By Ted Malanda
I suspect all big people are frightened that their senior aides will write books littered with dirty secrets about them.
I wouldn’t worry too much about that if I were them. The people who know the most damaging stuff about important people are the small, faceless workers we never see — the house girl, the gardener, the watchman and the driver.
It is the driver who is to be most feared, though. With house workers, one can affect an air of mystery and manage to pretend to be a nice guy. But the driver sees and hears it all.
He picks up the boss at the crack of dawn in Karen, which means he woke up at 3am because he lives on the opposite end of town — Dandora to be precise. For breakfast, he gulped down a cup of hot water.
But he needn’t have hurried because by the time he arrives in Karen, his boss is still snoring like a tractor. He will wait an hour till the big man wakes up, fool around the gym, shower, suit up and play with his grandson over a sumptuous breakfast.
“Let’s go,” the big man will then say. Not a word of apology.
They will head to meet a political contact whose name ideally belongs on a most wanted list. Meanwhile, the big man’s phone will keep ringing and the snippets of information that filter into the driver’s ear are enough to frighten the CID director to death.
Later, he will drive the big man to a city hotel for a meeting that starts with starters, proceeds to cold meats, graduates into hot meats and ends with fattening cakes.
The meeting lasts two hours, but the driver dares not dash to a kiosk for a snack lest the boss needs him suddenly.
And so it goes until another dinner meeting is held, as the driver’s roundworms grumble angrily in his stomach. Then the dinner meeting will proceed to yet another meeting on Ngong’ Road, where a pretty lass in a flimsy negligee will open the door.
That meeting will proceed under much clanking of wine glasses, giggles and a barrage of kisses till three in the morning, as the famished driver warms his bones by the watchman’s fire.
And that is the man, when he thunders “Harambee!” at a public rally, grown men will weep in his honour and women will faint, helpless with love.
Vetting did not begin yesterday
Among my people, when a boy faces the knife and becomes a man, protocol demands that he ceases to sleep under the same roof as his mother and father.
In days gone by, he would wander into the bush and return with construction materials. And his father, no doubt swelling with pride, would strut out of his hut, jab a finger at a spot and say, “Build here.”
The standard procedure was that a boy’s hut — the simba — was positioned nearest to the gate. This served two purposes. One, when enemies came, they would have to first contend with the young warrior before reaching the old man.
But there was a second reason.
Hedge
When a boy faced the knife, it was expected that young girls would begin to pay him clandestine courtesy calls, hence the simba was positioned to allow them to sneak in through the hedge.
Not that it was that clandestine. The young man’s sisters knew it because it is they who smuggled food for her into their brother’s simba. Being girls, they whispered the little secret to their mother who doubtlessly whispered to her husband under the cover of darkness.
Naturally, the old man would grunt like he didn’t care, although he smiled in the darkness, recalling his own youthful days, now sadly gone.
“He takes after me...” he would muse, never mind that it took an army of aunts to find him a wife.
Shyness
The shy girl never knew it, but a thorough vetting process would be underway. The old man activated his contacts across several villages, his wife did the same, and each time their daughters smuggled food into the simba, they would be investigating this or that.
It was like a massive police operation, only without teargas and gunshots.
Over time, the girl would overcome her initial shyness, to the extent of going to the river and helping out in the kitchen as an intern. At that point, her life would literally be on the line because the moment she placed lousy ugali on the table, she would be toast.
But don’t for one moment imagine that her parents had no idea of what was going on. Just like in her boyfriend’s case, she would need her sisters to sneak out now and then. They too, would whisper to her mother, who would whisper to her husband.
Oh yes, right across the ridge, another clan was investigating their potential son-in-law — vetting him!
Just like today, some young men and women would rubbish the vetting committee when it brought an unflattering verdict and forge into holy matrimony and a life of bitterness and regret.
Sadly, there were parents who noted zero female traffic towards their son’s simba. When their dark whispers reached a crescendo, the boy’s grandma summoned the miscreant to her hut and snarled, “What is wrong with you? Doesn’t that thing of yours function?”
Sadly, those days are gone. What happens today is that an elder could be watching his cows when his long lost son would saunter into the compound with a night runner’s daughter and say, “This is my wife.”
