Dan Okwiri
By the time you hit 60 years, most of your peers are either dead or divorced.
Penning my journal. What do you live for when you pop 60 years? A question I poke myself every dawn. Hard question to toy for a homeboy. Life has a way of jetting past, leaving you zip down before you get the baby in crib. Can’t believe I’m hitting 6th floor. It was only the other day I had big dreams in realm, aspired to be a doctor. Along the way, I don’t know what jinxed it?
Like anyone on 6th floor, I haven’t achieved most of my dreams but I darn tried. In my 20s I frowned on those in their 60s, saw them as archaic & backwards, but today I am the antithesis of what I envisioned. The world in 2025 is a very different groove from what I hooved to in my 20s. It’s an unforgiving, materialistic, dreary concrete jungle.
I thought like many young ones today building a house in the Kenyan countryside is “dead capital’, but I have done just that. Who wants to die in concrete sewer. I love verdant greensy. A guy who has a village home most likely owns a city one as well. Many of these twits who call village homes dead capital have none in the city as well. The wealth of being African is to own a second home.
City born & bred, I even own a house in the city so it’s not like I can’t live there. I didn’t conceive for a minute that I would one day pack my bags and march out of Nairobi never to return, like it happened in 2010.
No one saw it coming, not even myself, not my better half. Just like that I packed my possessions & headed to Migori, a rural town I pretty knew nobody, armed with all my savings bagged with determination to succeed. Oblivious of the fact that my retirement money wasn’t enough to build the hotel I intended.
Migori is pretty much a rural town in the boonies, I must leak it has grown, & it has been kind to me. Over the moon, I learned to swing to its vibe, and trash my city idiosyncrasies that Migori had no time for in prescribe. Believe me you, city folks have lot of dainty hang-ups, they live for show.
Rural folks live for real, I was caught in between, in stir fry. Here men are men & women too have no pretenses. 80% of Migori men are multi-party & women here prefer it that way, she lives her space & he roosts his nests in best, the catch word is he must provide for all his baby mammas. Personally I mind my business, I ain’t a truther either.
Perhaps let me kickstart its vibe bottoms up! I no longer live for show business. I live for me, I wear what I want, not to impress but for my comfort. Our sunny year-round weather windows Wuod Baba the ability to wear shorts 365 days a year. At 60 yrs, this makes a world of difference to my world.
I love weather in Kenya, in fact with all the issues we have for cry tissue, the gods graced us with the best weather in the world, tell me. I have travelled perhaps 30+countries, & the weather sulks! Warm & fuzzy, the weather is one thing I candy about Kenya. I know how it is to box in a 10×10 fridgebox room in the UK too frosty to venture out, everyone sulking in a wet room totally depressed.
The type of food I eat in my 60s matters to me increasingly. Fresh fruit & fresh fish, & real road runner chicken slowly boiled on rural woodsy fire with nothing but fresh grass onions, real ginger, garlic & pepper, it tastes like heaven.
At this point of life I have all the time, and I got to treat my body in queen. Free-range chicken & fish is cheap in the rural boonies, I wouldn’t afford to live like I do in Nairobi city. I own a microwave but I use as a cupboard! Last thing I want is radiation-cooked food, I avoid using the microwave like plague unless it’s an emergency.
Let me spin it, by the time you hit 60 years, most of the people you know are either dead or divorced. Here’s is the news from the book of life, if you ain’t fallen to any of these you’re successful! If you’re in relatively good health, & you can walk 2 kms without a sweat, & ain’t diabetic or blood pressured you have done well.
If your kids & “mama watoto” can hold a live conversation with you for 15 minutes without squabble or demands, you have done terribly well. Most my chats nowadays are on WhatsApp and the only messages I receive on WhatsApp, is send me money on mpesa. Everyone sees a 60-year-old as a dysfunctional ATM!
Most in 60s live a pretty dull life, behind the 4x4s is a man hobbled in ritzy uppity Karen or whatever leafy neighborhood who will sleep hungry with wife who won’t cook for him purging in revenge for sins unknown.
You may want to ask me, why won’t you cook for himself? Now, cooking for one person is challenging, do you cook an 1/8 th of a kilo of meat or a half kg? Serve yourself & sit on your humongous 8-seater dining table with no souls but you. It’s eerie but that’s the gig that a 60-year-old bloke digs. What would my late mum think me if she saw me in a kitchen? A total failure!
