A once-married man describing women…the whole lot of them as naturally bad?
It’s clear this guy who has just joined me at my table knows me better than I know him because he called my name after saying hi.
I soon learn he’s called Dennis. I’m a typical M’bongo who subscribes to the creed instilled unto us by Mwalimu Nyerere: all human beings are my kin, and Africa (read Bongo) is one.
I offer Dennis a “welcome drink", and we’re soon conversing on numerous topics until we navigate into family matters. At some point, he declares:
“I’ve vowed never to marry again…never!” he says, his face a picture of hurt.
“Why?” I ask and add before he has answered: “That’s a very drastic decision… and how come you’re using the word ‘again’ like you’re a divorcee?”
“Yes, I had a wife, but what she did to me was terrible; unforgivable… I now know women are bad by their very nature,” says Dennis.
This sounds interesting, I say to myself. A once-married man describing women…the whole lot of them as naturally bad? I ask him to explain, and he gives a long, detailed story of how his wife moved to bewitch him. Imbibing the second beer that I had unconsciously offered him, he narrates:
“You see, I used to hold the job of a driver-mechanic attached to a senior government official. Now my wife’s evil friends advised her to get the services of a powerful witchdoctor based in Bagamoyo.”
The mganga, they told her, could fix me so I would have neither the desire nor the capacity to do anything with any woman other than her!”
He tells me he got the details of his wife’s machinations from one of the very friends who gave her directions to the Bagamoyo witch doctor.
“One day I arrived home unannounced at 8pm—my boss having cancelled an upcountry trip—and when I neared my house, I peeped through the sitting room window of our semi-finished house and saw a man in boxers and a singlet, seated on my favourite couch, with a slaughtered black cat and some witch doctor's paraphernalia on the floor,” he says.
He entered the house quietly through the back door, rushed to the sitting room and attacked the mganga viciously. His wife, who was “poorly dressed", fainted and was crushed to the floor after he beat her mganga to near-death.
Dennis says he helped the mganga to his feet, and dragged him to the door, pushed him out and let him flee into the dark night.
“I didn’t want him to die in my house,” says Dennis, as he hails a barmaid to bring us a round.
He returned to look at his wife, still unconscious, he says, adding. “I checked her breathing and concluded she was alive, then I walked to the nearby grocery and started to drink afresh," he says.
He informs me the wife has since vanished, together with her child whose father he doesn’t know.
When I return from the gents, I find Dennis polishing off his beer. He then excuses himself, saying a client has called him from his garage.
When I’m ready to leave, I demand my bill. I’m told it’s Sh12,000. It means Dennis didn’t pay for the round he ordered!
When I express my disappointment to our mhudumu, a guy at a nearby table asks, "Kwani, bro, what story was Dennis telling you…I saw you listening to him keenly.”
When I brief him, he laughs and says, “It was all fiction… Dennis tells that same story to any patron who cares to listen…and he often earns free beers for it.”
Oh, Bongo, my beloved country; I say to myself as I part with my hard-earned twelve thou and leave!
