Post by jakaswanga on Dec 6, 2014 10:38:39 GMT 3
1. Our dead speak!
To cope with an assortment of grief, I had asked my main man to accompany me on an irregular trip. As omena fishing is banned –-to let stocks replenish-- on the Kenyan side of the lake (which is narrow and not as expansive as the sectors belonging to our neighbours, Tz and Ug), omena fishermen are forced to forage further and deeper into the lake, occasionally traversing the watery and imaginary borders. One runs the risk of running into Ugandan or Tz patrol boats, and having ones boat and gear confiscated. But behold, that is the greater catastrophe than drowning in the dark and having the fish turn tables on you, human kind, as their feed!
My main man is the captain of my boat. Without the engine he is hailed ''Pilot'', a Jamgowa or tillerhand. When the boat mutates into a motorboat, he is titled Captain. When we get drunk, we sing of him as 'Chwor Pi'. Or Hera Tut. The husband of the waters or Deep Love. That nickname is also a ''verbal death mask''. In the sense that it is a warning, that one day the waters may demand the ultimate proof of the husbandry, a death by drowning.
Anyway, going that deep into the lake has created a new market: motorised haulage. The omena fishermen camp at the Islands far in the lake, and speed boats then carry the cargo to whatever shore is giving the best price. I do not do this business for money, but to bathe in the culture and my dad's world. I love the lake, my dad indoctrinated me with her stories of life and death, myths and legends, like sexy nympsh who, suddenly issueing out of the deeps, could kidnap the head of a boatman by doing things to his d-ick which even the goddess of love has no knowledge of in real time. Too, the waters are a dangerous and terrible environment for police and soldiers posted hence, but without a water background.
You can carry contraband and then get flagged by a police boat waving a white flag of SOS. They have run out of fuel or their boat is taking water. Uplandsmen are vomiting, are sea-sick and have their eyes closed. They do not want to arrest you, they want you to save them quick time. In the eyes of some stupid lawmen you read them calculating the price of treachery, whether they should not, once aboard your boat, turn their guns on you the saviours and hijack your means, or become pirate robbers in turn, confiscating the contraband.
Seafarers learn to read the hearts of such stupid lawmen the way a diligent wife learns to read the emotional intelligence of her husband –-for maximum manipulation!
The lake has many stories how traitors of all sorts end. They say the sea-bed is littered with skeletons tied to rocks! And the waters have an infallible memory which goes back all the way to the days of Pangea, a zillion years ago! If you are a bully at sea, you do not last long as a sailor.
Museveni is a herdsman, Uganda marines from water cultures keep on apologising to us victims of their invasion. Herdsmen do not understand the laws of life and death of the sea. Like there is this day we caught a whole Ugandan police captain with his 5 armed guards drifting our sides of Mfangano; his engines dead, he just smiled and said they had been hunting for their wives whom we had stolen to put to work as prostitutes in our mainland bars! –--False cover story, but if you are a man of the lake you recognise a negotiations protocol has been launched. You repair the boat and send the enemy on his way after feeding him. Two days later, the enemy opens up his cells and a certain number of Kenyan inmates are released. You chastise your fellow Kenyans: Stop 'dhi ong'ora e mond Jo-Uganda', omera; General Dr Jules Karangi and co are too busy selling charcoal in Kismayo to bother with fishers of women like you, terrorists aggressively depleting the Ugandan count of cun-ts! –--Sianda meru matar kabisa!
Yes, the Lake. That is where I really feel at home. Relaxed. Alive. On land, I feel tense, competitive, ruthless and only ready to negotiate when I am at a decided disadvantage. On land I am scum who will drive past a road accident without a glance coz am late for my mpango wa kando date. On the lake, I would never sail past a boat in distress, even if its cargo is a swarm of flying snakes. Always human life first. On land, money first. On land I am an animal, on the lake, a decent human.
