Kenyan Humour

  THE CREATION THEORY This history book chooses to expand on the Adam and Eve story wherein we know that they reproduced and their children moved in all sorts of directions from the Garden of Eden to the Congo forest where the Bantus came from. They entered Kenya through a route in Western Province and the Kurias and the Kisiis decided to settle at the border and developed their own language. The Luhyas, Kikuyus, Merus and Embus proceeded eastwards and wherever they settled, they developed a new language. We must admit that they were brain-boxes seeing that we have only managed to develop Sheng which we have heavily borrowed from them anyway. They settled around Mt. Kirinyaga. The Kambas proceeded to the Eastern side of the mountain, and were happy to inform the Europeans who will come in the following pages that the mountain was called Mt. Kiinyaa . The Europeans decided it had too many vowels and reduced it to Mt. Kenya from where we also get the name of our beloved country....

  Yesterday I gave the introduction to our history.  Today we shall look at our origin. CHAPTER ONE FROM WHENCE WE CAME   The history of Kenya begins with two theories depending on how much faith one has. There is the Bible story in which God creates Adam and gives him some strong sleeping pills and forks out a rib from his side. Then he (God), crafts a woman from it and they eat the forbidden fruit, and he throws them out of his garden. They multiply outside of his garden and they start spilling into the rest of the globe. Some in the tropics get sun-scorched and black and end up in Africa and in Kenya. If you got a little more faith, you can believe that the world was a particle that exploded in the Big Bang, prompted by nothing and it became the earth and threw dinosaurs onto the northern part of Kenya which later developed into Zijanthropus and built primitive habitations around Lake Turkana. The Zinj crawled on their stomachs and then one day they were struc...

INTRODUCTION This is a sort of the history of Kenya.  They say, that if a people do not know where they are coming from they might forget and just take the same route and go back.  So we thought we should help us not to go back to most of our history. We warn you, readers, that this history has few facts and is mostly made of heresies, half-truths and untruths from the writers’ imaginations, who due to their low ability to be engrossed in things that do not matter anymore, were thrown out of the history class in high school. Parents are warned that children must not read this while they are still studying the lesson of history.  Only when they are insightful enough to tell the difference between a white elephant and a white lie should you let them read this blog. As for history teachers, you would do well to read it.  It might encourage you to write your own book in the sense of, “If people can read this kind of history, we too would be darned!” We shall of...

Fake is the trendy word in Kenya today.  This trend began with mobile phones and slowly moved on to toothpaste and now is on us human beings.  The way it started with human beings, there came a fake miracle baby Pastor. Then the faking bug moved from London where the fake Pastor lives and moved to the IDP camps where people, who had never owned a piece of land the size of a handkerchief were clamouring for land that the government was distributing to displaced persons.  Others left their farms and joined the two and a quarter acre gravy train. Before the country recovered from that fake shockwave, a fake policeman was found for the police, in the police by the police.  I had expected the PPO’s look alike dummy that probably the police hanged at the door or made sit on the PPO’s seat because, it is almost too good to be true that a real walking breathing human being can take charge of a police station and not even the police are aware that he has never ever seen th...

Why I love Current News I love the election season; politicians’ grandeur and hollow promises, and gawking citizens looking at politicians with dreamy eyes hoping that this time round the politician they vote in will deliver them from all their troubles.  Pretty much like the hyenas that rode to heaven with the promise that clouds were fatty meat.  That aside, news becomes exciting.  Usually I don’t watch news especially business news because they are not in any known language. During elections however, news metamorphose and become very entertaining movies.  No wonder someone, who am sure is dead, (those things are said by people who died a long time ago) said that truth is a stranger to fiction.  It is also on record that the most googled movies are those that are based on true life stories meaning that whether we believe in God or not, He still creates the best movies.  Political campaigns have started early and first on the agenda is IEBC.  P...

