We get to the field and watch the boys a little. Because we like games, we quickly pick up the rules. We start shouting tips from the side of the field. We have favourites. Scola’s brother, of course, and others. After a few weeks, someone gets tired of us stealing the ball and shouting so much and asks us if we want to play, since we know so much about it. We’re in!
He had moved in before I knew it. I had a small bedsitter. He had problems with his landlord. I liked him well enough. It wasn’t rocket science. Once again, I didn’t think it was a big deal for him to move in. I mean, this was Nairobi, right? I knew my mother wouldn’t approve, so I didn’t tell her, because I am a big girl. I send her money, after all, don’t I? That was enough.
Many years ago in the roaring 60s, two men built an unlikely friendship. Every night,…
What is the truth, and at this point, who will it help?” Her mother – Pamela – sought after the truth of Tom Mboya’s death until the day she ran out of air. Would it be fair to expect Maureen and her siblings to also pursue the same?
And even though the flames that will eat his body to ash will eventually die, I can only hope that the ones he lit in the altar of so many people’s hearts will keep burning in memory of a man that truly loved the world he left behind.
It is a text from HELB all right, but it says nothing about me getting my government student loan. All it says is that I am supposed to follow a certain link to get Barclays Scholarship. Now what the hell is this? Kwanza me these things for scholarship scholarship things, uh-uh. I did not want them. Because you know me I was a mwana wa thagana, and at the time my ushamba was telling me scholarship meant that you were being taken abroad. And we had all heard these stories of people being cheated ati wanapelekwa ulaya kusoma, kumbe they are being taken to work as servants. Halafu that was also the time when there were trending news of how Africans are being enslaved and killed in those countries of cold.
First of all, you need to leave your house thinking that the next time you’ll be passing through that door, it will be with a baby. You had done the last bit of shopping, and told the help to wash them. Hope is very important, because that is what finishes you in the end when the doctor tells you that what you created is what is killing your slowly.
And you’ll remember your mother crying about it, because they didn’t have to die, but when the presidents on TV say that people have to be killed, somehow neighbours pick up pangas and slash to death people they’ve lived next to for decades.
I am told my late grandmother held me up to the sky and spat on my forehead at birth; she said my death would never come from the hand of man, and that I was too blessed to be cursed. In the hierarchy of birth, considering all my father’s children, I was tenth in the pecking order. So I started this race of life at 10th place.
The day he arrived at the centre, there were no saxophones to play. Observing his crestfallen face, the music teacher quickly suggested that Mandla try his hand at the trumpet he had in his car. Mandla remembers thinking – a trumpet? What am I going to do with a trumpet? It only has three buttons! But these buttons were his only options, because if he didn’t take up the trumpet, he would have to wait for another six months for a saxophone to be available. Above all, the love was for music, regardless of where it was coming from. And so, he took the trumpet from the boot, wiped it down, and begun his musical journey.