Otiato GuguyuIf there is anything he wore on his sleeve, was his peasant dressing and dreamy eyes. They seemed to declare his greatest ambition the way he looked to sea, all he wanted to be was a tour guide.
But it had remained just a dream for a couple of reasons. He had very little schooling and his English was too elementary to command his own operations. His type could only serve as mute assistants to literate guides. And he had no connection to the boat operators who mostly hired relations and networks that he was not party to.
This however did not deter his spirit. He believed all he needed to be a successful tour guide, was knowledge of the sea. From childhood he had learned every crevice sloshed by a spatter of the Indian Ocean on Kenya’s coast and had drifted way beyond the tide further into the depths of the sea than most of his peers. He knew the sea like the back of his hand.
If they would throw him in the middle of it, he could navigate his way to shore. Floating like driftwood as the current sailed back on familiar tide. The sea returned everything men threw in it.
All his life he had dreamt of being the captain of a small tourist dhow to sail eager visitors into the silverish waters and the freedom of the empty expanse. But all he had to contend with was working with local youth groups to grow the mangrove at shore. Or hunt for wild salty honey among the trunks of trees that were upside down with roots above the water.
He would also be hired once in a while to hunt for oysters and clams, the vicious monsters that were jelly in water rock hard in air with a soft silk inside.
He dreamed about it though, about the affluence he would be able to afford as a captain. The fleet he would own one day and he would call it Magogo Starline. It would be the real deal, a circuit into the deep sea and not just keeping to the channel like most people did.
He would also offer overnight camping with a huge bonfire and dancers, storytelling and outdoor activities that rich companies can hire out for team building.
Story za jaba
But these grand ideas of setting up a tour guide business only made drunk talk at the local den drinking Mboko with his bosom friends. It stayed there and vanished like Dutch courage, as a matter of passing, a fancy dream.
Then Inamorata called him one evening and told him some local tourists, tired of the same snorkeling routine and willing to risk the unconventional, needed a local guide.
How difficult could it be, running a tour operation? He had seen other people do it, hire out a boat and take the tourists to do snorkeling, watch dolphins or visit a disappearing island. It was a very basic trip.
But access had always been the only challenge, only those with connections to the hotel managers who had enough money to own their boats had access to the dollars. For someone like him, the only available avenues to tap on the dollar was to clown like an acrobatic or sell beadwork.
At first it felt a nearly impossible task, he had no boat, nor itinerary. His eyes were local and he suspected he could hardly awe any tourist since everything for him was ordinary, what would such people want?
They were looking for something different so he could not just follow the trail of tourist boats and deposit them on the normal route of snorkeling, watching dolphins or visiting a disappearing island. But Inamorata insisted. Had he not said how easy it could be to start a tour company, well what could go wrong with a bunch of clueless people from bara the hinterland.
A lesson in marketing
His voice was almost inaudible when they asked about the price the next day.
They were sitting at the kibanda that had been erected at the payment booth of the Broadwalk. A wooden shack roughly painted bermuda blue like the sky and sea. A small retail shop sold cigarettes and charged fifty shillings for flipflops for walking on the dangerous ocean floor that had been laid bare with the disappeared tide.
The setting was uninspiring and already he could tell the woman was having second thoughts. A buzzing bee circled around her large brimmed black hat attracted by the aromatic scent of her perfume. She eyed the deserted shack and dirty table in front of her with obvious disdain.
Nothing good can come out of these backwater, he imagined her thinking. Then he checked himself realising the man may be looking at him and catch him oggleing at his woman.
It had gotten off to a terrible start. This business was not easy after all, it needed some sort of PR. a fancy reception and ambience to get your quarry in the mood. You needed a shirt so white it gleamed brighter than the sandy beach. Not the backwaters chocked by the clog of intertwined weeds where the sea joined the marsh of mangrove.
Where, instead of the pellets of glassy sand there were little spirals of mangrove seeds that looked like fish shit or empty snail shells that had been toppled over.
A bad bargain
‘How much?’ The man roused him from his realisation that everything was going wrong. He swallowed hard. He had planned to charge them ten thousand shillings as a bargain from the normal tour guides who he estimated would charge fifteen thousand, but now he realised even this could be seen as too high.
Ten thousand was also a safe bet given he expected that they would bargain, being from bara. That was the trick you had to play with Kenyans, throw a high figure than your real asking price because they will have to bargain. Now he had to come up with a figure fast. Eight Thousand he blurted quickly realising his mistake. They would probably now push him down to seven. With that, he could barely afford to hire a boat, pay for access to the Gedi ruins and split the rest with Inamorata for bringing them along.
The lady’s brown irises glittered from beneath the brim of the black hat, cheeky like a little school girl. Her lips shone like sticky honey in the bareness of sky and twitched ever so slightly in a smile. It looked as if she was calmly aware of her charm and its effect as she wafted it with a hand gesture trying to scare the hypnotised bee away from her enveloping scent. The little shack and all their occupants followed her cue. Eight yote? Sisi tuko na five’.
He swallowed hard, like he had caught the hook of a fishing line, and decided to tag away and swim as fast as he could back to safety. He shook his heavy head and trembled his pouty lips as if snatching himself from the snare.
With five thousand he would barely make enough to pay the boat which he wanted to hire from a friend at concessional rates.
But he started seeing them losing interest. The man was checking his watch, probably thinking about an option he had just turned down. They looked sceptical at his worn out grey shirt with a caricature of Snoopy the tiny cartoon dog towering over the tower of pizza literally tilting it straight back up.