I was going to post last year's Madaraka Day's post but realized that you would catch me in my little plan. This is an undecided year - Yes and No. I thought it would be better to try to be crafty next year. I want to ape former President Moi in his gift of Prophecy and prophesy the following things concerning this Madaraka Day and probably give some suggestions that would save our future holidays. One, the Committee of Preparing Really Boring Entertainment has already swung into action and they will have choirs that seem like they have landed at the Nyayo National Stadium on UFOs from various towns in the country singing completely out of whack as if they are being controlled by alien beings from space. I suggest that on Public holidays, we can reinstate the KANU regime for only that day after which we can take over and go back to building the Nation. Two, as always, there will be a protocol issue between the Prime Minister and the Vice President. They will both be rushi...

Life has a way of disappointing us but it seems solely interested in me, most of the time. Just when I am thinking that I have covered enough ground in many aspects of it (life), it springs a new surprise. The surprise that I had the other day was of a disease called kleptomania which, if you have read the last two columns, makes me want to sue some people because they punished me for being sick. I hate to check words in the dictionary but kleptomania, as hard as I tried to figure it out of context was like trying to locate and swim in the Mississippi river in Kenya. As I have written in this column before, I don't like to use a word and later, when I check out its meaning, feel like an utter fool. This is how my dictionary defines it - 'illness that gives a strong desire to steal'. I immediately checked the calendar to ascertain that it was not April 1 or if you don't mind Fools Day. Several other dictionaries and Thesauruses claimed the same. The next action I ...

I went to town the other day and swore that I will not ride in a 14-seater matatu again. This is because even though the mat is tiny and slummed, it produces music that wouldn't be played in any of our major stadia because it would blow off both the players and the audience out of the stadium. The music started to play and it is the kind of music that you can't tell whether it goes into your body through the ears and on to the lungs and out through the heart. So I figured that my ventricles and whatever other ligaments and tissue that keep my heart in place would cave in and I moved to buses coz there I get to share the noise with four times more people and I hope I will extend my life by the same proportion. So I took a bus and I promise you except that it was rather crowded, it was quiet. I sat between two men and you will find out the reason I mention them. We rolled off town finally and just when I made sure that the two fellows I was sitting with were not likely to p...

SPARE THE ROD AND SPOIL A CHILD in our days meant that if you kept the rod in a cupboard and let a child run care free, he or she would get messed up and would not become a responsible citizen. Today it means that you actually keep the rod in the wall unit and take your kid out and spoil him which translates into spending money that can feed several Kenyan families for a year at some popular spot. It is in the 90s when whacking children became a word for the old fashioned, when parents started to behave as if they had been to school to learn parenting that they started to say that they would not use the rod on their children. They said this oblivious of the good results the cane had produced- them. Now their kids have evolved into dorm-burning goons and surprisingly they all agree that it is the Minister for Education’s fault. I didn’t know that one of his capabilities was child rearing! When I was growing up, strikes were unheard of in schools. This is precisely because actions w...

Last weekend I attended a wedding and just before I settled, a friend of mine who I will call George, because that happens to be his real name, sidled up to me and asked me to write a wedding column. Suddenly I was converted from a guest to a journalist and ended up having absolutely no fun. So, George I would like you to know that you ruined my day at the wedding and I will look for a day that you have set your mind on 'enjoy' and will pay you back with interest. That was not the first day my day at a wedding was ruined. I guess that weddings hate me because, before this wedding that George ruined, I had several go worse and it had been like eons since the last one I had attended. It happened that most of my friends were wedding and I was shuttling from one wedding to the next and finally, all my friends were coupled and amazingly they started feeling odd around me. So they started trying to hook me up and soon weddings started to sound like job interviews or TV auditions ...