And so when I suffered a catastrophe of the emotional kind, it was to the lake I went to heal, doing the labours men do, running the dangers men run daily on a working day. Thinking of my late dad and our holidays together, when we would just lazy about in the canoe, drifting and bobbling with the waves, me telling him the stories of school, him telling me those of the lake, and quite a few wild ones of my mothers, and their various specialities in bed, which is why he kept them. (''Boy', he would lewdly look at me, tapping his snuff container on the wooden edge of the boat, ''I do not drink. Between all your mothers I need my faculties straight! Drink is for sexless or starved monogamous creeps when their spouses visit the moon! You got that Boy!'' –-Hi Hi Dad Sir, I got that alright. I would respond. 'You ever tasted cun-nt, Boy?'' He would press. ''I got pleny of cun-nts, I can spare one for your introduction into the tasty ritual, Boy, see I love you that much!'' yeah, my dad, I never did get round to loving anything nor anybody more than I loved him. And nothing fires my mind to think the way his memory does!)
So I really wont be apologising for consuming bandwidth after bandwidth before tackling the main topic for today, which is the focus of Director Wafula Buke of the ODM secretariat at Orange House Nairobi.
And so it was by chance that recently just before Nyakwamba Otieno Kajwang' passed on, with my captain were we hired to ferry stuff from a distant island to Usenge in Siaya county. Usenge beach is the logical end-point of the Kisumu-Bondo road. Now, from Usenge there was a party ready to pay for a trip to Sio Port, so I and my main man and crew looked at the on-board boat mechanic and tilted our heads. He knew the question and he sighed. It meant Sio Port is not that far from Ugandan waters; could we risk a forage to find out what cargo was hot and already on the beaches of the foreign land, load and, if flagged down by a Ugandan patrol boat, out race the bullets? (in truth you race until you reach the Kenyan waters, then stop and wait for the Ugandans to pull aside. They cross the imaginary border and ask you to pay tax. You pay tax, and then ask them if they have ''something going'. Usually they have other goodies to offload, so you do the trade and compare prices around various markets, and possibly exchange telephone numbers for further business and Mpesa overdrafts. –-Out pacing bullets!? Those are the legend parts of the lake.
Men trade, even if they have idiots like M7 and UK at the helm. Men will trade to survive. It makess sense. That is the primary law of existence. The Lake is a market. The lake is a platform like your stock market in Nairobi. But you got to be 'literate to know that'! Few bureaucrats in far-off capital offices are literate in this sense.
And so we landed in Sio Port. In Sio Port I chanced into a friend from the ministry of education. He was pleased to show me his 4x4 and announced that, if he could get deeper into the tender business, next time he would ride me in a genuine Prado, Governor standard! And no more pneumonia boats for me! But air conditioned clubs with lots of low-mileage butt perfects –-with cunning lips to boot! Then, with schoolboy conspiratorial pinches, he asked me if I was still a good negotiator the way I used to be for the teachers union. That is how I ended up in Busia later.
The man told me Busia had a wondrous hotel –-higher than KICC in Nairobi! And that .. that was where His Excellency the governor of that county –-HH Sospeter Ojaamong I believe, held knightly courts. And that is where he needed my services, to psychologically read the hierarchy of the brokers. He remembered my days when I would dismiss all ministry officials because they did not have DECISION POWER and therefore an agreement with them was not state binding, even if they signed it. (some CBA's from 15 years ago have not been honoured. Null and void, said Kazungu Kambi and Joseph Kaimenyi I believe).
And so I agreed to tour Busia and admire the Hilton Hotel at the Border. –---Waauw! In deed! The building grazes the clouds, far past the El-Somebody towers in Dubai! An architectural miracle at the border of Kenya and Uganda. A monumental confidence in the future.
It was while we were drinking in the lounge of this Busia Hilton, that the inevitable subject of ODM politics came up. It quickly emerged I was an inlaw or ''omukhwasi'' –--he he he! they don't say Omunyolo Omusinde (uncircumcised fishboy) these days!
