Bintiafrica’s Blog

Not for a world would I trade my morning crossings through the Likoni Channel. Not for a world I swear.

 It’s something. It is said that you must either amuse people or shock them or feed them (Scott Fitzgerald) and each is done here in equal measure. From the Buibui clad bintis with veiled faces and immodest eyes, their perfumes sickeningly sweet like a sailor’s first sip of drink at a foreign pier to the good-time girls chasing the sun, light skin and the ubiquitous scent of money that lingers there; skimpily clad and leaving little to the imaginations of the enraged Sheikhs who stare angrily, and hungrily.

From the fawning coolies who fall over themselves smiling, carrying your luggage to the terminal, menacingly demanding more than was bargained for at the end to the touts who ruffle each other up for idle sport. It is how lazily life flows here at the waterfront. And what a fool I was once to even conceive that I could change the world…that I could change a world. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. C’est vrai.  There will always be a beggar there. Once it was a blind man who played the Nzumari, the same tune always…it’s stuck in my head. Now it’s a lame acrobat and a female leper with a manila paper telling her life story in impeccable English. The lame acrobat makes me laugh. These are familiar faces, and they all have names. They want a city in the sun where they can ‘dare to be lucky and live out loud’ and Mombasa is that one.

And there is a blind preacher, who plays the accordion rather decently, cites- quite impressively- numerous Bible verses. He places a tin at his feet for offering. The Muslims even, are charitable.

And the incongruous couples; foreign senior expats with painfully younger girls bathed in expensive perfume and too dark a shade of rouge. Robust young black men with octogenarian white ladies, their thinning hairs a metallic blonde. Old coastal men who wink and the younger ones who wink to each other. They all work for the president…everything has a price. You can feel the money changing hands around you. And the touts who tease young schoolgirls with wicked smiles and suggestive eyes and the girls giggle back…and cupid sighs. I harbour a merry dislike for them all and sometimes I love them childishly.

I love the sea. How it varies in hue from the promontory and where you can see little schools of fish no longer than your thumb to the ominous blue of the deep and a shimmering green in the distance at high noon. In the wee hours it smells like rotten eggs. And when it rains the sea goes mad, like a caged lion. You can feel the ferry tilting beneath your feet and the wind, its breath, blows against you and wrestles you like an invisible ghost…the zimwis.

And in this sea of humanity stand I, alone in a crowd, painfully diffident still at 21, but I’ve made such a consummate art of hiding this that my contorted face looks almost hostile to the tourist who smile encouragingly at us in the breath of those wanting to save us. Some smile back, wanting to be…

The government, in its eagerness to do more harm has built waiting areas so that while at first the crowds waiting for the crowds waiting for the ferry looked like disorganised sheep, now they look like cattle due for a dip. This amuses me. The tourists shake their head forlorn. And the gatekeeper in shades and a danger red shirt, buffed beyond the call of duty, treats us worse than cattle.

The away trips are alive with gossip…of yesterday’s conquest, of tomorrow’s promises. The return legs desolate, with people who look like cut-flowers out of water. There are women donning Kangas with scathing Swahili messages imprinted at the edges. Like a new means of conversing…a constant fad here. Kupanda mti kwataka shimo.

 And the smells…of acrid waste from burst drains battling vehemently with the lemon scent of aftershave on beautifully chiselled faces, cleanly shaven and freshly kissed. Yesterday’s sweat mingling with today’s sautéing dishes from roadside eateries, infused with every spice imaginable. You breath it all in and it becomes native to you. And the city claims you.

It is the vanity of youth to think that one can save the world. A crucial vanity for from it one realizes that it is you who need saving. Because the world is perfect, it is our perception that is skewed. Its catastrophes and hurrahs, its griefs and solidarities…its moments all are perfect. No one should dream of changing it but rather finding one’s place in it.

There are moments in every day that Satan does not catch. They are intimate moments, hidden under the gauze of the ordinary. They are silent moments, unpretentious. As true as a girl’s first kiss, and as pure as a dream like the first touch of kindness from a stranger. And I thank God that I am lucky enough to be privy to them.

Of partly red and partly golden plummage, thePhoenix that makes a journey from Arabia to Heliopolis, to the Temple of the Sun, is the only creature capable of reinventing and renewing its own being. it and us.

What are the most important things in life? To live one’s life with honour always, to teach your children to be generous, to believe,  to hug those who need hugging, to fear, to fight, to question…even the truth, mostly the truth, and then to stand for it. To hunger for things, to grasp at them with the heart. To live…boldly. (Easier listed than done!)