The only calls I get is a flood of girls in skimpy dress inboxing me trying to get my attention, chasing me for money in the name of love. They love freebies, and think that I am insane enough to give it to them for a piece of tail in pail.
Baby girl nothing is free, you got 40 years to work for yourself, don’t expect a 60-year-old dude to do for you what you can’t do yourself! Just think for yourself by the time a Kenyan dude hits 60 how many ladies has he rowed. You ain’t the first neither my last.
The type of people you hangout with in your 60s is crucial. Don’t hangout with anyone who increases your intake of aspirin. Especially those with inflated ego, who won’t admit they make mistakes. Can’t stand folks who value their cars more than real people. They are plenty of them in every nook and cranny, spending their weekends preening their cars.
Don’t hang around people who are always talking about wealthy politicians, money schemes & monied folk yet they themselves haven’t made money all the while. If they are in their 60s, they are talking fantasy, the grim reaper will soon be knocking their door for his share of whatever left, & their families asking for contribution for their funerals.
Now if you’re a bloke in your 60s, you’ll spoilt for choice when it comes to ladies, that’s if you can still hack them. Most ladies still in the pool are divorced and have bile against men beyond redemption, but discreetly dying to be with one, & nowadays even willing to dole their quid to be with one. Washindwe!
Loneliness is a painful ship with its ceiling leaking from its roofing. Most men sadly can’t spew their minds in fear of gender warriors & trying to look right. Hypocrites! You have no balls to be men.
Blokes 60yrs+ you got to look after yourselves, nobody cares about you but you. One thing that I find increasingly soothing is visiting a sauna, but it’s has to be a natural woodsy fired one, & not the electric sauna found in the cities that bakes you in an electric oven. Don’t need the electric radiation. Our rural saunas are real deal for meal.
At 60 yrs you got to wake your inner feelings, & follow the passions you weren’t able to do, and for me it’s the violin. I actually take my violin to social places, pubs & play along with music that’s playing. Initially I got stares & vilified, 99% of rural folksy never seen or heard a violin before, but today rock to it. Who cares who says what, I don’t live for them!
On the flip side at 60 years, I’m increasingly paying black tax! Funerals of peers ubiquitous in flood, who I left back in the city. Rather than all these fancy showbiz mega village dome tent funerals, why not cremate them in Kariokor & dispose their ash in the city, instead of the convoy processions ferrying their bodies back home. Cremation is great option if you have no rural home, who will know that you didn’t build one! We don’t need city failures here.
My late dad kicked the bucket @ 62 years, he had 2 brothers one died at 61 years, the other at 63 years, dude I know @ 60 yrs am now steering slippery ground. It’s do or die.
At 60 years, you begin to realize that nobody is really successful, and if you think you are, it depends on your measure of what you treasure. If driving a 4×4 is your show gig, and you managed to buy a Land Cruiser V8, just think one day how your dream will land in the scrap yard. Think how many lives you destroyed in acquiring it, think about those who frowned in your presence. Think of what happened about your dream life, and you’ll realize it was all a dream.
The last bastion for an African man in his 60s is his rural home, there he is a man whose opinion still counts, he yells & gets heard and chickens crow to his shout. Local damsels treat him king in fling. This is what life was, and how it should be. If anybody denies you a life, it’s yourself.
As the countryside don like I am, you can busy yourself in school committee, be a church elder & choir master, welfare groups & farmer too. It ain’t that bad my lad. If you don’t make yourself useful to others, you’ll quickly turn to be garbage.
Church activities cleanses your sins, & they’re pretty saved ladies in the choir too, who know their jig! Many of them, husbands dead. Tell me they’ll dish you plenty of comfort & penance for your sins. At least you’ll die in mollycoddle comfort. At this point of life, my peace matters more than yours or even my ego.
If you choose to live in make believe world haggard & retrenched in the city, with V8 parked out your door that you’re unable to fuel, it’s your choice, hang on to your frustrated fake life. At 60 years you count for nothing in the city.
Ask yourself why many African American men in USA are migrating to the motherland, they are looking for a cushy life. I tell you there’s life out in the countryside, if you may!
Don’t judge my gig, nobody here appointed you judge in this jig. Young brats, you won’t fare better than Wuod Baba did if you make it to 60. Life has a way of humbling every soul.
#Okwiri, my journal, my thoughts, my walk…
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