THIS IS KENYAAAAAAA!!!(THINK 300)

Some idiot has been leaving his grenades everywhere around the nation. If that’s you then we need to have a sit down. A talk. No come closer. Ok drop the grenade. On second thought just hold it tight.Drop the Ak47 though. And the angry rat. I’ve seen what rodents can do. This is for your ears only. First, I won’t assume that it’s Al Shabaab. Why, you may ask? Well I just don’t wanna have them take the credit for someone else’s hard work without giving them a chance to prove themselves. I mean, it might be some drunk cop who just keeps leaving his work tools everywhere.

Though if it is Al Shabaab, here is the skinny. You don’t freak us out. We don’t scare easy as a nation. Either we are not smart enough to know when we should be afraid or we are more excited by the thought of showing up on the evening news as an eye witness. (Doesn’t matter if we heard the story from a friend of a friend of a brother of a sister’s cousin). We will be at each other’s necks over petty differences like who is stealing more money from our coffers but insult our nationality and you have a war on your hands.

GAY? ME? OF COURSE!

So I’m sitting in a barber shop the other day and after a thorough verbal thrashing of Manchester United,(yeah we get it. WE GOT OUR BUTTS KICKED!) the topic changed to something quite unexpected. The radio had a news item about some Zimbabwe’s response to a growing homosexual population in its midst. The topic was taken up by both the patrons and the barbers and within seconds, the consensus was that they should be hung.

I wouldn’t have necessarily been surprised had it been for a conversation I’d had earlier in the week. Apparently my own sexuality has been put into question and on some level I find this a bit laughable. But then the academic in me found that there was more to investigate in this matter.

I am from a generation that grew up in the information age. Most of my friends were brought up by a television and have grown into adults with the internet at their fingertips. I would like to think we are a learned lot. At least, a bit better off than our parents’ generation where the very idea of homosexuality was deemed a disease.

So the question was posed to me. Are you gay? It doesn’t necessarily surprise me. I am not the world’s manliest guy. It’s both nature and nurture. First puberty just messes around with me. Depending on the day, I wake up with a voice close to a shreaking little girl or a man talking in a flashback. I’m told I also have a gay build which is something I can’t quite understand.

NI KUNOMA:ECONOMIC BLUES

I had dinner at this swanky restaurant the other day. Swanky here denotes that there were tables and chairs as opposed to a shady spot under a tree. So anyway, after a hearty meal I had to settle my bill on the way out and then things got a bit hairy. While things have been getting thick economically, others have been getting thinner. I found this out the hard way when I had to pay for four chapatis. To save money, they had made the darn things half as thin for the same price. But the girl next to me just thought I was a hog.

The shilling is on a free fall. Like a fat kid diving for the last bit of cake or like Mike Sonko's IQ dropping whenever there is a camera crew around. Big up to Treasury and the Central Bank for doing stuff to help stall the drop. Our sources inside these places tell us that technocrats have been burning the midnight oil to turn the tide and thus some new economic policies have been announced to the public. These include crossing fingers, blaming those other guys and my personal favourite, NOT doing anything because it will sort itself out.

We are starting to feel the pinch though and with that comes the conspiracy theories. Is it aliens? Are guys filling up their war chests for the next elections? Is it blatant stupidity by the government? Ours is the worst performing currency. IN THE WORLD! Mind you, it's not the most worthless. Just the worst performing. That's after countries like Iran, North Korea and even Uganda despite the fact that they are still in 1957 as evidenced by UBC's coverage of last week's match. Yeah the Uganda bit hurts. It doesn't hurt quite as much when you are being beaten by military dictatorships.

ADULTS ONLY: THE EPIDEMIC

Puberty hit me early and hard. Very hard. That growth spurt hit me when some kids were still losing their milk teeth and baby fat. It was that early bloomer who was the object of snickers during Home Science lessons when the teacher would whip out a list of ‘symptoms’ of adolescence. I had contracted it earlier than most of my contemporaries. The sudden growth spurt had left me towering over my classmates and my face became a veritable farm, sprouting little pimples on every oily inch. It was torture. Absolute torture.

That said, puberty had a summer romance with me. It was intense and crazy but ultimately it was incomplete. It was a fling. It’s like puberty woke up one day and just decided I wasn’t good enough for her anymore. Just woke up, packed her bags and…(Ok I think you get the relationship metaphors). Point is everyone seemed to catch up and left me behind still looking like a half-formed adult. I swear I have the years to prove it but the body (and at times, the brains) of a child. I am continuously reminded by an evil, evil friend that I need to stop shopping in the 8-15 section in shops because I apparently look like a pedophile. It’s not my fault that it’s the only place I can find fitting clothes. (Disclaimer: My shoes are actually adult sized. I would take pics and post those but that would just seem petty)

CONFUSED KENYAN

Juxtaposition. My high school teacher had a knack for throwing big words around. Ahhh Mr. Kamoni…those literature lessons were just so we could see how garrulous and loquacious you could be while using words resplendent in superfluous grammatical theatrics. See what I mean? It was all hogwash but my vocabulary was vastly improved just so I could keep up with the exploits of one Chief Nanga. But I digress (as he so often did). Juxtaposition was one of the words he would pull from his repository and it is the one that jumped into my mind this past weekend.

A few weeks ago I had an early session at work and after that, I found myself seated in a bus eager to get home and start my weekend. The bus hadn’t left Kibera when it had to slow down to pick up more passengers. Here I was confronted with a few things. Firstly, on the right were flags draped for sale in preparation for the Kenya-Guinea Bissau match that afternoon (OLIECH!!!). On the radio, they were extolling the virtues of the Kenyan athletes in South Korea bagging medals on behalf of the Kenyan population. The paper on my lap informed me how the ICC hearings were going. Someone had apparently mentioned something to the effect that there are no IDP’s in Kenya and that people who live in those camps do so of their own volition.(I might need correction on that since no one could say something that stupid)

SOCIAL MEDIA DEMOCRACY

We are a product of our history. As Kenyans though, we are plagued by bouts of selective amnesia that make it impossible to trace historical roots. The vast majority of Kenyans are afflicted by the ability to settle for mediocrity. The middle class is content to sit back and try not to rock the boat while the rich make the rules and the poor suffer under their brutality. We live average lives, in average neighbourhoods and drive average cars so we can sit at the end of the day and comment about what is happening around us without thought of doing something about it.

Think about it. On one end of all those demonstrations are chauffeur driven gits in sound proof cars. On the other are guys who will have to trek to either Kibera or Mathare. In the middle? Tear gas, police batons and rubber bullets. This sense of amnesia is what gives us the same class of ‘representatives’ after every election cycle. We are a reactive rather than proactive country hence we lack a national ideology.

Such is the case that after people our age started fighting for democracy in North Africa, whispers about the same thing started in Kenya. One such initiative was KenyaFeb 28th. For those of you who have been living under a rock, the plan was that on Monday the 28th of February, from all corners of the country, Kenya was going to explode into patriotic song at 1pm with a rendition of the national anthem. While I applaud the organizers for this noble and novel idea, I have some issues with the purpose and effectiveness. Why? I’ll explain. But first, some facts.