Warning : This blog may impair your morals
a) Why is it that rail-thin men wearing baseball caps (back-to-front, or sideways) always go with large, well-dimensioned women ?
b) Why is it that rail-thin women always never go with large, well-dimensioned men wearing cowboy hats at dangerously tilted angles ?
An email update from the Big Apple:
Hi midnight,
I hope you are fine ? Kenya appears to have made the news both on ABC and CNN. It usually takes a few 100 deaths for an African country to make the headlines on ABC. I saw this strange news heading in one of the local gazettes, which left me increasingly confused :
“Kikuyus committing ethnic cleansing in a place called Kikuyu”.
So its the name of a place too ?
By the way when you visit please bring me one of those machete things.
The parody that is the media can be seen even locally. The prism of my senses witnessed parallel universes in action today. The same news report from : Universe no.1 and Universe no.2.
The last time two parallel universes collided, the big-bang occurred.
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.
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.
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.
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