CANDID TALK : Wetting your throat? Just keep your trap shut

What you need to know:

  • If Uswahilinite’s mouth is not chewing something, it will certainly be blabbering something about how my favourite team Yanga got a beating from Azam FC. Our women are worse but that is a story for another boring Sunday.

Mouths in this rat and cockroach-infested Uswaz can never stay shut! Even when there is no genuine reason for anyone to keep talking, gravity does its best to keep them open at all times.

If Uswahilinite’s mouth is not chewing something, it will certainly be blabbering something about how my favourite team Yanga got a beating from Azam FC. Our women are worse but that is a story for another boring Sunday.

I now understand why Americans, even diplomats keep chewing gum! My drinking chum Winchinslauss Rwegoshora (BA, MA Dip UDSM), the man said to have ‘swallowed’ more books at the hallowed university at the Hill than the entire Uswaz put together recently quipped that if one has nothing to say in front real men (with real serious wallets), he should keep his trap shut.

My wallet that had prior to that been suffering from financial Kwashiorkor was not badly off and for that reason, Rwegoshora, Hussein the wag, Tatu the barmaid and another lassie I really don’t remember had all gathered at Mzee Shirima’s beer hole to enjoy my new found wealth. Hussein is a loud-mouthed know-it-all bloke, who assumes the chairmanship of any unofficial drinking meeting and won’t let anyone else speak at that table. He is a retired army serviceman (though he calls himself a retired officer) of dubious reputation.

He ekes out his living driving a taxi as a deiwaka (casual worker). He is conversant with Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Kampala and all the cities on the eastern side of this continent. Having been a soldier, he boasts of a high capacity to accommodate hard clear liquor like Konyagi, whiskeys, rums, scotches, gins and other devil’s inventions.

He considers the likes of and Winch some sort of sissy creeps because we prefer to irrigate our Kalahari-like throats with frothy brands in cockroach coloured bottles from hallowed Ilala Breweries – bottled stuff.

We had just been into our fifth drink when Hussein’s mouth went into full gear. This must have been provoked by Winch’s learned discourse about computer viruses that had crept into his second hand laptop junk.

“I have tried all kinds of anti-virus software. Worms and viruses seem to be having an uncanny way of getting into my computer and damaging my files and folders,” Winch said with a tinge of importance written all over his face. Around the same time, my own junk had also been infected causing me to format the entire hard disk, thus giving me something to talk about.

It is then that Hussein’s mouth went gaga. In his boring monotone, he kept shouting at the top of his voice as if to outdo the radio speakers that were behind us. “These viruses I know, have way of infecting human beings too. Keep your daughter Jenny away from the computer.

Have tried using anti-retroviral (ARVs) on your computers?” You can even try antibiotics such as penicillin,” Hussein went on. I stole a glance at Winch whose face had telltale signs of boredom. I also wanted to tell Hussein to just shut up and drink – to tell him that computer viruses are not organisms but obliterated programmes that screw up other programmes in your computer.