My brothers attended dances all over their friends Kiumbus, but they never hosted one. We did not have older working siblings who owned a record player and even if we did, my parents were not the liberal type who would allow a dance party in our home or even allow us to attend elsewhere. In fact, my brothers only managed to attend the dances at their friends kiumbu’s in great secrecy. They understood our parents’ strictness but they did not want to be left out of such monumental social events of our time.
So, on the day of the dance, they came to the Main House for supper as usual to avoid any suspicion. They ate their meal and hang around the kitchen for a while yawning and stretching constantly, feigning fatigue. They sheepishly apologized and asked to be excused to retire to bed early. They headed to their kiumbu and a little while later they disappeared into the night.
Those dances were usually held on Saturday nights and lasted to about 10pm, or earlier if the juice in the Eveready Batteries dried out. 10pm was very late according to my parents standards. My family ate supper early and by 8pm the dishes were washed, everybody had washed their legs and ready for bed. 9pm always found the entire household sound asleep.
That is why for the boys to sneak back at 10.30pm on a Saturday night, that was considered ungodly hour. The dogs barked wildly upon the boy’s return, and in the morning when our father asked what was driving the dogs wild the previous night, my brothers put a puzzled look on their guilty faces telling mzee, they wondered the same thing, they even came out to check what was happening but they did not see anything unusual. “The dogs must have been barking at moving shadows of trees swaying in the wind”, they suggested to the “old man”.
Today, I watch and listen gleefully as my Kung Fu bumping, Bell Bottom and Platform wearing brothers are outsmarted by their Dotcom, Facebook and twitter generation of children who believe they are smarter than their now middle aged parents. Life has a funny twist. What goes around comes around.
