By Pascal Mwandambo
I was thinking deeply about the prospects of reopening schools soon and the arrangements that should be done, when the seemingly distraught chap walked straight to my table and planted himself next to me.
My apparent indifference did not seem to move him as he kept casting cursory glances at my bottle of beer without any indication that he intended to buy himself one.
I looked at the fellow with a mixture of disdain and pity and asked Yondo Sister to give him a beer.
I could see the warm glow on his face as he pursed his lips as appearing like he wanted to say something.
Getting a drink from a scribe who lives from hand to mouth is like milking blood out of a stone, but on a positive note, a generous writer might end up getting some good lead on a story from the likes of this man.
The beer came and I could see some other chaps near us turn green with envy.
“The world is ending. I swear by God these are end times,” the chap prophesied with a doomsday tone, without elaborating how.
He took a sip of the beer, wiped the foam from the corners of his mouth and went on, “such people should be castrated, or thrown to the bottom of the sea”.
At that juncture I was forced to disturb this boring monologue. You see, one personal attribute of yours truly is listening keenly first and asking questions later.
“You will save me a lot of pain of doing guess work on whoever and whatever you are talking about”, I said to the chap who apparently knows I am a writer.
He took a deep sigh and said ruefully: “I traveled Two days ago to see the cousin to my wife who is ailing at the border town and got very disturbing news. His neighbour had been caught…sigh…sigh… sleeping with a goat…sigh.”
Despite the fact that I had now gotten an idea on what had driven the chap to prophesy that the end of the world was nigh, I deliberately decided to jog his mind by asking a rather foolish question.
“A man sleeps with a goat? Does that mean the fellow was so poor not to afford even some small space to let the poor animals rest in peace?”
The chap looked at me as though to suggest that I was among the most clueless scribes on earth, sighed again and said almost shedding tears, “No, bwana mwandishi, the fellow turned a goat into his wife”.
With such events unfolding and the beer beginning to work on the poor fellows emotions, I felt like buying the chap another cold Tusker just to console him because he was so concerned and touched by the unfortunate incident, that you could think the goat that had been turned into a wife was his very own.
But this is a sad reality that we keep on getting reports about, day in day out.
From chicken to donkeys, mentally sick women to grizzled grandmothers, this matter is grave.
I am not a very superstitious fellow, but could these strange happenings be the reason why we hardly get any rains in Mavumbi town?
Well as the name suggests, this dusty town which might as well be the headquarters of anopheles mosquitoes in the country, only gets rains once in a blue moon.
I sipped my beer and wondered how my ancestors were feeling in their graves.
You see in my community, in those years gone by, fellows who committed such abomination were either hurled down the rocky cliffs or buried alive after digging their own graves.
I felt more pity for the chap as he rose and melted into the night after realizing that his donor (read yours sincerely) was no longer loosening his purse strings.
As the music began to blare to deafening decibels, I could only recall the words of wisdom by one of Kenya’s celebrated playwrights… “When the madness of an entire nation disturbs a solitary mind, it’s not enough to say that man is mad”.
