“The Bapfubuzi”

Believe you me, life in Kigali is rapidly changing mostly in upward or better direction but some aspects are in reverse. These days, one finds young men doing this or that in a bid to make ends meet. Many spend so much time doing nothing and hoping to get “a fair return on investment”! As if that was not bad enough, some “chain keepers” are also out there running amok in a bid to fulfil their so called “uburinganire” (equality). When were growing up, there used to be a common saying that, “if one serves you with cooked hooves, serve him with a cooked head”. The other day, I found this guy (let us call him JM), JM is a successful guy around town, and his success has not come the easy way. As they say, “behind every successful man, there is a dissatisfied woman”. (Don’t quote me) I do not want to get on bad terms with my “chain keeper”. I happened to meet JM while having ‘one one’ at Kigali’s Car Wash alias “Kwa Wahome” alias “Kenya Embassy”. Yes, if you don’t know what I am talking about, Wahome happens to be the name behind the Car Wash fame, being a man from the land of the Babas (Baba Moi and Baba Mwai), Wahome’s place is frequented by Kenyans so much that, it is like a defacto Embassy for the Kenyans. JM happened to be Gafaranga’s relative; since Gafaranga and I are members of the “Embassy”, we are always around day in day out. This time around, Gafa came by in the company of JM. I wouldn’t have minded a bit whether he had come with the devil himself, all I wanted was him to come around and foot the bills for the “Nyama Choma and the Bellos and SKOLs. This time round, he appears with a wealthy lookingbrat; as I was preparing to hate the new comer, Gafa introduces him as sijui, a brother to his cousin’s aunt’s maternal uncle’s brother-in-law! Unlike most of us, he was donning a business suit, that made him “smell cash”. As we settled down and the drinks began hitting us, JM began cursing, “bariya bana, barakavuna umuheto” (those boys, deserve to die); this was after Gafa had inquired about JM’s wife (umufasha wawe araho?) I became curious as to why a prosperous guy like him would be cursing some poor Nyamirambo boys! The alarm bells began tolling in my head. As the booze bag hit him, his tongue began loosening slowly by slowly. It is at this juncture that he narrated his ordeal at the hands of the Nyamirambo Boys (popularly known as bapfubizi). I will be brief because, his story was long and heart breaking! Take an example, if over time, you wash your clothes in dirty water, they will tend to acquire a bad or dull coloration, in Kinyarwanda, we could refer to such clothes as “byarapfubye”, likewise, if you are making juice from bananas and you stop halfway, the bananas may go bad or birapfuba! Literary, the common saying is that, some guys are too busy to manage the affairs of their chain keepers such that, the chain keepers end up “gupfubaring”. Now, this is where those young, disorderly and idle Nyamirambo boys come in, they try to restore the status quo by offering the services of “bupfubuzi” (menders). From JM’s story, his wife had run away with one of these youngmen. mfashumwana@fastmail.fm