Kenyan Humour

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...

The coming of Hillary Clinton left me with mixed feelings. First we were told that she came for a meeting which annually introduces the acronym AGOA, which is almost always followed by EPZ and then they disappear until the following year. Experts claim that they are about trade but even Hillary had to talk about TJRC because, if you are talking about trade, surely there's gotta be a T somewhere. From the way she spoke of a wide range of topics, I honestly think she had come for the wildebeest migration. But you know Americans are strict with their taxes, so she couldn't have possibly hopped on a plane and announced like our MPs announce, 'Hi, I am going for the annual gnu migration in the Maasai Mara in Kenya on ya taxes!' I could be getting ahead of myself but it might be that that was not Hillary. Rumour has it that for every congress person in the US there are 200 look alikes - most of whom are drawn from the marines. So it is very likely that our enterprising c...

MAT MAD! Are we sliding back to the matatu madness days? If you have answered this question, I suggest that you go back to pre-school and do research on rhetorical questions and write an essay on them. Then keep it for future reference. Of course we have slid back to the matatu madness days. When Hon John Michuki fished us out of the matatu madness sludge, we suddenly developed this urge to go to and from work. We became a working nation. But not anymore, courtesy of one Ali Mwakwere, who treats the public transport docket as if Michuki carried it in his shirt pocket to the Ministry of Internal Security. As well he should have. Mwakwere brought in the diplomacy docket to the Ministry of Transport. Atleast Dr. Murungaru brought in some notable changes like for example breaking the yellow line. With Mwakwere, there is absolutely no change. The City Council also seems to have signed a MoU with the route 44 operators, where they fenced the stage so that all passengers alon...

SOUND PARTY SAVING RECOMMENDATIONS IT IS OFFICIAL. THE PARTY OF NATIONAL UNITY (PNU) HAS MUTATED INTO A PERFORATED NEW UNIT and, with lots of exaggerated preamble. The worst part about it is that some of the members are acting the way gazelles pretend to be startled by cheetahs when filming documentaries in the Mara. All along the gazelles are aware that there are cheetahs and lions and wild dogs and other gazelle-eating animals in the tall grass and then when one appears they take off as if their eaters don’t try to eat them every five minutes. Or their ancestors the wildebeests (actually they are grandparents of the gazelles), which go to drink water in places where they have a terrific view of crocodiles – nostrils, ears and the whipping tail, and then go right ahead and drink from a few meters. I think that the crocodiles are just usually going about their business like basking and are not usually waiting to eat the wildebeests. They probably just react to...

BE FASHIONABLE AT OWN PERIL RECENTLY I HAVE BEEN HIT BY THE FASHIONISTA BUG. I found myself suddenly having the urge to read fashion columns and before I knew it I had started to believe some of the stuff they write. The one that really caught my eye was an interview with a local model who said and I quote, “It is a shame for any woman not to have a pair of 4" stilettos”. This came as a big surprise to me because all my life, I have assumed that stilettos were another name for leggings ( or trouser stockings ) and 4" was kind of bizarre to me. So I looked up the word in the dictionary and my first inclination was to take rat poison. I have used my ‘meaning’ for stilettos with people I would have liked to impress and all this time making a fool of myself. I have also used the word on my friends and nobody corrected me. Either I have overly diplomatic friends or they know nothing about fashion or they don’t have dictionaries. My saving grace pro...