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Finding Home Part 1
The three boats were anchored against a log at the shore. Nobody was supposed to touch anything left in them until the next morning. Nobody slept. The whole island was awake as the devil. Prayerful men prayed. Women mourned their missing. Your mother said your dad had been so secretive the last few days before his disappearance. He had been closing himself inside his hut. Perhaps he was worrying about the tough times. We had been attacked by a belt of hyacinth and fishing was almost impossible. The lake’s clear water was now buried under green twigs and it would be so for months. He had told me over beer that he was thinking of going east. I told him to spit those words out of his mouth. He did. He never mentioned that again.
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Apart from these wild musings, Aliet was surprisingly calm. The contrast between his measured presence and the provocation of his ideas perhaps explains both his devoted following and the unease he stirs in others. Walking beside him made one thing clear: Aliet’s worldview is not merely a set of opinions; it is a mirror reflecting the anxieties and contradictions of modern masculinity. Men claim supremacy yet depend on women for emotional stability; women shrink themselves to be chosen, even when the choosing devalues them; and the narratives we cling to continue to reinforce the very traps we complain about. Aliet may be controversial, but he exposes a truth that many would rather avoid: our relationships are shaped not just by love but by the power we fear losing.
As it had become the tradition of later days of postcolonial politics, funeral functions were harvest times for politicians. They attended funeral functions heavily loaded in the mouth to capitalise on silent funeral crowds, where they enthusiastically marketed their so-called ideologies to the masses. It was where they talked out their spirits and spilt beans of their competitors. No politician worth his salt missed funeral functions. Since the entry of the culture of materialism, the respect and solid attention given to the deceased and the family mourners had been left and forgotten in the forest of tradition.
Your mother is going to need your protection desperately when your father dies. Your useless Uncle Okelo has a dangerous design to inherit your mother at whatever cost. You know how much the Luo culture has been corrupted by materially oriented persons. Okelo is going to cause chaos because I know that only over your mother’s dead body would she accept being inherited by such a skunk.
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The “crazy” things our Gen Z do are no different from what we, our parents or grandparents did. My grandpa, for one, thought my father was an idiot for buying furniture instead of cattle. My father thought I was a numbskull for spending the equivalent of five months' pay on a music system instead of, wait for it, buying cattle! Mark you, clean-shaven I, who once pranced around with a bushy afro to my father’s chagrin, couldn’t stand the strings my son carried around on his head.
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In our final instalment of Betty Kilonzo's newly published Househelp Manual, we delve into the relationship between employer and househelp.
