Dan Okwiri
Penning my journal. Despite the affluence, many Nairobians toy with hell in needle for thrill. Was invited to party last week in Kilimani and the delusion in the lives of many uppity corporate Kenyans lives rained on me.
The folks all swaggered in with swanky cars 4X4s that made me drool with envy. Guests graced designer outfits, ladies strutted hip tight mini outfits which were so undersized it trumpeted their porky nakedness. Most of the girlies had cemented their faces with layers of makeup in beauteous.
Some of the spunky wannabe portly blokes all middle-aged gassed about mind-boggling money that I couldn’t comprehend. Other than the host, I knew no one, I decided to wait the party out with a glass of wine and ear to the conversation & mellow techno music.
In a while, the call of nature urged me to take a leak. I buffet knocked the toilet door, since no one answered, swung it ajar to do my thing. I wasn’t prepared for what I would peep?
A wasted lady sat on the toilet seat legs astride, her razor-thin red dappled panty messily sprawling onto the floor, it straddled her ankles. There was a needle on the floor, her mouth was foaming. Her torso & face flung crouched on her knees, her arms dangling onto floor.. Bawling out glassy eyes that stood dead still in half daze, her eyelids unable to tuck in. Her head twisted in side sleeping position on her knees. It was a spooky scene.
I shrieked, frenziedly calling my host and he looked freaked out too. Even then how he handled it drizzled me the feeling that he was not new to this. I urged him to take her to hospital, but he said hell no. The hospital might want to know the circumstances behind it & call the police. He feared the public drama might cost him his cushy 7-figure top-notch corporate job.
He buzzed a doctor pal and was told to let her sleep it off, she’ll turn around. This was all eerie to me. It gradually came to my observation that all these guys in room were woozy & pretty high on something, fondling each other in randy mollycoddle each in luscious lust. Yet hardly none taking the wine I did.
The lady in her late 30s who had passed out I would learn is a senior bank manager.
I excused myself and left in a jiffy, this just wasn’t my world. My host called me 2 days later to apologize. I said to him, let it be.
Nairobi of today ain’t the same coffee I left in 2010 when I migrated the city. Kilimani was a leafy suburbia, it even had monkeys playfully dangling its trees. The one I encountered was popping dizzy tall apartments.
Many of the new residents are flashy Nigerians with bulky gold chains, flashy attire and are rambunctiously boisterous. Many of them are pushing heroin to the upper-middle-class Kenyans, and it has caught the city like wildfire. The density of Nairobi’s gated apartments provides a quintessential market for drugs. The residents are young, affluent, & needling for excitement.
Heroin washes Kilimani, Klileshewa, Ruaka and Westlands behind the modern facade. We are losing a generation before our very eyes. Folks in Nairobi hardly consume beer anymore like my genre did, they are injecting themselves with the devil’s needle. Ladies have joined the bandwagon too. The folks I met at the hang weren’t ordinary, they had good jobs, living large and almost all of them divorced.
The junkie generation is here, and we are squatting on a time bomb. These drug peddlers needling apartment dwellers in hook must be brought to book. Those ladies now frequently plunging from balconies in apartments in Kilimani to death have been drugged on something that ain’t wine. Smell the coffee, for Nairobians heroin is the new beer in swine. For me that ain’t fine, let me stick to wine.
#okwirimy journal, my thoughts, my walk…
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