What the WhatsApp! ( When your electronic guide to the Galaxy packs up!)

The Igane manyatta before it was repaired by Ekiru the terrible Turk(ana)

Like I've said before on this blog, and as the more perceptive of my readers (all ten of them!) may well know, we are now in the multi-dimensional age of intergalactic governments, Big Brother, beyond 1984 and so forth. Anyone with a hand-held pocket-friendly device can instantly insult or be nice to any number of other someones in any number of places in the known world and, ever since space travel went commercial with the launch of Virgin Galactica, space and time myths of years gone by have been smashed to smithereens.

I was sharply reminded of this yesterday when my hand-held guide to the galaxy in the shape of a Nokia Asha packed up in the middle of a conversation with a girl sitting on Nyamurembe hill in M7land and another at a glitzy wine tasting event in  in Stellenbosch, Western Cape.  I was also trying to reason with my teenage daughter about something important and halfway through an article about muses and how they were considered the nine daughters of Zeus which was supposed to help me with stuff I am not supposed to tell you..

Panic!

But panic at times is what we need to be inventive; to think in a tangent, to reinvent our environment. So  I thought of all those things I could do and don’t do now because I’ve got my electronic device: the magazines about disease that I used to read at the reception areas of medical clinics, the personal errands I used to run and the freedom I had of not being available to the world all the time, but most of all, it just occurred to me that I should be writing my new look blog.

So I dropped the phone turned to my word processor, but was sidelined by a few jacaranda seedlings that  needed planting. I stuck them in the ground and added some humus from what formerly used to be my Maasai manyatta before one heavy bout of rain brought it crashing down. This was as a result of an unfortunate encounter with a Turkana moran called Ekiru, who had insisted on piling mud on the manyatta’s roof, saying that the cow dung used by the Maasai was not as good as the mud they (the Turkana) use for their dwellings. 

Besides providing all the humus I ever needed for mock agriculture and landscaping for my republic, the manyatta also has the two dubious distinctions, being not only the shortest-lived of all human dwellings ever built in my neighbourhood, but also the structure after which our area was named (see Manyatta, Athi river on Google Maps). It has ever since been replaced by the hut, which I may or may not attempt to write about next. 

Meanwhile, may I recommend that you check out  http://amolosart.blogspot.com. It may change your mind about a lot of stuff. Buy her pictures even (if you can understand them!).