"THE WORLD IS FULL OF ‘EM"

My taxi guy Lenny is a nice young Rwandan.

Beside his tendency to play loud music and to talk too much and much too loudly over it, and to occasionally take too much liberty with the exactness of time (he once called me to inform me he was at my place to take me to the airport long after I had called the bluff on his “I’m almost there” mantra, taken another cab and had just made check-in by a whisker!), he is, in fact, a really nice guy. And I mean this in exactly the same way it would elicit the leering rejoinder “The world is full of them” from Vernon Ayton, if he, instead of you, were reading this.

Always eager to please (Lenny, not Vernon), he will, if you complain, lower the volume on the car stereo and apologise profusely for it. He will even ask you what kind of music you like and put it on at a friendly decibel level whenever you enter his always neat, sweet-smelling vehicle. His eagerness to please is, as a matter of fact, a character flaw of sorts. Why, just the other evening, in a classic case of how low the service standards have to be raised from in the city of Kigali, he lost my fare again - and not because he is a bad guy.

After I’ve been waiting outside the Nakumatt where he usually parks for almost a quarter an hour on a rather cold Kigali evening that threatens to burst into spontaneous showers, he saunters up to me with another man in tow and tells me what’s on his mind.

“This is mkubwa wangu (my big brother),” he explains with a wild wave in the direction of the goateed middle-weight guy who smiles eagerly at me and makes as if to board with me but stops when he sees the sura ya kazi look on my face. ‘Can he,” Lenny continues, “come with us as I take you home? Ako pia na mke wake hapa (he’s with his wife),” my cabbie adds with a respectful leer.

“But Lenny … ,” I grumble, pointing at the cigarette I have immediately lit as I settle comfortably in the front seat of the taxi voiture, “how do you expect me to enjoy my ride if you take your passengers?”

“It’s okay, they are smokers too,” he explains, missing the point entirely.

Now one of the good points for Lenny's cab is that I can always smoke in it without the guilt that comes with smoking in someone else’s car. He himself smokes some brand of Rwandan cigar that smells suspiciously like burnt grass and immediately after sprays the car with a sweet smelling perfume which he hides under his seat. But what he is proposing is different. Unless we are splitting the fare, I don’t see myself sharing the ride with these guys whether they smoke or not.

“Okay, let’s make a deal,” I say to Lenny reasonably, “you just take them first, then pick me up right here… No, it’s okay,” I insist when he offers -  rather late in the game I must add – to take me first then come back for his big brother and rastafarian girlfriend/wife. “I will go into Nakumatt and buy something I forgot,” I lie with a straight face.

As Lenny and his non-paying passengers pile into their nice-guy-mobile and take off in a direction, I take off in another and get into another cab belonging to another nice guy who quickly takes me home without much ado. An hour later, while relaxed in my dwelling, my feet up and a specially selected comedy DVD blaring away for my entertainment after a long day’s work, the phone rings and it’s Lenny.

“Hello my boss,” he yells above decibels in his car when I pick up. “I’m now outside Nakumatt.”

“Really?” I ask, thinking of a gentle way to let him know I had lied about waiting till he got back to the city centre …

Surely the world, Vernon was right, is full of nice guys.

©Lloyd Igane, Kigali, 30/10/10

kreative@ earthling.net 

Why I haven’t bought a Kagame t-shirt yet

As we celebrate Paul Kagame’s birthday today, I realise with a pang of guilt that although I own and proudly wear a shiny bronze pin adorned with the likeness of the president on a background of RPF colours, I have not yet bought a Kagame t-shirt.

“I am waiting for the price to come down” is the story I’ve stuck with ever since the rather too orderly august presidential campaigns when I watched awestruck as Rwandans and foreigners alike scrambled over each other to buy PK merchandise. Great high-quality stuff too; not the crap I’m used to seeing fought over at rowdy political rallies in Nairobi.

