A wasted generation drowning in the drink

About three weeks ago, I returned to Mwenendega, the place believed to be the origin of the people of Embu. It is at Mwenendega, as folk myths would have it, where Ndega first met and settled with a woman called Nthaara.

The union was solemnised amid the chattering of colobus monkeys, the nocturnal coquettish laughter of the bush babies and the chirping of bird species that inhabited then vast Ndega forest.

Nthaara, agreed to get married to Ndega on condition that the latter would never ask her where she came from or who her people were. So one day, after Embu’s Adam and Eve had sired children, who had by now moved out to settle in other parts of the land, Ndega decided to throw a party.

He slaughtered a fattened ram and retrieved the gourd of muratina (traditional honey beer) that had been fermenting for days in a hollowed muthare tree trunk.

Nthaara loved a good feast. Actually her name, Nthaara (which means the one who grabs) had been given to her after Ndega noticed how she liked hogging meat and tucking herself almost endlessly whenever she saw roast goat ribs.

After Ndega had had one calabash too many, he fixed his wife a groggy gaze and asked: Woman, you are amazing, where did you come from? As folklore would have it, at that moment a downpour like had never been witnessed before pounded the land, sweeping away Ndega, his wife and their home.

Muratina thus became the forbidden fruit that ended Ndega’s blissful life in the garden of Eden called Ndega forest. And while I would be lying if I said I don’t enjoy my drink “at the right price and temperature” – as the late satirist Wahome Mutahi, aka whispers used to put it – the kind of inebriation I witnessed back in the slopes of Mt Kenya recently is simply frightening.

It gores the heart when you find the guy who used to make young girls’ hearts want to leap into the mouth has become a withered cabbage. You see a man walking to a shop and buying half a kilo of rice, and 20 minutes later, he is frothing a whitish substance at the sides of his mouth, eyes popping out of their sockets, drenched in his own waste and the half kilo pellets of the family supper strewn all around him.

For the first time, the word rehabilitation has started featuring in families’ list of headache. And it’s not only the Class Seven dropout whose legendary love for chang’aa makes headline village news, you hear even people who once held top government positions have gone bananas.

And it has everything to do with concoctions brought in illegally and which for Sh20, addle the brain completely in a matter of weeks. So the guy you used to compete with for position one in class and who dropped out, or did not get a job after college, is now a strange version of his former self, after his mental software vanished to lalaland to see the wizard of Oz.

I’m not sure I approve of the draconian measures being used to indiscriminately flatten structures suspected to be selling these brews that have no physical address declared on the plastic bottles. Neither do I see any justification for anyone to be dismembered after they have become ‘useless’, as recently happened in Nyeri, but you also see where the women the beautiful girls from the mountain are coming from.

Remember, it is in these same places where, last year, brews of death did in tens of people, including a relative. Earlier on, a group of men were blinded by these concoctions and, thinking the lights had been put off, vowed to continue drinking in darkness.

For me this is personal. I want someone to tell us what it is that these people are drinking that makes a straight ‘A’s student of yesteryears morph into a drooling imbecile after only Sh20. Or is it the curse of Ndega that has returned to wash away another generation? No, Ndega used to quaff well-matured vineyard-and-honey wine, not poison in nondescript plastic bottles!