Why Nairobians should stop eating at village funerals

We were watching a match between Harambee Stars and Algeria in a small pub when one of our strikers, Henry Motego, I think, unleashed a torpedo of a shot that my people call itabali, Swahili soccer commentators call it fataki.

A cheer went up in the small crowd. An itabali is not your ordinary shot. It is the sort of missile that is fired by well-fed striker, one that comes with sufficient force to floor a goalkeeper whose lazy wife cooks noodles, spaghetti or rice for dinner!

So powerful was Motego’s shot that a kinsman who was seated next roared, “Lola abasiani basenanga injenga (look at the men who eat maize flour)!”

I have been thinking about maize flour because I hear Kenya’s strategic food (read maize) reserves will barely last the next ten days.

Now if that bad rumour, that little snippet of hate speech, turns out to be true, Interior CS Joseph Nkaissery will have to deploy his men in full force to quell riots in my home county, Kakamega.

We love our food. But that is not to say we are greedy. It is just that we are big bodied. Our men are massive and our women are well endowed in the thoracic and rear view regions. As I pointed out to a Kalenjin colleague last week, our bellies and those massive legs our women use as a means of transport are not acquired through meditation.

We hammer granaries.

Unfortunately, we have a small problem. We are not producing enough food to satisfy our hunger pangs and the result is that many of us ‘sleep just like that’.

As you read this, most villages in my county are ravaged by hunger, with only one or two people with enough grain to feed their families. We have no cows to produce milk and we manage our chicken in such a jua kali manner that it is a miracle they lay eggs. This is why our funerals are crazy.

We don’t eat big at funerals because it is our culture. We arrive at a funeral and munch like hybrid cows because we are hungry.

The moment a relative dies, we come in the guise of saying pole and set up camp.

Charitable luhyas

An hour later, we expect our hosts to reward our presence with tea. We are sure they will because the Luhya are a charitable and proud people who love visitors.

So although our own homes are barely a stone’s throw away, we transit from neighbours and relatives and become ‘visitors’.

That sugarless tea with a drop of milk in it is the kind of thing Nairobians would sneer at. Not us.

We love tea, but unfortunately, we can’t afford to sip as much of it as we’d like.

People who don’t know us would imagine that after being rewarded with a mug of tea, we will go to our own homes for dinner and then come back later in the night to keep vigil.

But it doesn’t work that way because we have no maize flour in our houses so we stay put until the bereaved family puts a meal on the table.

We stay by the fire dozing and braving the early morning chill till 7am when a mug of tea and githeri comes our way.

Only then do we go to our homes, to wash up and fix a few chores. But we ensure to return just before lunch, and right before dinner. And so it goes until the eve of the burial when real visitors starting popping in.

When a cow is slaughtered we salivate because for most of us, the only meaty thing that goes down our throats is omena, which, truth be told, is not the tastiest or meatiest of meals.

In the old days, they would slaughter the cow and we would corrupt matumbo and a few meats across the fence. Not anymore.

These days, some annoying fellows called caterers have emerged in virtually every village. They come with tents, plastic chairs, huge sufurias and tiny paper plates that no respectable in-law should be served on.

They slaughter the cow, cook nice foods like chapatti, fish and pilau and hide them in a tent as far away as possible from where we are seated pretending to be listening to lies about how sweet the departed was.

Then they get the meanest looking villagers to stand guard with instruction to usher in only visitors from Nairobi.

Look, people from Nairobi eat meat daily. They eat a whole fish on their own and chew chicken, chapatti and pilau so often those foods are no longer a delicacy.

They have money to eat in hotels, they are well fed, they have big stomachs. So why are they given all food while we, the hungry, watch?