Man republic: Why do men love drinking in dark, stuffy, dingy joints?

Last weekend, a busy day ended with my friend Aggrey Wekesa and I looking for a place to quench our thirst.

Now there is a new joint in town launched with such gusto at the start of this year, you’d expect it would surpass all the other entertainment joints. So we chose to overlook our local pub and made our way to the new joint.

The reception was superb. This place has incandescent lighting. You know those lights that make you appear handsome when in real sense you are not. The seats were also meticulously arranged.

Swinging leather chairs {though I thought this wasn’t a good idea because a drunkard could as well swing himself to the ground). The drinks were served by voluptuous ladies who spoke English as they welcomed the sober us to ‘the newest joint in town.’ What also caught my attention was a constant fragrance that kept thrilling my nose as we got accustomed to the place.

However, for some reason, we just couldn’t stay here. There was just something amiss about the sophistication of this joint that made us both agree that it wasn’t a good choice for a Saturday evening.

Aggrey even commented that here, you would need so much alcohol to get drunk. The scanty population inside the joint made it worse and we made our way out.

As you might guess, we made our way back to our local joint where were received like heroes since we had been away for some time.

Now, our local joint, famously called ‘Kwa Mwalimu’, is the direct opposite of the earlier joint. It is such a dark place. It is always dark even during the day. There are hardly enough seats for all patrons at any given time but this never deters the merry makers.

In fact, many of them usually make do with sitting on empty soda crates. There are no glasses here and drinks are taken straight from the bottles. Rhumba music bellows from the makeshift speakers that hang precariously right above the revelers at such high volumes, you wonder how the revelers manage to hold conversations in such an an environment.

Despite all this, ’Kwa Mwalimu’ was full to capacity. Were it for the fact that ‘Maggy-the-Bartender’ quickly found a place in the ‘VIP’ section for us, we wouldn’t have enjoyed a drink that evening.

Now, the VIP section of this joint actually refers to a room that is also used as a store for empty beer bottles. It had no ventilation so were sweating profusely as soon as we got in. The only positive about our VIP section was the privacy. At least there was social distancing since it was only reserved for two.

Advice for anyone planning to start a business selling alcohol; do not make your place very clean and sophisticated. You won’t have any customers. Kenyans love drinking in dark, dingy and unkempt places. Have yourselves a nice weekend and please don’t drink and drive.

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