I can’t help but remember with nostalgia the snot-nosed years when life revolved around the playground. Life’s aim was play…and life was joy.

At nine, I was hopelessly ignorant of the world’s ways. I knew that at roughly 7.00 am people dressed and went to work. That at 4.00pm, these people were the streams of humanity on the sidewalks, clutching to their Dailies and grocery bags, spent as the day. Children had to go to school.

I had also come to the realisation that coins, not tears, were the way to my shopkeeper’s heart. Was loosely aware that everyone was chasing it. Money. But there was no grand deduction from this knowledge…no intellectual catharsis. No aim to it. Life was the way it was.

At 11, it was inflicted on us that we work hard. That life itself was hard. We nodded sombrely in complete puzzlement. We couldn’t wait to grow up. I especially, had a plan to change the world…nothing as dramatic or labour intensive as Mother Theresa, but it was air-tight.

By 14, I couldn’t claim to be a complete self-creation. I had read cheap literature, wasted years’ worth of man-hours in front of the tube, had pep-talks from my mother…I wanted to be a writer, casually world renowned and yet an enigma to this same world, banging away at  my typewriter…completely self-absorbed. I wanted to sail the high seas on a seven-foot raft. I wanted to be a rebel and a thief…something of a Robin Hood who’d read a less radicalized version of Karl Marx. I read the Bible and wanted to be a prophet, I read Shakespeare and wanted to love a man. I watched First Wives Club and reconsidered it all. I contemplated sisterhood, the military, Oriental religions, Sects, Weed…and somehow it was important that this fall within the 7.00am to 4.00 pm timeline. I would be a lawyer. It encompassed everything. The endemic dialectic of good and evil, the social intercourse with the world and that inviolable feeling of being in it all. Being a part of the mechanics of justice. (Yes, I adored Tom Hanks in Philadelphia). Besides, I wanted to see the law in colour.

For most of my sixteen years boys interested me in the same way that death interests empirical scientists: an idle question, intellectually impotent. There would be no Eureka! At the end of one’s musings. I had however gained insight into my mother’s quips about growing up. I could some Stepford grand plan to have me exchanged for prized bulls to some unimaginatively named man. No love but there would be bliss. No cows, I resolved.

By 18, I had questioned a few things: my DNA, my Christianity, the human fibre, the viability of Chang’aa in the global market…always thought there was promise there. Chang’aa is as local and as illicit as brew gets in these parts and I always found human nature had a curious penchant for both.

And now I’m old enough to know that there are no answers; that the plan is yes. Yes to climbing Mount Kenya, searching for God at the peaks. Yes to a weekend in Lodwar. Yes to a dip in the Ganges chanting the sacred Vedas. Yes to Rio and its rums…yes to the spontaneity of living. Frivolity, frugality and all. Be all that you can be!

I wish I could go back though, and tell my nine year-old self to gaze into people, eyes more, not as windows to the soul but…just to gaze. Tell my 14 year-old self to not take this self so seriously…to remember to laugh at myself and to tell  that 16 year-old girl that there are a few good men, great men, ‘they walk the back roads and do what is right everyday and nobody knows but those lucky enough to be loved by them.’

There are parts of me I fear. The parts that are cynical, the parts that refuse to love…that don’t want to care. The parts that don‘t instinctively clutch to kindness…the parts that don’t want to live. It is these parts that I must fight off. They overpower me sometimes.

I remember when I was young and decided, not to be rich, but to own a huge white house, a dazzling white car and an inexhaustible supply of clothes. I want to go back to that clarity, paradoxically though since I now see through the hollowness of money. I want to wonder again. Want to be awed by the world, conquered by it even. I want to be the happy-go-lucky chap whistling in the rain.

At 21, I realize that cows are not the enemy, that a seven-foot raft could actually have been a viable idea…too late. No dice on the Chang’aa. But there is something to be said for pipe dreams.

This grand painting attributed to Caravaggio perhaps captures adequately the mood of the first feminist movement. "Feminism: It isn't only for lesbians anymore"

My constitutional law lecturer, Mrs Pamela sporting modest heels, a witty tongue and that ubiquitous black skirt designed to flatter well toned legs magnificently,stands at the stage and tells me women rule the world. How can I not believe her when half the class is swimming in drool? Men being the visual creatures that they are, and gender disparities being what they are.

