Why Jethro does not dread nuclear waste

Somebody was trying to make Kenyans nuclear-powered by selling them milk that contains what goes into the making of bombs. This is to say that we would have entered the nuclear age through our stomachs and without trying too hard.

I hear that if that nuclear powder had gone into our stomachs, a number of things would have happened.

One is that the Kenyans who went all the way to the Ukraine wherever that is) to get nuclear-powered milk, would have acquired nuclear power in their pockets without much effort. They would have become the owners of a good supply of Pattnis to keep them out of poverty for many years.

The other thing is that other Kenyans would have spent their Pattnis on that milk.

As a result they would have been so nuclear-powered that soon they, would be producing children with tails and four heads. Very soon we would be looking like those ancestors of ours called dinosaurs.

There is one person though, who does not believe that contaminated milk can do anybody any harm. He happens to be my uncle Jethro, that man ‘who has been married to my aunt Kezia for the last 60 years and still threatens to divorce her if she fails to understand that he married her and not the other way round.

Jethro was once the manufacturer of contaminated milk and although he had never been to the Ukraine, he thinks what he created in his efforts to kill a man called Loli Koro was worse than nuclear waste.

However, Loli Koro survived and that is why Jethro cannot understand how milk contaminated with something as simple as nuclear waste can harm anybody. Loli Koro’s original name was Lord Cole.

But Jethro thought that whoever manufactured the English language did not mean it to be used on the slopes of Mount Kenya.

As a result, Jethro’s tongue as well, as those of other residents of the slopes where I was born and brought up, refused to understand that the man was Lord Cole and so he became Loli Koro.

Loli Koro was yet another white man with a peeling nose living up the slopes; but unlike the man from Torino called Father Camissassius, he did not go to where I was born and brought up to fight the devil and his assistants.

Loli Koro came all the way from the land of King George the Fifth, and his mission was not, to eat the arrow roots, sweet potatoes and other tubers that grow in the slopes. He came because he had heard that the slopes of Mount Kenya was a land of milk and honey.

He had heard that there were fools like uncle Jethro who were willing to help him get the milk and honey.

So he arrived there and declared that the first 500 acres that he set his eye on were his although he did not belong to Jethro’s clan or any other up the slope.

The man had never milked cows or held a jembe where he came from, but that was not going to stop him from owning cows and maize from the land that he had taken from uncle Jethro.

That is why, like my boss, he started telling the people of the slopes that if they want to see the future, they must work for him for the wages that he offered. Uncle Jethro
found himself working for Loli Koro not because he was a fool but since like I he needed a payslip to among others things, pay something called hut tax which today we call the Pay as You Earn or Pay as You Eat.

Jethro had no choice but to pay the tax because if he did not, he would have ended up in the local Kamiti Prison which is where Loli Koro who served as a land owner, policeman, the Amos Wako, magistrate and prison warden of the area, put people who failed to pay that tax.

That tax amounted to something like five bob a year which was equal to Jethro’s total salary for three months after all deductions, including his contribution to his savings and credit society.

You see, at one point, Jethro had planned to save enough with that society to take a loan so that he could go into snuff business and so say good bye to working for Loli Koro.

Finally, he did not become a snuff wholesaler despite saving five cents every two months and making my aunt Kezia eat arrow roots with water so that they could accumulate enough to go into business.

However, other things happened. One of them was that poverty made itself a permanent visitor in Jethro’s house.

The other was that Jethro knew that the same poverty would not have come if Loli Koro had stayed in England and not given himself a large piece of soil up the slopes of Mount Kenya.

As a result, when Jethro thought of his boss, the Briton with a peeling nose, a number of things came to his mind. He thought of a snake, a slimy snail and of a pig whose skin had been roasted by the sun.

In other words, Jethro kept wishing that he could meet his boss in a dark valley. He wished that during that meeting, he was armed with a poisoned arrow. In those circumstances, he would have done one very simple thing which would have been to turn Loli Koro into past tense.

Loli Koro was not in the habit of walking in a lone valley unarmed and Jethro was also not given to walking in such valleys at night armed with poisoned arrows when his boss was in such a state.

