Voice Of Taita Taveta

 I have been at home for more than a week now. No alcohol. Sober as a church mouse. Being sober has its peaks and lows. For one, I just realized that for all the years I have lived here, I have never bought window curtains. No tinted windows. Nothing. I have never actually been in this house during the day. So you can imagine my shock the first time this realization hit me. I was so shocked I nearly went to the chief’s camp to report theft. Sunlight ilikuwa imeingia kila mahali. I looked at the color of my sheets… and my mind just took a walk. How did I end up here? I have not seen Jamo and Tumaini, my daughter, for quite a while now. I hear stories they decided to take a break… rethink their relationship or something like that. But as they step back… old birds of prey have started circling again. Those dead relationships we thought were buried… Zimerudi. The damsel singer from Werugha — the one who used to ride with the Subaru boys… Now she is back in the pictu...

 Today Jamo and my Echo are not on my mind sana. It’s mid-morning. Niko tu hapa,  just staring at the iron sheet roof. Sina form kabisa!!!. And I don’t like that feeling. No cash, Sober, just thoughts making noise in my head. I keep thinking of a story I read recently. The story of the mouse, the cat, and the glass jar. A powerful story. A clever story. But like all stories… it depends on who is telling it, and why. In the version I read, the mouse hides inside the jar to escape the cat. The cat circles outside, patient, hungry, confident that sooner or later lunch will come. The lesson being pushed is simple — for the cat to get the mouse, it must fast get into the jar. Alaa!!. But as I kept looking at that iron sheet roof, I asked myself a different question. Why is the mouse hiding in a closed glass Jar? What if the jar is not protection… but a trap? Because in politics, especially in Taita Taveta, we must stop pretending that every move leaders make is str...

Being a father is not easy. You can be a Father and be just a father. Same as you can be a Voter and just a voter. It's the bother of raising kids that made me absent. Like an absent voter who doesn't make an effort to impact the future. Your vote counts. I look at her again. For a long moment I say nothing. Because the truth is… The future rarely arrives as a stranger. Sometimes it arrives carrying your own blood. And suddenly my mind drifts back. Back to a different time. A younger version of me — long before the tumbler, before these conversations with Jamo. Back to the day I met her mother. Because if we are to understand the future standing at that door… we must first understand the past that brought it here. The past was easy. I remember growing up playing Chobo uwa , times when the president would just decide to extend school holidays and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Times when the president visiting an area meant we would miss school and line up along the...

I once talked about the Butterfly Effect. That small flap of a butterfly wing in Africa — insignificant as it may seem — causing a tornado in Brazil. Small action. Massive consequence. One vote. Your vote. We keep pretending it is small. It is not. It is the tornado. I am appealing to the youth. We need your votes in large numbers. Not noise. Not hashtags. Votes. Can we, just this once, be the generation that forces change? Can we educate our people on the consequences of bad political choices? Because bad choices don’t disappear. They mature. They knock. As I sit here with my pal Jamo, still a bit hesitant about this “new leaf” he wants to turn, I can feel something brewing in him. An eruption of change maybe. Or indigestion. Hard to tell with Jamo. We make our order and sit. The music fills the air — quiet, cold ambience. Classy. Elegant. The kind of place where mistakes are made politely. We take small sips of this tasty whiskey. I feel it burn my tongue. That raw barrel feel. For a...

 Have you ever wondered what happened to the New Generation brothers? The mall stands like a sore thumb. A reminder that all is vanity. A reminder that even giants fall. Goliath did. And when he fell, the Philistines were ruled by the Israelites. That’s how David became king. It’s past midnight and I’m burning the proverbial midnight oil. I hear the sound of my buck intimately trying to ride the does… the sound of kids bleating. I have always wanted to own a ranch. I have watched Yellowstone from season one to the finale. The last episode was a kicker. I nearly shed tears. It pained me how they killed John Dalton. It was not how I envisioned it ending. And it happened in the first episode. I nearly stopped watching the damn series. But I felt I owed it to my Mr. Dalton to see it to the end — and with that curiosity, I learned something new, something so profound that it made me smile. That was just an imaginative dream I have when I haven’t had a pint. So where were we? Jamo h...