Safara hits a ‘dead end’ as Aunty Cecilia is coming home

“I hope you aren’t calling me to bail you out of jail,” I had joked when receiving that late night call from my cousin Safari Safara, in reference to the time when he was in high school (and myself in college) and I had to go bail him out of Central (Police Station) after his arrest, having been netted drinking as an underage lad.

Of course you remember Safari from last October!

He is my first cousin (dad’s side), based in the US, where he holds three ‘C’ jobs – as a morning Cab driver, afternoon nursing home Caregiver and evening fast order Cook in New York.

“Mom is dead!” Safari simply said, then began sobbing into the phone.

“My aunt Cecilia Ikoma-Michael, dead?’ I thought to myself. “But how can that be?”

Okay, so I was aware she had struggled with breast cancer since the time of Covid-19, and even had a mastectomy in early 2022, but as far as we knew, the cancer had been in remission since, and I fully expected her to live into her 80s.

Because my memories, and the stories about her, were of one tough cookie!

Also, a beautiful biscuit.

One of my childhood memories was of her glamorous wedding to my dad’s older brother Daniel Safara, then 45 (and who had divorced to marry her). At 23, Cecilia was such a dazzling beauty that I had a puppy crush on her for a while – and I am sure almost half the grown men in that kanisa that day.

A year later, Safari was born, and two years after that, my uncle Daniel died from a lightning strike out of the blue, leaving Cecilia Safara a widow at 26.

Like, how many 26-year-old widows do you know?

For nine years, she stayed chaste in Kenya, raising Safari who was already showing signs of being a problem child.

But at 35, she was swept off her feet by yet another older man, a 55-year old Tanzanian called Ikoma who ran a clearing company at the port of Dar es Salaam.

From being a struggling single mother, Cecilia Safara was suddenly Cecilia Ikoma, married to a tycoon determined to spoil his new wife (even as he mostly ignored the troubled teen Safari, and shipped him off to boarding schools where Safari got into fights, drinking, weed smoking, expulsion, and then off to another school).

This was the teen stage where Safari’s relationship with his mother got strained, and by the time he was sent off to college in the US at 18, he had in effect estranged himself from Aunty emotionally, calling her ‘Jezebel Iscariot.’

It didn’t help that by then, two more children had come into the Ikoma household – my cousin Arnold, a photocopy of the Tanzanian tycoon whom Ikoma doted on. Followed by my cousin Daniella, a carbon copy of her mother, adored by her, and named for her late first husband.

Then when my aunty was 44, tragedy struck, again out of the blue.

Her beloved hubby got a brain aneurysm and passed away at the shipyard in Dar, on his 65th birthday, while Aunt Cecilia was at their mansion preparing a massive surprise Saturday party for him.

His last words on phone, when she called to ask him to ‘come home, kuna emergency’ (with a hundred guests waiting to surprise him, shock on them!) had been “My love, I’m going home…”

“Coming home you mean,” Aunt Cecilia had teased him. “Kweli kizungu ilipita Dar, ika-land Mombasa, darling.”

In later years, she would wonder if his words weren’t a Freudian slip from spirits.

Aunty moved to the US within two years of Ikoma’s death after whispers (and veiled threats) from his Tanzanian relatives that she was a “witch” who killed her hubbies for money, never mind that uncle Daniel had just been a common hustler (little money). Anyway she did inherit a ton from Ikoma – enough after selling a mansion, shares and stuff to move as a millionairess to the US. Enough money to fund her children’s education with absolutely no need to work, and buy a comfortable house in Missouri.

Which is where she met her third hubby, Mr Michael, a retired white corporate executive 15 years her senior, fit as a fiddle (with a great sense of humour) who loved travelling the world. She fell head-over-heels, proposed, and Aunty remarried at 50.

Five years later, Mr Michael, himself a widower before marrying Aunty (he had never had, or wanted children with his first white wife) was dead from a massive heart attack, while climbing a mountain in Wyoming or Colorado or somewhere.

“That’s it with husbands,” Aunty had managed to joke, even in her grief. “Unless it’s a serial killer who deserves the (capital) sentence, I am done with the aisle.”

She had a dark sense of humour to go with a certain ageless beauty, Aunt Cecilia.

And now she herself was dead at just 66, from her cancer sickness.

“I took care of her these last two years in NYC,” Safari, who had made up with his mum the second she landed in the US, wept into the phone. “She didn’t want anyone to know or see how sick she was, outside of us three children, Mike.”

“I am so sorry, Safari,” I said. I could hear him gathering his composure.

“I want you to coordinate her funeral in Kenya, Mike,” he finally said, his voice calmer. “Everything! We will be coming with mum’s body in a couple of weeks.”

[email protected]