Mzembe drinks tripple distilled

When I first saw him at our local watering hole Mzembe looked rather listless, bored and absent-minded. He was dressed in a shabby oversized coat that draped on his bony shoulders like a scarecrow’s outfit, and which was a faded dirty color of a shade somewhere between jungle green and brown. It is a coat that I would get used to seeing him in because its bulging pockets were his mobile bank in which he stored his pliers and wrenches, and occasionally, a cut of meat wrapped up in a banana leaf that he had chanced on when a villager’s cow had had to be put to slaughter following a difficult calving.

You see, Mzembe is not your average village layabout, he might just be your saving grace when your car breaks down at Kisangula along Inyali road. He is a mechanic, and a very fine one, who had honed his skills on Nairobi’s Kirinyaga Street – or ‘Grogon’ – like he liked to refer to it; the finest training school for auto mechanics in Kenya.

What intrigued me about this absent-minded chap was not so much his looks; he is a kawaida-looking guy who you would easily pass by on the street. And when he opens his mouth he speaks with a lisp, thanks to a gap in his front teeth whose story he would tell me later. He isn’t even coherent, and often struggles to make a point, gesticulating wildly with his bony hands that you would be advised to stay clear of because the gestures often end in a vicious karate chop, especially after he has put a few drinks under his belt. But if you are patient with him you soon realize that he is full of stories; funny stories. A drinker’s instinct told me that the fellow looked absent-minded because he was in need of a drink, and which Sandoka, the sly chap who ran the place wouldn’t give him on credit because he had already worked up a long bill that he was yet to settle.

Read also: My Side of the Street

And so I stood him a drink, and immediately he inched closer and flashed that gap-toothed grin. As expected, my act had just opened a tap of stories.

When this fellow was still new in Nairobi after giving his dad lots of problems seeing him through school because of truancy he was taken to work at a factory on Lusaka Road in Industrial Area. His uncle, who was hosting him in his one-room shack in Mathare, had found him the job with a friend, who had been contracted to steam-clean some industrial machines.

Now when he reported to the job, our boy, who still looked deceptively innocent back in the day before his face acquired the many drunken pocks, dents and scars that he likes to proudly display like some sort of badge of honour, was given his instructions. He was taken round and shown the section they would be cleaning that day. He was shown how to pump pressurized steam into the machines, but more importantly, he was shown how to mix a curious substance in a jerrican and use it to clean a section of the machines where he had to contort himself like Houdini in order to get access through the mazework of pipes.

His employer instructed him to strictly adhere to the rations while mixing from the jerrican, and to always wear his gloves and facemask while handling that stuff, which was to be kept in an open space where his employer could see it from the upper deck of the factory building, where he would be working.

Now, our boy had not gone through school for nothing, and had a measure of intelligence in his thick skull. Soon as he was alone he opened the mysterious jerrican, whose label had been ripped off by his boss, and sniffed the contents. And what wafted out immediately reminded him of the finer things that had been manufactured in Kariobangi Light Industries, and which he had already sampled in his neighbourhood shebeens in Koch; only that this stuff zinged much more sharply into the back of the nostrils.

Back then there were no CCTV cameras. But he was conscious of being observed, given his boss could easily surveil him from the railed-off upper deck, which had been purposely constructed by the Wahindi managers to observe what the workers below were doing. And so he kept his burning urge in check and focused on the job. Other than the two of them the cavernous factory was deserted, save for the day guards, who might equally surprise him since they went about their rounds quietly with their issue industrial-quality rubber-soled boots.

His other instructions had been to go slow on the job and cover only the section he had been allocated for the day since they needed to finish the job in the allotted one week that his boss had agreed with the Wahindi owners. Anything short of that and they wouldn’t be paid as agreed. Mzembe kept to those instructions as instructed, save for the fact that he was a fine technician who figured out things according to how the machine was designed.

He was also agile and lithe of build, and could crawl effortlessly into narrow spaces in the belly of the machines; which was probably the reasons he had been hired for the job in the first place. Meaning that by midday our boy was done cleaning his section of machinery to a spit polish, and was ready to move to the next section. In the meantime, after the lunch break he had nothing to do but loll in the curving pipeline and dream about the fat-assed girl in the house neighbouring his uncle’s house, and who had flashed him a bewitching smile the previous evening when Uncle sent him to fetch his bath water at the communal tap.

As he had gone out to grab his lunch at a kibanda he had picked a discarded plastic bottle in the gutters and stowed it in his overalls pocket. When the guard at the entrance clocked him back in he sauntered casually down the wide passageway, watching the upper deck, studying the position of the other guards, who had taken advantage of the lunch hour to crowd together by the entrance to share a smoke. Seeing it was all clear he bent over the mysterious jerrican and quickly filled his bottle, spilling some of the precious contents in haste.

Meaning that as he now lolled in the piping of the giant machines in the idle afternoon stretch he was solving the puzzle that had troubled him all day. The first sip was hot, the fumes hitting him hard, the raw spirit searing down his throat like a trail of fire before settling on the melange of Chapo dondo he had had at the kibanda at the pit of his belly. He smacked his lips and squeezed his prickled teary eyes shut and listened for a reaction. The warmth spread slowly, both in his belly and in his head, where he soon felt a giddiness that wasn’t too unpleasant. His curiosity now pricked, he decided he had come too far to stop. By the fourth sip the stuff was no longer scorching, his throat had got used to it. Now he was gulping it down like a pro. It was now a few minutes to clocking out. Our boy looked at his plastic watch and realized he needed to collect their equipment and return them to the store. He was still steady on his feet, but was now feeling extremely thirsty. He made his way towards the entrance. There was a tap outside the toilets where the workers quenched their thirst.

“Unaenda wapi, Kijana? . . . Saa bado!” barked the guard, stirring from his doze in the central box.

“Maji, mkubwa,” he said, touching his flat lizard belly, which was on fire.

He tells me he drank water like a camel. On his way back the clocking-off siren went. He peeped through the entrance and saw his employer leaning on the railing on the upper deck, dusting his hands on a greasy rag. He waved and shouted, “ Kesho, mdosi!” The old man waved back. Then he turned and left on his way home.

He joined the rest of the workgangs streaming out of the factories and fell in easily in Nairobi’s famous ‘workers’trek’; these guys who kept Kenya’s economy running rarely took a matatu or bus to or from work because of their meagre pay. Our guy had already memorized the path he would take to get to Mathare for, despite his stubbornness and thick-headedness, he also happens to be sharp as a pin and only needs to be shown something once. By then he was feeling very giddy in the head, his feet feeling like he was stepping on a mattress of air; high as a kite. It was as he was approaching the first junction where he was to turn that his knees buckled and he felt himself drifting off the dusty sidewalk into the busy road. A car horn sounded from somewhere distant. His eyes swam and he tipped forward.

The last thing he remembers after his face struck the hot tarmac was a loud screech of tires and the burning of rubber just inches from his face. Then his world went blank. (. . . to be continued).