OÙ T’ES PAPA? – A DECADE OF LOOKING FOR YOU AND FINDING MYSELF

“Knock, knock-knockin’ on heaven’s door”, before the Devil is done greasing his gates.

2237h, February 16th, 2026. Would it even be appropriate if I wrote this homage any earlier than a few hours to my personal and your anniversary’s deadline? This is despite writing it in my mind for these last 6 months or so. I have imagined sentences and lost them, I have recalled memories and kept them. Tonight, I recreate the past and immortalize you.

Hi Dad, Wakia Awa,

Time really does make good use of its wings and dashing feet doesn’t it? Passing faster than my grey hairs can pepper my mind as well as conversation. I was just updating you yesterday about the family was I not? It’s hard to imagine the 5 year salute has now doubled for the sum of years you have been away. I apologize for being so long gone. That half decade arrived like the flu but left a memory gap for which the CDC is yet to find a vaccine. All I possibly remember is that J&J became famous during the Covid pandemic but when Big Bad Boy Diddy huffed and puffed, the reasons were no longer as academic. That probably gave you a chuckle didn’t it? If not, I don’t claim to be the natural stand up comedian that you were.

Now that we are past the chipping of the ice or as I call it aligning my thoughts using filler drivel, allow me to get to the realness as you liked it. I have known you all my life as one never to waste words unless they made others smile or exuded well thought out ideas or responses. Something that a noisy child like me could never understand till I grew older. The quieter I grew, the more questions that arose especially from dear mum. I don’t believe she will ever reconcile that I am the same person and that in my change I have found my rest. In my solitude, I create and release the cacophony of ideas clashing and banging in my head. I get to rest when the internal noise dies down, even if for just a day.

Today, that noise threatened to overwhelm me. Here I was, anxious over a new project, excited to write about you later in the day and then mid way through the morning, I learn that a dear friend of 20 years left this plane to join yours over a year ago. I couldn’t figure out which emotion to feel, which feeling to express. On one side, I had lived long enough since you departed to talk to you or of you with a smile on my face. On the other, the idea of you also meant the reality of my friend’s exit. In the end I chose to compartmentalize, I owe you today. I apologize in advance because this note is also coated with grief deferred. I will cry tomorrow.

My first memory of you is probably not real but the amalgamation of years seeing that photo of you holding me while seated on the stones that would become our home to date. To be truthful, the memory begins not with you but your leopard print hat. I don’t even know whether it fits to be called a hat or where it had originated. All I know is that I was obsessed with stealing it off your head and wearing it. It covered my entire face and half my body. It also smelled like you and Sportsman. Though in retrospect, I thought of the combined scent as just you. The other half of that memory is me tripping over those same stones as I was prone to always falling over. It could be the same memory or a similar one as falling over was so regular that I also sat on a hot cooking stove or jiko at one point. This is besides the point but I also remember the last time I truly fell, in a ditch while jogging in the first week of high school. Soon after I would learn dance and grace, even though to date I still say my toes curl towards the ground because of how long I’d been trying to grab at it.

“Most of what I know I’ve learned from falling, from placing the brighter side of my hands against the earth
and pressing until vertical. The ground has taught me more about flight than the sky ever could.”
― Rudy Francisco, I’ll Fly Away

From hereon the memories flow haphazard, complete and in pieces. For some reason, just like all African dads, you were to be feared. I played along and I think you always knew this. Especially how the entire family seemed taken aback when I would decide to keep prodding at your stomach and asking why it was round and still firm. I was almost a pre-teen while doing this so being a child was not my excuse or yours to errrm stomach it. Dearest mother was the disciplinarian, sparing no cane at school or at home. But again, just like most African homes, the least feared. If a cousin said they’d seen you at the shopping centre, a day’s work would be completed by all hands in the 10 minutes it took you to cycle home. If the front gate banged shut announcing your arrival, the chickens would be forced to roost and the dogs chained for the night acting like they’d eaten their dinner a few hours earlier. It is thus quite interesting that 1 of the 2 times you actually caned/whipped me or us (the hardened boys) had to do with not feeding our “pet” rabbits on time. I was slowly understanding that you could never stomach seeing an animal abused. This was why we had the lesson lashed quickly that whether it was pets of our own acquisition as the rabbits were, they would receive the same attention and care once they arrived in your homestead.

The 2nd time you would whip me with what I very well remember was a bicycle rubber strap was truly so well deserved that I almost thanked you when it was done. I was disappointed in my own decision making but also mostly in my creation. What incidence is this you ask? To those alive in Kenya in the 1990s, you remember a show titled Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman. Now her love interest Sully, whom we called Selly all our lives because there was no Google to prove us wrong, was known for possessing a native American’s tomahawk. Genius me decided that one of the old office seats in the store full of cobwebs and past use items was going to sacrifice a leg so my battle axe could gain an arm. This might seem crazy but I blame the fact that I’d already received a home made spear to the head before then. Boys! After a day’s toiling, my resulting weapon could neither fly in circles or stick to its intended target. My disappointment hurt than the beating but at least the lesson that nothing was ever truly useless stuck.

