My brothers and I never read the newspaper except looking at the pictures. Maybe we couldn’t read English very well, but who is asking. The only time we really looked at the paper is during the Safari Rally. We were fascinated by the rally and we looked at every picture of those international drivers and their cars. Björn Waldegård from Sweden, Juha Kankkunen, Tommi Mäkinen, Ari Vatanen all from Finland, Carlos Sainz from Spain and our very own Joginder Singh, Mike Kirkland, and Shekhar Mehta. We were fascinated by the female team of French woman Michele Mouton and her Italian co-driver Fabrizia Pons. We kept track of every driver, their position and points, knew which team they were driving for: Team Toyota, Team Datsun, Team Subaru, Team Audi Quattro, Team Honda or Team Peugeot. We were disappointed when they introduced the American Dodge Ram-charger into the Safari one year, all performing poorly, making some of our favorite drivers drop out prematurely.
We knew when these drivers changed their co-drivers, whom we also knew by name too. Ask about the rally, we had the scoop you would think we were part of the Safari rally officials. You can imagine our excitement the few times the Rally passed through OlKalou heading towards Kirima and Kinangop on their final leg towards KICC Nairobi. If they were looking for bad roads to test the skill and grit of these drivers, we had them everywhere in Nyandarua.
Everybody, including us wondered where we got the fanaticism of the Safari Rally. Then one year we got our answer. Our father had just switched from driving a Peugeot pick up and he now had a Datsun pick up. Team Datsun had won the Safari Rally a few years in a row and they were the most popular team to win that year as well. There was a Rally Check Point in OlKalou, slightly past the Cereal Board warehouses. My father took the boys to see the Rally. They assumed our father would just drop them off and leave. To their surprise our father and a few of his friends parked their pick ups next to the Datsun Rally officials and Pit Crew. Story has it that when the first car approached, and it happened to be Shekhar Mehtar driving a Datsun, my father and his friends climbed on the bonnets of their pick ups, and as the car stopped to be registered and the pit crew quickly cleaned the windshields and such, the “old” men were pumping their fists in the air chanting DATSUN, DATSUN, DATSUN. Really? This was the man whose permanent expression on his face was either angry, about to get angry or fiery furious. To hear he was now having fun, fist pumping in public is unfathomable. But then I backtrack. My father was in his forties at that point. It was us who labeled him ‘old’ but by any standards he was still an energetic young man who was entitled to have some fun. But dont tell that to us. He was “old” in our eyes and that was it. That is the day we learnt Safari Rally was one of his passions and that also explained our fanaticism.
Anyhow, the Safari Rally was such an event and we enjoyed it immensely. It stirred up our curiosity into reading the newspaper at least for some few days in April of each year. But our older siblings read the paper for real, you would be forgiven to think they were preparing for an exam.
