Random Blues: Who sets these crosswords?

 Puzzle of clueless crossword setters. Photo: Courtesy

The expatriate is something of a riddle in himself, insofar as he can barely be understood by sane Kenyans. More importantly, he likes doing riddles and puzzles, as he grew up in a culture that values problem-solving and lateral thinking.

Consequently, when the daily newspapers arrive on his breakfast table, neatly ironed by the servant, he doesn’t do the Kenyan thing and turn immediately to the obituaries page; rather, he turns to the puzzles page. He is particularly fond of crosswords, but he’ll also play codeword, the word wheel and other such brain teasers, in the hope that his normally idle and empty brain might fill with cleverness.

He was conditioned into this when a child, when he did jigsaws, the Rubik’s Cube, and other such time-fillers. On growing up (something that some expatriates have achieved), he graduated into crosswords; firstly, ‘simple crosswords’, and then those profoundly riddling ‘cryptic crosswords’, which test the mind with clues such as ‘Mr Palambi’s archetypal ostrich is green-green’. It takes a special kind of curdled mind to solve cryptic crosswords.

But, the newly-arrived expatriate to Kenyan needs to be careful, for crosswords are not as they seem. Personally, I once had occasion to post on Facebook a peculiar simple crossword clue I found in one of the national newspapers: ‘A cock hungry slag’. This struck me not only as offensively sexist, but also as odd and an indicator that either the newspaper editors don’t check what the crossword setter is setting, or else they don’t care. Which oversight probably explains other problems I’ve encountered, and that other expatriates (the only people who do crosswords, I believe) will find, with the daily Kenyan crossword.

These include: Over-simplicity: one daily has a ‘simple crossword’ that my pet budgie once completed. Over-obscurity: another daily (read by ‘smart people’, apparently) always has strangely specific clues that nobody could ever possibly know (‘The second favorite nickname of the sub-chief of Kinanie’.) How am I supposed to know that!? Clues that don’t fit the grid given (that is, clues for a presumably different week) are very common as is the occasional printing of the solution for that week’s crossword alongside that same week’s crossword.

While these might, in the grand scheme of Kenyan newspapers and their various issues (violence, corruption, grand theft, political hatefulness and financial collapse) seem like very small matters, indeed they are not to the expatriate, who finds that his large cooked breakfast is ruined whenever he’s presented with such crossword calamities. Indeed, so serious is the expatriate’s concern and indigestion that he almost considers writing a letter to the editor to complain, and would, if he trusted the editor to reprint that letter without spelling and grammatical errors.

Games and puzzles are a serious business to the expatriate. Without them, he’d also have to start reading those obituary pages and would find himself having to contemplate that greatest puzzle of all: ‘Why do we die?’ He then considers murdering the newspaper’s crossword setter, and feels much better.

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