This song is like that men's toilet in a bar along River Road where you find piss everywhere but inside the loo itself - yeah, that kinda miss."

I know, one would immediately feel that such a savage review would elicit anger from me who put out weeks of hard work and decent money into having a studio record and master the EP.  Well, no.  Nairo-fee FM actually played my song severally and has been doing so since - a win for me.  Papi Pato may have potty-mouthed my work but he spoke to an audience that eventually started downloading my song to hear 'how bad it was'.  I actually got 1,355 online downloads within 4 weeks!  And here I was thinking that the whole notion of bad press being better than no press is BS!

Exit March enter April, I start gigging again to make ends meet.  This time I am called to perform songs from my EP at the Alchemy Concoction Pub in Hurlingham neighborhood, the paragon of bourgeoisie Nairobi night life.  A place where you would typically find your rich campus kids hanging out after class with a rich mix of expats who don't know what to do with their superfluous salaries, thousands of miles from their home country.  Such gatherings offer a lot of content fodder for artists and I am not the one to pass on such a privilege.  Observation.  Yes, observation is the mother of all paths to creativity - ask the musician, poet, filmmaker or even author!  Fela Kuti's song Observation no be Crime comes to mind. From the expat mzungu girl (Swahili - 'White Person') thirsting for the dreadlocked young black DJ to the active-on-instagram local celebrity actor making moderately intelligent conversation with a bunch of high-earning 9-5 crunchers, subtly trying to show his superiority amidst a gaggle of plastic chuckles. This would be my first time performing my songs live to an audience and I was nervous to the core but what happens next could only be described as bizarre serendipity.  First up, as I walked onto stage for a sound test Mr. Michael Mwendwa, the venue manager informs me that the resident DJ is AWOL and that they want me to stand in for her.  Again, in Nairobi bearing more than one skill set is usually an asset but on occasion can be abused by those who know what you are capable of.  I say yes and have my EP performance pushed for the next week; it is Friday night and Alchemy Concoction is filled up all through to Sunday which means I would be on the jog-wheels for the next 3 nights during which I would meet 3 interesting characters.

Night One

I accept the adjustment then call my sister to send my gear by cab from our home to Alchemy.  As I am setting up my booth, a short balding light-skinned man, early forties give or take, comes up to me and introduces himself as a Phil Mashoga, a name I found peculiar for obvious reasons. 

"I see you here a lot, I didn't know you DJ?"

"No I don't, I'm standing in for DJ Liz K, she's the in-house DJ," I responded as I began wiring the decks to the sound system now that my gear had arrived.

Phil would then keep asking me a barrage of questions about what I do with many other questions that were borderline intrusive, so I kept my answers vague.  He hovered about the booth as more and more people started streaming into the club.  Thirty minutes into my set he pushed a crumpled paper into my jorts as he said, "Hio ni bwerere, ukiipenda simu yangu pia iko hapo (Swahili - That one is free, if you like it call me for more, my number is also in there).  He then vanished as randomly as he came.  Later that night I would unwrap the package from Phil revealing what seemed to be unrefined marijuana.  I immediately flushed it down the toilet - there was no way I would be caught dead with drugs just when  I began getting lucky with consistent gigs.  I would later learn that Phil was what in Nairobi is referred to as a pedi from the word 'peddler' and was popular for dishing out drugs to foreigners who frequented Alchemy.

Night Two

Enter Saturday night I meet Stacey MaGracey for the first time.  Yeah I know, who the hell is Stacey MaGracey?  A person I did not know 24 hours prior, that's who.  She waltzed into Alchemy's courtyard a bit before 7pm.  Like a gazelle she masterfully moved tossing her hips this way and that as would a runway model save that her appearance was far from model-material which then drew my attention.  For someone who moved with such confidence she looked like a person who had just woken up at midday on a Saturday within the comfort of their home after a night of binge-watching rom-coms.  She wore faded burgundy sweat pants that were ridden with what my mum called boys in our mother-tongue, you know, the same as those annoying pockets of flour you find in porridge that wasn't mixed well.  On her feet, flip-flops from the Bata brand, one blue the other red; perhaps she left the house in a hurry, the red slipper with a black kiraka (Swahili - 'patch') between the big toe and next toe.  On her torso she wore a very light over-sized cotton t-shirt clearly with nothing else inside.  The t-shirt looked a decade old and was well faded with numerous tiny holes here and there; it resembled those t-shirts given free for promotions usually by detergent companies, what my sister liked to call 't-shirts za kulala' (Swahili - 't-shirts for sleeping').  In her right hand, she had an iPhone and car keys that looked misplaced given everything else.  Her head was styled in cornrows or what Kenyans call lines, hers seemingly overdue for a trip to the salon.

I tried not to make eye contact as I headed to the bar counter to grab an energy drink, preempting a long night standing at the booth.  As I walked from the bar she walked to it simultaneously, constantly gazing at me which of course I could tell by side-eye.  I then took my drink and sat at the far left corner near the patio.  Seconds later she came to exactly where I was and asked if she could sit with me which I found so weird given all the other empty spaces.  Curious, I agreed.  Other than the severe unkemptness she was a fairly attractive woman, probably mid to late twenties.  She had a can of beer with her.  Then, like with the Mashoga fellow the previous night, she began asking me a litany of questions starting with the common, "What do you do?"  which is essentially a "How much money do you make?" euphemism.  I told her that I was singer-songwriter and immediately her expression dimmed.  It's 2028 and hypergamy is as real in Nairobi as it is in New York or any other 'developed city' a scenario that has led many young men into crime to finance lifestyles they can not get easily via legit means.  Young women on the other hand have been lured into the 'blesser' culture; constantly in search of much older richer men to finance the same lifestyles that the young men use crime to achieve.

