Oral East Africa>The Bonus Tea party, Inyali farmers uproot tea bushes At the hut of the story

Written by Stanley Gazemba

When I was a kid growing up in this tiny hilly hamlet called Inyali in Vihiga County there was a memorable glow to the village homesteads around this time of the year. It is the time when, if you took a stroll on the village paths and perked up your nose you would catch the aroma of frying beef, chicken or chapatis wafting out of the thatched kitchen huts as the tea farmers fattened up after a year of starving themselves on boiled magaraba and maseve veggies.

The farmers would have settled their debts at the village duka and would be walking around with a monied swagger, their heads held high.

As for the head of the homestead he would be nowhere to be seen. All the farmers would have abandoned their tiny tea patches and hit the nearby market towns of Mbale, Chavakali and Mudete to do what my people call “kupigia mwili pole'” - literally to put a salve on your tired farm-tortured bones. Often in anticipation of this season of bounty that came around only once a year the farmers would have forcefully pruned their tea bushes even if they were not ready for pruning, knowing that for the coming couple of weeks no one would mind them.

Self evident prosperity

It was easy to tell when the tea bonus season was upon us. At this time fundis were extremely busy. It was common to sport a battered pick up truck backing into a homestead to offload shiny mabati roofing sheets purchased at trader Damugo or Godeka’s hardware store in Mbale town or the village tycoon Ambwere’s store in Chavakali. Meantime as brand new sheets would be offloaded the fundis would be busy tearing the thatch from the roof of the main house, sending the mice and rats that had been nesting in there for ages scampering for safety. It was time to give the homestead an upgrade.

Meanwhile, as the womenfolk supervised the work the men would be perched on the “sina tabu” stools at the pubs in Mbale and Chavakali market towns cradling their twin Tusker Export bottles, often their arms cradled around the rump of the fat crafty barmaid, nodding along to Franco and TPOK Jazz as he belted out the praises of Azda nkombo ya sika. Often one of the excited chaps would have colonized the coin-fed jukebox in the corner, forcing everyone else to listen to and dance to his music selection because once you had fed in a shilling your song had to play to the end.

At the back the beef would be sizzling on the grill, the butcher kept busy serving up the orders that came from the front nonstop, and which the fat barmaids were kept busy delivering. Not that they minded. Often they ended up eating half the meat!

It was easy to sniff out where the tea farmers were saying “pole” to their tired, creaky bones. If you were in Mbale the place to find them was Kadogo, Egebet, Oceanic or North End pubs. The particularly adventurous lot would book themselves into a room at North End with a voluptuous gap-toothed beauty from whence they would daily dispatch a cunning drinking buddy to deliver a kilo of meat home and fetch them a change of clothes. Of course they could never disclose where this character was holed up, and the missus knew not to ask. Not as if she wasn't keeping busy with her own monkey business while the ninja was amusing himself with the shine-eye girls of the towns.

The Embassy

If you were in Chavakali the place where you would get them was Embassy pub. I knew it because that is the place where my own father surprised me with a stinging slap when he caught me and some other village lads peeping through the bamboo screen in the doorway trying to find out what was going on in that hedonistic mystery place of thumping rumba. The maths teacher at Chugi Primary had ordered us to fetch bottle tops with which we did our arithmetics back in the day, and since back then villagers only treated themselves to soda on Christmas day, the only other place to find bottle tops was on the garbage dump outside a pub.

This was generally how tea farmers spent their week or two after the bonus pay came around back in the day. And it wasn't small money. Back in the day, as the old man “stepped on a crate” at Embassy he would have set aside enough money to pay for our tuition at Mumias Boys' when January came around. We would also have received our shiny polyester pants for Christmas and been shod in new Bata Prefect shoes in anticipation of First Term. All that was courtesy of the mighty tea bonus windfall.

PR Prosperity

When KTDA announced the rates for the second payment, popularly known as the bonus, this year farmers were utterly disappointed. The rates range from Sh 45.5 as the least amount that the farmers will get for every kilogramme of green leaf delivered, while the highest rate for the farmers is Sh 57.3 for a kilogramme.

KTDA has tried to explain that the bonus rates were based on tea prices, tea volumes, as well as the production and operational costs of each factory.

It is Bonus season but this time when we took a walk around the same village it would appear as if that was a glorious era that was long forgotten by the village tea farmers. Instead they dragged their feet in the mud with their tattered mitumba shirts just barely hiding their shame and drowned their sorrows and displeasure in the little comfort they could find at the bottom of a glass of the fiery chang’aa liquor at the neighbourhood Mama Pima’s joint, their bellies caved in from a daily diet of ugali mrenda.

All we could see around were bitter farmers who were even contemplating uprooting their tea bushes and instead planting nappier for their cows or trees because the management of the tea sector had reduced them to paupers who were slaving away to line the pockets of brokers who were plenty in the tea- production chain and ultimately the big boys who set prices at the tea auction in Mombasa and finally in London. That tea farming had turned them into slaves on their own land.