Sugar in Western Kenya as metaphor of masculinity

The year before old Makiton died is still memorable in my mind. 

He is the man who formed my manhood with old words. He spoke words of life and age that jingled. They jingled and mingled with air, and as I healed after initiation, his words remain trapped in the south under the healed zone.

That year before he chose to die was an election year. The election was the one that killed his party, Kanu. 

So old and bold was Makiton that no one near and far dared to contest he was the branch chairman of that party in Bungoma North. 

Those who did, died. Many who didn't, remembered he was fond of practising magic as a temporary pastime. 

It was whispered his magic was like a road without a destination.

Anyway, for whatever reason, old Makiton liked me. His lone eye that haunted his ridged face spoke with light whenever he saw me.

On such countless occasions, he would spit in a loop and say, "Son of Makokha, is your father still alive? If so, why and how?"

He had promised my dad death several times due to ancient feuds both carried from their village of birth near the Elgon. 

 I had been warned against sharing a beer pot. Beer in Western Kenya is partaken using tubes of useless electrical wires called lusekhes. These tubes can come in odd colours of the rainbow. I loved pink. I had been warned repeatedly against sharing the lusekhes with him, but out of youth bravado, I never listened.

Let me just say that his pot was my pot, his company mine.

He admired bravery and used to ask me, shaking his oblong head catatonically, "You are not afraid of me?"

I always answered by fishing a coin and repeating as I give it to his arm without a palm, "Finish my father, but spare me to avenge him!"

So, in one such sitting of cheerful Bungoma while-away-time moment, under a lush canopy of a massive banana forest, Makiton the old arrived abruptly just like that. As usual, his peers scampered and many more scattered. Hornbills that were mating on a lusoola tree, discouraged, left for the distant skies of Yahweh. 

His great grandchild hesitated with his stool made of nameless skins. Makiton removed his cowrie shell beret and surveyed the area with his lone electric eye.

Soon he saw Ken and I sharing a Tree Top juice bottle full of an illicit acidic brew made out of sugarcane products known to many as sukari-nguru or molasses. 

The wiry mzee pointed at me in particular with his bony fingers that had snapped many lives far and wide when he was yet to retire from his fame as a rumoured village assassin. The stool came. I tell you. Ken and I stood up and called him in unison alto by his circumcision age-set name. 

"Omukinyikeu, we fear you." He smiled. Chuckled.

We continued, "Chewer of men, we see you." He chaffed his mbake snuff, spitting a curve of nose saliva the colour of new rust. 

I yodelled solo. "May your vengeance reach your preys. My dad is one! But evade my body to do wanton revenge!" He spat with a hiss at me without missing. 

We then sat after him. He adjusted his bones and wrinkled skin into a seated mass of clothes reeking of young magic.

He asked what time we had started assassinating our sobriety. We boasted that we had slept there, munching molasses brandy. He roared toothlessly and cursed us. We laughed. 

He then asked why we were not taking busaa, the maize flour beer, and instead were busy with the painful molasses brandy, the colour of a small herbivore’s urine. 

We cited the tough economy of that era in Kenya like all Kenyans of that time always did, infants included!

The old retired colonial foreman surveyed his hectares of land by the hissing River Nzoia nearby and cursed Kenya. 

His head was not in the recommended place, I recall. Sadness mounted his neck like an Adam's apple gone awry. Slowly, he then said:

"When this sugar and its products like this nguli you are imbibing came to our lands from the Coast and Nairobi, I knew our women will scatter like chaff." 

He paused for emphasis, his palmless arm fondling his protuberant zip chaotically yet gentle.

He continued, after surveying the universe with his blind eye:

"Where will our womenfolk not go in search of the sweetness? Sugar has now replaced here?"

He left without drinking. He died. 

To these very days of a raging global pandemic and an impending election tsunami, old Makiton's words still haunt me. 

They haunt me, these words, as I evade loaded sugarcane trucks roaring across western Kenya today, carrying sweetness in tonnes upon tonnes. 

His grave, which my father and I visit to curse from time to time, is squeezed dangerously by a massive sugarcane plantation of his great grandson. 

Yes, you are right. The same grandson, the stool carrier of old.

Of course, he is not young now, is he?

Dr Makokha teaches Literature and Theatre at Kenyatta University. [email protected]