1.
When I closed down my stalls at Kamukunji, I tried hard to convince myself that I did it for me. For once, the Kanjo officers, often dressed in long raincoats on chilly mornings, wouldn’t pester me with almatums to settle my license payments and the accrued penalties.
The business was struggling. Customers no longer travelled all the way to Kamukunji for wares they’d easily find in well-arranged Chinese stores in town, even at lower prices. Every other time I’d sit with my ledgers and look through the numbers, I was being reminded that I needed to do better, and Kamukunji wasn’t the place to do it better.
Closing the shop down, for starters, relieved me of the stress of waking up so early to take three matatus so that I could arrive at work at least by 9 in the morning. I became less busy and had more time to even grow my afro.
However, looming within me, and slowly taking root, was the self-doubt that perhaps I had done it for something else other than my peace. I had become embattled with the notion that I needed to let go of a part of me that weighed me down in a selfish bid to soar to new heights of opportunity, juxtaposed with the sacrifice of despising a lesser internal glory for a greater external one.
Hasselhoff was beside me after the fact, implicitly reminding me that I had failed in my black womanhood. He didn’t have to say it, but the leaning on that I did to him and the appeal I indirectly gave of, ‘I have no job so please sort me out,’ gnawed on my conscious. I felt like just another woman who depended on a man. A white man. I had given in to the whims and caprices of a mzungu, an unsure promise of richness that Ashawo women held on to dearly as a means of escapism.
I was never an Ashawo, but those blue Scandinavian eyes perked at my Adventist skirts, slit my good girl sundresses, and sewed them up to the bare minis that Ashawos donned on Friday nights.
Hasselhoff worshiped Melanin, for that is what he called me. He worshiped me. He groped at me with the thirst of the kids he fed on most of his philanthropic safaris. He kissed the darkest parts of my skin—armpits, knees, and elbows—as his eyelids clasped to each other as though he were tasting some heavenly, nutty smoothie. He called me names that foreign Ashawo-preferenced men called local women.
I never fully understood why it appeared to him that my blackness was the best thing in his world at that moment. Even from the point he met me, at an old classic cafe that also sold liquor in Ngara, he was drawn into me. I could trace the way his eyes studied my skin and how they marvelled at the color of my jet-black nappy afro. If he were a poet, the silence, coupled with his grandeur admiration for my melanin, could as well be creating sonnets and sonnets about melanin.
When he finally said the first ‘Hi,’ my thoughts were on my locked-down stalls at Kamukunji, my three-month overdue rent, the call from my mom the night earlier about fertilizer, and my Pinterest shopping board.
Hazel gave me childlike fleets that tapped into my conviction of and gnawing for promise and safety. Somehow, I thought that locking down my menial means of earning a livelihood to give him more attention would open me up to the vast ocean in his blue eyes, and that from it I would tap what all Ashawos looked for.
Kamukunji gave me some sort of fulfillment, even when, almost all the time, I felt shitty about it. Living a tourist life in a country where one should be touring away from didn’t appeal to me as much as it did to Hazel. For months, I fought with my doubts, conjuring morsels and morsels of confidence and energy to ask him what should come next. We seemed to vibe at every turn of the moon, but I was a believer of all things to have a meaning at the end.
Fearful that my questioning would make him leave me and find a blacker version of me from another black girl in a classic cafe in Ngara, I held myself, waiting for the perfect moment to ask him.
‘What now?’ I asked Hazel one early morning, distracting him from whatever reverie he got from tracing the stretchmarks on my skin with his white, impossibly clean fingernails.
‘We travel.’
We. He said we.
2.
Ma learned the wrong way that I was living wild. Her friend’s friend had a friend who was also living wild.
One thing with living wild, especially for someone who barely respects the code of living wild, is that you will find the most unexpected of people you know living as wild as, or even wilder than, you. It is customary to just ignore them. Pretend that you just didn’t see your praise and worship leader playing with the Shisha pipe like she does with the wire of the mic at church. Just mind your fucking business and greet her on Sunday when you are done leading the prayer. Don’t say hi. If she’s leaning in for a kiss, give her a quick peck and look away. She is probably pretending she doesn’t know you either. Keep things straight. Don’t complicate stuff. Whatever happens in Nairobi Socials stays in Nairobi Socials. Besides, you’ll be too hungover the next morning to even remember to tell people that this church girl gets her praise moves from pole-dancing.
