How did you get your scars? Most of you would answer that you got yours while playing as a child or experimenting with harmful objects as a kid, some scars you don’t even know how you got them, maybe your sneaky mum gave it to you as a mark so when you got lost she could easily identify you! A smaller percentage that share names with Jamaican musicians, like… Adi gaza msafi had theirs inscribed under not so innocent circumstances!
Well in my case I got mine one night in college, it was a weekend. All we were doing was club hopping and getting our asses drunk silly with cheap liquor, it was around midnight and we had come from one club now going to last one which closed late and had some bearable music, I was singing initiation songs very loudly while staggering, following my where my friends were going otherwise I would get lost even though this is a place I knew like the back of my hand.
On getting to the said club aka Club Sambaza, the watchie/soja outside, an old man asked me why I was singing initiation songs and yet it wasn’t the season or place. I told him to shut his toothless mouth or I would decrease the number of his remaining teeth, mzee akashika nare, he tried grabbing me by the collar and by instinct getting into fight mode I went for his groin. Mzee alinipiga blow ya kichwa na zile rungu ziko na modification ya sprocket kwa tip.
At first I felt nothing, then I started feeling some gooey liquid trickling down my face, my friends jumped into action, others restraining the mzee from doing further damage the rest trying to arrest the bleeding. Meanwhile I was drunk and confused wondering why that fight was over so quickly?
Someone suggested that I should be rushed to hospital for the wound to get looked into. I protested at first at the idea, in the end popular opinion won. We got hospital and was taken to the casualty area. The medics there didn’t even ask what happened, ati “leteni uyo mlevi hapa, weka yeye kwa hiyo kitanda.” A bulky medic, must have been in charge was giving orders, "Hata usiweke dawa ya kumaliza uchungu, huyu amelewa mwili haitasikia dawa. Shona ivyo tu! Ati what? I tried protesting that I also have rights as a drunkard and therefore should be treated humanely, lakini wapi! Nilishonwa kama naskia sindano ikiniingia na kutoka, by the time the stitching was over and I was all patched up, I was a very sober citizen, my head throbbing like my heart had migrated to there!
For the next two weeks I did not even want to see an empty bottle of alcohol in my vicinity. Lakini mlevi ni mlevi tu, hata umwache na coconut pekee utapata anabugia mnazi! Have a drunk, dent free weekend! Won’t you?