Weed, Dreads and Christ
WEED:
Red eyes. Dark fingertips. Dark lips. Green leaves. Thin white paper. Clouded stuffy room. They say second hand smoke is the worst. Many see me on stage and conclude that it is still in my blood stream.
Maybe. Maybe not.
My first puff was scary. My virgin lungs couldn’t hold the smoke. I coughed it all out… Hang on, this can only be explained in the present tense: I feel it burning my chest. “Hey, this is not as bad a feeling as I thought it would be!” I think. It’s really my first time. The paranoia is getting real. I keep my eyes glued to the doorknob. I can hear footsteps approaching. Is it the police? No. It can’t be the police. What if it is the police? What will my parents think when they come to pick me at the police station? Will they be disappointed? I can see something below the door. It is a shadow.
I find myself next to a river. A calm river. I am listening to its murmur as it flows past me. I’m thinking again. Where will this river end up? Can I wait here and see if it will go all over the world and come back? Will it look the same way it does now? How far out is it going right now? Where did water come from? Why is it that we need water to quench our thirst?
Haiya! I’m still in the room! I’m neither at the riverbank nor in a police cell. I need to write some lyrics. Isn’t that why I took a puff in the first place? Haya!
I pick up a piece of paper. “Niaje budah! Nisaidie na biro.”
I need to use Kitu Sewer’s pen, I conclude, maybe his spirit will take over my brain make me write amazing stuff. Just like him. He hands me the pen.
“Asante budah…”
I jot down the first line.
“Wawawawa!”
Now I am thinking out loud. I can’t believe I’m almost about to fill this piece of paper with words. No, deep words. Lyrics to a song.
We took songwriting as a spiritual endeavor. You didn’t just write music. You had to dig deep into the unknown dark corners of your being to find the secrets and truths about life. Then break them down through songs for mere mortals to comprehend.
We puff and pass. Puff and pass. I imagine a longest train over the SGR.
I can see a fly. Why is that we can just squash a fly with our bare hands? Why kill it without even thinking? Is it a living being? Did God create it? Why is a fly a fly? Is it God’s CCTV? Does God use the eyes of flies, birds, insects and rodents to see what’s happening in the world? If it is insignificant, why did God create it? Will Baby Fly and Mama Fly cry when they hear Baba Fly didn’t make it home? That a human used his bare fist to end his life?
Why am I thinking about flies? I should be writing!
Steam imeshuka. It is not completely out of my system yet, but I can finally feel my hands. I have to go home. I am walking from Phase 2 to Phase 4 and it’s getting late.
I’m home. How did I make it here?
Dad is home early today. Dad never gets home early. He always shows up late, drunk. Shouting to let the whole neighbourhood know he is back. Even the dogs stop barking. Or maybe his singing drowns the barking. I’m not sure.
What will he say when he sees me?
I knew when to ask my dad for a new book or for a little cash needed for a school trip. I’d wait till 10 pm. He always took some time in the corridor. I knew he smoked the herb before sleeping. That was the best time to ask him for anything. He’d be relaxed and say yes to everything. I will never forget the day he came home and woke us all. He lined up all the male kids in the family then said he was about to give us a crush course on self-defense. Everybody refused, but I was like “What the heck?” So we started sparing. He hit my nose. I started bleeding and burst into tears. I didn’t mind though, it was our bonding session.
Back in Mathare, before we moved to Dandora, my mum sold weed to survive. She was known as Mama Mboga. She had the sukuma wiki and nyanya on display, yeah, but the real mboga wasn’t. And it earned her more money.
I guess they will know when I step into the room. How do I even hide? Our house only has two rooms. One has our parents’ bed. It doubles up as a sitting room. The other is both the kitchen and the kids’ bedroom. We are seven kids. I’m the third born.
I walk into the room trying to act sober. All eyes are on me. From the moment I get in to when I sit down. I will later find out that I was moving my left leg and my left arm together. Same thing for the right side.
DREADS:
The picture above proves why I needed dreads. I look like I need a hug. Badly. Just know I had walked from Dandora to Umoja, hungry, to shoot a video. This was one of my few chances to prove that I deserved better than the poverty surrounding me. This was the only thing I had. I had no rich uncle to run to.
They had to work with the passport shot. There’s no way they would have shot anywhere below my belt. I was wearing a pair of dirty jeans. Not as a fashion statement. They were exactly that. Dirty jeans. I had second hand Timberland boots. They were only pair I owned. The only ones I could afford. They didn’t even fit. I had to stuff newspapers at the tip to fill the gap left after my toes ended.
We were talking about dreads; I started growing them as I morphed into becoming a MauMau camp Hip-Hop artist. I always got froze at gigs because I claimed to be one of them, but it didn’t show in my demeanor.
It became an identity. We couldn’t afford salons. So I started by banning combs from the vicinity of my hair. Then I started wearing marvins 24/7, occasionally mixing avocado and raw eggs to add to the magic. It didn’t matter what, as long as I had dreads.
I had tight lyrics. I only needed baggy jeans, oversize tops, dreads and ta da!!! I’d be MauMau.
I considered cutting them off to announce my transformation when I got born again. But then I looked at the picture above and was like, “Naaaah! Wacha tu! Hakuna pahali imeandikwa kwa Bible ati dreadi itafanya ufungiwe heaven.”
CHRIST:
Years later realised why I got myself into weed and started growing dreads.
In simple terms, it all boils down to meaning and identity.
I wanted to find meaning in what I do. I got tired of being just another good rapper with heavy punchlines. I was trying to find myself, my voice and meaning in life. Meaning in my existence.
I needed to know who I was. Was I MauMau? Was I just a rapper? Was I a Luo? Was I a Kenyan? What am I?
That period in time, Mungiki was slowly becoming popular and there were crackdowns. The normal way for cops to identify and separate them from regular citizens was by their dreadlocks. The other way was by what they wore (or didn’t) under their trousers. Get it?
I was a disturbed child. Always looking into things that I shouldn’t. While my age mates were playing bano, I was at a corner trying to figure out why the world is round.
Why do akina Maich have a bicycle? Why can’t my dad get me one? Does he hate us that much?
My perspective changed when, one day, my dad came back home. He opened the door, went to his bedroom (the bedroom and sitting room were separated by a curtain), asked us to switch off the TV and ordered us to follow him outside the room. Then he made us watch him flush his cigarettes and weed down the toilet.
He told us he had gotten born again!