So one night, this muscular, hotwired, a little bit older friend bumped into my ass at Nairobi Socials. She ground and ground her frontal pelvis on me. At some point, whatever bewilderment I was sending into the locked-up brains inside her coccal chamber nicked her nuts loose. She cupped her buff hands by my shoulders and mulikaad her inebriated, jaundiced eye on me.
‘Nkirote?’
I might have been drunk, but I swear the way she said my name triggered generational trauma from the way Ma had spent years drilling that same name, into me. This buff and wild lady sounded exactly like Ma, said my name in the exact same way that Ma did too. Ma used it as a tool for correction and warning. Sometimes, she would quickly say it just before spearing me to near death after I’d fumble about and made mistakes like letting milk spill over the counter board. So that name, my real name, lashed at my conscience, and for once, I thought Ma’s omnipresence had caught up with me in the worst of places, scantily dressed.
Half-drunk, half-nabbed, I jabbed my fingers into the chest of this buff lady built like a cute Shrek in a bid to ask, Mom? What are you doing here? I waited a minute. Ma might have been a superwoman, working like a horse on Pa’s farm in Meru, but she wasn’t built like a gelded bull.
‘Do I know you?’ I hiccuped.
The music was too loud for me to see her face.
‘Oh.’
She realized she was making a mistake. ‘Sorry, I mistook you for someone I had seen somewhere.’ She left for another pelvis, all the while shooting questioning glances at me as though confirming that my awfully familiar face wasn’t undergoing some form of transfiguration.
When this ordeal trickled down the gossip chain and reached Meru, Ma called. She never fichad anything, So she laid it bare: I was becoming a disappointment, or, if she ever meant it, the things she was hearing about her good Adventist girl weren’t pleasing to her ears. She spat at me, her words boiling with a characteristically rich Ameru jaunt and a tone that her great grandma might have used to curse our entire generation.
I should have asked how she had known, but that wouldn’t sell her my outright lie that those stories were curated out of pure hatred and pettiness by people I didn’t even know rivaled me.
At some point within our discord, she simmered down, the Ameru rove undressing her concern. She wanted to come see me. I wanted to say no. But there was a quiet, forlorn moment in between, I will come to see you and can I come see you? She turned. Stirred even. I knew she wanted to say, I know it’s not been easy since your dad walked out on us but that would be cliche, and she knew I hated cliches. So instead, she said, ‘You are my girl. My only girl. Please don’t get yourself killed.’
She might have had a point. Girls were being lured from clubs into murderhouses by murderous men. Rich men. And she thought my living wild at that moment was one of the formative stages of Another Love Triangle Gone Sour, a TV headline to which she would recuse into her space, and after shedding a few tears, say a prayer to Murungu to keep her girl safe from the clutches of depravity and her eyes away from murderers who masqueraded as rich, appetizing, even tempting men.
Now, however wild you want to live, black girl, the blackness within you has a limit for you. The reality is, except for the music video, a majority of the ladies in Drake’s yacht bouncing their botox injections and smacking their puffed-up lips to the beats of In My Feelings are white. And rich. Well, a little.
I knew this, and that’s where I draw the line. The brokenness in me put a leash on the blackness in me which sought to manifest itself as a wild sort of thing. I knew this. So Ma assuming that I was as naive as to blindly let anyone stuff me into an insufficient BnB, which I found more spacious compared to my student studio, was not only condescending but also annoying.
I wanted to talk back. I wanted to say that instead of letting friends of hers feed her with stories of what I was doing in the city’s sin industry as though they were hired spies, she should have perhaps considered changing her friends. Perhaps she housed the best intentions in her heart by warning me. Or perhaps the butch lady, a friend of Ma’s friend’s friend, should have known boundaries. Perhaps she, the hierarchy of friends that reached Ma, and Ma herself had epiphanies and they didn’t want me to get lost alongside swimmers with the current.
Whatever the case, it wouldn’t change my disturbing realization that butch girls are the worst snitches!
3.
The security guards at the embassy knew me too well. They no longer had fun frisking me. They might have been cooing behind my back that my visits to that place were unending and that I might be having struggles with life, judging by my polite nonchalance that met their small talk whenever they screened me before I got in.