The folks wanted to know what madness had gotten into 'our heads', such that we could call Tawfiq Ababu Namwamba a mole. 'Sikia, omera, abana banyolo ni betu. This side of Luhyaland tuko pamoja. But you joke stupid with Omwami Ababu, the way you joked stupid with William Ruto, we leave like the Kalenjin left! Banyolo babaki peke yao ni huyo kazee kao! Wacheni upumbavu bwana!''
When this was said point blanc to me by serious men of Busia county, I did not feel like dodging duty by claiming I am no ODM-man. I felt compelled, and ambushed into prematurely fishing out a teaching aid I was still perfecting in the mental lab. Wafula Buke and his lofty title of director of strategy at Orange House. –--Another good Luhya in a Luo Snakepit?
That is the topic.
And that was a long introduction to a proposed Jukwaa focus on Robert Wafula Buke. He came to my forefront attention when Professor Anyang' Nyong'o performed a ritual which is called 'Our dead speak!''
ie: Anyang' Nyong'o is a political corpse. He momentarily resurrected to lung a dagger at the vitals of Wafula Buke, after the tough Bukusu had, in a coup-like move, usurped Magerer Lang'at's auspices. The script is straight out of a scene from classical Roman intrigue. But ''Our dead speak'' is Luo pun.
Now we can start the main course: WAFULA BUKE AT THE SNAKE PIT, A MODERN PARABLE.
Continued. Instalment wafula buke 1.
To cope with an assortment of grief, I had asked my main man to accompany me on an irregular trip. As omena fishing is banned –-to let stocks replenish-- on the Kenyan side of the lake (which is narrow and not as expansive as the sectors belonging to our neighbours, Tz and Ug), omena fishermen are forced to forage further and deeper into the lake, occasionally traversing the watery and imaginary borders. One runs the risk of running into Ugandan or Tz patrol boats, and having ones boat and gear confiscated. But behold, that is the greater catastrophe than drowning in the dark and having the fish turn tables on you, human kind, as their feed!
My main man is the captain of my boat. Without the engine he is hailed ''Pilot'', a Jamgowa or tillerhand. When the boat mutates into a motorboat, he is titled Captain. When we get drunk, we sing of him as 'Chwor Pi'. Or Hera Tut. The husband of the waters or Deep Love. That nickname is also a ''verbal death mask''. In the sense that it is a warning, that one day the waters may demand the ultimate proof of the husbandry, a death by drowning.
Anyway, going that deep into the lake has created a new market: motorised haulage. The omena fishermen camp at the Islands far in the lake, and speed boats then carry the cargo to whatever shore is giving the best price. I do not do this business for money, but to bathe in the culture and my dad's world. I love the lake, my dad indoctrinated me with her stories of life and death, myths and legends, like sexy nympsh who, suddenly issueing out of the deeps, could kidnap the head of a boatman by doing things to his d-ick which even the goddess of love has no knowledge of in real time. Too, the waters are a dangerous and terrible environment for police and soldiers posted hence, but without a water background.
You can carry contraband and then get flagged by a police boat waving a white flag of SOS. They have run out of fuel or their boat is taking water. Uplandsmen are vomiting, are sea-sick and have their eyes closed. They do not want to arrest you, they want you to save them quick time. In the eyes of some stupid lawmen you read them calculating the price of treachery, whether they should not, once aboard your boat, turn their guns on you the saviours and hijack your means, or become pirate robbers in turn, confiscating the contraband.
Seafarers learn to read the hearts of such stupid lawmen the way a diligent wife learns to read the emotional intelligence of her husband –-for maximum manipulation!
The lake has many stories how traitors of all sorts end. They say the sea-bed is littered with skeletons tied to rocks! And the waters have an infallible memory which goes back all the way to the days of Pangea, a zillion years ago! If you are a bully at sea, you do not last long as a sailor.
