Snoring for watchmen is suicide

By Ted Malanda

Our flats have the craziest of watchmen. Last week I got home at 9pm and the chap was snoring like a tractor.

I flashed my lights, but that wasn’t enough to rouse him from stupor. I honked gently, but that only deepened his snores. 

Because I was also impatient to crawl into bed and frighten the frogs in the pond behind my house with my snores, I stepped out of the car.

armed men

It took me a bit of time to open the gate because I had not spent the evening drinking water. But as I fiddled with the lock, my heart kept thumping against my ribs.

I was half expecting a band of armed men to spring out of the darkness and say, “Money or your life.” I had no money, which meant I would have had to part with my life — something I’m strongly opposed to.

But when the gate creaked open, the watchman jerked awake, rushed out of his cubicle and ‘swung into action’ towards me.

In between musing how a married man can fall into deep slumber on a broken plastic chair with three legs, I realised I was now more frightened of him than of thugs. There is nothing as dangerous as a sleepy coward armed with a rungu.

The next morning, I crept out of my house at 5am and true to form, the watchman was still snoring away. Once again, I, his employer, ended up opening the gate.

As I drove off, it occurred to me that the watchman has, like some civil servants, a dream job — he merely turns up.

Not that I blame him. At the wages I assume he is paid, he would be a damn fool to die for me. Put differently, I would forever hold him in contempt if armed carjackers pounced on me at the gate and he rushed to my rescue and ended up stopping a bullet.

Unlike you, I believe firmly that a man ought to die peacefully in his sleep — and not after a long illness bravely borne.

I like it when a man wolfs down a kilo of roast meat, swigs down a barrel of hooch as is his custom and staggers into the darkness singing circumcision songs only for word to filter out the next morning that he gave up the ghost in his sleep.

That is why I get incensed when I bump into sleepy watchmen.

trouble

My dear kinsmen, I harbour no illusions that you should stay awake to protect me because I know you can’t. I only need you to stay awake so that at the first hint of trouble, you can wet your pants, hop over the fence screaming ‘mummy!’ and melt into the darkness.

The only place a watchman — or a policeman — could be excused for sleeping on the job (pun intended) is at the Vatican. But that was before priests started shooting fellow priests.

Cowards live longer, my friends, but sleepy and absent-minded watchmen simply get their heads blown off.

 

Church has changed since grandma

I first saw her in Church when I was a six-years-old. Last month, I saw her shuffle past my father’s gate to the village church as she has done every Sunday of her adult life.

Like my grandma, she is among the women in my village who got ‘saved’ in the 1940s or earlier. They were illiterate, but miraculously, they could read the Bible. It could be a coincidence, but while they were the pillars of the church, their husbands were a permanent fixture at the busaa club.

Back in the day, they all wore white, ankle-length dresses, blue long-sleeved cardigans and white headscarves to church. When benches were introduced, they ignored them because they felt better stretching their legs on the floor like they had done for generations.

As a teenager, they frightened me silly because the moment you walked into church, they stared at you from head to toe, following you with their eyes all the way to your seat. Much later, I came to learn that their wizened eyes were only looking for setan — the slightest hint of the devil and sin among us teens.

Girls were particularly in trouble. The old birds took great exception to young women who turned up in short or transparent dresses.

When that oily thing called curly kit became a rave, one of them walked to a young worshiper, summoned her with the flick of a finger and explained to her in no uncertain terms that ‘prostitutes’ were not welcome to church.

After the service, the gradmas gathered outside the church where they hugged each other. I used to think that hugging was a ritual for staunch Christians, until I figured out that they only aped what they saw white women do after Church!

But my grandfather — bless the old rogue — used to swear that they were merely sniffing each other to detect who secretly smoked cigarettes or drunk beer.

So conservative were these old girls — they called each other Dada — that in 1982, when a progressive pastor invited someone to play Christmas Carrols in church on a record player, there was a near riot. They mumbled for weeks. 

Yet last month, when that old granny shuffled past my father’s gate to church, she was dressed in a flowered dress — not the all white ensemble of old.

I guess she gave up when disco came to the pulpit, men began turning up in shorts and T-shirts and girls landed in tight jeans. 

And you can bet she misses the old days — and the sisterly hugs.