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By Peter Muthamia
Someone recently wrote an email wanting to know why this weekly third-rate tirade is christened ‘Candid Talk’. I reserved the explanation for this weekend. It is hoped that if she reads this madness - then she would understand.
She can consult Wa Muyanza the writer of ‘Our kind of English’ column for grammatical and if need be, for literal meaning as well as literary nuance. My simple explanation will therefore be very skimpy, for as I have always ranted in this column, I have never seen the inside of a classroom.
I was expelled after being caught pinching Mary above the thigh and for placing mirrors under the girls’ skirts d uring break time. For that, I shall be excused.
The title of the tirade therefore comes from the clarity with which I rant about a place called Uswaz. This is where the poor of the poor live. We live here in comradeship with choir-singing rats, snakes, hostile landladies and landlords, shades of marauding houseflies, and zillions of fighter jet resembling mosquitoes all from rotting Kilimanjaros of garbage damps positioned behind my shack.
Uswaz is the home of drunken sods like loose-mouthed Hussein the Uswaz wag. It is also the abode of Winchinslauss Rwegoshora (PhD, MA, BA, Dip UDSM), the man said to have ‘eaten’ more books at the university than the entire Uswaz put together.
Those are not the only residents. Mzee Shirima the owner of the bar where my throat gets its reprieve whenever my sickly wallet is out of financial ICU.
This man is famous for something else. He ‘murders’ pigs and sells ‘devil’s culinary delight (pork or Kitimoto if you like).
Other residents are Mama Mwakilambo the woman taking care of throats of those blokes whose blokes whose pockets are always broke.
She serves the stuff that would land anyone in Uswaz police post but revelers partake of it anyway.
In Uswaz there happens to be other residents that include our sack-bellied MP Hon Dr Tajiri Tumbo Kubwa. For now, we are spared of his lying mouth for he is peddling promises laced with lies in other parts of Uswaz.
Enough of Uswaz! As I hinted earlier, my cohabitants are houseflies and rats. Last week, for the first time, a real-breathing snake somehow slithered its way into my house (err…I mean my two-roomed shack).
You see, in Uswaz everyone eats the other and bloody reptile in its wisdom thought that since always accommodated all tribes and sub-tribes of rats, it had to pay me a homage as well.
I won’t have minded if it were another animal besides the accursed creature. I am willing to accommodate salamanders, newt’s armadillos but not snakes. This must have been the bold type to survive unseen in Uswaz.
I had been inclining on my worn-out couch, trying to ward off the day’s tiredness when a blood curdling scream came out of our only bedroom. It was Bisho Ntongo my one and only woman from the shores of Lake Victoria. She had been scrounging under a pile of worn out shoes (in Uswaz we don’t throw away shoes for they might come I handy). Beneath the pile was a serpent that must have come out of the DSTv National Geographic nature program.
The natural instinct was to rush inside. But as you all know, half-wits like me are real cowards encased in a body of a man. I also would have screamed my head off but realized that any show of cowardice would jeopardize my position as the ‘man’ of the house.
It is only by stroke of luck that Bisho had not put her finger in its hungry mouth. That would have spelt doom for us. What would I have done had the damn thing taken one bite on her?
The first step was to pretend that everything was under control. Snakes are not exactly the kind of creatures one would befriend unless one was of the genealogy of a snake-charming tribe from India.
“Get out everyone,” Of course one cannot tell whether this tribe of snakes does fly. The logical thing to do was to evacuate the tribe living in my shack that comprises Jenny my ten-year twerp, Kokushubira the house help and Bisho Ntongo.
I won’t want my commando experiment with the snake to go wrong in the presence of kith and kin.
To cut the long story short, I actually ‘murdered’ it by smashing its head the biblical way with a mallet handle. Had I been alone, I suppose I would have evacuated the house. In other words, I managed to kill it partly out of fear and need to impress Bisho Ntongo. For a couple of weeks that followed, anything that came out of my accursed mouth had to do with the snake. I was an unsung hero!
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