Finally Mother Nature cracked up about being ignored and had us grounded. I could imagine her saying 'Just because they have mobile phones and the Internet they think they run the show? I will once again prove that they are not as independent of me as they have come to believe'. And so the Icelandic Volcano erupted and we, who lost our tails is it over a million years ago? were huddled at airports because an ash cloud had spread all over the first world. Hahaha. I don't know why but it gives me the kick to just write the first world. If I was saying it, I would have said it nice and slow. The (pause) First (pause) World. As if the Icelandic Volcano eruption was not enough, suddenly there was an eruption of experts too - Volcanists and Ash-cloudists. Just last week I heard on television that they had found another Homo- (didn't bother about the word that followed) in South Africa. With this latest discovery, me thinks it is time we stop digging dirt and think ab...

A month ago, I thought that I had penned the last word on the draft constitution. Now it won't go away and it is all I have gobbled the last week and so I am spluttering it out to you my fans. This is a debate I have come to abhor because it has no fodder for Kenyan Humour - sure check the top of this blog, it is Kenyan Humour and the constitution is not funny. It is a serious almost morbid book, draft, document, whatever. It is even more serious than the Bible. At least the Bible breaks into the Song of Solomon after every verse in the previous books (the Proverbs) has depressed you by confirming that you are not the wisecrack you have always believed yourself to be, and Ecclesiastes, in an attempt to lift your spirits, reminds you that 'Life is meaningless, a chasing after the wind'. The constitution gives you no such break even though right now our politicians are telling us that it is 'better'. The only better that I like is the one of 'Better a live ...

People we have been duped! We have the worst draft constitution in the whole wide world and we are being told by experts, to quote Prof. Yash Pal Ghai, that in the circumstances it is the best which means that Kenya is in the pit and that all hope for a good constitution is lost. I sensed this hopelessness when the Periodic Selective Conformists (PSC) who are now using the euphemism Parliamentary Select Committee on the Constitution went down to Naivasha and came out in agreement. You do know by now that when our politicians agree on anything it has to do with allowances. No wonder they could not wait to go back to Naivasha but their colleagues wanting a share of the 'cake', blocked their return to the capital city of Happy Valley and so they all agreed to troop to KIA to go introduce all sorts of amendments only to withdraw every one of them last Thursday in Parliament, after sitting in the House into the night and interrupting all TV programming. Finally they have agreed o...

I have a war that has been going on in my mouth for a fortnight now. This is because a section of my dental formula is tired of being treated like dirt. My teeth have decided that their primary duty is to chew food. They started protesting the other day after years of being soda openers and breakers of everything the hands couldn't and they now won't even chew a piece of bread soaked in tea. One of them is so furious it won't even go to sleep. It works fine during the day but at night when it senses that I am in the usual sleeping position, it starts to ache, at first not too sharp and then the pain crescendos and before I know it I can't even sleep and nothing is at peace anymore. So I tried sleeping standing the other day to fool the tooth but after about 30 minutes my feet almost buckled. This tooth has learnt that the best way to teach me a lesson I won't soon forget is to ache during the hours I am trying to catch some sleep. Once the alarm goes off in t...

There is a woman whose grey and white matter I don't mind seeing splattered on the four walls of her living room. Oh, you think that is violent? It doesn't sound as violent when an 'endocrined' - What the hell is wrong with this computer????? Why is it putting a red line under 'endocrined'. This word originated with Mrs Esther Timberlake. Surely she can't be wrong. Forgive me . I am just on the warpath and I don't think I am quitting soon. I was saying that you feel this violent when an 'endocrined' woman shows up at your doorstep shouting at the top of her lungs that you have been grabbing food out of her six months old baby's mouth because her charitable organization type of husband paid for your fare. So I went to open the door for the woman who was already set on Tigress and she grabbed me by the hair, which was just as well coz I slipped through her hands coz nowadays I wear my hair short. I obviously locked her out and she pou...

