usiogope

there are many things that one is privileged to fear in this life ... and i have had my share ... though in the sea of fear ... am yet to add a drop of the craven ... but now to things that have really given me the creeps in my young life

• the Christmas Tree... don't get me wrong ... have nothing against that ice-cream shaped little cute tree with a misplaced star on top ... its just that at my paros place there is this huge tree ... i think it is a podo ... and it is really scary ... especially when i was much shorter than i am right now ... it is enormous and so tightly-meshed with dark green leaf and if you ever perch beneath it for shadow ... you will be welcomed with an eerie din ... and a constant pecking sound that my sister claims must be a python ... my mum wanted to 'trim' (her idea of the word is to lop the tree into a measly half) another time ... but i damnedestly clung to the fact that mr and mrs.stork had nested there recently and were expecting to have babies and it would be very inhuman to cut it down ... so at last the xmas tree was saved thanks to me ... keep green mr. christmas tree!
• coffins ... i have always been disgusted by the shape, size , features, boola boola ... i have this loonish superstition that if a coffin is the last thing i see before i go to bed, something very sinister will happen ... though i have never had the courage to discover what the sinister thing is ... but i always ensure that i gaze at something more enlightening before i catch my share of forty winks
• turning twenty ... am now 21 but that does not mean am in a constant state of panic ... though it took a while to adjust to the fact that i was no longer a teen when i hit 2 decades ... i just realized that age was just a number and i could keep on doing the things i love doing till my limbs give away with age and tear
• lizards ... i really hate those reptilians ... once saw one in highschool that had two tails ... like at the same time ... shock of my system ... it probably saw that i was afraid of it because it literally jumped and am not kidding, and landed on my shoulder ... hate to remember how i got it off ... but somehow i believe that reptiles all over the world have started a campaign to scare me in similar fashion because the other day i sat down on a comfy chair only to find out that i had squashed a pair of mating frog ... but the worst was when i was young and was walking back home after walking miles into the wilderness to search for some wild fruits courtesy of a friend who told me how sweet they are ... as i walk i felt something cold against my leg ... but i dismissed it to be the wind ... then i enter the living room and my mum screams ... a full-sized(1.5M) snake had wrapped itself round my leg for warmth!
• teachers ... this is a fear that i have been able to outgrow ... but i was always ready to jump at my skin when i met my teachers on the road ... one day in my primo days ... i was carrying a particularly heavy piece of luggage with my sisters ... and were glad about the progress we had made with our small feet ... then all these teachers appear ahead of us coming from some TSC meeting ... we skittered back home with luggage ... hid in a corner to let them pass without noticing us ... only when the coast was clear did we realize what a task it had been to trudge uphill with the load.
• tintin ... he was a large, overfriendly dog that we kept ... though he kept marauders and waylayers at bay with his steel-shod fangs and eerie bark, he also succesfully locked me within when he was out ... he used to jump at me till i fell down then like a lion protecting its kill would proceed to lick me all over ... gross! nways RIP tintin
• mamsap ... there was this old lady who lived alone in a little hilltop ... rumors said she spent the night as a black cat ... and once i walk up at midnight and cast a glance outside only to find a black cat sitting on the window sill ... its form immensely 'creepefied' by the moonshine ... i nearly got a heart attack ... which is not a good thing at such an early age ... nways mamsap was said to be a witch who cut up the ears of kids who misbehaved and cooked it for her dinner so that she could turn into a black cat ... the thought was enough to keep me squeaky clean...
• the nandi bear fur coat ... my mum had a purple fake fur coat ... quite beautiful it was when i look back at it in retrospect ... but she embellished her purchase by saying that her brother had knitted it for her from the very coat he had skinned of from a nandi bear (read my previous article) which she said her brother had bravely killed ... any mention of the nandi bear always increased my heart palpitations ... which goes without saying that i could never be left in a room where that nandi bear fur coat was hanging.
• mr. J.E.B Williams ... my highschool headmaster ... no one ever got to know what names his first three initials stood for ... he was a tall man, white, very british and with dry wit ... when i think of him i remember a man with an overwhelming personality ... who never minded walking to a meeting with gumboots direct from the muddy school farm much to the shame/disgust of the BOD who must have spent the entire morning trying out the appropriate attire... he was always keen to catch anyone committing a goofy mistake (which could have been anything like laughing out louder than the rest of the crowd when he made a joke) ... down to the farm with a heavy jembe for you it would be ... or probably you would be told to go and feed and wash the pigs ... now that would not have been very necessarily bad were it not for the fact that those hogs were enormous, canniballistic, stinky malformations of a genetic engineering experiment with pigs that had backfired
• KCSE ... i always waited with trepidation for this big day which was going to culminate everything we had done in high school ... i was not like in the top ten or anything ... but i always wished to pass ... when i saw that i had gotten an A-(minus) grade i was on top of the moon
• kapenguria 59 ... it was the dreary room i got when i was in second-year ... am in lower kabete campus UON where am taking a BCOMM degree and we kind of shift rooms every year ... all my friends got these nice, freshly-painted rooms and laughed with mocking glee when they came to visit me in my dreary hovel ... it looked so gloomy when i first stepped in ... some shadows never lifting in spite of all the electric bulbs you could put on ... but thanks to a friend who is a wiz in interior design ... i was able to refurbish the room with cheap stuff i got from secret spots in town ... and when i was going to third-year ... it was like the most marvelous room in kapenguria ( a second-year hall in lower kabete)
• now for something i would love to fear ... if you have happened to read through my list, please be kind enough to tell me some of your worst fears in life ... yeah, i love that hair-raising, pulsating feel i get when reading through such nasty renditions

