City paupers who play king in the village

Many Nairobians are haughty, vain and patronising when they visit the village, but are sly operatives who barely survive in a hostile city, writes JOHN KARIUKI

of Nairobians & their strange ways

Let’s face it; a small dose of real or faked flamboyance opens doors. And if ostentation is the hottest selling social commodity in Kenya today, the largest concentration of pretentious people reside in Nairobi.

At a glance, Nairobians deem their tweng, swanglish, grammatical mistakes and fashion sense as a standard that the rest of the country should embrace. And when upcountry, they spare no effort to demonstrate how superior their city life is.

“In Nairobi, we pay only 50 cents per minute to browse!” A city dweller, who in all probability is a technophobe and a dullard to boot but has picked up this jazz from the matatu chatter, will say with authority that only Nairobians can muster!

Often, Nairobi people are patronising to a fault, giving advice to their rural kin that is at odds with common sense and local custom.

Pigs

“Why can’t you people rear pigs instead of planting maize and beans, which is grossly uneconomical?” One such fellow, who is always broke minutes after payday, sneers to a group of people he is buying beer in a village pub.

But Pascal Marete, a banker in a small rural town, argues that many Nairobians are trendsetters to a fault, which is good for the economy.

“Any new adaptation of new technology to local needs, say formatting new computers on the cheap and unlocking mobile phones that come programmed onto a particular network, is first done in Nairobi,” says Marete.

Marete, however, laments that many bad things creeping into Kenya and the hinterland of the East African region often start with Nairobians.

“Where else do new vices like confidence trickery, strip tease shows and partner swinging orgies originate from with frightening regularity? Nairobi!” he poses.

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