NANJINIA WAMUSWA and TED MALANDA take you back in time, when love and lust were brewed in local dances
The smoky tin lamp made for disco lights. The bouncer was a village ruffian with a scythe tucked menacingly in his belt.
A pretty girl sat next to the man of the hour — the DJ — demurely wiping sweat from his face. It was boogie time at a local dance, oloko as we called it.
Although he had only three hairs on his chin, Wasike considered himself a man, a ladies man, and his catch, Atsieno, was 16, brazen and wild.
There being no guesthouses, Atsieno was impregnated in the banana groove behind the hut. The year was 1977. They left together that night, to his home, to live happily thereafter.
That was the golden era of the local dance when young men and women convened at night to socialise, table both false and genuine marriage proposals and, above all, boogie and have fun.
The raves were rampant during the festive season. Such was the time when young women broke free from their marriage vows and melted into the darkness, overwhelmed by the allure of nightlong merriment. These are women whose marriages were brokered at a local dance and the temptation for just one ‘final dance’ always held sway. Often, this final dance sent them parking to the bar as barmaids.
In Western Kenya, it is said the local dance owes its origin to the educated boys of an earlier era — the likes of the late assistant minister Dr Elon Willis Wameyo. Such Makerere boys, ‘British’ and ‘cool’ to the core, would arrange elaborate parties in December where peers from St Mary’s Yala, Maseno School and other big schools in the region would be invited.
The guests would come with female cousins, Class Eight graduates — highly educated by the standards of the time. It is fitting to note that the girls came with full knowledge of their parents because the parties were an accepted forum for courtship among the elite of that time. Many of those tough boys maintained lifelong bonds with their schoolmates because they married friends’ cousins and became family.
The village version was not as dignified or as classy, though. On the contrary, it was a place of scandal, frowned upon within religious circles in the village and a place where good, well-bred girls would never be caught dead.
Unlucky parents had a hectic time locking up their daughters, who sneaked through windows, sometimes with the connivance of naughty grandmothers, to go shake a leg.
Most of those girls were in primary school. They arrived dressed in men’s shoes, white stockings and crimpling dresses with handkerchiefs tucked in their belts. High school boys of the time derisively called them ‘calicos’.
Each dance they attended moved them closer and closer to school dropout status because the hormone-charged lasses often eloped with the first men they met at the dances.
Sometimes, and there being no ‘morning after pill’ back then, they got pregnant. Fearing the consequences of giving birth to omwana wa isimba (a child conceived in a boy’s hut), they fled to the young man’s home and declared themselves married.
In some cases, girls slept with more than one boy in one night and were never able to figure out who the father of their child was.
There were several local dances, each with its own membership and a name just like political parties. For instance, you would have big names like Burangasi Super Star Association (BSSA) and Six United Brothers Association (Suba). But just like football associations, local dance officials often fought — especially when they ‘fell’ for the same girl.
Still, the local dance committee was a study in leadership. The chairman was a man of integrity. The secretary could at least write his name. The organiser was a cunning man, a fine orator and an accomplished MC who controlled dances the whole night. The treasurer had to have a clean record and no history of stealing chicken.
For obvious reasons, village dudes adopted pet names like Simba Imunyanya (randy lion), Kwalulukha Kuloma (better shed leaves than dry up and die) or Embula Oburuma (merciless).
Preparations for dances that would be held in December began in earnest every February. Members met and resolved what to feed visitors. A budget was drawn and each member contributed money, often in small bits after working on people’s farms, for the big do.
Others pledged maize flour or chicken (many villagers obviously lost their chicken every December!).
A guest list was drawn and letters sent to the chosen few. Obviously, only men were invited. But they were reminded to come with two ‘ladies’. Those who came without girls were fined heavily before being allowed to join the bash.
By December, all plans would be ready. The committee would have sought and received permission from the assistant chief — of course after parting with something small. Many times, they were given Kanu youth wingers for security — probably also one reason guests were required to come with two girls.
Just like today, visitors were frisked at the entrance, yet when fights inevitably broke out, all manner of crude weapons miraculously appeared.
Members had a programme showing the order of events. It started with arrival of visitors, registration, feeding, introduction of guests and finally, the ‘official opening of the dance floor’ by the guest of honour. The merriment would then proceed till morning.
Young men used all sorts of strategies to win beautiful girls. They lied about non-existent sugarcane farms, the big schools they attended or that they had just qualified to join university.
They would mention having visited many parts of Kenya. Photos of guys taken in major towns like Mombasa, Nairobi and Nakuru would be tabled.
English language was broken into hundreds of pieces: “Me, I likes you fere much. Come we cook (I love you. Let’s get married),” a young man is on record telling a girl who had caught his eye.
Meanwhile, others would be playing spoiler. While you were busy regaling girls about the photograph you took outside Kenyatta International Conference Centre, spoilers began a rumour that you had just escaped from prison. Alternatively, they would label you a chicken thief or a notorious night runner. No girl would henceforth look in your direction, no matter how sweet your lyrics.
Girls were not spared either. Some were said to have had five abortions, or to be notorious for ‘marrying and unmarrying’.
The only challenge is that it is the girls who chose dancing partners. So if you didn’t have ‘swag’, you ‘floated’ the whole night while the men who were with it dangled four girls on one arm.
Many young men got wives, courtesy of the local dance. There were playboys who sired a child at every dance and rogues who acquired a new wife each Christmas. Today if research was done, the number of children conceived in local dances would be amazing.
Such was the magic of the oloko that an otherwise shy man who could not look a girl in the face could muster courage to say ‘anything’ in the dim light of a village dance.
But for all its charm, there were rowdy fellows who were known to cause trouble in local dances. As a consequence, they got blacklisted. But they would still arrive uninvited and disrupt the dance in the dead of the night, leaving visitors stranded.
Mad gatecrashers set huts on fire or sprinkled stinging nettle on seats, sending invited guests scattering when they were turned away.
Despite efforts by the Provincial Administration to ban local dances because of social order and security reasons, they persisted up to the late 1990s when they were stamped out for contributing to the spread of HIV and Aids.
The emergence of monthly discos in virtually every village market town could also have contributed to the end of a pastime that many parents and grandparents secretly recall with haunting nostalgia.
