there is an old viking tale that when a brave warrior dies in battle his soul goes to valhalla where he is entertained by a thousand virgin maidens for all eternity. i shared this with a friend and he said that the chances of finding a virgin maiden is just as possible as being hit by lightening twice under a very clear sky.
anyway, i meant to talk about myself and not to scorn the virtues of the female kind(which am sure there are plenty around)
it is midnight and i am typing randomly on my keyboard. i wonder if anyone is up late with me for there is a full moon outside complete with a fairy ring, maybe if i look close enough i could see those pixies going round and round in their enchanting dance. there is always something sinister about the moon; it is full of werewolf tales and witches swishing to and fro on their ugly brooms. someone told me that there was a full moon the day Judas Iscariot betrayed my saviour Jesus. i don't know about that but it is enough to get me scared.
but today the moon is different. i have closed my room lights so that i can type with her sheen. her light is different today as it slowly sifts through my window. today she is hiding away everything ugly-the concrete, the steel cages commonly known as sky scrapers-and all i can see are the tender buds of the purple jacaranda and the dew drifting down her leaves like soft tears. it makes me think that if i could just open the window i could drift back to my childhood.
i was born about 300 miles from Nairobi a long time ago ( but not that long time ago that you wonder what it is i'm still doing in campus). my parents brought me from hospital and my grandmother blessed me by touching my forehead with red ochre smeared with fresh milk.
mine was the nature around me, the guinea fowls that strutted around with their harsh shrill cry( we used to take their eggs and hatch them with a pullet so that they would grow up believing that they were domestic fowl) and the squirrels that stole our precious millet from the farm, i found it hard to associate thievery with those cute fellows and forgave them, never stoning them when they skittered away with a few grains of sorghum.
school was a mile or so away, and it meant leaving my village of 500 chimneys to pass through a dark , gloomy forest, ha ha that is a cliche, it was not gloomy at all but warm and full of wondrous lights dropping like liquid jade all the way down to the forest floor. there were monkeys along the way, colobus monkeys dressed like old men in white and black suits and another bluish-whitish monkey whose name in English i cannot tell. someone told me that another monkey lived in the forest too- a big ,black baboon that stole little boys like me when no one was looking. this made me very afraid and i never walked in there without company.
at school i was the only one with shoes and the kids must have spent a better amount of their time in admiring my pretty bubble-gummers than in listening to the teacher, no wonder i garnered all the As as they floundered along.
girls were never an issue. after all i was timothy, the altar boy who helped the kindly italian priest every sunday at the catholic mass. he had a mule, that italian priest, a pretty mule with a tail like a horse and with a bite scarier than a dog's. i meant to befriend him in spite of all and fed him with bread when the italian priest was not looking ( bread was precious and meant only for humans). he let me ride him once, when the children performed the nativity play, although i was a boy i insisted to play the part of the virgin mary so that i could ride the mule. and boy did i ride him like a king, sorry, queen.
when i was about to join high school a girl walked into my class and into my heart. before that all the girls had been the cheeky annoying type that hid away my story books so that i should kiss them before taking it back. but clarissa, with her long black hair cascading down her back like a waterfall was different, her hands were soft like a butter and her luscious lips begged to be kissed ( i had read my share of romance novels set back in the days of chilvary to develop such a lusty little mind). knights fought dragons to win the love of their damsels but i went back to my monkey-filled forest to bring her the sweet red lamaek berries, they grow so high up in the trees and i was so short, like a hammer more or less. to cut the long tale short i fell and broke my leg and my cries brought me a local farmer who whisked me to hospital in his tractor, my search for the lamaek fruits left unproven in the forest floor, just like my love for clarissa.
high school was a long way of, in a dusty town called eldoret. it was a national school where the bright kids went to meet with others of their kind from all over the country. it was in high school that i developed a love for literature and for language, admiring the lyrical French that we were now learning. high school was a unique experience altogether-some were rich, most were poor- some were the kids of diplomats and had grown up in Europe, most had,like me, had grown up in sequestred forested villages.
my roommate was a sleek savvy guy named Arjuna who hailed all the way from Gujarati India, he used to torture me with spooky tales and i never realized till much, much later that it was he who filched soft drinks from my locker in the dead of the night while i shivered in bed believing that a ghost was prowling about.
high school came and went and it was back to my green village while i considered the places where i could pursue a higher education. the forest was gone now, replaced by wheat-fields and concrete houses all in the name of development. the only monkey left was a sad blue one, emaciated to the bone, sitting beside the road, his hand stretched out begging for food. i couldn't hold back the tears, it was like a piece of my child hood had been stolen .
their new parents now, new parents who have sassy jobs in distant towns and smell of new money. and to prove their wealth they stuff their kids with chocolates and ice-cream, with video games and salsa lessons. the kids no longer speak the local kalenjin language, they now prefer, although seldom, swahili but most of the times they prove themselves in their english, imitating the britons and the americans they see on tv. it stabs me to see a language going to waste like that, it is like allowing a whole species to dwindle in extinction, i fear that one day kalenjin will go the way of the mammoth and the mastodons.
they now listen to 50 cent and Britney Spears, trying to behave like them, how do you behave like an artist who is worth 150 million dollars while you don't even earn a single, miserable penny a day. they should concentrate on building their lives and their countries, and not waste their tender, African lives in hopeless imitation of others.
anyway, i came to Nairobi University, where i am currently pursuing a degree in commerce, majoring in marketing, i plan to work for a while, in a reputable company and then do my masters in a foreign university, i want to understand money and why it has so much power, power that could often lead to good but often ends up destroying, and i want to come back to my country with some of it and build back the shattered lives around.
may be we will all find our way back to valhalla and be entertained by a thousand colobus monkeys all our lives, just think of that........
goodnight!