the nandi bear (chebakerit)

my ancestors have always talked with dread about this creature ... and when they talked about it ... especially my mum, and my aunt, and my grandma ... and even my great-grandma whom i had the chance to meet with very briefly ... they all had their encounters
one time in the distant past when the plains of uasin gishu were wild ... they spoke of a creature that came to village ... especially when men were away on a battle ... or wherever men went when they left women alone ... they remember well the devilish cry ... they sound of a tortured demon ... they remember the dark moonless night ... they remember the goat lying headless on the field ... they remember the sinister smell ... so strong that it could make one collapse ... they remember wearing pots on their heads when they wanted to go outside to take a leak outside ... for the creature so much desired to lop your head off that it keshad on your rooftop

my mother was among the last to spy upon it ... she believes the creature is now extinct ... she tells me that it loved living amongst bamboo trees... and that one leg was shorter than the other ... so that it limped when it walked ... my priest back in iten spoke about it too ... and you could have heard a pin drop as the horror of his tale stupefied his congregation ... and yes, i believe that the nandi bear once terrorised peeps ... call me a romantic but that is what explorers were dismissed as when they went to africa and spoke about gorillas .... a mere hundred years ago giant pandas were also dismissed as a chinese myth

and all in all, would it not be nice to know that there was or is a loneful creature out there that scientific description has not appreciated ... many cryptozoologists have tried to adequately describe it ... the kalenjins, luos and bagandas who lived alongside it say it looks like a giant baboon ... early colonialists in uasin gishu say it is more of a bear ... some say it is an undiscovered species of hyena ... though it has been discovered that africans, who have never seen a bear, will describe it as a giant baboon... so may be the chebakerit is truly a bear, an african bear ... a bear that could climb trees and spring away very fast with your head in its mouth ... your beheaded corpse waiting to be discovered by your terrified village folk...

there are many tales of encounters that my family shared with me ... tales calculated to make you jump right out of your skin ... i will share them with you one time ... as for now ... why don't you pay a visit to http://www.cryptozoology.com

times are wasting

went to my sister's in Naks the last weekend ... and like always it felt thrilling to travel in a car full of strange peeps ... it sort of felt like we were this big wierd family and i was this little kid hunched up like a camel on a small corner while the rest were having fun ... actually i suffered a lot because i was sitting next to this lady who gorged up piles and piles of food from her kiondo mpaka i was like men ... nways, the only sad thing is that the driver ran over a hapless baby baboon... i pity those baboons in Naivasha ... someone should relocate them to some safe place

