Change

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How things have changed since 1987. I suspect 1987 probably looks at 2017 and covers its mouth in fascination, envy or even horror. In the last writing masterclass I invited Oyunga and during his talk he used the word “monzo”, a slang word from the hey days that meant cigarettes, and that sent me hurtling back to the very depths of 1987 – pre-internet, pre-selfies, pre-cheers-baba, pre-democracy, pre-happy-hour, pre-single-malts, pre-IG, pre-anything as we know it now. Shit has changed so much that nobody says monzo anymore. We have all changed. Men have changed. Women have changed. Women have changed men. Men have been forced to change because women have changed. Nothing remains the same.

 

I remember the time I was having a drink at J’s Fresh Bar on Muthangari Drive and flirting with the waitress. I’m saddened that I only realised so late in my life that the trick to great service is to make the waitress laugh. Keep her laughing and she will get you a complimentary guacamole. If she laughs harder she might even consider garroting the chef for you. If you ask nicely.

 

Sometimes I wish I could nick those waitress’s notebooks and see what they write therein. I suspect those notebooks are full of drawings of stick-men and smileys. I also suspect they write bad things about us. Table 4: Garlic bread and a double cappuccino: Guy with  boat shoes (Who wears that in 2017). Roast eggplant and herbal camomile tea: Lady with yellow scarf.  Table 2: Roast Beef sandwich: Psychotic man who can’t stop staring at my chest. Caesar salad and strawberry smoothie: Lady who looks like Oprah before the money. Lamb and sparkling water: Gay guy in a yellow jacket. Chicken tikka skewers and cold still water: Hot guy with broken tooth, yum yum.

 

Anyway, if you have been to J’s you know that all the staff wear suspenders and fedora hats perched on their crowns. Very avant-garde. The cool ones cock those hats to the side to give the whole experience some spice. Sometime back I told one of their waitresses, “You look so good. Back in the 80s you would not find a waitress in a bar wearing a hat, much less suspenders.” She looked at me like you would look at an ancient hipbone at an archeological museum. She must have been born in 1998, around about the time I was pursuing higher education. So the 80s must have felt to her the way the 1960s felt for us at that time; a very distant time when people wore strange trousers and referred to dancing as “boogie.” Out of politeness and maybe because of our earlier banter, she made the mistake of asking how female waitstaff in bars dressed up in the 80s. Even though I never quite stepped into a bar in the 80s I said, “Aprons. They wore checked aprons and rubber shoes.”

 

The face of the female waitstaff in bars has changed tremendously. Actually, bars in general have changed tremendously. In the 80s when I was a boy, only men and women of ill repute frequented bars. Imbibing alcohol was a sin, a one-way ticket to hell. Both my parents didn’t drink alcohol and so I grew up knowing without a doubt that alcohol was bad and sinful.

 

Sometime in 1987, when I was ten, a neighbour who was seated on a stone outside his gate called me as I ambled by and handed me some coins to go buy him three Sportsman cigarettes. Back in those days anybody who thought of himself as an adult would send you and you would go. Now you can’t even talk to someone’s child in case you are mistaken for a pervert. So I went to the shop to fetch his cigarettes but when I returned I found told he had left word that he was at the bar and that I should  deliver the cigarettes to him there.

 

That presented a catch-22 scenario because my mother was SDA. We were not allowed to go anywhere near a bar. We were not allowed to talk to people who spent time in bars. There could never have been any scenario where any of us would find themselves in a bar. Bars were for social misfits. If you passed outside a bar you would turn your face from the devil and look the other way because  Jesus did not approve of people who went to bars. And who wanted to disappoint Jesus? Actually I didn’t care for Jesus much, I was more afraid of my mom than I was of Jesus. I don’t think there is anywhere in the Bible where Jesus beat up a child with a cane repeatedly and sent them to bed without food. The image of Jesus was of a gentle, long-bearded white man who would pat you on the head and say that you shouldn’t go to bars again because bars are not nice places. My mom on the other hand didn’t have a beard and didn’t believe in patting heads.

