The same thing happened when we went to high schools in Central Province and met kids who grew up in Nairobi and other big towns like Nyeri and Thika. They looked sophisticated to us, with fashionable clothes and shoes, their lockers filled with items we had never seen, and they spoke fluent English and Swahili.
They discussed amongst themselves storylines of TV shows they were familiar with. Shows like Dallas, Different Strokes, Little House on the Prairie, the Jeffersons, Goodtimes and others, programs we had never heard of. Even then, when we watched them on TV in the school hall every evening and on weekends, we did not ‘catch’ the American English spoken on those shows. Our Urban classmates watched intently and laughed out loud exclaiming “that was funny”. The “Shau” people like us looked and wondered what was funny because we did not understand a thing that was said on TV.
Those Urban students played all kinds of sports like Lawn Tennis, Table Tennis and Bad Minton, sports we had never heard of, let alone know how to play. For those overconfident classmates of ours, they held conversations with the teachers, cracked jokes and even played sports with them.
Come visiting day, their parents came looking clean and sophisticated, dressed in modern clothes and bringing plenty of supermarket shopping in beautiful boxes and packages. On some visiting days, they brought huge beautifully decorated cakes which they cut after blowing out a bunch of candles and sang Happy Birthday. They invited their urban friends to share in the fun.
Try to think what was going through the mind of a 12 year old girl from OlKalou on witnessing this charade. First off, I did not know when my birthday was, and my parents had no interest in such subjects. We were born, we are here, life goes on. There were more important things to think about in the present time, than wonder when we were born more than a decade earlier.