Nakuru was cool as always ... we had so much fun there last december with guys from campo ... we rented a kismall place and literally painted the town red ... but last weekend it was all about seeing my lovely sister again ... let us just call her Susan ... it was lovely seeing her house again ... she is a brainiac when it comes to interior design and the whole place had been transformed into yellows and browns ... from the plates to the spoons, the sofas and the curtains, and all those fluffy fluffy stuffs with strange names were all in those sweet colours ... the place felt kinda hallowed

Yes, she fixed me tea, served it on a yellow cup and stirred the sugar with a brown spoon ... and with those mysterious scents that always linger in a lady's apartment, our conversations were lent an air of enchantment ... she told me about mama and papa back at home ... about how mama is to make a pilgrimage to Israel and how all these hizballah-lebanon thing might affect it ... about workers at the farm ... and my favourite Dan, who has always fascinated me with endless tales about night-runners ... incidentally Dan was doing more than just tell me tales because he is now the proud father of a bouncing baby boy dutifully delivered by a local girl whom I never realized had fallen for Dan's sweet charms

Then another elder sister arrived ... the youngest girl in the family and the one whom i immediately follow ... let us call her Roxa shall we ... Roxa the true raconteur and the life-of-the-party kind of girl further embellished our talk with such hilarious anecdotes that sent our bellies bursting with laughter ... but soon we somehow drifted too much more sober talks ... it seems somehow that in shaggz peeps are starting to lead such messy lives ... a neighbour burnt up her husband with petrol and is now langushing in Lang'ata ... another finally let out that her children were not fathered by her husband, was beaten up by the enraged spouse and is now lying comatose in hospital ... another, a decent man actually, living a modest life and all, cut up the wife with a panga and drove with the corpse to chebloch, a gorge in the iten-kabarnet road to feed the remains to crocodiles ... and this are just the nitty-gritties ... i was like shuck-a-ducky and jizz-the-whizz, wondering why all this was happening..

Iten has always borne a romantic enchatment about it ... mostly because of the scenic valley and the way thick fog would rise from the valley during the rainy season and pour like heavy cream over the land ... may be it only takes a child to see these things and since i spent my entire childhood there, i noticed them all ... we have a farm and a kitchen garden, and an orchard where my mum strove hard to plant all the kinds of fruit available in Kenya and the world ... my sister whose in Swaziland brought her some strange-looking seeds recently and we are waiting with bated breath to see what kind of plant would sprout from them ... nways, about the orchard ... yes... i loved staying there when i was a young lamb, eating unripe apple fruits because they would never mature with all the birds that came to eat them up anytime they produced any form of sweetness ... and when the fog came i would imagine i was in a strange land ... or i had been whisked away to the ice ages and the fog was a snow blizzard hiding away mammoths and mastodons and sabre-toothed tigers ... may be because my folks worked hard to ensure me a comfortable living made me blind to the fact that there was a much more uglier side to Iten ... now that I am old enough i am beginning to see...

but still when i go back there ... and see old gogos shuffling about with grass to thatch there roofs ... and see farmers move about with puttering old tractors ... and see them greet me so warmly in kikale and with so much admiration because am like from kampo and all ... the scent of beauty flows back to my nose

but i could not reminisce for long ... for another sister walked in ... let us call her Shifrah ... Roxa follows Shifrah in the order of birth sequence ... and the two have been arguing and fighting for longer than i care to remember ... i hear it stemmed from the day mama brought me home from hospital... freshly born somewhere around the year 1985 ...and that i was so pretty with cheeks begging to be gobbled and the two sisters would fight over who was to look after me ... the altercation matured over the years into even more bizarre forms ... they would fight when one left a scarf on the other's bed and other wierd feminine battles and the whole house would be full of noise, the two female matadors not minding that there were other folks in the house who needed some peace and queit....

so a pleasant surprise it was to see them hugging and admiring the other one's hairstyle ... and for the rest of the evening ... to hear them talk and chat like bosom buddies brought so much joy to my heart ... every war in the world can end ... it is all a matter of being patient