A digital essay by Onyango Oloo
People who have been following this particular Onyango Oloo
on these blogs, online fora and social media mailing lists over the last
fifteen, twenty years know that I have lived a very colourful , if somehow tortured
existence, which in some senses, reads like an excerpt from a Nigerian soap
opera.
Incidentally, I never ever watch Nollywood on Citizen, K24,
KTN, KBC, NTV or any of those pirated, cheap DVDs readily available in the
streets of Mombasa, Nairobi, Kisumu, Eldoret or Nakuru.
And I am not talking about my five years as a political
prisoner at Kamiti Maximum or my almost twenty-year sojourn as an exile in the
frigid climes of southern Ontario or Quebec.
I mean, if ever I want a whiff or sniff of
Patience Oghre
Imobio,
Genevieve Nnaji,
Ini Edo,
Nse Ikpe-Etim,
Linda Ejiofor,
Sylvia Oluchy,
Omoni Oboli, Belinda Effah, Dayo Amusa, Queen Nwokoye, Tonto Dike, Ufuoma Ejenobor,Adesua Etomi, Klint the Drunk, Ramsey Noah, Desmond Elliot, Van Vicker or even
Basket Mouth, all I have to is to dip into my very own romantic autobiography
which is far more ravishing and melodramatic-and moreover, pure concentrated
tropical juice.
Over the decades, I have had loving and satisfying
relationships with Meru radical socialist feminists, Kendu Bay models, Tala
hairdressers, Lamu bankers, Jamaican-born, Toronto-based, post-modernist
literary dilettantes, Dar es Salaam nutrition consultants, demonic and
insatiable Nyeri marathon lovers, Oyugis trade unionists, Kiambu All Africa taekwondo
martial arts champions, Cleveland playwrights, Murang’a deep underground political activists, Kisii
clinical officers, made in Jonglei dark charcoal Dinka beauties and
Kirinyaga senior marketing executives.
Who could ask for a more super-duper existence?
You simply cannot make this stuff up!
By the way, did I mention that this digital essay is
actually about Anne Waiguru, the former Devolution Cabinet Secretary?
The other week I was in Sagana visiting another set of
in-laws located in that of the country-like others dotted throughout Kenya as I
have alluded above. I was there for almost a week, observing the thriving
industry at the Fisheries, sampling the succulent, humungous watermelons at the
nearby Kagio market and drinking in gory and macabre tales of the blood-soaked
nights of gloom and doom where their vicious feuds between the dreaded Mungiki and
the equally vicious vigilantes who hunted down Maina Njenga’s boys and literally
executed the young men at the KAgumo in Kirinyaga at a place known ominously as
“The Hague”. Locals were nostalgic about the salad days of the late John Michuki and his
Mau Mau era style of state sponsored extrajudicial killings which all but wiped
out what they called the “Mungiki menace” bolstered by the gun toting, grenade wielding, red bereted GSU thugs.
In conversations with the villagers, I was struck by the
gushing, almost delirious love and hero worship some of them reserved for one
person and one person only-Anne Waiguru.
Somebody literally pointed out where Waiguru’s father lived
in Sagana-before they moved elsewhere in Kirinyaga.
To some of them, Anne Waiguru was a mugithi queen, an
ohangla star; a lipala diva; a chakacha malkia. The fact that she was
running for Governor endeared them more to her, with some vowing that if the thy
would get away with voting for three or four times without getting caught, they
would do it without batting an eyelid.
And their main source of admiration were all those millions
upon millions she was supposed to have “liberated” from the Devolution ministry
and NYS.
If, like some of them argued, they could propel her into the
Governor’s mansion as the next Jubilee incumbent in 2017, the goodies of
ugatuzi would finally dawn in Kirinyaga.
Who knows?
She may even end up inheriting Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta and
finally shut up all those people from Murang’a, Kiambu and Nyeri who had been
insulting Kirinyagans for eons as “those primitive Ndia Kairos who used to haul human
excrement”.
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