Our pubs should be tourist attractions

By Ted Malanda

It must rank as the tenth wonder of the world that Kenyans claim to ‘relax’ in our pubs. Even more shocking is that they, somehow, manage to have a good time. How?

Our pubs seem to have conspired to create the most uncomfortable experience for its clients. To begin with, all pubs are dark as hell, even during the day, with walls painted in colours so garish that one could be mistaken for thinking they are holed up in a pirate’s dungeon.

The lighting is always dim. Oh yes, pub owners believe drunkards see best when light bulbs are blue, green, red or orange.

The furniture doesn’t help either. The tables are always too low, the chairs too hard and the space so cramped that it is a miracle patrons never require bum, knee and back surgery after a drink. Incredibly, none of the tables in a bar can stand on its four legs without being propped up by bottle tops, pieces of cardboard, and so forth because two or three legs are always shorter.

It is as if the carpenters who make bar furniture graduate from the same village polytechnic, where a ruler never features in the curriculum.

As if that is not enough, bar owners insist on investing on TV screens on every wall. You have one screen showing the Bundesliga, another the English Premier League, another La Liga. Other TV sets scream in Portuguese and Italian, not to forget another showing the African football version of puuh-paah where the ball is forever in the air while players run around like headless chicken.

Udulterated

Into that noisy mix, add a shrieking stereo and an even noisier reggae DJ with the guts to interrupt Bob Marley with guttural rants in a Bukusu-Jamaican accented English.

Now enter the patrons. I don’t really know what happens to Kenyans when they enter a pub. You have four people huddled together around a tiny table, yet they speak so loud you would think they are sitting on different ends of a stadium.

So after spending hours cramped on a hard chair in this dark, noisy hole, drinking stuff that could be adulterated, in glasses that never get washed, breathing in the fumes of burnt goat meat and stale urine from a urinal that never gets washed, a guy staggers home smiling from ear claiming to be relaxed, to have had a good time.

Curiously, national parks, the places where one can really relax, never have diehard ‘fans’. Yet, install a noisy, dirty pub beneath high voltage electric power line, right on top of a petroleum pipeline and behind a garbage dump and it will be full to the rafters daily. 

 

Euthanasia a pipe dream in Africa

To appreciate that we are yet to crawl out of the woodwork compared to the so-called developed countries, ignore the ‘development’ parameters set out by UNDP and focus instead on euthanasia — or assisted death.

In Kenya, when you take a patient who is gravely ill to the hospital and notice doctors conversing around his or her bed in hushed tones, be afraid. What is likely to follow is that one of them will call you aside and say, “We have run a lot of tests but we can’t find anything wrong with your father.  We suggest you take him home for prayers. You could also try traditional medicine. These herbs work sometimes…”

Bills

Of course, the good doctor is lying through his teeth. Their tests will have revealed that your patient has a virulent strain of something that is likely to kill him in no time, ‘when’ being the only issue in contention. 

Being folks who grew up quite poor themselves, studying with the aid of a smoky tin lamp, subsisting on boiled cassava and getting educated through the grace of God and the sale of chang’aa, the doctors will be fully aware of the devastation protracted illness can wreak on a family’s non-existent final fortunes.

So don’t, for one moment, dream that they will start running around, wheeling your patient to the ICU and sticking oxygen masks tubes all over his face. They know you can’t afford it. They also know your patient will die anyway, so why not let him ‘pass out ‘in two weeks as opposed to running up bills for one year? 

That’s how you end up with a terminally ill patient in the house. In most villages, there is always a quack who, much as the Medical Practitioners and Dentists’ Board might frown upon his operations, is the ‘Flying Doctor Service’ at the grassroots.  It is this chap who will arrive daily on his old bike to administer Panadol, Cofta and Vix to a dying man with a humongous tumour in his gut as the local pastor intones, “Riswa — out with the madimoni (demons)!” 

And all the while, relatives and neighbours pay solemn visits, waiting for the patient’s ghost to depart. When they leave, they are bade bye by the woman who will soon be a widow stoically saying, “We have left it all in the hands of God…”

Around here, when people discover you lying in a trench with blood oozing out of your mouth, they shake you a little bit. If you don’t wake up, they upend a bucket of water all over your face. If that doesn’t work, they immediately start making funeral arrangements, never mind that you got a small knock and fainted.

Yet in the developed world, a guy whose brain conked out will lie in state on a hospital bed for 20 years, tubes all over the place, while his family engages lawyers to have a court allow his wife to save her husband pain by killing him.

Not for us, that sort of nonsense. Here you arrive for a morning hospital visit and discover a stranger on your loved one’s bed.

“It was the will of God,” a nurse whispers kindly.