A few weeks into her first month at a new job, Karen Wambui was seated at her desk, clicking away at her keyboard when the door to the office burst open, and a woman billowed in.
She scanned the office for a moment, her eyes eventually landing on one of the interns, a pretty girl named Irene. The visitor promptly descended on Irene, first with blows, and then— after the office strongmen had intervened— with colourful, not-safe-for-work insults that rang through the building.
There was something about a randy husband, a trip to Lamu, and a long list of M-Pesa messages to Irene.
“Do you have no shame, going after a married man like that?” “You think he’s going to leave me, his wife of 14 years, and his kids, for a small girl like you?”
The situation was soon bottled up, and the angry visitor was escorted out. But that interruption was the last time any work was done on the day.
For the rest of the day, people kept sneaking off, often in pairs and returning with satisfied smirks. Once or twice, Karen noticed a congregation around the cubicle of a senior employee, where things were discussed in hushed tones, and knowing glances were thrown Irene’s way. Finally, unable to bear it, she approached the senior employee and asked what was going on.
It was her introduction to the underground world of office gossip. That senior employee was the master of spies, an elderly woman with an extensive catalog of knowledge.
She knew everything about everyone. She knew who was sleeping with whom, she knew where the boss took his side-pieces, and on this occasion, she knew that Irene had been flown to Lamu for a weekend by the visitor’s husband, where she had finally stopped playing hard to get.
“Her reputation is such that any time I miss a few days of work or I am away on leave,” Karen says, “her desk is one of the first places I go to when I return so she can catch me up on what I missed. There is even a rumour that the company cannot fire her because she knows too much.”
Ben Oywah works at a law firm in the city. It is a large organization with several departments and even more employees. One of the few places he gets to meet with his colleagues is in the bathroom.
“I go in sometimes just to hear what’s happening around the workplace,” Oywah says.
“Guys speak so freely in there, I don’t know why. Like one time, when the guys were ‘ranking’ the new interns. Or trash-talking our boss, who everyone says overworks because he is afraid to go home to his abusive wife.”
A lot of the faces he sees are familiar. But over time, the sense has become that it is a safe space and anyone can contribute.
“When we meet back at our desks, we go back to being productive employees, as nothing happened. But then we meet at another spot and we pick the stories up from where we left them.”
For Diana Nduta, a journalist with a local media station, no spot is more effective than the water cooler.
“You can pretend to be getting a drink,” she says. “It’s not that the company frowns upon socialization, but we have some supervisors who like to see everyone buried behind a computer. So when I’m going to refill my water bottle, it’s an opportunity to catch up with my friends.”
The days when there are delays in replacing the water bottle are usually very long ones for Nduta. But her gang is nothing if not resilient.
“We have other spots around the building. There are some workstations which are not used too often, a nice spot just outside the main entrance. Sometimes we just go to the cafeteria and have long lunches.”
Often, the gossip is endless, flowing unsolicited from one to another. There is a WhatsApp group born from the main official one, used primarily to provide running commentary on what is said by the higher-ups.
Like when a mkubwa posts his wife on his status, and the side group takes it upon themselves to investigate why she looks nothing like the lady he was with at the last company dinner.
Gossip, it seems, is an integral part of most workplaces. It exists in one form or another, whether it is a deliberate undertaking as in the case with Nduta, or a complex network headed by an amateur Sherlock Holmes, like Karen’s.
At its heart, gossip represents the social aspect of humanity. There is a certain joy to knowing your superiors are human too. Learning their secrets, that they have weaknesses beyond the icy demeanor they present at work, can be a way to humanize a figure employees are meant to fear. Gossip cuts through the dynamic inherent in most organizations; nobody is safe from the ‘tabloids’.
It is therefore unsurprising to find employees searching for good spots to ‘partake’. Some of the classics include bathrooms, a cubicle that attracts little traffic, the kitchen, the side of the building facing the fence, and of course, the water cooler. As long as the gossip flows.
Dr Jane Thuo, a Journalism and Mass Communication lecturer at the University of Nairobi attributes this kind of interaction to our innate need to connect with others.
“The nature of human beings is that they crave for interaction, so when you meet new people there is a tendency for the friendship to grow,” she explains. “This often extends beyond the workplace; they can end up getting drinks out of the office, visiting each other and other joint activities beyond the office.”
A healthy dynamic, however, is held together by a common interest, not backbiting. People who share a love for football, for example. People who can help each other grow outside the workplace.
“Gossip has a negative connotation, where people are talking about each other,” Dr Thuo says. “It is about backbiting. There are people who just have fun talking about other people. They see how you’re dressed, they point it out to others and laugh or sneer. This is when they don’t want you to know what you’re saying. It could be out of jealousy. Maybe you’re doing so well at work, or even badly.”
The latter, according to Dr Thuo, can be very destructive.
“It's bad spirit. Not wanting the other person to hear what you’re saying about them means it’s not well-intentioned. It destroys relationships at work and eventually leads to the creation of camps. It creates hatred and animosity, and can even lead to physical confrontations. There is no positive gossip.”