A normal establishment would have their guards on rotational basis. Even security companies don’t ever post their select group of guards at a place for too long. I think it’s the rule of the industry. However, to show that the embassy is full of secret agents working as spies to eliminate perpetrators of the sporadic terror attacks, they don’t change their guards.
As soon as I finished high school, I got myself into a roller coaster of the American dream. I wanted to leave this country and school in the States for college, and, in the process, acquire residence in a blue-state countryside. I wanted it so much so I started willing it into existence. I started by getting obsessed with those campuses at university websites and brochures. I then moved on to attending a few college fairs. Every one of them reminded me why the United States was the best and how easy it was to enjoy one’s passions and fulfill their dreams. I believed that as long as I demonstrated need, applied for aid, and was approved, things like the visa would be easy pie.
I never mentioned to anyone that I wanted to leave the country. I was convinced that the best plans were the ones unsaid. I worked late at night writing and rewriting essays, doing math and reading those biased, long-ass passages with the hope that I would pass the college entry tests and get into a good Ivy League school. I became dangerously secretive, submitting fraudulent recommendation letters and forged transcripts in dingy cyber cafes. I hated the highs and lows that came with the whole process, and the fact that I couldn’t speak to anyone about it. Not even Ma.
When your friend sent you the reel that said, ‘Girl, you need to shut your mouth about your plans,’ she most probably should have sent another saying ‘Girl, it hurts differently when your secret plans don’t work out.’
The ride in the coaster was perfect, up until I got my first invitation to the embassy for an interview. I had watched that lady on YouTube giving perks about visa interviews and had, say mastered, the art of responding to the questions. I might have even said that I aced it, until I got the denial letter.
It hurts differently when your secret plans don’t work out. You become engulfed in this black… flame that burns into your entire self trust. It makes you remember God and His punishment for sinners: malipo ya hapa hapa duniani.
But Ma raised no quitter, so I applied for a different type of visa. Denied. Okay, fake that you were circumcised by village elders and your girlhood is in danger so you’re seeking asylum. Denied. DV lottery. Denied. You’re turning 24. DV lottery again. Denied. F1 student visa? For the last time? Denied. What do you do? Touris… Denied.
‘Hello ma’am! Do you work here? Periodically?’
Guards are this polite?
‘No. Just another visa interview.’
She searched through my bag, thinking.
‘I must admire your consistency. A friend of mine from Kisii did this seven times and he got it the seventh time.’
She was trying to tell me that perhaps eight times was way too unreasonable. She waved her electric wand through my curves, which peeped as though I was carrying a C4 military grade bomb. The wand always peeps whether or not you’re carrying the bomb, which makes me wonder how the hell it’s supposed to show that I am about to bomb the embassy.
As a parting shot, she let me into a little of her wisdom. ‘You should try dating a man from there.’
In the spirit of always settling for less, I found myself stuck with Hazel, who was not only not American, but also married with three kids back in Sweden.
4.
When Hazel said, ‘We travel,’ I pictured Bali.
I saw the Balenese snake dancers prancing through our faces, teasing us with reptiles siring with venom and mischief. I saw the jungles of Samoa and us staying at a cabin built by that guy on Facebook who raised it from scratch in a fast time lapse. I wanted to ride Mongolian horses and swim at an aquarium with inedible fish in Australia.
Instead of having steamy sandy beach sex in the Caymans, we hiked and hiked through the mounts of forests in Congo, every time replenishing the mosquito repellant on our skin as we got deep and deep into the forest and the mosquitoes got bitter and bitter. Once, we got rained on, but the excitement in a white man beset us on a tragic trance, bewildered with the mundanity of Africa.
At least he was happy, so I pretended to be happy that he was. We should have been headed somewhere else. He was rich enough to own a jet ski that mistakenly came with a small boat, but somehow, he had no capitalist ambition to always want more.
Sometimes I doubted if he was indeed a genuine, rich white man. Genuine rich white men didn’t flush their fortune exclusively on exotic African escapades that could get them killed. He knew that white-man-eating, blood-thirsty beasts roamed these jungles at night yet he wanted us holed up in a small tent in the middle of nowhere, listening to his weird-ass music and making love-he called it. I called it cheating on his wife.