Being not unintelligent, I’ve always been loosely aware of the universal mantra of Amazondom. ‘If you’re intelligent and have a vagina, you rule the world.’ Secretly, everyone knows this to be true. From the king who wishes to place a kingdom at his Cophetua’s feet to the beggar who wants to win the chief’s daughter. There was Corazon Aquino, the plain housewife in a yellow dress who dissembled the Marcos dictatorship in a whirl of yellow ribbons with roses at her feet and Cristina Kirchner who wooed voters, literally, hair bouncing in the wind. Red lips, all woman. Each cascading lock swinging some crucial undecided voter.

Years after white women, in a fit of domestic fatigue and sexually frustrated and repressed rage (or was it the other way round?) decided to burn their bras, the fires have spread to Africa. Feminism has gone black, and in two words…it’s a jumbled mess- in all its various age brackets. The 18-24 girls with that deliciously girly,bra optional, no make-up needed mien, they can afford to be unidealistic. They want to be pampered in these their ‘best years’. You can treat them like tarts as long as you pick up the tab. For the 25-36 bracket, a radical shift in priorities has taken place. They still want to someone to pick up the tab but they must not be condescended to. At all. Middle age is a labyrinth. Dealing with mistresses and wrinkles in equal measure. Of course culture, education and lifestyle shift the dynamics greatly.

In Kenya, the feminist movement is in dire need of a pin-up girl. It must not be Martha Karua. Arguably one of the best legal minds here. Brass-balled divorcée…I love her to pieces. But she emasculates the men and alienates the women. But then again, it can’t be anyone else. The women want to be repelled. A recent initiative by gender-based groups which called for a voluntary ‘dry spell’ of sorts for the sake of institutional reforms was a nationwide flop. Fiercely intelligent women in protest argued that by deploying their genitalia as bargaining instruments, they were advancing the notions of women being, well…sex bunnies. The rest, who had no argument, just wanted to get laid.

The question needs to be asked, though. What are feminism’s footprints in post-independence Kenya. The subsistence sector of our economy is a woman industry. Yes, women are running the country and go-figure…they are the last to know.

Because Africa was colonized, women here didn’t really get a gradual understanding of their own femininity. It was already defined for them. The modern goals and demands of the African woman are heavily borrowed and imported from the West. And what confusing signals this importation brings. African Traditions dictate that we be seen, not heard. Scratch that, they said. Don’t wear bras…!? We didn’t to begin with. It became okay all of a sudden to sleep around. You weren’t loose, you were liberated. We could drink men to bed. Love them, and leave them. Fast-forward to this century and you have to wear spandex and padding just to get a line thrown at you…how I do so desire those kiss-ass days of yore!

The timeless stereotypes are still alive. A career-oriented woman with no children is secretly hiding testicles under her skirt. If you cry you’re a hysterical female, if you don’t you’re a man. Low IQ and culinary skill is still the secret to a lasting union. You mustn’t watch politics or business and if you do, you must feign complete miscomprehension. And men aren’t helping matters any…but again, they never have. They want to be the breadwinners. They want to hunt. They want someone, ideally a woman, in the kitchen. And they secretly want to pick up the tab. Anything else is a disruption of set rites and designated roles. Yet our roles are changing every day. How are we to cope?

All around the country women are waking up to the coffee-fresh realization that there’s more to life than breeding and cook shows. Martha Stewart and Oprah? We’re not that pathetic. Barefoot and pregnant has become passe. Women want to not pop babies; in heels. Six inch. What I find infinitely depressing is that once you’re liberated, you’re labelled a slut. but more’s the woe: liberated women are sluts. the current state of things is: sex sells. Yes still. Ergo the magazines with sex tips that make you blush. Men sleep around, women can sleep around better. But is this what it’s all about? The hard truth is that women don’t know what they want. Do they want to be the Ventriloquist or his dummy? Do they want the corner office or a modern kitchen with a friendly oven? Do they want to be demur or feisty? Brainy or compatible, abrasive or soft-spoken. Unfortunately for women, there is no middle ground.

Yet what is my contribution to the Good Fight? Beyond silently chanting Allon-y mes braves! to those clamouring for affirmative action. With adolescence and mood swings, I always thought I should concentrate on living to fight another day. Yet still in the remote parts, White beards are holding beer fests to discuss daughters-swaps. The inappropriate kind. And in the city there’s a Slap-on-the-wrist policy for male clients and a nothing-but-cell one for prostitutes bundled away in Black Maries. I thought it was enough to buy my own drinks and give a spirited mock protest when he offered to…refusing one for the team.

Is feminism dynamic or am I just a pretentious feminist?