He was the snoopy doodle tiny in reality but daring Atlas to let him carry the world on his shoulder. It would break him but he will dig in with his two feet jutting out of a brown pair of shorts. It did not matter that he was stuttering, his voice slightly trembling betraying his lack of confidence.
The man was suspicious about taking the leap of faith with strangers or had realised he was selling him short and inflating the ruse. He decided to lure them back.
Utopia
‘I will take you to haven. An enchanted island with the rarest species of snakes that have never been seen on land. The occupants of that island of magical mystery report sightings of mermaids sometime.
It is completely autonomous, that island, no police station on it you can smoke bang in the open. What is more, they are so autonomous they make their own rules since they do not have no police station nor jail.
That magical island that has never seen a car, the richest among them and there are billionaires from bara who have bought land there; and the poorest man in that village all walk bare feet’. He could see that the man was taken in by their little utopia. His mind was in his childhood cartoons of the sexy Little Mermaid and through instagram photos of Mykonos islands. ‘It is completely egalitarian not like here where the rich want to crush out the poor with their big cars and bad laws’.
‘Tuko tu na hio five,’ She intuitively flounced away from his counter attack and held her ground on the most supple set of brown legs seductively peeking beneath a short black dress. She would not budge, she knew the worth of the proprietor, she knew the price of anything. She could tell the price of her golden anklet as clear as she could tell their magical island was fictitious.
He accepted the five just so he does not lose everything. And as his mind was busy dividing the money, he was quickly learning. This business is not that easy after all. You need to know some good maths. Income is not profits.
Heaven
The trip started just five feet above the ground on the Boardwalk. The suspended bridge crept into the mangrove like a centipede and they rode its back until their legs trembled with fear as they dangerously descended between two supporting posts.
The chipped pieces of wood that served the footbridge dangerously stared at the ground. The railings are held by a threadbare rope for support. The centipede wiggled and the ground danced up to meet them, the grip of the now taut rope nearly snapped from their grasp. The girl was elated, the man fearful, and their souls unfastened from their everyday lives, they had carried with them up till now.
When they got to the end, at the dock that reached out to sea like a jetty, they were already shaken, their legs trembling as if they had been dancing all night. The bareness of the sun sunk into their skins which shone from within.
When the blindness of the sunstroke lifted, he had taken them towards the sea. A truly magical land was revealed. Just a few hours ago this endless sponge of cascading sand was completely submerged, hidden like the secret of the sea. Now, this empty expanse was littered with a sway of birds of every plume. Colourful Turacos, fire breasted Malachite Kingfishers and African paradise flycatchers flounced and padded the floor of the sea with zig zagging lines of footprints. They were flying, emerging as if from nothing as there were no trees for miles. At their feet little crabs of dazzling colours as many as the sand swarmed around them. And yet you could not step on even one of them, as if they were completely aware of your deepest intentions, and moved even before you thought about putting your foot down. They swarmed beneath your feet in their sideways jig littering the sea floor with a splash of moving colour.
When they got to the water, it’s cool veneer transformed them from the heated empty sea bed like an oasis. They were now fish, all wobbly inside. The girl was giggling and you could hear a chortle choke out of her, the last time she ever did that was as a little girl. The water grasped their souls and emptied it of fear because in it was life that coexisted with imminent threat of death.
Beauty was dangerous, like the Octopus which pushed out of the dark depth to check the disturbance at the surface. Where the water went shallow on mysterious islands detached from their reality, it went completely silent and you could hear a ripple.
On the island, the water was so clairvoyant you could count sand at the bed of the ocean. The deep mangrove, left alone for so long it had forgotten to live with humans and had let its guard down. Everything for the two lovers slowed down completely. They allowed themselves to be captured just like a star fish that was laying cosily on the clear sand, oblivious of the dangerous humans that found their dazzling elegance hypnotic and lifted it out of sea almost killing it.
Before he returned them to shore, hungry and tired from looking at the Gedi Ruins he gave them fresh coconut grown shaken down from the magical island. While they drank the sweet coolness from the crust of coconut and munched the sugary water tinged flesh, he told them a story.
This Island was built by the magical beings in the twelfth century. They built the great Gedi magically transforming soft corals into rock hard brick buildings, a palace and a Mosque. Nothing could be brought from inland due to the length of the gaping sea so they used magic and created a community. When they died they planted a baobab tree on their hearths which carried their souls back to land.
The dead city littered Phoenecian porcelain, Chinese vases and Venetian glass was abandoned after all water turned salty. He said a woman went to the well during her menstrual period and all the wells dug 50 metres deep, which had previously issued sweet scented water, turned salty.
Her feminism would not let her belive him, and she turned to her Google which was more clueless, speculating from devastating diseases, an unknown war or the receding sea.
Marketing by word of mouth
When they returned back to dock. The two lovers had been completely transformed as if they had undergone a rite of passage. They sat around a dish of coconut, pilau and biryani and cold water that tasted sweet as honey.
The scent of nourishment gleaned on their lives. They looked at each other with new fresh eyes and smelled the freshness of new memories. They were conscious of the taste of their food, as if this moment had to be remembered with utmost clarity, to the minutest detail. The rasp of wind, the chatter of swahili, the coolness of the dock against the glare of the sun outside.
As they left, happy awed customers, softened and satisfied. They paid him his Kes5000.
He cursed as he watched them leave waving with a smile or grimace.
This was bad business. Maybe they will come back. Maybe they will bring others. That is how businesses build brands. Maybe they will tell other people about it.