 

So, understandably, I was  very scared of going to that bar, mostly because I hadn’t previously stepped into a bar. What if she saw me?  Unlike these days, mothers were omnipresent back then. They knew everything. (Now they are busy with KPIs and Facebook groups.) But an adult was waiting for his monzo so I planned to go all Italian Job on it. In and out.

 

The bar was called Eligawa Bar. It sat next to a big old tree with massive tentacle-like roots jutting above the ground. In the evenings errant high school day scholars congregated under it, bad boys in their teens who referred to themselves as Rude boys, listened to roots reggae and cat-called girls sent to the shop to buy milk. These were boys you would not dare to have your mother see you talking to because if you passed by them there at dusk you would see the red glowing end of cigarettes. I guess spots like that later came to be known as “base.” Eligawa Bar sat next to that tree.

 

The closest I had been to this bar was in the mornings when a surly bleached out lady would sweep out  the beer bottle-tops and we would go to gather them for a chance to win in the promotions that ran underneath the rubber films.

 

Anyway, there I was, parting the beaded curtains on the doorway and gingerly stepping into the noisy, dark Eligawa Bar. It smelled of adults. And beer. The room was grey with cigarette smoke. Music screeched. Laughter rose from the gnomes I couldn’t see, a sea of spirits.  My heart galloped because I felt like I was standing in the midst of sin and I would surely burn in hell, that is, after my mother clubbed me to death.  As I stood there foolishly, my eyes trying to adjust to the darkness, I heard the neighbour’s voice call out my name thunderously. I walked towards the direction of his voice and found him seated at a table with other men. I handed him the cigarettes and his change which he pocketed (idiot didn’t tip me) and commanded me to sit on an empty chair next to him. I protested feebly and he repeated that I sit briefly. Then he ignored me.

 

From the very edge of my seat, my eyes now adjusted to the light inside, I looked around like that girl in Wonderland, what was her name, Alice? There were men seated up at the counter on those long stools called Sina Tabu. Those days counters were not barricaded with grills. A man stood at a blinking jukebox feeding coins into the navel of the machine, picking a number (this is a dark time when they called songs “numbers”) while holding a beer in his hand. The bottoms of his trousers swept the floor. A big poster behind the bar proclaimed that Tusker Export was to be had “mbili mbili kama kawaida.” Come to think of it, I don’t remember beer ads featuring any women in them. Maybe I wasn’t looking.  There were no pool tables back then so men in bars flung darts at a board at the end of the room.

 

Since our neighbour seemed to have forgotten me, I was planning on sneaking out quietly but as I plotted my Irish exit something strange happened; a barmaid came and sat on the lap of one of the men at the table! My eyes popped out. She had her uniform on, which is how I knew she was a barmaid. Maybe she was on her tea-break or whatever break barmaids took back then, but she just came and sat on this man’s lap like it was couch and started drinking beer (beer!) and laughing as if sitting on the laps of a man was the most natural thing ever. Now I couldn’t even leave, how could I? Now things were getting pretty interesting fast. It honestly felt like the Sodom and Gomorrah that I had been hearing about on the Sabbath. This is how the world would end, I thought; when women started sitting on the laps of men, drinking beer!  

 

Remember that this was the 80s when TV was just KBC and all we watched was Joy Bringers and in Joy Bringers no woman sat on the lap of a man. In Joy Bringers women wore long skirts and sang and brought joy to our lives. So I was flummoxed! (And I don’t use that word lightly.) A woman sitting on the lap of a man?! How was that even possible? I felt like I was watching a live sex show.

 

In the mid-80s barmaids were seen mostly as women of loose morals. Most were bleached. Most had big knockers. Most smoked. Oh and there were no thin barmaids back then because “gluten intolerance” hadn’t been discovered and women ate wheat. Maybe it’s where I grew up, but all barmaids had big behinds that swayed dangerously from side to side like a gunship in high seas as they walked. And everybody knew them in society, they were singled out and stigmatised. So when this barmaid plopped herself on this man’s laps I thought, boy won’t his laps break? Why can’t she sit on a chair?

