What makes a man fall?
There are three Fs that can destroy a man.
To get to Ngong, you take a matatu at Railways, near that grand old Naivas. The route is 111. Fare is 50 bob when not in rush hour, or 100 if rush hour. 150 ukipanda nganya which are driven by drivers who are (or should be) on suicide watch.
That is if you are coming from CBD. If you are not, you can board at Dagoretti Corner, one of those mathrees that have cicadas and crickets to make noise in lieu of entertainment. In other words, they are loud and you may well be advised to get the contact of an otolaryngologist. You hear?
Poor joke aside, tell the conductor/makanga/konkodi /maniac to stop at a place called ‘the office.’ It’s a notorious bar, and that’s not actually its correct spelling, but because I am flirting with libel, just know it is remarkable for how unremarkable it is.
Not many young men come here—the music is old, the chairs are plastic and the vibes are off.
But wazees and their vitambis love this place, and if you look carefully, you can make out someone who works at State House here, or the Special Branch with their Subaru Foresters—or both—and if you speak nicely, or lie honestly, your tongue can negotiate to get you an audience with the president, or mganga wa kienyeji, or your missing cousin.
We sit here, my friends and I, first to watch Man Utd getting beaten, and later to watch men go after their game, if you know what I mean.
But to tell you this story from my plastic chair and hot water with a thermos flask at Ngong would be to start from the middle. Toward the end, actually. So, strap in. That is, if you have time and don’t have a ruracio to attend or have to cuddle a woman—or man, hey, I don’t know what you are into.
In 2007, I had my first swig of beer. I was in Class Seven. I was in a club, well, a local bar if we are being pedantic—with my uncle, and father. Questionable parenting aside, I knew then that bitter drinks were not my portion. How do men drink a crate of this and enjoy it? Willingly? All I ever felt while drinking beer was I needed to piss, and I needed to piss now.
I then understood why there were so many usikojoe hapa signs on the road.
There are benefits, though, to living in a slightly dysfunctional country, and so I didn’t kojoa hapo. I did it hapo kando. Legal loopholes and plausible deniability and the fruits of the 2010 Constitution of Kenya.
I tell you this because this bar in Ngong takes me back 17 years. It’s a bar for responsibility-leaning men—judged, prima facie on the things they sell: pegs, shoes, underwear, nyanyas, jackets, baby clothes. My friend buys some questionable tights which are clearly feminine but whatever a man does with his money—or thighs—is none of my business. Some of the old mzees have passed out from the accumulation of makali. Others are entertaining sweet 20-something-year-old yellow yellow girls with asses shaped like the rainbow. At the far corner, is a very old man limping, the weight of age and experience and life burrowed deep in his shoulder blades, yet he dances wildly, holding, perhaps refusing, to let go of his youth. I ask myself—what makes a man fall?
Not to sound like an Old Testament prophet but it was whispered to me, that there are three Fs that can destroy a man. Fame, Fortune, and Female. Fortune because no matter how evil money is, being broke is not holy.
Fame?
Look, even those philosophers who wrote treatises against fame did not forget to put their names in the title of the book. Perhaps F is not giving the alliteration, so let’s try G. The 3Gs. Glory (fame); gold (fortune) and girls (female). If you like the latter alphabet, we can make something with the letter S. Sex (girls), silver(fortune), self (fame)…and we can even throw in sloth.
The thing is, this is something that has disturbed humanity for millennia; what do you think the Athenians were gathering at The Pnyx Hill to discuss? What makes a man fall?
Pesa, pombe, siasa na wanawake.
That’s what Mashifta, the grunge underdog rappers sing. Pesa, pombe, siasa na wanawake. Every man falls into one of those categories. Pesa, pombe, siasa na wanawake. That’s what will make men fight each other. Kill each other.
Samson, perhaps the strongest man to ever live, was felled by the machinations of a soft woman who didn’t need a weapon, just her tongue, perhaps the greatest weapon of all. Do I need to talk about Luanda Magere?
The late “Friends” actor Matthew Perry confessed that he had struggled with alcohol from the age of 14, around the same age I took my first beer. He died of an apparent drug overdose.
Mobutu Sese Seko, the billionaire strongman decided to transform his ancestral village Gabdolite into a Xanadu and his personal seat of empire, building a high-rise luxury hotel and conference centre, numerous broad boulevards, a 3,000m runway for the Supersonic Concorde and—the pièce de résistance—three palaces of kleptocratic kitsch—the costliest monument a man has built to himself.
Mobutu declared himself Head of State, renamed his country Zaire, renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko Koko Ngbendu wa za Banga (meaning the “all-powerful warrior who, because of endurance and an inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake”).
Needless to say, he was deposed, then indisposed, Gbadolite lying in ruins, the final hurrah, and a whimper of a surrender from an African warrior. Mobutu enjoyed the fame of politics but failed to master what was more crucial, the politics of fame—the poison that gradually snuffed the life out of him. History remembers.
Such is the fall of man. Pesa, pombe, siasa na wanawake. In Roman society, the emperor Aurelius hired an assistant whose only job was, when the emperor would saunter into the colony and his subjects would hail him, this assistant’s job was to whisper, you are just a man. You are no god.
So here I sit. I pick my poison, knowing very well, what will likely make me fall. My friend E- is definitely fortune. K is fame. D is a potent combination of females and fame. Me? I think you know the answer. The Koran says that man just says. It is God who decides. The ways of men are very strange, but eventually, every man has to decide his fall. Pesa, pombe, siasa na wanawake. What makes a man fall?
