Public Interest Notice

So the president and his nemesis have agreed to talk.

Since one of the main issues on the agenda is the issue of foreskins, or the absence of it – I believe it is *imperative* for the public to establish without doubt, the exact status of the preputial anatomies of these two gentlemen – i.e. if the president is missing a foreskin, and his nemesis retains it intact.

What if it revealed that the president was not, but his nemesis was, circumcised – would the two then change sides?

A knotty matter indeed, for the highest judge of the land.

Seeking Employment

In the course of the week the organization (“NGO”) I work for (I do not wish to name it, for clear reasons of anonymity) has received 3 applications of employment from Kenyan Civil Servants. Maybe it is a sign of individuals abandoning ship? Unfortunately the NGO hasn’t had a good experience with Civil Servants in general.

There was one, a middle-aged gentleman with impeccable credentials who we imported over from Europe last year, but we had to send him away after it was revealed that he had demanded certain personal favors bordering on the sanitary from one of the  attractive secretarial staff (one would have thought the vast selection of paid ladies would suffice ?).

Then there is an unspoken rule in many NGOs like mine – Never employ a Kenyan civil servant. Working for the government appears to add a cocktail of credentials involving corruption, incompetence and nepotism to one’s resumé.

The homeless and the homed

Today morning the house-maid (house-maid, house-girl – strange words have I learned in Kenya) and her child appeared at the door, with a few meager and pitiful belongings (The child has a comb and a cigarette carton for a toy).  The mother tearful and in distress, but the child smiling, and still carrying a pocket of warmth despite the darkness of the immediate past. Both evicted on short notice (“Get Out!!!”) from the shanty they lived in. Reason: Landlord was from a tribe from the opposing side. Now they want to stay with us until….

Mugithi’s fat and well powdered aunt intervened : the house-maid is from so-and-so tribe, we could be putting our lives in danger for their sake.  How I loathe this woman.  She saw the daggers in my eyes and stood down.  A moment later, Mugithi walked in — and bless her,  for the Aunt flinched and then dissolved under a choice selection of kikuyu dialectics.

The child immediately descended into the garden, playfully chasing the dogs.  The mother wiped her tears, and reached for an apron and a pot-scrubber. The house is a kind of private universe, a deceptive cosmos of friendly dogs, smiling faces, a small orchard of mangoes – all within the greater one that is burning outside at the moment.

Metamorphosis

One of Mugithi’s aunts has materialized at our home. Big kikuyu woman, typically strong, the husband kept beating her until he thankfully shuffled of this mortal coil with a serious bout of gout. She still sheds a few tears, in relief, rather than grief.

The husband was one of the few privileged ones who prospered in the shining light of government benevolence. In the 70s there was something called the Kenyatta Resettlement Scheme – the government handed out title deeds to large parcels of land in different parts of the country to various beneficiaries. Mugithi’s uncle received a large swathe of land near Diani on the coast, and sometime last year the Aunt received another title deed to a fertile tract of land further north, near Malindi. She rents it out to a local tenant farmer.

“Who else got these parcels of land?” I ask her innocently, and the facts tumble out. There were about 300 title deeds handed out last year about 15 went to people from the local inhabitant community, the rest went to kikuyus and their kin. Why not to the local communities ?

“They don’t know how to farm…” says the Aunt disparagingly, crinkling her nose.

This is the voice I hear in my family – from my girl-friend, from her family, from her sisters, and from her uncles. Yet, people keep telling me this battle isn’t about tribe and ethnicity, but about land. In a country with communal nepotism, everything begins and ends with petty arguments and prejudices. Inferior and superior is decided on the basis of not having a foreskin, a servant maid is hired on the basis of her being from a “servile tribe”, the list is endless.

To understand this better, I think I should start by beating Mugithi everyday, and eating red meat and ugali three times a day. Luckily, I am already circumcised, my mother was Jewish.

Who or what is a kikuyu

A friend of mine from the Big Apple emailed me to ask “who are what is a kikuyu?”.

This is what I told him:

From your office block in Manhattan walk 6 blocks east until you reach the World Trade Center site. Here you will find people laying flowers, others taking pictures, a hot dog stand doing brisk business and so on.

If you wait for five minutes a black man will approach you with a shoe box. Inside the shoe-box you will find a piece of dusty rubble. The man will tell you with great animation that this piece of concrete is an “original” fragment from the World Trade Center, and it can be yours for a price.
That man with the shoe-box will almost certainly be a kikuyu.