Kenyan Humour

Lately the media has bonked us with images of some noisemaking hobos whose noise the media is promoting as music. I know that many Kenyan youths adore these guys and are even carrying their underwear to have them autographed by these feel-gooders. I have nothing against the so called celebrities except that my dictionary has a different definition for the word. And so every time I buy a newspaper, and God forbid a magazine, I have all these little smiley faces on the photographs. Celebrity delivers bouncing baby, celebrity’s mobile phone stolen, celebrity visits restaurant and this is news. That we can call a radio presenter a celebrity should drive celebrities (including the radio presenters themselves to massive protests). I know some of you are getting pissed off at this point because I am touching some raw nerves here. Hey, get ready for this; who cares? Just so you understand, I would like to give a definition of a celebrity. A celebrity is a person who has risen through the...

I HAVE THIS LITTLE WHITE FURRY KITTEN named Jerry that likes to think that we belong to the same species but different generations. I guess it is because she thinks that fur falls off with age. Sometimes I am also tempted to think the same except that in the kidney of my memory is an eternally etched Darwin ’s theory. The theory suggests that the closest furred relatives I could have are the little thieving monkeys at the gate of Lake Nakuru National Park whose males’ leisure time is spent painting a certain part of their anatomy blue. (Please do yourself a favour this weekend and visit our distant cousins in the name of domestic tourism. Be sure to close your car windows because these cousins cannot keep their little dirty fingers off your stuff). From the way she looks at me, I know she wouldn’t like to go beyond a certain age where she might start to resemble me. I have come to this conclusion because every minute she is awake; she spends it grooming her fur. She starts with her paw...

I have tried to ignore the on-going raging Semenya debate for a time now, but since it is not going away, I might as well throw in my siasa ya pesa nane (two cents worth) opinion. I have a three-pronged approach to the issue- a medico-layperson prong, a Kenyan prong and a female prong. I'll start with a story I read in a magazine that today's doctors have so advanced that they are now able to carry out whole human body transplants. Caution:We should be very careful about this one because they will start zapping people off the streets and presenting them to their relatives as the new human transplants! The story continued with the interview of one doctor who had carried out a human head transplant and, (the author noted) that the patient did actually live for 8 hrs with a new head or body - I am not sure who had died; the owner of the head or the body. Apart form my initial amusement and going back to the front cover of the magazine to ascertain that it was not an April fool...

The current water situation has deteriorated so much that it has caused some of us to be brain damaged. I am talking about the last time we were queueing for water the whole night and, there we were, several women who have respectable careers as we prattled on through the night and I am even ashamed to write about what we were talking about. Yes, ashamed! We were talking about two housegirls who had left their employers, who were now fetching water with us. You would have thought that we would have the presence of mind to talk about say, the 'unlawful' re-appointment of Justice Ringera or the 'Shut up' bluff by Hon. Mutula Kilonzo or the Mau forest which was the reason we were out in the cold in the first place. But No. We were seated on jerrycans all night long talking about some two girls who had decided that they were not going to carry another jerrycan of water up the damn stairs again! So woman No. 1 said: I heard them planning to leave. It was all planned on the b...

The way I ended up writing about elephants and wildlife in general was out of a computer error (which in wildlife is referred to as random sampling). I wanted to be a computer scientist. Everyone wanted to be a computer scientist in our days. In those days, computers had just been introduced in the country and they elicited a lot of feeling. We were told that they (computers) could do everything. That people would be without jobs because the computers would do all the work and only those who studied computer would have jobs. We were also told that they made everything easy and that by the turn of the millennium they would be pulling shocking stunts like telling you only what you wanted to hear (because you told them what to say in the first place) and driving the kids to school. I fell for this lie easily because I like everything made easy. I actually have a library of the ‘made easy’ series that was popular in our days. Unfortunately this computer science craze coincided w...