 

I don’t remember that bar having many women, maybe three at most, because women who drunk in bars were outliers. A rarity. These days to be an outlier as a woman you almost need to resume work two weeks after giving birth like Marissa Mayer of Google. The mothers in our estate were mostly teachers, nurses, house-wives and secretaries and I wonder what they did after work because in those days they didn’t say, “Si we catch one drink after work?” If our current crop of women stepped  into a time machine and back into that time and found themselves seated in a bar alone after 5.30pm for an after-work drink, the male patrons would automatically assume they were hookers. Because no woman went to a bar and sat alone. And of course they wouldn’t be able to get a glass of chardonnay. When did they start selling wine in bars anyway?

 

Back to Eligawa Bar.  Just when I was thinking that I had seen the worst and that I would be damaged irredeemably, I saw this barmaid balancing a tray of beers with one hand, skirting between tables and a man whacking her ass with his open palm as she passed! I was dumbfounded! Two things amazed me; one is that she didn’t drop that tray! She didn’t even break her stride after that man whacked her behind. That seemed like a talent, to take in a slap like that while balancing beers on a tray with one hand and not drop it. I suspect now that it had something to do with balance yes, but also surface area to volume ratio of those barmaid bums and their capacity to absorb the shock of the slap and contain it below her waist. The second thing that took me aback was that she laughed it off. I couldn’t reconcile the fact that such a “violent” act in my young eyes evoked glee from her. I expected her to yelp out in pain and drop all those beers on this barbarian’s head. Instead she laughed? And nobody turned to look at that spectacle. What the hell was happening in this bar?

 

Can I also say [and don’t judge me] that at that age of 10, sitting there in that bar, I found the woman’s posterior fascinating! Which goes to show that being an ass person is in the genes. You are not socialised to be an ass-person, it’s how you are born. I haven’t seen any man slap a waitstaff’s bum in the bars I go to, but there is an occasional amorous guy who has had a few too many a drink and puts his hand around her waist or shoulders and tells her that he can marry her by Sunday next week and make her happy. So yeah, men in bars have not evolved so much from 1987, only that now there are bouncers and FIDA so people are in check. (I wonder why there were no bouncers then, anyway?)

 

At some point, a tray of samosas landed on the table and the neighbour who had sent me to buy the cigarettes said, “Take some and go home.” We were not allowed to eat food from other people’s houses back then but this wasn’t someone’s house, this was a bar and nobody technically lived there, so I shyly picked a samosa and stood up to leave. “Pick another one!” He commanded and I picked another and quickly made my way out into the evening sun as Kool and The Gang blasted, the same chap with his flowing pants still standing at the jukebox with his beer. I guess he was their version of DJ Adrian.

 

Now are in 2017. I wonder how much things will have changed in the next 30-years for kids who are ten years old now. That’s 2047! What will they think of Happy Hour? And cocktails? Will they think having tu-umbrellas in your drink is the height of shadiness? Will our sons tell us casually, “dad, I’ve been thinking of having a sex change.” Will weaves still be a thing or there will be something worse? (Could there ever be?) Will they look at our ads on TV and think “Gosh, how many creatives came up with that garbage?” ? Will Thika Superhighway be a running joke? Will Julys still be as cold? Will they look at how we queued to vote and shake their heads at the sheer primitivity? Will apps be outdated? How will people meet and eat? What will have happened to cancer? When they watch a clip of Cobra Squad, what will they think of us? (We need to hide those things in a tomb).

 

Things will change.

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135 Comments
    1. i was not born by 87. but inst Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes?we cant resist the changes; that only creates sorrow. reality will always be here to stay whether we hide them in a tomb or not. i have learnt that you have to let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like

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  1. Hell is still waiting for you (Will the 2047 teens still buy it?), drooling after the posterior of that barmaid. But in the meantime, we will just sit here and pat ourselves on the back. My perveted self asks, how low is that pat on the back supposed to be? Especially if you are sitting in a bar drinking directly from bottle.

