Grab your husband’s waist to survive ravaging famine

Hunger is upon us— again! The rainmakers of Bunyore in Vihiga County have taken leave, or so it seems. Our miracle pastors and prophets have refused to speak in tongues and people, real people, could, God forbid, die.

People who live in Nairobi can’t, obviously, comprehend this. The majority are used to living tough, trekking miles to a job in industrial area with nothing more than sturungi in their bellies.

Lunch is an air bugger, to fuel the long trek back home on a rumbling belly. And dinner, if you can call it that, is ugali and sukumawiki, seasoned with a piece of mutura (yes, that African sausage, that is, on a good day).

Such folks are so used to hunger that they treat famine alerts with the sort of alarm that a slum dweller treats police crime reports.

The other type of city residents don’t lift their eyes off the TV or smartphone screens when you mention hunger because their problem is fat.

They hit the gym, jog and subsist on fruits and water, but the fat they accumulated through years of diligent eating stubbornly keeps piling up interest, like quid in a fixed deposit account.

It is a different scenario altogether in the village. If the rains fail, cows join the doctors’ strike. Fields dry up. Granaries empty and everyone starts ‘sleeping like that’— on empty tummies.

But Africans, hardy people long resigned to fate, don’t walk around sulking. They resort to humour, as the hilarious names my Luo in-laws christen each devastating famine illustrate.

Many Luo traditions and customary practices, including planting crops at the beginning of the rain season, revolve around sex.

So it is hardly surprising that one of the fiercest famines in recent times was nicknamed mak nungo chuori — hold your husband’s waist.

Village men are sly and tricky creatures, you know. Although they hold firmly onto the instruments of economic power at the household level, they rarely turn in a day’s work.

Because they own cash crops and livestock, they are the ones likely to have a coin in their pockets.

Yet when famine strikes, the man pretends to be inspecting the fence before melting off to the market where all the hotels have a dirty curtain at the doorway to keep pesky wives at bay.

Our man looks left, right and left again and when certain no one who knows him is watching, he ducks in and quickly wolves down chapo sita na chai or ugali na mlima.

He walks home burping like a mongoose that has devoured a chicken, but somehow manages to look hungrier than his youngest child.

So if his wife does not mak nungo chuori (firmly grab his waist), her kids will perish.

The other type of village hubby is the one who has the knack of turning up at people’s houses, just when food has been served.

Wazungu (and some city people) would ignore him. But a proper African woman says karibu, even when she fears that the unwelcome guest at every meal will hammer 80 per cent of the meal.

For such a lout, his poor and long suffering wife is compelled to tell her children, “Kibrit olwar epi!” meaning the matchbox fell in water.

This is because the famished kids are looking expectantly at her, yet she has nothing to give them and her useless man of a husband is busy strolling from house to house in the village, inviting himself to meals. So she lies to the children that she can’t start a fire because she has no matchbox.

But there are certain women who are luckier. They can at least scrounge one meal together. Either that or their husbands lock the granary, keep the week’s supply of maize flour under lock and key and only provide a ration sufficient for one meal a day.

While other men sleep with pangas beneath their pillows to protect their wives and children, these men sleep with the keys to the granary firmly tucked beneath their legs.

When hunger strikes, these women and their children logo dichiel, meaning they wash their hands only once a day.

The timing for this one meal must be very strategic. If it is at lunch hour or dinner time, unwanted guests will pop in and finish food for her children.

So the meal is timed at 3pm. Those sent to call their siblings simply shout, “Teeed! Mama is calling you!” not “Come and eat!” for that would beckon an army of hungry neighbours’ kids to wreak havoc.

And with each mouthful swallowed, mum thunders, “Drink water, you stupid fool!”