Fast forward to a few years later and I would soon learn that men are boys and boys become men through practice than the passage of time. You loved attending the ASK shows, bringing in various pamphlets on new age farming practices (Supa Money Maker pump comes to mind), all manner of new gadgets and gizmos and on this occasion you had brought a football or as we called it ball ya pumsi. Now, we had already broken enough windows with our home made sponge and polythene footballs playing one touch right in front of the kitchen, so it was a 100% risk to bring a real football into a compound with 3 boys, their cousins and family friends. Little did I know that on this day I would be suffering a similar fate to that of the long forgotten (ok, not by mum) window panes. You found us playing football at around 6 pm, darkness was creeping in but one could still make out the white bits of the football. A loose ball found itself at your feet and with the legs that had played football for ages when young and ridden a bicyle for decades, you unleashed a Granit Xhaka like shot for the goal post (the house wall and the water tank), only it didn’t find its intended target but my stomach. As I fell over, you turned into my big brother in seconds (our age gap is 40), quickly rubbing my stomach, declaring the game over in hushed tones and saying we should get inside without raising any suspicion. All this to escape the ire of dearest mother. As all this transpired, I realized you expected no tears from me and that kukausha was about to become my new reality. Men!

I cannot speak of you without bringing up your type of education and wrestling (WWF not WWE). Every Tuesday when the car battery powering the black and white Greatwall TV would have enough power, you’d steal me from the study room so I could explain what the current storylines were since the previous week. Mum thought you were pulling me from studies but I was learning new things through different mediums. On the Tuesdays, KBC would decide to disapppoint me, I would sit and listen to programs like Face to Face, In Search of an Answer and Professional View as you snored the day away on “Dad’s seat”. Also let’s just face it, I was doing no studying when in the study room as I’d never found anything worth revising for in primary school. My absence probably gave my siblings much needed silence to actually do serious work. As I came to learn about your past, especially your career, I started understanding why you viewed life as the teacher. From accompanying surveyors as a kanda ya moko to learning the trade through observation and questioning till you acquired your own instruments and licences becoming Mukabi Surveyor to many from Kinale to Gatamaiyu, from Ndeiya to Thikimu. Most of your lessons came unspoken, unwhipped, just you saying, watch me.

In the article about you in February 2017 I mentioned the phone call you made when I was 24 and convalescing from clinical depression. I do not know whether you even understood what the ailment was but you did not need to. I had a job but one day I woke up to an Mpesa message from you of Ksh 8,000. Considering I had once made you look for me for an entire day, (legitimately because I thought it was fun since I still had your money ready to send back) including through my siblings, after you wrongly sent Kshs 20,000 instead of Kshs 2,000 when I was in campus, I called you and asked the reason for the cash. I tried explaining I did not need money and the medical was covered by the company’s medical insurance. In very few words, you said that you knew that. You said I needn’t worry no matter how old I got, you would always have my back. Hearing ndukamakio nî thî îno (Don’t let this world worry you) coming from you hit like a shot at new life. A high that I carry to this day especially in these recent years. I have needed you and even when away you have remained available and accessible in my veins, my blood, my nurture and my memories of you.

As I bid you farewell for now, I find myself wanting to tell you more stories of how you made me and who you made me become. Several people have found me too rational in situations that demand full blown anger, asking how do I manage to do that. On this through you and your sons, I learned to never start a fight I am not willing to see to the end. Most situations are simpler or non essential when you take a step back and a full breath. I also learned that family was the line. When a high school going bully would attack me on my way to school and smash my books into the ground, you turned up at his home, sharp panga in hand to have a stern talk with his parents. When I changed primary schools, I would learn that the reason no one wanted to even have the newbie fight with me was because no one was going to start a fight with Dave’s brother. They had already learned this lesson first hand when he’d changed schools earlier. And when older, grown adult bullies decided to waylay me and some other new initiates on the way home, your eldest son, sharp warning in tow delivered a similar warning as you had in another homestead 3 years prior. Through you and them I learned to conserve my energy, to deliberately direct it only where it served a true purpose that I believed in.

Awa, I miss you. Your rough hard-worn palms whose cold touch as you lay gone from this life finally broke me on that fateful morning. I have never told anyone this but I lost you twice and then some few more times. To date I have never known whether it was lucid denial, but I would still get confused whether you were still alive on certain mornings years after you were gone. A few months after you passed on, I had a dream, an event spanning a whole 2 years but in one night. In the dream, you never left, you had survived what had taken you away in reality. We lived another 2 years together then I woke up, lost you all over again and kept losing you every morning after when I had to remind myself of reality. The reality in which you no longer existed.

Thank you for the lessons, thank you for having my back, and thank you for making me, me. Sending some greetings for Alex and Wanjiku who travelled before you. Some further greetings to your own dad, Njoroge Mahinda whom you always made fun of as using Njogero Mahindi as his signature. I can’t forget how it tickled me to the point of tears the first time I heard you say this. Once more, you were the comedian and I your willing and receptive audience. Jusqu’a la fin.

Koma thayû Baba