The 10,000 francs ($16) for the t-shirt is however not the real problem. Truth is, I’ve become pathologically apprehensive of certain people’s tendency to label me a self-appointed apologist for the RPF leader and CEO President. Why, just the other day while watching the news in Kenya, I caught myself hopefully scanning a line-up of regional dignitaries attending a summit in Nairobi and getting rather anxious that my personal favourite East African president was missing the photo op.

 “I read your blog,” says Manwa Magoma, a Kenyan acquaintance of mine who ran a regional ad agency in Kigali for a few months before scurrying back to Kampala. “I can’t say you sound quite like Kariuki Chotara of the Moi era, but you come quite close.”

. But why, pray, would one write about evil where one sees none? I write about poor service standards and the slow last-minute.com approach to things and bad TV, don’t I? And isn’t it a most ungrateful guest indeed who, after going walkabout in a strange neighbourhood, unmolested even at late hours, turns around and rails against the heavy presence of armed guards?

 “Every sweet-smelling rose has its thorns,” they tell me darkly when I insist that nighttime Kigali streets offer a far higher life expectancy than Nairobi streets in the daytime.

“But there are too many armed soldiers everywhere I look,” complains Manwa, refusing to see the logic that too many overtly armed soldiers are better than too many covertly armed thugs.  “You are too scared,” he accuses me, “of rubbing the government the wrong way.”

Yes, I am Manwa. I am so scared that, like King Julien of Madagascar, I have people for that.

I also have relatively big ears for the conventional wisdom of ages past. Consider if you may this story told to me when I was barely seven by a very old and wise grandmother (of a neighbour) who walked with a permanent stoop because “the white man’s black policemen” broke her back by walking all over it with hobnailed boots during the mostly inglorious hunt for the Mau Mau.

A long time ago, during the Famine of Many Monkeys, which was long before the Famine of the Great Corner, a boy and his mother walked a long gruesome journey on growling empty stomachs in search of the home of a one-eyed man called Mbutu, whose wealth and generosity were legendary. Another legendary thing about him was his aversion to any mention of his bad eye or even a hint of it by carelessly suggesting he had one good eye. When they finally got to the old man’s farm, the son could not help but marvel at the abundance of food. The barns overflowed with stored grain, the cows walked funny on account of painfully extended full udders and the farms were choking with ready-to-harvest cereals, fruits, and tubers. There were grains and bananas just being toyed with by noisy monkeys as birds and beasts came and left as they wished yet they couldn’t finish the food. Old, childless and too tired to give a hoot, Mr and Mrs. Mbutu just watched.  

“Wowee!,” exclaimed the boy scampering up a mango tree and biting into a succulent fruit, barely before a bewildered Mrs. Mbutu had finished welcoming them into her homestead.

”Remember,” whispered the mother sidling up to the mango tree to avoid being overheard by their hostess, “we can eat whatever we like; as much as we wish. But we can not______”

‘“____ mention the old man’s one bad eye,” said the son in the same urgent whisper.

As his mother went about chasing away the monkeys and other wildlife and generally helping the old couple with all the milking, harvesting, and storing, the young man jumped from tree to tree, barn to dining table to tree again, eating his way through his welcome, so to speak, not quite unlike the monkeys his mother was throwing little rocks at.

On the third day, the son, now brimming with over-fed confidence, his stomach bulging with food and his cheeks looking smoother and rounder, climbed up an over-laden mango tree for what would be his last time.

“Mum, Mum,” he shouted at the top of his voice for everyone to hear; he rubbed his stomach contentedly, “I am so full I could accidentally mention Mr. Mbutu’s bad eye!”

He was about to break wind contentedly but the old man’s anguished bellow stopped the wind in its tracks as mother and son were banished from the land of plenty, forever.

Now if you don’t mind, I'm off to see if those nice t-shirts are still in stock.

Happy Birthday, Mr. President.

©Lloyd Igane, Kigali 23rd October, 2010. kreative@earthling.net