    Oooh! And hell is waiting for you. Guacamole in bar.

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  2. Talking of waiters and waitresses, can we agree there’s a discrimination against men? Yengs are always the ones serving. And I am not complaining but let’s exemplify with this joint in town where all you see are “ripe” yellow-yellow exuberant women in black knee-high skirts trotting up and down between the tables. The men are normally the ones picking up crates from the delivery van or dragging the fresh sack of warus from Kinangop across the floor to the kitchen. What did the boy child ever do wrong? But then I think butt people like you Biko would not appreciate if there was a perfect balance, would you? You’d say that ka-joint is boring. I feel like in 2047 this will not change. The young-lings of the future will still follow the rules of women that men were tricked into thinking they made.

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    1. We all know who runs the show. Maybe what I should say what runs the show and We all agree it is not the brain.

      so the ladies balance the tray of cocktails and the dudes balance the sack of potatoes (Could be a pun if you we me). See, it is a balnce.

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  3. Hahahhaha
    Wait till we tell them about our big behind televisions and chalk black boards and that we had to sit in a class of 50 with one teacher…

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    1. 50 in a class with one teacher seated on Gods earth will still be with us for a long time , but I think they’ll mistake that red greatwall tv for a microwave BB

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  4. You have taken me way back……i saw all that in my neighborhood….a guy named the bar probably after his shagz “Kerwa Chania Club” i kept peeping trying to catch a glimpse of what was happening inside, and i wondered what that juke box was..

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  5. The sooner they invent a time machine the better. For now all we have is Biko. I don’t really remember much of reggae in bars but madilu system hypnotised patrons. And we don’t have v much of bar fights , we’ve grown soft in the knuckles. And guiness doesn’t bring out the power in us anymore

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  6. Nice read as usual. You got me at” Aprons. They wore aprons and rubber shoes”. About cobra squad…with the sound track and all…. (I hung my head in shame ).

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  7. Will weaves still be a thing or there will be something worse? (Could there ever be?)haha
    Somethings need to buried in a tomb like yesterday..

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  8. This piece is golden. Made me laugh so hard. For those born in the 80’s and grew up in the 90’s we are the last generation that learned to play in the streets and could play from morning to evening and ended up being beaten in the evening like ‘ nonsense’ by our mothers but that never stopped us playing the following day. W e still went in the streets! We were the 1st to play video game and brick game, the last to record songs off the radio on cassette. We were the pioneers of walk-man. We traveled in cars without seat belts. Lived without cellphones. We didn’t have 99+ TV channels, flat screens nini nini. It was just KBC. No Facebook , twitter or IG but never the less, we had a good time.

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    1. We were the first generation to get bmx bikes. I remember mine was this big red sparkling number. Too big for me. But that didn’t keep me from riding. Since I was the only one in my street to own a bike. Well to have a ride on it you had to push me. Poor lil kids never got a go. The thing was big and heavy.

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    2. When after 3 months of schooling you were assured of a holiday. Where you could be shipped off to Shags to improve your mother tongue or enjoy the different outdoor games that were played during those holidays.
      April- slippers were cut up to make wheels for wire shaped cars (stolen hangers).
      Tyre tubes were finely sliced for blada (or unravel your makuti kifagio)

