A MANUAL (FOR THE ECONOMICALLY DESPERATE): NETWORKING WITH THE AFFLUENT

By Immanuel Lokwei,

What happens when an immovable affluent rock meets an impoverished force? The solution to this pseudo-philosophical question will be apparent through this candid narrative which could have easily been titled “My ‘Sonko’ in Eldoret, Be My Godfather.” The origin of this account is an arbitrary encounter. If you have watched Godfather I and II, I think you need not trouble yourself with watching the III for an equivalent measure of the vicarious experience is contained in this personal exposition.

I had a slightly ambivalent chance, though that depends on your hermeneutic disposition, to meet who I believe would be my future godfather. Belasco Lounge is a goldmine of happenings, that’s where as they say adventure is at, and so along on a fecund Saturday night this opportunity was born interestingly in a very unalarming and oblique manner.

Let’s call her “butterfly”, the anthropoid catalyst, for she had a remarkable bubble behind which despite its exaggerated elongation and curvature and an outward bulginess that my taste is unused to, was nonetheless commendable enough to create a voluptuous commotion of interests. There she was, a central object of attention. Had I known what was in store for me, I mean “Sonko”, I would have definitely averted my gazes to some other crazies. But before we go in this dimension, we should get a few facts right.

Wait a minute! Don’t tell me that this economic upper-handedness that my “Sonko” lavishly struts about with his sumptuous range rover could be the reason why the “butterfly”, after visiting out table through a mutual acquaintance, and after witnessing how we sort of ingeniously stretched the intervals between the sips we took from the one bottle at our table, and excusing not the fact that our wherewithal could only sponsor this pace and communism, immediately departed and became uncompromisingly elusive just like an ordinary butterfly!

Well, if that is truly what is, that we were found aesthetically revolting due to our economic background and shameless table mannerisms, fine. I will console my poor and bloated ego that at least I can relate to the bourgeois luxury and interest. Anyways, it is indeed empirically verifiable what Chris Rock said that once a lady sexually-dates upstream, there’s no turning back! We’ve always been downstream.

Actually this is a nice segue into another quality, if at all it is a quality and not a God-given serendipity, of my “Sonko.” My “Sonko” is extremely wealthy. He is the embodiment of all the good and suitable qualities of youth; that is success. Evidently he is more interested in the success of ambition rather than the ideas of them, and he is not much given to theorizing about the meaning of “butterflies” and public fights. So when the scuffle ensued, as if by design, I got punched and instead of the expected little dark twinkling stars that a punched-face sees, I saw a string of one thousand Kenya shillings bills floating about. That instant I knew a hand so mighty had touched me.

Well, let bygones be bygones. A punch is sometimes necessary to bring senses into an uninitiated mind.

But to have ones mind stirred from economic slumber, to meet success in its stark element, and then end up without a mentor who could inculcate the necessary ingredients for growth, is like to awaken from deep sleep and fall asleep again after glimpsing the beautiful landscapes of ones dreams in real life. My dreams have always been to prosper economically and intellectually, if not in my youth like my admirable Sonko, then at some point before I wither away from the surface of this earth.

Now that you know all these, won’t you deny that my encounter with my Sonko was the luckiest thing that could ever happen in my life? I bet you wouldn’t. It would be an unfortunate encounter if he declines to mentor me at least to a level, economically speaking, closer to him. But if he does agree, if he forgives my trespass, if he embrace and initiate me into the secrets of his successes, then oh my!

I am ready to renounce my membership in The Brotherhood of Rastas (The BRAs) if only he could admit me to his mafia clique if he belongs to one or more. I can’t wait! Soon I would be soaring high up in inexplicable successes. My goodness, won’t so many “butterflies” spoil me with bouts of their intimate excesses?

I care less about these intimacies. Economy, which at the moment is really holding me down, must precede sexual-bliss. Perhaps my “Sonko” will be kind to me, that is if he still remembers the brawl. I won’t be surprised if he doesn’t; successful people hardly dwell on such trivial stuff. But if he does and if he comes to me and say, “Brother, here are my open arms,” I think I would have unearthed a novel way that youths from lower economic stratum could apply in their endeavors to make breakthroughs and connect with the upper world. The only way through is through brawling with the affluent. But “butterflies”, the indispensable objects of common interest, are also necessary to kick-start the whole process.