I almost quit my job in April for personal reasons.
What happened is that I was playing truant in my village when I remembered that the daughter of my mother’s sister works in Pukasi (Bookers or Mumias Sugar Company to you).
What made me lick my fingers ravenously was a piece of intelligence related to the fact that my cousin owns a cooking pot and is extremely versed in the technologies of turning smoked fish into the finest stew you have ever tasted.
Salivating in anticipation, I dialed my personal boda boda rider and ordered him to race like a maniac to a Shibale. ‘Ships’, as those of us who are exposed call it, is a township so sleepy and dusty you would never believe it has swallowed the billions belched out by Mumias Sugar Company since 1973. Perhaps I should have called, but who fixes an appointment to see the daughter of his mother’s sister? We are not wazungu, so I simply arrived.
Luhya women are interesting. When you visit, they don’t hang around swinging you stories. They switch on the radio and then run to the kitchen. In a span of three hours, my belly was taut as a drum. I had hammered two mugs of tea, a concoction of fruits (my stomach was so shocked to receive vitamins it gasped), a fat ugali served with that smoked fish and of course two more mugs of tea.
Fearing she would kill me with food, I severed ties and after vigorous handshakes bade her bye and stepped out into the approaching darkness. It’s when I reached Ships that the devil spoke unto me.
Son, he said. Instead of going back to your village, why don’t you look around, you know, explore this town? You are a journalist, right? Besides, your belly is stuffed to the rafters and that thing brewed by Mr Johnnie Walker should hasten digestion. You honestly can’t walk around looking like a pregnant woman.
That is why I turned to a boda boda operator at the market and asked him to recommend an establishment where a man who had hammered a whole fish, a fat ugali and four mugs of tea would find a suitable beverage to lighten his stomach.
The guy looked me up from head to toe with an expert eye. Then he smiled and, while glancing at the rich protuberance on my belly, said: “Poss, the way I have looked, you cannot sit in a hivi hivi place. There is a place that is brand new. That is where menejas and Ministers drink. Twende!”
Who was I to say no after my fat ego had been so sweetly massaged? In fact, for suggesting that I was I was very big man, he earned himself a hefty Sh10 tip.
It is, however, when I stepped into that club that I discovered a whole new world. The proprietor, a clever man if ever there was one, had engaged the prettiest waitresses south of the Sahara. They were shapely, they were beautiful, they were leggy and oh my goat, weren’t they yellow-yellow?
Let’s not mix things here. On a scale of one to ten, the daughters of mulembe score pretty high on the beauty Richter scale, especially when viewed from a vantage point. But Ugandan women? Don’t joke my friend! And those waitresses were as Ugandan as I am a direct descendant of the Nabongos of Wanga.
That’s when the devil spoke unto me again. Son, he said, why do you waste your life in Nairobi meat wrapping when you can make a living running a boda boda or two here? You could drink the sweat of your labours right here you know, in this very bar, your eyes feasting on Ugandan sugar.
It was not the Lord who intervened. Just before I texted my boss telling him to go to hell with his meat wrapping job, I remembered that that my father, the old cop, owns four walking sticks and sobered up.
That would not have been the first time the devil had tempted a sugarcane farmer from Mumias to invest his entire sugarcane harvest in Ugandan sugar. Since the days when my grandfather was a spanner boy at the Kakira Sugar Works or something in the 1940s, men from my neck of the woods have been licking Ugandan sugar.
Yes, Mumias men woo Ugandan barmaids out of the pub and install them at home as wives. Then those beauties serve us eggs, millet, groundnuts and simsim imported from Uganda.
Let me tell you something. If you went to Mumias today and attempted to round up and deport all Ugandan women, there would be such a riot Boinnet would have to call up the Ugandan Army for reinforcement.