I received the news of the death of Dr. Kulundu with great shock especially because I learnt about it on Monday morning in a 'mat' because we didn't have power on Sunday evening and all the other passengers looked at me as if I had just emerged from Lake Naivasha where we understand there is scarce oxygen when I gasped at as ancient history as 9pm news of the previous night. Here is a column I wrote when Dr. Kulundu had the famed clash with US Ambassador Ranneberger. MR AMBASSADOR SIR! I want to echo our politicians for the first time, (note: it is for the first time!) and tell the US ambassador, Mr. Mike Ranne-whatever, who from this point I will refer to as Ranne because his name is difficult to spell, to put up and shut up or ship out! His behaviour is off-putting. First, he takes up the onus of giving us advice on whom we should elect to office. Just as a reminder, in case Ranne has forgotten or is unaware of Kenya ’s history, we have been electing someone to office ...

I am 'PROUD TO BE KENYAN'. Really. And it is not because this adage originated with Dr. Alfred Mutua. No, I really am proud to be Kenyan. Who wouldn't be with all the democratic millions of hectares that we are enjoying compared to the tight rope we were walking a few years ago. Today, you can stagger right out of a bar with all your pockets hanging out, knees knocking while you are trying to hold onto anything that your hands can find or walk from a church with a weird name like 'Finger of God Ministries' and announce that you want to be the next President of Kenya. If you are lucky and a journalistic ear happens to be around, you join the Raila, Martha and Bifwoli Wakoli bunch and you will be on television as a news story which goes 'Another Kenyan joins the (rat) race'. The most fascinating thing for us who have eaten a lot of salt is that the President, going about his business, will occasionally remind the guys who want his job that 'job iko na ...

We are soon going to lose Alfred Mutua's 'I AM PROUD TO BE KENYAN' and be proud to be East Africans. I have been wondering whether this is good or bad. One, we shall stop fighting over Migingo island and losing sleep over whether the fish we are eating is either Ugandan or Kenyan. Second, our dressing, our food and every other thing that makes us sooooo Kenyan, like being loud mouths and rude and stubborn over nothing will be watered down by Tanzanians. And just last year we had a parliamentary debate in Uganda where the MPs were vehemently opposing wearing of miniskirts. Now these MPs should get busy like Kenyan MPs putting their fingers in the coffers because once we go East African, they will never be elected to parliament. I was afraid that the MPs would banish the miniskirt wearers to Kenya and my reaction was 'Oh My God! They will come to muddle our already muddled fashion waters'. Later, I was relieved to realize that what Ugandans call miniskirts are ...

My creative juices have migrated to my legs which means that I did more wandering than thinking about this column. Since this is where I get my daily bread, and got to eat, and can't fail to post a column, I decided to join the abortion fray which I hoped would give me enough word count for a column. It did not disappoint. I'll start with a lady from the NGO world who thinks abortion is the next most innovative idea after Albert Einstein's light bulb. First, I think she should have been aborted. Second, she is mixing up issues. She talked of aborting children that are a result of rape as if we can't solve this rape thing. What the constitution should propose to curb rape, is to use a farm implement that has an Italian sounding name - a burdizzo (Sorry you won't find it in the dictionaries because I forget the spelling. Check a Std 8 agriculture text book) and burdizzo one or two men and the rest will think twice before hopping onto an unwilling woman even und...

This week has been dry news wise, that is for those of us who no longer consider the constitution debate newsworthy anymore. So I got down to cleaning my house and changing the newspaper covers that have been in the cupboards since the Nyayo Era and I came across some articles which I thought that even though they are ancient history, they are still worth mentioning. I am not a proponent of AGEISM, but I am going to say something that will unnerve some of you in the reading audience and as always when I say something unnerving I don't give a rat's behind. Most of our Presidents should be in classes studying the Internet and mobile telephony. I came across this story which intimated that French President Sarkozy had been robbed on the Internet because he can't keep his 'user name' and password safe. It is possible that at his age and profession he doesn't leave many brain cells devoted to memorizing his personal details. Sir, that is why we carry cards to remi...