Why country bumpkins get ensnared by ‘Mombasa Raha’

Irrespective of gender, religion, class, tribe or our other silly biases and stereotypes, Kenyans love Mombasa like crazy. That is if you discount meat, tea and ugali which we devour from Malaba, across Mt Kenya, down the coast and all the way up to Moyale.

This love is so profound that my own people, the Wanga of Mumias, have a full-fledged welfare association in Mombasa. In fact, they even own a bus for transporting their dead back to the ancestral land for burial, confirming the age-old stereotype that when a man from Western Kenya sets foot in Mombasa, the only way back home is in a casket.

Ask any villager in their 70s and they know kinsmen who vanished in Mombasa, never to return. The few who return only find their way home by enquiring from strangers about grandfathers long dead and of ancient trees now swallowed by sugarcane plantations.

Wags say it’s the bewitching sensuality and beauty of the coastal woman and her mouthwatering culinary skills, rampant raha and limitless mnazi that ensnare upcountry men. But more discerning sages whisper that apart from the coastal women being fatally sexy, they also employ love potions potent enough to knock the daylights out of a fire-spitting evangelist.

Bus to likoni

Stories abound of upcountry men who take annual leave to visit their first wives in the village (they hitch up second wives the moment they set foot in Mombasa), say bye to everyone in Kwale and take a bus to Likoni. But they never cross the ferry. Instead, they just sit at the jetty with their stools, cupboards and radios the whole day, eating mahamri and dreaming about the beauty they left in Kwale. In the evening, they slink back to Kwale, mumbling about missing the bus home. Here, they receive a king’s welcome — deft massages, samaki wa kupaka and pampering of the kind King Solomon never imagined in his wildest dreams.

This goes on for decades till the prodigal son dies and that trusty welfare bus trucks his remains home to be buried in the middle of a thicket by kinsmen who are but strangers.

Curiously, immigrants to the coast get so charmed that they eventually become more coastal than the indigenous people. In fact, Nairobians travelling down for a mere weekend inject that poetic twang in their pesa nane Kiswahili even before they reach Mariakani. Mombasa, it seems, is the only place besides the USA whose accent visiting Kenyans acquire and unleash with unrivalled pride when they come back home.

Local markets

Veteran local tourists will recall being accosted by ladies of the night who pretend to be authentic Waswahili. But a beer down the line, the fake twang slips, revealing with pinpoint precision the upcountry local markets where they were born.

Authentic coastal people are never taken in, though, and they sniff wabara from miles off. When I went down for a beach meeting with some elders early this year, an old man, a Cuban who has lived in Mombasa for years and speaks impeccable Kiswahili, took in my pair of black jeans, hiking boots and said, very casually, "Could you kindly lift up the hem of your trousers, my brother?"

"There!" he roared with laughter, pointing at my socks, "welcome to Mombasa, upcountry man!"