Hawkers with uncanny instincts

By John Kariuki

A young woman saunters into a pub with a hot pot balanced on her head, shouting, "Mayai moto pamoja na kachumbari! Kumi kumi tu (hot boiled eggs and salad, for ten shillings only!)"

Stella Mwihaki, a secretary in Nairobi, has nothing but praise for hawkers. She has been buying most of her perfumes and beauty accessories from hawkers. "One particularly resourceful hawker anticipates my needs and sells me the right items when I need them most," says Mwihaki.

While alighting from matatus in the morning at her place of work, Mwihaki is always grateful that this chap is usually on hand with phone credit vouchers and chewing gum ready for her.

"On rainy evenings, I have often pondered how I would get home but this man would magically be selling new umbrellas at the bus stop. At times he gives me a black polythene bag for free to cover my hair," says Mwihaki.

She says that the hawker has many customers in the office where she works. He has such an uncanny business instinct that he knows exactly what each person is likely to buy.

The man’s understanding of his customers is thorough and he frequently sells cuff links, neckties and pornographic DVDs to some of her male colleagues.

But Marion Wangari is still smarting from a con trick that she suffered in the hands of a crafty hawker recently. The man was peddling a 3G mobile phone handset at a cheap price. "Ordinarily, that brand of phone goes for Sh17,000 but this guy was ready to take Sh8,000," says Marion. They were in a matatu. She held the handset in her hand and inspected it. The man even allowed her to Google through the phone.

But when she put the phone down to take out the money from her purse, the hawker took it ostensibly to take out his SIM card. He then exchanged it with a similar looking shell of a phone!

"It was only after he had left with my money that I thought of inserting my SIM card in the phone. And to my horror, the inside of the phone was stuffed with clay!" says Marion.

She cautions people not to give items back to hawkers once they have decided to buy them. It’s prudent to pay when the merchandise is firmly in their hands.

Gender debate

I remember the case of a hawker who was selling whips made from old tyres in a Mombasa bound bus. "Viboko jamani, viboko! (Buy whips!)," he shouted.

He cracked one whip fiercely through the air but nobody was interested in buying. He lamented that were it not for the endangered status of the hippo, he would have brought the real hippo hide whips instead of the tyre ones.

Then he started wheedling: "Hamtaki kununua hata ya kupiga bibi? (You don’t even want to buy one to beat your wife with?)," he asked.

The passengers burst out laughing and the inevitable gender debate broke out.