Jethro was to be found in the Lord’s kitchen where his name now became boy although he was several decades old. He was called ‘Boy’ by Loli Koro and his clan, because he existed for no other reason than to make his boss’s clan happy by cooking for them.

Because he was the cook and therefore Boy, he had to call his boss Bwana, the wife Memsahib and their Junior, Bwana Mdogo. Memsahib, however, liked to be called Leri Beti which meant Lady Betty.

Failure to call them by the right names meant loss of pay slip or demotion to work in the shamba under the hot sun.

Jethro finally saw that he would never get a chance to take a weapon and murder his boss and his entire family one night in a quiet valley where only crickets would witness the midnight massacre.

But being neither too clever nor too foolish (I am like him), he eventually discovered that he had a weapon against his boss which he had owned all along but had not thought about. The weapon was the nose and what it produced.

Jethro discovered that the nose, which was connected to the throat was not designed just for breathing and taking in snuff. He suddenly discovered that the African nose was also created to be a weapon against such people as Loli Koro.

The discovery came one morning after Jethro had blown his nose with his bare hands and something very thick landed into his palm. It had come from his nose and it was a load of brown mucus.

He shouted “Eureka!” on seeing it because he thought he had seen the ultimate nuclear weapon against Loli Koro and his entire family.

He told himself, “Jethro, God was not foolish when he created an African nose able to produce this kind of stuff.

He was not foolish either when he created snuff that goes into the nose and comes out with· mucus. If this is not poison enough to finish off Loli Koro and his family, then I don’t know what poison is.”

With those few remarks, Jethro spent the day a very happy man waiting for the following morning when he was due to prepare breakfast for Bwana, Leri Beti and Bwana
Mdogo. For the whole day and night, Jethro did not blow his nose or clear his throat.

He was accumulating enough nuclear power ready for attack the following morning, a process that he enriched by taking in more snuff than usual that night.

It was a whistling Jethro who proceeded to take out the ingredients for making tea and as he whistled under his breath, watched the water boil. Then he added milk and as that was happening, he stepped back to launch the first nuclear weapon.

He launched it by holding his nose between two fingers, holding his breath for a moment and then blowing his nose like an angry elephant blowing its trumpet. That nose was directed into the pot of boiling tea and its contents landed as if it had been shot by a gold medal hopeful during Olympic.

Jethro stepped near to survey the damage that he had afflicted and he was happy with the results because floating on the tea and ready to be boiled with the rest of the stuff was a very generous deposit of a mixture of tobacco and other things.

Soon Jethro was, pouring the concoction into a kettle ready to serve it to Loli Koro, Memsahib and Bwana Mdogo. My uncle was sure that what he had supplied was going to kill the lot slowly but surely without him being discovered.

It was Jethro who served the tea with trembling hands having almost turned back during his journey to the table.

The same man withdrew to the kitchen as soon as he had laid the tea on the table and immediately broke into a sweat as if he had been attacked by a sudden bout of malaria.

When Loli Koro shouted his name a short while later, he knew his end had come and as he presented himself before his boss, he expected a bullet to go through his head. The bullet did not land but instead words did so.

They were not bullet-like words but instead sounded like music. They were the words of Memsabib who said in the Kisahili called kisettler: “Boy ongeiza plus tomato halafu leo wewe nafanya·chai mzuri sana. Kwisha wekacream ama nini? Very good.”

Then she turned to her husband and asked him, “Don’t you agree dear? Very rich tea.”

Loli Koro replied: “Never tell a native that he has done well. You know how these niggers are, you praise them and the next time, they are going to spit in your tea. All the same, darling, I agree with you. Today the tea is first class. Reminds me of what we used to have in Ceylon.”

Jethro did not understand a word about native and spitting but he was horrified that Memsahib bad enjoyed the tea he had hit with his nuclear bomb. He simply could not understand why the clan did not drop dead after taking the tea.

The following day he put his nose to work and repeated the process for a week. None of his victims even complained of a stomachache, leave alone dying but Jethro did not think that he had wasted his time. He had at least made his enemies drink some very nasty things that came from his nose.

Jethro had a good reason to use his nuclear missiles. It would take a man of his wisdom to know why anybody would want to make Kenya a nuclear power through our stomachs when Ngunu, that cow owned by my mother is still producing milk made from grass.