'ILOVI'

Uhuru Park- Nairobi

                                              

Ask your Kamba friend to help you pronounce this term. (Are you done?, Do you now know how to pronounce 'Ilovi' well? Then you are ready for the story.

Ilovi is the Kamba version of the word Nairobi. The city in the sun. The city whose name originated from a Maasai phrase 'Enkare Nairobi'- 'cool water'. Our brothers whose love for chicken can only be marched with the need to breath call it- Nalopi while the fervent ambassadors of miraa call it- Narombi. These two versions do not stray from the popular and arguably correct pronunciation. But what we Kao's have done to that word is just murder and the result is beyond any kind of redemption.

Ilovi is the place where serious hustle happens; it is where people are perpetually busy as they chase the proverbial good life. Where i come from, students who fail their national examinations and those who cannot afford further education, soon after the deities reveal their fate, they pack up and leave for the city to make a life for themselves.

Most of them are housed by a relative until they learn the ropes around city life, needless to say, being housed by a relative comes with its own challenges. Soon they are employed by a mhindi in industrial area, and move out to a single room in Pipeline and begin to grind the city life the best way a kao knows how.

I was not born in Nairobi. And i know the same goes for some of you. So we all have our 'first time in Nairobi' story.

I was born some one hundred and sixty Kilometers from Nairobi. But was raised in the county that does its things with flair (youknow it!), at least for the five years of my life. I attended a school that was a thirty-minute walk from home. When we didn't want to attend school, my sister and i would hide in a furrow, munching our food as we watch the hours pass by while waiting to join other kids leaving school for home, as though we had attended school. Do not think this happened several times, we tried it once and we failed horribly.

We were five years old then, i didn't want to attend school, so i shared my lazy thoughts with my twin sister who suggested we hide in furrow. As we sat their chuckling excited that we missed school, a shadow of someone standing on the edge of the furrow was cast in the furrow. It was mother dear!! Our excitement immediately fizzled out and fear of the imminent beating we would face overtook us. We were shit scared, we wished that somehow we would be small enough to be invisible, but it was not going to happen. (Till to date i have never figured out how she found us, she must have smelt us or read my mind earlier that morning! Because we enjoyed ourselves with the stealth of a cat, i made sure of that).

"What are you doing here?", she asked in consternation.

I did what i always do when am shit scared- my face turned red, i became dumb and my brain shut down. Then my sister did what she always does best- explained her way out the mess, well at least that day she was gracious enough to weave me in her lie! I remember it was a shady lie that was a mix up of my stomach ache and her innate mother Theresa need to help me out. Of course mother dear saw crisply through her weak lie.

She pulled us out and silently walked us home. My friend, hell has no fury like a woman who has paid school fee for her children to learn only to find them wasting time in a furrow!- once we got home we received a beating enough to last forever made worse by the laughter of our neigbour's nosy kids.

With such a cheeky behaviour, no wonder i didn't produce much in school. What do you expect anyway when for our teachers, teaching was a side hustle? They had to deliver their milk to the local dairy, then hastily come to class and leave one hour later to till their land.

My dismal performance that included copying an entire exam prompted my parents to transfer us to a city school. Just like many other parents, they wanted to give us the best shot at life (I wonder whether today they look back and say it was worth the hustle; i hope they do).

We were excited, our peers envied us. Moving to the city then was considered cool and prestigious. We would learn swahili faster than our peers who would continue learning a, b, c...in kikamba. After the new year celebrations in 1996, we were early on the road (it was rugged and dusty then, and it still is today; my flair county is not so flair after all!) We had packed muthokoi, beans, and a host of other foods. We had to be ready for city life! No jokes. One would think that we were in a migration of sorts. We boarded a bus to Matuu, our final jump off point to the city.