      Skipping as you answered quizzes or followed the leader. Cha mkebe, Bano, Ominjo(guys won’t have an inkling), cards.
      Tying ding’oing’os legs with a string and enjoying the frenzied insect escapades until it landed in your hair. There was one more where you would blow the liners of pekes upside down.
      Hop scotch/ Pushing Stone where players claimed whole boxes as their houses and you had to gymnastic ally jump over them to stay in the game.
      Tiktak, Shake(with a tiny danger box), different versions of Kati, version 1: evading the ball(another story) mpaka you reached a hundred to save those who had been hit. Version 2: building a tower of 30 pekes to ensure you stayed in the game and again save those who were out.
      Going up to your bedroom to watch the walk-in movies which aired every mid month coz you were prohibited after coming back crying smelling of rotten eggs. Punishment for standing. Anyway the announcer always did a great job for even those who lived in courts that did not afford a view knew the stunts the “Otero” pulled.
      I could go on forever. God I miss those days. And these kids don’t even know what they missed. Eti sponge bob square pants. Do they know that we all (girls & boys alike) wanted to be Heman coz he had a dog that changed to a lion, was cooler than Sheerah even though she was his sister. Who wants “the power to carry a flower for more than an hour”

      Biko, incase you were wondering, Otero – star of the show not Ontero. Ukituandikia hapa monzo. Not once but three times.. Jehovah. Wako wapi hao proof readers wako? Wanafaa wapigwe viboko.
      Lucky for you we ni mnoma tu sana na ndiyo mi ukutegea kila Tuesday juu sijawahi cheki mwengine Ka wee.

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      1. I suspect that the proof readers are some
        dreamy-eyed (on account of the infamous forehead) millenials struggling to understand how ‘monzo’ relates to ciggies (a.k.a. gaffs)!!!

        And speaking of memories, don’t forget Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tintin, Asterix, and (for the naughty ones) James Hardley Chase…..

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        1. haha they definitely are millennials. Mills and Boons was the naughty one that almost all the girls had. All those reads were amazing!
          alafu hapo ikifika play time ongeza “Cha baba, Cha mama”

  9. Tumetoka mbali……… I remember the first time I stepped in a bar. Women were dancing with men and not side by side. It took me weeks to comprehend the spectacle! I couldn’t believe it!

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  10. Good read. True, things have really changed. But they’ve changed since the beginning of time. You’ll actually note that change is progressively faster. Indeed the only thing that will last is change (as Msanifu Kombo says in Walibora’s Siku Njema, kitakachodumu ni mabadiliko).

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  11. Biko.. you forgot! most of the bar maids had curlcit on their heads! you forgot to mention how the samosas tasted? thank God your mums friend or a good neighbor didn’t see you coming out of the bar! Good read as always!

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  12. I forgot to mention! do you all men attend classes on how to hate on weaves! lol..you seem to speak in one voice across board (solidarity forever)!

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  13. In 2047 The Rags will have started home delivery services-“Please deliver a bottle of 2017 Balvenie Double Wood to Hse #XYZ Kawangware Drive” (Kawangware will be an upmarket estate) . Most of The Gang members will be pensioners.

    Ps: Happy belated birthday Grace Nduta Social Economist (such a long name).

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  14. I saw this barmaid balancing a tray of beers with one hand, skirting between tables and a man whacking her ass with his open palm as she passed! I was dumbfounded! Two things amazed me; one is that she didn’t drop that tray! She didn’t even break her stride after that man whacked her behind. That seemed like a talent, to take in a slap like that while balancing beers on a tray with one hand and not drop it. I suspect now that it had something to do with balance yes, but also surface area to volume ratio of those barmaid bums and their capacity to absorb the shock of the slap and contain it below her waist. The second thing that took me aback was that she laughed it off. I couldn’t reconcile the fact that such a “violent” act in my young eyes evoked glee from her. I expected her to yelp out in pain and drop all those beers on this barbarian’s head. Instead she laughed? And nobody turned to look at that spectacle. What the hell was happening in this bar?that hasnt changed and i would think no barmaid worth her ale wouldnt be furious to be scorned her whack!