Museveni is a herdsman, Uganda marines from water cultures keep on apologising to us victims of their invasion. Herdsmen do not understand the laws of life and death of the sea. Like there is this day we caught a whole Ugandan police captain with his 5 armed guards drifting our sides of Mfangano; his engines dead, he just smiled and said they had been hunting for their wives whom we had stolen to put to work as prostitutes in our mainland bars! –--False cover story, but if you are a man of the lake you recognise a negotiations protocol has been launched. You repair the boat and send the enemy on his way after feeding him. Two days later, the enemy opens up his cells and a certain number of Kenyan inmates are released. You chastise your fellow Kenyans: Stop 'dhi ong'ora e mond Jo-Uganda', omera; General Dr Jules Karangi and co are too busy selling charcoal in Kismayo to bother with fishers of women like you, terrorists aggressively depleting the Ugandan count of cun-ts! –--Sianda meru matar kabisa!
Yes, the Lake. That is where I really feel at home. Relaxed. Alive. On land, I feel tense, competitive, ruthless and only ready to negotiate when I am at a decided disadvantage. On land I am scum who will drive past a road accident without a glance coz am late for my mpango wa kando date. On the lake, I would never sail past a boat in distress, even if its cargo is a swarm of flying snakes. Always human life first. On land, money first. On land I am an animal, on the lake, a decent human.
And so when I suffered a catastrophe of the emotional kind, it was to the lake I went to heal, doing the labours men do, running the dangers men run daily on a working day. Thinking of my late dad and our holidays together, when we would just lazy about in the canoe, drifting and bobbling with the waves, me telling him the stories of school, him telling me those of the lake, and quite a few wild ones of my mothers, and their various specialities in bed, which is why he kept them. (''Boy', he would lewdly look at me, tapping his snuff container on the wooden edge of the boat, ''I do not drink. Between all your mothers I need my faculties straight! Drink is for sexless or starved monogamous creeps when their spouses visit the moon! You got that Boy!'' –-Hi Hi Dad Sir, I got that alright. I would respond. 'You ever tasted cun-nt, Boy?'' He would press. ''I got pleny of cun-nts, I can spare one for your introduction into the tasty ritual, Boy, see I love you that much!'' yeah, my dad, I never did get round to loving anything nor anybody more than I loved him. And nothing fires my mind to think the way his memory does!)
So I really wont be apologising for consuming bandwidth after bandwidth before tackling the main topic for today, which is the focus of Director Wafula Buke of the ODM secretariat at Orange House Nairobi.
And so it was by chance that recently just before Nyakwamba Otieno Kajwang' passed on, with my captain were we hired to ferry stuff from a distant island to Usenge in Siaya county. Usenge beach is the logical end-point of the Kisumu-Bondo road. Now, from Usenge there was a party ready to pay for a trip to Sio Port, so I and my main man and crew looked at the on-board boat mechanic and tilted our heads. He knew the question and he sighed. It meant Sio Port is not that far from Ugandan waters; could we risk a forage to find out what cargo was hot and already on the beaches of the foreign land, load and, if flagged down by a Ugandan patrol boat, out race the bullets? (in truth you race until you reach the Kenyan waters, then stop and wait for the Ugandans to pull aside. They cross the imaginary border and ask you to pay tax. You pay tax, and then ask them if they have ''something going'. Usually they have other goodies to offload, so you do the trade and compare prices around various markets, and possibly exchange telephone numbers for further business and Mpesa overdrafts. –-Out pacing bullets!? Those are the legend parts of the lake.
Men trade, even if they have idiots like M7 and UK at the helm. Men will trade to survive. It makess sense. That is the primary law of existence. The Lake is a market. The lake is a platform like your stock market in Nairobi. But you got to be 'literate to know that'! Few bureaucrats in far-off capital offices are literate in this sense.
And so we landed in Sio Port. In Sio Port I chanced into a friend from the ministry of education. He was pleased to show me his 4x4 and announced that, if he could get deeper into the tender business, next time he would ride me in a genuine Prado, Governor standard! And no more pneumonia boats for me! But air conditioned clubs with lots of low-mileage butt perfects –-with cunning lips to boot! Then, with schoolboy conspiratorial pinches, he asked me if I was still a good negotiator the way I used to be for the teachers union. That is how I ended up in Busia later.