He loved it when I jested him. He would cave into me, obviously turned on by the fact that I was villainizing him. He’d smile and bite my shoulder, all the while entering and exiting with heaves of a mzungu hiker. Perhaps he was so much into schadenfreude that the thought of me, perfectly crafted like an erotic Italian sculpture, replacing his plus-size pale wife, exploded his innards with spates of want, desire, lust even.
His ambition in Africa was to live simply, he told me the first day he met me. He wanted to escape his royalty, or whatever you call a lifetime of wealth and wealth management that killed the soul out of a white man.
‘Why would you come to Africa if you want to keep it simple?’
‘Because I pay for convenience. And your convenience is just too affordable.’
Ouch! I liked it when he jested back, his Svedish accent cajoling the sound of a man speaking while food is in his mouth.
In our shared experience, we did buy convenience. Living in an apartment at the top of a skyscraper in the Wester parts of town was all the convenience we needed. Again, moving in with him, just to find that he had designed a creative studio and stacked all the supplies I needed for my artwork and tapestry was all the convenience I needed. Getting me bags and bags of Louis Vutton, and sandals and sandals, heels on heels, dresses and dresses and dresses, with jewels and trinkets was all too convenient.
He showered me with blessings like we sang during the days I attended Bible study, and more showers of surprises, experiences, bungee jumping(I almost died), and once in a while released me to go to Meru and reshower Ma with his second-hand blessings.
My inner black girl didn’t dislike this idea of showers—literal showers in the African jungles. She just waded through the monotony of what Hasselhoff found interesting and pictured another lifestyle. This black girl wanted the Cayman experience so bad that she nudged me one afternoon to speak to…
‘Hazel.’
‘Yess?’ He stretched the ss like a real foreigner.
The doubt in me had long gone. Two years in and I had fully mastered the art of suppressing it. The anxiety that had once paralyzed my nerves and ability to ask questions calmed and the realization that Hazel was stuck with me and all the other black girls in the city weren’t as black as this melanin urged me further.
‘Do you often wonder what the rest of the world looks like?’ I asked, then realized that my folly had ignored the fact that he came from the rest of the world. But he was a smart man. He knew what I was talking about.
He paused, but his right fore finger kept circling the tiny black hills surrounding my left nipple.
‘You know, there are six continents. Perhaps we should try the Amazon rainforest, or the wild beaches of Barbados. No?’
I cocked eyes with him. He evaded real quick.
Gosh. I felt like poor Daenarys begging the great Khal Drogo to take the iron throne for her.
Throne? A king does not need a chair to sit on. Only a horse. Drogo had said then.
‘Baby, this is the best place on earth. Where I am with the best woman on earth.’ He motioned, smiling.
I smiled back, concealing the floricks of disappointment that my demure witticism had attracted.
‘Don’t you want to see other cultures?’ I straddled him.
‘And maybe live in them too?’ On top now.
In my ‘living wild’ days, I had learned that it took little to convince a man, let alone a white man full of lust, to do something for you. And so, if all a king needed was a horse, he was the horse I needed to get to where I wanted.
‘I mean…’ Inaudible, he started to tweak. My horse trick was working.
5.
‘Nkirote?’
‘Yes Ma.’
‘What do you mean you’re getting married?’ Ma was sipping her water, trying to cool down the pain I was causing deep inside her nose that was nearly sending her mad with screams.
It was a bad idea to let Ma into my plan. I need to shut my mouth about my plans.
‘Ma, I love him.’
I almost didn’t believe myself. Did I love that man? Was I riding on the Ashawo promise? Was I full-proof in the emotional side of me? Had years and years of seeing someone, casually coursing through life without sweet-words and the standing on business with life made me acute to love? We were deserving of each other’s love?
‘Nkirote mbona unaniletea mzungu kwa nyumba?’ She demanded, pretending that I hadn’t been in a relationship with this white man for over three years now.
Love was a complicated thing. It was the cradle for many things. For Hazel and I, I don’t think we had fully explored all the facets to it. Admitting that to Ma would be catastrophic because that would sum up all the reasons not to marry him. Among other reasons, of course, was the major one that Ma was fighting: that he was a white man.
‘Nkirote umetafuta bwana hii Nairobi yaani ukaona mzungu ndio wa kuniletea kwa hii nyumba?’ She was clearly troubled and worried about my future.
