Down memory lane: Saturdays in the 1990s

Last Saturday, I got quite excited when I saw the Wanga Woman above me had a story with the headline ‘I wish it was Saturday, 1990.’

Instead of giving the likes of us a nice trip down memory lane, though, Wanga Woman went on to complain about a friend’s child whom she babysat; and she had to check the little brat’s temperature with a thermometer, and monitor air pressure with a barometer (to see if it was safe to go play outside) and such stuff.

What was the typical August Saturday for the 1990 child growing up in an urban estate like Nairobi West? The day would begin with being sent to buy the weekend papers – Standard and ‘Nation’ (cue Jesse Kamwaro to see these old newspapers in the library!) – alongside milk and a loaf of bread (which meant the household of six each ate three slices).

After breakfast, it would be time to go for the ‘morning show’ at the Rainbow cinema at the shopping centre (it cost two shillings and fifty cents) which were always Shaolin kick flicks with names like ‘The Return of the Legendary Drunken Monkey Master of Kung Fu.’ Fired up on the ‘ninja’ movies, brutal martial arts fights would rage all the way back to the different estates between us boys.

Once home, we would arm ourselves with ‘feyas’ (catapults) and metal dustbin lids (shields), these in the days that Kanjo used to have trucks picking up garbage on Saturday mornings (days Sonko has sworn to bring back) and rush back outside for inter-estate warfare (rules of engagement – only small pebbles in catapults to ensure no serious injuries to the various combatants). I LOVED this game. Warriors and warlords would break off at about one pm for a quick lunch at home (you had to go home and eat, to avoid beatings in the evening).

After lunch, it was time to go get dessert by stealing into compounds (kwanza those ones of muhindis) to steal umquarts, to tie strings to a species of flying beetle we called ‘ding-oing-ngo’ (and so enslave it as an organic kite) and go fishing or swimming naked (‘dush mpararo’) in the nearby South ‘C’ river. In the late afternoon, a soccer game would begin between ‘first field’ and ‘second field.’ And go on beyond the prescribed one and a half hours till it got too dark to see the football (the scores adding up calamitously like those IEBC tallying machines at Bomas of Kenya). Back in the house – and all Nairobi homes were decorated the same, from Umoja to Golf Course, in August 1990, because liberalisation and second hand stuff that brought variety were yet to happen – it would be time to shower.

My late mom had something of a fastidiousness when it came to separate soaps for separate bodies; so it was Palmolive for her, Lifebuoy for our old man, Imperial Leather for me, Lux for my sister, Dettol (for our ‘dirty’ little bro) and Panga soap for Nandwa, our long term house-help (whom my mom later got into Kenya Polytechnic, a clever lad who liked estate maids and James Hadley Chase novels, in that order, and later went to work as an architect’s draftsman).

Once scrubbed clean and so ready for supper – almost always ugali, sukuma wiki, three pieces of meat and a glass of Mala milk (which we’d want to sweeten with sugar, but alas, ‘sukari is for tea’), it would be time to settle on the ubiquitous vitambaas that covered fake leather sofas. Before the black-and-white Zenith TV set (beside the Radio Sanyo) to watch weekend shows on VoK. (KTN would premier that October of 1990).

‘Dunia Wiki Hii’ and ‘Top of the Pops’ would be followed by news – and then ‘Dynasty’ or ‘Falcon Crest’, followed by a weekend movie (the only ‘films’ one would get to see, seeing as only three families in the whole estate had a JVC – VCRs being a whopping tens of thousands). In fact I remember taking ma-threes some Saturdays from Nairobi West to Ngumo, just to go watch ‘Rambo’ or ‘Commando’ or the ‘A Team’ series at my friend Anthony Karanja’s house.

Saturdays in August. 1990.

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