by Eddy Ashioya | Aug 16, 2024 | Uncategorized
The dead are born every day. I know because I am at the Langata Cemetery. There are more fresh graves today. The mud is still virgin, the ground thick and warm and damp and smells like formalin and wet dirt. A fig tree, the modest mistress of solitude, sits alone...
by Eddy Ashioya | Apr 12, 2023 | Chinedu Tales
7. Akili mjini, nguvu kijijini. Tack that on your walls—and tattooed in your brain. 12. Nairobi is an expensive city—14th overall in Africa. You wake up hivi and KSh. 2,000 is gone. That is the rate to wake up in this city. Nairobi is a designer label sewn into a...
by Eddy Ashioya | Mar 17, 2023 | Chinedu Tales
Jesus has always been box-office. You can tell by how the church, and in extension, religious organisations have been serving popcornentertainment by falling over themselves, angling to frolic in the corridors of power—from mashinani tomajuu. For a cleric, the hottest...
by Eddy Ashioya | Dec 6, 2024 | Uncategorized
To get to Ongata Rongai, you board those decrepit buses at Railways. The route is 125. Fare could be anything between 50 bob and 120 bob, depending on the mood of the conductor, the rain or the number of traffic officers on the road. If you are in a different tax...
by Eddy Ashioya | Nov 8, 2024 | Chinedu Tales
Shyly the girl jumps into the pool. She’s teaching me how to swim, but I am learning how to leave. This falls on the wrong side of my pleasure principle. This won’t work. The swimming, and the relationship. She’s a good girl. The kind of girl God gives you young so...
by Eddy Ashioya | Sep 13, 2024 | Chinedu Tales
There is a boy next to me making love to his Smirnoff Ice. Smirnoff Ice tastes like expired antibiotics, but I don’t tell him that. A girl and her lover make way to ask for a matchbox. They reek of Dunhill cigarettes. I haven’t smoked in years mostly cause I end up...
by Eddy Ashioya | Jul 19, 2024 | Chinedu Tales
It was ten to 11 PM when the lights went out. Close your eyes. Yes, that kind of darkness. Like that Kenya Power rogue monkey had cut off power. A cough here. A whistle there. A glass shattering. The parabola of tension. The air was heavy, as if there were too much of...
by Eddy Ashioya | Jul 9, 2024 | People
Nobody needs to tell me, but I know when Mother’s Day is approaching. I usually have an Instagram-worthy caption that will accompany the flattering photo I post of my mother when she was a jeune fille, a young lass, before I destroyed her mental health with the kind...
by Eddy Ashioya | Apr 20, 2023 | Chinedu Tales
The first thing to understand when laying down a comrade to rest is that a comrade never rests. They give up the ghost. They kufa. They chew. But they don’t rest. And a comrade is never buried when the sun is at high noon. No. It has to rain. Because rain is the tears...
by Eddy Ashioya | Apr 9, 2023 | ManTalk
So…my English teacher (teacher of English?) is one of those people who made it a criminal offense to start a sentence, much less a paragraph with ‘so..’. I never understood why. The thing is—from a writer’s point of view—is that you can use that word only once (maybe...
by Eddy Ashioya | Mar 30, 2023 | Chinedu Tales
There is a certain routine of life and I’m willing to blur the lines at the end of it, because as I get older, I have learned that I could be quite rigid, but I understand there are such shades of grey in life as in fiction. For instance, having dreadlocks and running...