The town was crowded by passengers as many families were living the rural home after the holidays going back to their life in the city. This was to be our first test on our preparedness to city life. Due to a mammoth of passengers who were travelling that day, fare charges were hiked. We were a little low on cash so we had to wait for a cheaper vehicle. But we were not the only ones! Again there were thousands of other families who applied the same strategy as us. The trick was simple- when a vehicle came and the conductor shouted 150/= Nairobi, beat everyone, get into the car and preserve seats for the rest. Simple right? Yet not so simple when you are carrying copious luggage. And most importantly when you have no experience in struggling for something as mundane as boarding a vehicle.

Vehicle one came, we missed it. None of us managed to get in. Vehicle number two came you'd think now that we had a little experience we would get in, well only my brother managed to get in and wasn't able to save us all seats, when i saw him disembark the vehicle he was so furious at us you would think he was literally on fire inside. Two hours had passed and our fear of arriving in the city at dusk begun to look like an imminent reality. So we had to resrategize. We gathered around my brother, who was the master planner and hunched listen to him keenly.

"Use your elbow to prevent someone from moving forward", he explained.

"Do not waste time feeling sorry or apologizing, because you surely won't make it", he continued.

I rubbed my elbow as if to sharpen it, in preparation for the arduous task that lay ahead of me. Believe it or not the strategy worked, any way it had to. It was either that or going back home and none of us would have that. The idea of our neighbors' grinning at us because of our aborted journey gave us motivation to elbow most passengers out of the way (You should have seen tiny me, tough as a nail pricking people as i charged to my destiny!)

The journey that marked a significant change in our lives lasted for two hours. Throughout the journey i envisioned what life in the city would be like, they were all great thoughts. And they never prepared me for my first encounter with a robber in the city.

When we arrived, the sun had just began to set, darkness was closing in and the city was crowded. And that is when a robber stroke. We hustled through the crowd to catch bus thirty three #33 which would take us to Embakasi our new home. Just before we boarded the bus, mother dear ran a quick check through her bag to confirm she had our fare.

To our profound astonishment there was nothing! The place of a few thousand shillings was taken by a disgusting 'kitambaa' which looked like it was used to wipe all the shit in Nairobi (and you know there is lots of that!) The few seconds that followed our discovery were quiet, lonely, cold and dark (i could go on with the adjectives- because it was just horrible).

This is when having relatives in Nairobi comes in handy...the God of Abraham had sent one who helped us out of our quandary. Am telling you till today, the story of how we lost that money never makes sense: we have gone through it in double digit times and we have also laughed about it. The only plausible explanation is that- the robbers smelt our new ukambani blood and knew we were new in the city and thanked the deities for a belated Christmas gift! If it is not that then- Nairobi robbers can smell money or they are just so freaking experienced!

While in the city, we had so many firsts- we visited the monumental Uhuru Park and had our first Television experience which came a few months after our arrival.

On these now #tbt moments, we built more memories and experiences and we still continue to do so.

A few weeks ago, I hunched on my bed while reading Adolf Hitler by James Bunting. (Reading books about Hitler takes you to dark and horrific places that scare you and annoy you. ) So I was alarmed when i heard screams and noises outside my window. And there was drama! A robber had snatched a young lady's handbag and was now facing the hot wrath of the mob.

For the first few seconds i experienced a rush of excitement, because i was finally going to witness mob justice. Well! not that it was an item on my bucket list but because i would not have to get a second or even third hand story!

As the people kicked and threw stones at the young man, they asked him a series of questions

"Unatoka wapi"?

"Soweto", he replied

"Hapana! Kwenu ni wapi?" They retorted as they hit him harder

"Makueni" he replied

That moment got me thinking... I have called Nairobi home for twenty plus years now. I have travelled to Nakuru and Kisumu to study and when school closed i would say "am going home- to Nairobi": So when people ask me- where am from what should i say?

Do i say Machakos or Matuu or Nairobi?  Honestly i use all of them, depending on the forum? And, who are the "Nairobians?" What qualifies one to be called a "Nairobian?" Is Nairobi really anyone's home? I have been here for two decades, even though every now and then i have to visit my rural home (you see that?), i would still call me an "Ilovian" (hahaha...)

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