"How old are you? Where do you live?" She asked.

These were but a taste of a flurry of more intrusive questions she would bombard me with for the next few minutes but, as I did with the Mashoga guy, I kept my answers vague and evaded most questions with counter-questions.

"What about you, what do you do?" I tossed a rejoinder. 

She went on to tell me that she was an air hostess which then made sense because the fifty-year-old looking detergent promo-like t-shirt she was in had a tiny faded logo written 'Mavuno Air Kenya'.  A recent airline company that had risen to popularity during the COVID19 pandemic by offering much cheaper flights than the bigger companies.  She said that she had been laid off which explained a lot. Mid-conversation, someone tapped my shoulder from the rear - it was Phil Mashoga.

"Hey bro did you like it?" He asked with a smirk.

"Er ... yes I did. Thanks."

"Well, you know where to get more of that, nipigie simu baadaye (Swahili - Call me later)," he said gleefully trotting off to join a bunch of middle-aged white men and women who were at the courtyard, presumably potential customers.  I continued talking to Stacey for a a couple of minutes before I started getting dizzy.

"You okay?" She asked.

"Yeah ... ," I replied, reluctant to let her know I was dizzy.

"Your nose is bleeding."

I felt my nose only to feel something wet on my lips - dripping blood.  I was nose bleeding but why?  I had never nose bled in my life.  I got up and staggered to the washrooms where a mzungu was washing his hands at the sink with a woman behind him whom I guessed he had made out with - a washroom, how classy.  The skinny make-up ridden young woman looked at me contemptuously as I washed my face at a different sink.

"Mchele nini?" She laughed (Swahili  - mchele is a grain of rice, in this context used metaphorically to refer to a spiked drink).

I deteriorated and the next thing I saw before a black screen were the tiles on the washroom floor.

                                                                                Day Three

I woke up in what looked like a lobby; many people in a small space, noisy, smell of sweat, cigarettes and other nondescript odors.  I had a monster headache and blurry vision from time to time.  I was on the floor along with dozens of scruffy looking individuals, it then dawned on me that I was in a local police station.  Just as I tried to stand a man came running through the corridor with two police officers in pursuit.  The man crushed through the crowded space charging at anyone in his way but finally being slowed by the limited space leading to his capture.  One officer then asked him in Swahili why he run if he did nothing wrong and the man kept replying that the marijuana they found on him was planted by a short man with 'yellow-yellow' skin.  It then hit me that he could have been referring to Phil Mashoga, was this man part of a club crack-down at Alchemy Concoction?  After about 10 minutes I decided to talk to him and asked whether he knew a Phil Mashoga which he denied in bewildered manner.  I then decribed Mashoga after which Ibra, the man I was talking to, confirmed that Mashoga was the man who planted the weed in his jacket.  So, Phil Mashoga was an alias after all - I knew that name was off.  When it became obvious we were set up by the same person Ibra opened up more.

"Si ni yule dame alikuwa amevaa t-sho ya Rivertexx (Swahili - It was that woman wearing a Rivertexx t-shirt)?  She's known for spiking drinks in clubs around Hurlingham!" He barked.

Actually, what Ibra referred to as a 'Rivertexx' t-shirt was the ugly oversized promo t-shirt worn by Stacey MaGracey - a name that was obviously a fake too.  The humor in the Rivertexx reference was a bit of an inside joke where poor quality t-shirts usually given during company promos are generically referred to as a 'Rivertexxx t-shirt' given that Rivertexx was the largest fast moving consumer goods company in the country known for dishing out free merchandise.  It so turned out that Mashoga and Stacey were knee-deep into a drug ring that not only sold drugs at nightclubs but targeted rich clients by spiking their drinks.  It was that moment - "Hey bro did you like it?" -  the perfect distraction while I turned round allowing Stacey to mchele my energy drink.  After an hour of endless back and forth with the police I finally got released, my sister having negotiated my release and waiting for me at the parking lot.

"Weh! You are lucky I knew where you were.  I saw the crack-down trending on Twitter and came to the station," my sister narrated. "It looks like that chic DJ you replaced ... what's her name ... ?"

"DJ Liz K." I said.

"Yup, her!  She actually quit but was too scared to resign officially.  She called in the bust.  Looks like she was a victim of spiking too last month and lost some of her equipment in the process."

"Damn..."

*    *    *

Alchemy Concoction Pub was shut indefinitely.  It was now 2 months after the mchele saga and downloads of my EP tracks had quadrupled because of the same incident.  Images of those arrested leaked online and my face was one of them.  Papi Pato got wind of this and of course could not pass up the opportunity to diss me as radio content. "He first releases a nusu-mkeka (Swahili - 'half-carpet') EP then gets arrested doing weed as he DJ's for mzungus in Hurlingham, this guy!" 

The End.

Title: Kukuru Kakara 

Type: Short Story

Genre: Dark Comedy, Crime, Mystery

Synopsis

J, a young musician lands a 3-day gig at a local upmarket club where he meets 3 peculiar characters.  What starts out as a fun weekend of clubbing degenerates into a numbing catastrophe.

Written by Robert Mũnũku

© Mau Mau Arts 2022

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