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  15. This is the most holarious personally relating post I have read in a while
    1. First time at the bar…. So where do little girls who get fascinated with posteriors get categorized? Just to be safe #NoHomo
    2. Marissa Mayer – Her maternity leave story got me lots of digging about Senoir corporate women work-family balance . Sheryl Sandberg did not take two weeks but practically worked through her leave. And ooh, my friend went back to work after 20 days ( she lives in the US)
    3. I wish I knew and understood the pleasure men get in smacking asses that wont wiggle

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  16. “Men have changed. Women have changed. Women have changed men. Men have been forced to change because women have changed”

    Kwinished 🙂 🙂

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  17. That rubber film under the beer/soda bottle cap was called Pele…….and we even had a game of piling and blowing them or flipping with a certain angle of the palm.

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  18. “Back in those days anybody who thought of himself as an adult would send you and you would go. Now you can’t even talk to someone’s child in case you are mistaken for a pervert.”
    Back in those days, we were like family. Now we let our children repeat after us,,”Stranger danger…don’t talk to anyone.”..and God forbid anyone has a conversation with our children out of earshot..we will demand to know the contents of the conversation verbatim. The world contains very spurious characters that cannot be trusted around kids.
    Life in 2047 will probably be more technologically advanced and futuristic, with more robots taking the place of humans, and humans relating less and less with each other…don’t we miss the authenticity of community in the past decades?
    Earthlings in 2047 likely would have fried or drowned our dear planet, or some nincompoop leader in an angry fit of rage would have tinkered with the wrong button and blasted the world into tiny smithereens, or better still, Jesus Christ would have finally come back to rescue us from all this madness.

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  19. As usual brilliant thinking and nice read……Biko Lol! I cannot stop laughing surely”surface area to volume ratio??lolest,of those barmaids bum and their capacity to absorb shock of the slap & contain below her wrist

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  20. This post will be short of comments because i don’t think many 80’s teenagers know what a blog is.Hehe( where’s the smiley tab around here Biko?

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  21. Can I just meet you and commend you for the good work Biko,will buy you the expensive whisky that you take, but to be honest you keep us going with your sense of humour

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  22. That calendar has my birth day…damn am 30 in a few days! Yesterday I was watching Westlife and I asked my house girl if she’s ever heard of them…you know the answer. But the change in music and it’s content is not good, I wonder what will be playing on repeat on Kiss 100 in 2047 ( if it’ll still be there)

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  23. Walking by a bar had you running. Praying no one who knew you or your mother saw you. True, mothers were omnipresent, how did they know your movements anyway!! To this day I still fear and respect my mum. Hahaha

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  24. You forgot to say that they will never understand what it means to use a paperbag. Ati Cobra Squad, Alfred Mutua did his best. Cut him some slack.

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  25. I grew in a village and I can relate to the kind of life Biko is talking about.
    But then the village too is also undergoing the change. Personally I believe it is devolution that is changing the village. before we would hear of goodies from the town, we would associate good roads and electricity in the towns, well now it is all opening up. These are now common stuffs in the village. The sleeping beauties are waking up.
    Our ladies in the village have also gone the change, they drink almost more than the guys and it is bad that they start at a very young age. Drinking very cheap liquor that is not as healthy.
    One of my fears is that soon we might start experiencing violence (something we have never faced) in the villages.
    We are braced though, we are ready for the good and bad that comes with the changes.

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  26. I grew up in the 90s. I remember going to the bar with my dad..(There was only one) and would be given a ndururu for the juke box and also there used to be darts hapo ndani ya bar.And chips zile za waru

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  27. I expected her to yelp out in pain and drop all those beers on this barbarian’s head. Instead she laughed? And nobody turned to look at that spectacle. What the hell was happening in this bar?…. I haven’t laughed this much in a long time. Trust me I was there with Biko in that bar in 1987!

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  28. oooh how i hate the image of Jesus that was handed down to us. maybe in 2047 men will be fascinated by other thing and not big behinds!