The man told me Busia had a wondrous hotel –-higher than KICC in Nairobi! And that .. that was where His Excellency the governor of that county –-HH Sospeter Ojaamong I believe, held knightly courts. And that is where he needed my services, to psychologically read the hierarchy of the brokers. He remembered my days when I would dismiss all ministry officials because they did not have DECISION POWER and therefore an agreement with them was not state binding, even if they signed it. (some CBA's from 15 years ago have not been honoured. Null and void, said Kazungu Kambi and Joseph Kaimenyi I believe).
And so I agreed to tour Busia and admire the Hilton Hotel at the Border. –---Waauw! In deed! The building grazes the clouds, far past the El-Somebody towers in Dubai! An architectural miracle at the border of Kenya and Uganda. A monumental confidence in the future.
It was while we were drinking in the lounge of this Busia Hilton, that the inevitable subject of ODM politics came up. It quickly emerged I was an inlaw or ''omukhwasi'' –--he he he! they don't say Omunyolo Omusinde (uncircumcised fishboy) these days!
The folks wanted to know what madness had gotten into 'our heads', such that we could call Tawfiq Ababu Namwamba a mole. 'Sikia, omera, abana banyolo ni betu. This side of Luhyaland tuko pamoja. But you joke stupid with Omwami Ababu, the way you joked stupid with William Ruto, we leave like the Kalenjin left! Banyolo babaki peke yao ni huyo kazee kao! Wacheni upumbavu bwana!''
When this was said point blanc to me by serious men of Busia county, I did not feel like dodging duty by claiming I am no ODM-man. I felt compelled, and ambushed into prematurely fishing out a teaching aid I was still perfecting in the mental lab. Wafula Buke and his lofty title of director of strategy at Orange House. –--Another good Luhya in a Luo Snakepit?
That is the topic.
And that was a long introduction to a proposed Jukwaa focus on Robert Wafula Buke. He came to my forefront attention when Professor Anyang' Nyong'o performed a ritual which is called 'Our dead speak!''
ie: Anyang' Nyong'o is a political corpse. He momentarily resurrected to lung a dagger at the vitals of Wafula Buke, after the tough Bukusu had, in a coup-like move, usurped Magerer Lang'at's auspices. The script is straight out of a scene from classical Roman intrigue. But ''Our dead speak'' is Luo pun.
Now we can start the main course: WAFULA BUKE AT THE SNAKE PIT, A MODERN PARABLE.
Continued. Instalment wafula buke 1.
I presume. The holy spirit descended upon the gathering, seized somebody who, shivering convulsively as is customary in those epileptic moments, handpicked the chosen ones. Yes, it was an obscure process like the gathering of the Roman curia which, when all is finalised, lets fire white smoke to billow out of a Vatican chimney: And ... Habemus Papam. .. chimes the bells of Rome! And winged, the good news engulfs all the four corners of our believers-rich Planet.
the Israeli genius at dealing with terrorism!) Having defined the Palestinian nationhood question as a terrorist problem, Israel is of course no longer bound by international nor [civilisation's) moral conventions defining HUMAN RIGHTS and accompanying due processes for a colonised people conducting legitimate resistance.
as her presidents and premiers? (President of the Union, President of the Council). In Europe, which is mature bourgeoisie, it is called organisational inferiority and democratic deficit. It has no defenders. China is of course a straight forward one-party dictatorship, and the communist party, ideologically mature, has never pretended to adopt our bourgeoisie definition of democracy. Theirs is to make China a super-power, and at Turbo growth rates. (The Chinese people stand up, is the way ideologue Mao Ze Dong put it. To me it sounds like The Chinese people stand up, make money but shut up!)
and susceptible to coursed chicken meals like the national IEBC??)
bent on distracting the party from its course! (such course leading to paradise I surmise between the lines!)
' the exit of the conered Mpigs at Olare. (Osele of Kasipul, scared silly, has had enough for the moment!)