On one Thursday evening, my brother and I set off on a journey to the famed second-hand market of Gikomba. The road to Gikomba was littered with new buildings, banks and departmental stores and I found the market to be a lot smaller than I thought it would be. The rich wanted more land to tarmac and build on and the market was now just but a little muddy clearing.
The mud in Nairobi is relentless when it hugs your sole with an aim of getting your entire body on it. Everyone in the market was doing that flamingo-esque walk where you raise your feet higher than you normally would and place your arms in a ballerina position to improve your balance. Those more familiar with the market were marching comfortably with their Wellington boots sneering at us with a mild superiority complex.
I find African markets to be the craziest places on earth. I was constantly dodging mitumba bales and streamlining myself with walls to evade the mikokoteni then knocking shoulders with almost everyone there. There are also moments when I lost my brother in the crowd with the many turns that we made and people passing in front of me and behind and around and how I would slow down staring at all the nice merchandise hanging from the stalls.
We finally got to ‘the shop.’ With mitumba, you never change your supplier, or rather, your stylist. As my brother tried on some clothes, my eyes stumbled upon a trail of smoke with a certain level of choreography it seemed like it was a smoke signal. Beneath it was a group of men in a circle seated on whatever they could find. They stared at whatever was in their line of sight as smoke found its way out through their mouths and nostrils.
They seemed very tired and wore dirty worn out clothes that the sellers in the market had probably disposed of. They are called bebabeba. They are the solution to the narrow paths of the market that prevent loads from being transported by car. They are the beasts of burden that carry bales heavier than themselves on their shoulders and drag loads on makeshift carts for a meagre living.
I honestly believe that a day in their lives must be the quintessential example of a long day. I imagine waking up on a pavement because I never earn enough to have a home of my own and I begin my day of begging people to let me break my back for them just so I can get enough to get by with.
I imagine how difficult it must be to remain noble and good; to resist the temptation of joining a gang and mugging people in the Nairobi CBD just metres away instead. I imagine how bad it must feel to be the example parents use when they send their children to school of what they will end up as if they do not work hard. I imagine how bad it feels to be sneered at by all who see me in the market because they see me as an anathema. To be reduced from being a human being to just a carrier. To not know how lovely it is to smell nice or how wonderful it feels to dress nicely.
The pain of letting go of all the dreams you had as a kid; of being a doctor and saving lives, and all you can do is blame ‘the system’ for your predicament. I imagine the weight of hatred that develops for the world that treats you so cruelly that you come to believe that all you will ever amount to is a bebabeba. The worst thing, however, must be the knowledge that I shall wake up to the same miserable existence I had yesterday. This loop, in addition to a market that is literally shrinking must be why they lose all hope for a better future.
Perhaps that is why they smoke, because in some way each time they heave the smoke from their corrupted lungs, they get some relief. When the relief is too momentary and they broke their backs enough that day, they often get drunk perhaps because it is a longer relief. I imagine it must be a state of euphoria for them. Perhaps in that state, they break free from the loop and they place themselves in a world of their imagination. Perhaps they place themselves in the cars they admire or the office chairs that swing and turn. As they sleep in trenches and ditches, they are in Wonderland; dreaming just as we all did as children because that is all we all were in the beginning; children with big dreams.
You should see the bebabeba in political rallies crowded like fans in a Beyoncé concert screaming with joy at their new found messiah. Witfully bamboozled by politicians, the bebabeba always seem to believe that their struggle shall not be long. During these rallies, their dreams are revived and their clairvoyance renewed. They carry bales with enthusiasm for it will not be long before they need not carry bales to make a living because so and so promised this and that. Yet time and time again they play the fool.
That said, I imagine it must be easier to believe in a perfect and heavenly new world than to believe in the betterment of the harsh and flawed one you live in now. Maybe that is why the market air is usually heavy with the sounds of gospel music from Christian crusades as the local churches try to get more people ‘saved’. With nothing else to do, the bebabeba often listen and I am sure they always hear about a God who can save them. I am sure they hear about how happy the poor are for they shall receive an ethereal kingdom with no sorrows.
Other not-so-local churches will have crusades at the market too and the bebabeba will listen and get born again, and again on the next crusade and again and again. They will keep getting born again until they give up on this higher power they are preached to about that will uplift them and ease their struggle and the only reason they will keep getting born again is because when they are on that stage undergoing the Pentecostal pugilistic exercise of bloodying and binding everything with the blood of Jesus Christ, we see them not as beasts of burden but as people with a chance at a better life. We see them as human.
I love the way your literature takes a turn to focus on something I usually don't think about. This was awesome✨