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  29. “It honestly felt like the Sodom and Gomorrah that I had been hearing about on the Sabbath. This is how the world would end, I thought; when women started sitting on the laps of men, drinking beer! ”

    ‘”Remember that this was the 80s when TV was just KBC and all we watched was Joy Bringers and in Joy Bringers no woman sat on the lap of a man. In Joy Bringers women wore long skirts and sang and brought joy to our lives”

    funny…

  30. “The time tested ways of our people are best… yet oh Lord God, make us wise that we may accept change”. That was the first line in the set book we did, Aminata… stayed with me to date. The only thing constant in life is change… and change is mostly good… Looking forward to what the future will present even as I make sure to live it up in the present, because just like you are doing now, someone else will look back at 2017 in a few years and note all the things that will have become obsolete or disappeared altogether.

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  31. Nice stuff here Biko. for sure things change. its like when I tell my daughter that for us to be promoted from nursery to class one we had to pass a hand over the head and touch your ear, they think our teachers were crazy.

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  32. Hahaha, no matter what kind of day I’ve had and I end up reading one of your pieces, it always always brightens my outlook on everything. Thanks Biko for doing this, keep up the great work. In the meantime let me try to get off my mind the picture of a 10 year flummoxed biko (btw it is in black and white).

  33. I always roll my eyes at those who rush to comment before reading the article. But today, I had to stop and comment.

    Biko the word is MOZO not monzo. I truly scratched my head at that one. Mara ya kwanza I thought it was a spelling mistake and then you went and did it again.
    Take from me, it was MOZO before it became FEGI. (And I don’t even smoke)

    Kwani all these commenters mbele yangu ni mababi.
    This must really show my Obohoness.

    Now let me go back to reading.

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  34. Interesting read. That part about mothers… so true. Thats the one thing that never changes..i behave the same way towards my kids.

  35. Anyone who thought of themselves as adults could send you and you would go…..in addition to whacking your little behind before escorting you home for a thorough beating by mum for embarassing her out there with your indiscipline even after all the military-style upbringing,memories……

  36. Why?? Was Magunga somewhere in your creative room? Coz I could have sworn I heard his little voice in the back. Then the broken tooth cropped in the story.

    I always enjoy your stories, always.

  37. “Marissa Mayer of Google” – She’s president and CEO of Yahoo not Google 🙂 Great post though. Thoroughly enjoyed it…

  38. Clearly the only constant thing in our lives is change…

    And Bars and beer are still evil… Ask the guys who face morning afters with resent!! 🙂

  39. “Just when I was thinking that I had seen the worst and that I would be damaged irredeemably, ……” Biko you make my day.

  40. Biko Next tuesday i need to know, what happened after you left the bar?, did your parents find out? did you tell anyone about it? did they tell on you? am sure when you hit puberty you had some wet dreams about it. And lastly how was your first experience as an adult in a bar like.

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  41. That poor samosa was it eaten or thrown away.you forgot to mention about it and back at home did you mention it to anyone or it has been a secret till now..i feel for our kids and grand kids they will not have the pressure of using paper dags

  42. “If you passed outside a bar you would turn your face from the devil and look the other way because Jesus did not approve of people who went to bars. And who wanted to disappoint Jesus? Actually I didn’t care for Jesus much, I was more afraid of my mom than I was of Jesus. I don’t think there is anywhere in the Bible where Jesus beat up a child with a cane repeatedly and sent them to bed without food. ”

    I have not laughed like this in a while!!!

  43. This was the Killer -> Which goes to show that being an ass person is in the genes. You are not socialised to be an ass-person, it’s how you are born.

  44. Some things will never change. Men will still be fascinated by women with big posteriors. even in 2047. Good read Biko. Your mum was just like mine. Ever omnipresent instilling fear everywhere I went.

  45. “Unlike these days, mothers were omnipresent back then. They knew everything. (Now they are busy with KPIs and Facebook groups.)”

    Motherhood changed with all the changes. I wonder what changed it!

  46. Bwahaha! Thanks for the trip down memory lane! Why were all bars dark and dingy back then?
    I remember that alcohol was sold to minors since you were sent with the empty bottles to the bar when there were visitors. However you’d never dream of drinking even one of them otherwise your behind would be too hot to sit on for a week!!!