I was not only bringing a white man into the house, I was bringing a rich Scandinavian white man into this poor house.
I wanted to tell Ma he was married but ‘He is rich,’ spewed out.
She stared at me, her face taking after a blank page, asking to be dressed with emotion.
‘He runs a covert charity project spanning Africa and he is looking to expand to the rest of the world.’
‘What about you, Nkirote? You trained to be a lawyer.’
Yes, Ma. And now I can’t get employed because I didn’t get into KSL and firms are looking for professionally trained secretaries and Otieno & Associates wanted sex for a job and I can’t even finish CPA and Ma we’re broke and my bankrupt shop in Kamukunji can’t help us and Ma the economy is so hard right now Ma.
‘This is what I want to do, Ma. My sole ambition in this world is to help the needy. There are so many people around Africa and the world suffering worse than us, Ma. Now that I didn’t have support for doing that, I think that it has been a blessing that I have found support in the person that I love. Hasselhoff is God-sent, Ma’
What a sermon! Ma was impressed, I know, but she couldn't just smile, yet.
‘What did you say his name was? Hassle?’ Mama ignored all that I told her and stuck with the rich part. She struggled with his name, the Ameru having little hang of it.
‘Just call him Hazel.’
‘Esol.’
‘No. Hazel.’
Ma’s potency dissipated now. Her novelty for young love requited her respite for her failed one. If she really had a say, she kept it to herself. Had she been good at love, maybe even Pa would be around. We both didn’t miss that deadbeat drunk, but we both knew that he left because of Ma.
That thought boiling in our heads, we jolted the conversation into a new plane altogether, implicitly acknowledging that neither of us was warranted to question the novice nature with which I made such a big decision in my life. If there ever was going to be an unforeseen and unmentioned storm in my future married life, I would be better equipped to turn a shade of silence on Ma and on it, for I knew I would be dealing with that storm from a sunny beach.
6 Years Later.
KikTalker’s Reel Talk
Tuesday 7th March
Girl, be as selfish as you want to be. Don’t let anyone, even your husband or mubaba put you in your place. Some of these wababas and husbands don’t even have a sense of direction when you are absent in their lives. Be the centre of it. Extract everything to your centre. You are the core of their lives, and make it known that you are.
PAUSE! I jump to get my notebook. Kiki is my favorite KikTalker. Running into one of her reels has become a thing that I am always looking forward to everyday. She enlightened my black girl lite feminist front by convincing me that all men are clueless. They have so much that needed to be managed by us, black girls.
Notes!
PLAY!
Look babe, you aren't a prize, you are the prize. THE. T.H.E. Be that prize, take when you can, crave attention as much as possible.
PAUSE! This girl has taught me so much about money management. She said that while money is stable and is flowing into my account, I needed to reduce the tangible expenditure of it. If I wanted that Gucci bag, I could as well get Hazel to buy me. But getting my cash to buy it is kind of insulting to him. He claimed to be in charge of me. So I should let him be in charge.
The rest of my money (which I got from him anyway), I needed to plough into the index fund, to investments back in Meru and to the dummy account I created in Ma's name. How do I keep this inward cash flow? By being the center of it all. Craving attention and acting like the ‘baby’ Hazel calls me.
Notes! Notes!
PLAY!
Finally, for all my girlies finding it hard to face their inner fire. Gurl, you better acknowledge that you're just that. Don't fight it. Listen, there's a ruthless Ethiopian Queen in every black girl. The better and quicker you oil and tend to that Queen, the more that Queen becomes real. You're on your path to your greatness. With Love, Kiki, your favorite KikTalker. Bye!
PAUSE! Every turn of my marriage year marks a turn of a shade in me. I have become that virtual butch girl that goes to the club and gets grinded on like crazy. I hit the gym like never and Hazel falls in love with this femme-turned-butch, in a new way everyday. White people and their kinks!
He remains skinny and attractive though. He refuses to let his dad bod bend him down. He runs with my five-year-old athlete son for over six miles everyday. He hikes mountains when he travels North to see his other family. I know he keeps us a secret, but who cares?
Girl, as long as you are the center queen, you're the most powerful piece on the board.
Notes! Notes! Notes!
PLAY! REWATCH!
Girl, be as selfish as you want to be… You're on your path to greatness…Bye!
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