Here is reason for wanting to travel to hell…

Several years ago, there existed a man both un-ordinary and extraordinary called Adolf Hitler, whose thick hairy forest below the nose I wished was mine.

That moustache of sorts was first class, unlike the ones that spread unnecessarily eastwards and westwards.

The moustache was the only thing I admired about Mzee Hitler, but whose chief hobby, senseless killings, I hated. That’s why I boycotted the baptismal reception for the son of a one-time almost-best friend, Babylon Pondaufukara, because he had named him ‘Adolf’. When I attained the age when young human creatures become constitutionally entitled to grow moustaches, no tiny bits of hair were in the mood to grow enthusiastically below my nose Hitler-style.

A few hairs pretended to grow there in scattered fashion like grains of maize thrown at chicken. Slightly more sympathetic hairs grew (and thank God, still do) below the chin, but not too patriotically.If I were to pretend to walk on four feet stark-naked, a not-too-observant person walking from the opposite direction would mix me up with a miserable, old male goat. He or she would assume that I was on a sensitive mission of hunting for thorns to chew!

Less terrific goatee

I do, however, draw remote comfort from the fact that, when I was a trainee reporter in the mid-70s, I was nick-named Cosmas Kamanga, after a senior journalist who owned a marvellous goatee.

For that reason, he had been nick-named Uncle Ho, after the Vietnamese political hero, Ho Chi Minh, who was rumoured to have been the original owner of what in Kiswahili is poetically known as ‘mzuzu’.

For three days in a row recently, I slept for an average of only four hours per night, because of reports I heard, of a beautiful woman who had reportedly remarked that, if I had had a Hitler-like moustache, she wouldn’t have minded befriending me.

You can now appreciate why I almost committed suicide by jumping into a large cooking pot in the kitchen section of Mwisho wa Dunia Bar, and travelling to hell, after beholding a most disturbing scene:

The woman was happily enjoying beer in the company of a man who was starved of a Hitler-style moustache, a less grand one like Ho Chi Minh’s; and a Samora Machel bushy beard.But worse, his goatee was by more than half less terrific than mine !