An old shawl thrown over her once expensive
sweater strangles her neck as she trudges the ridge in mud caked
gumboots that are partially covered in a once upon-a-time-ago in-fashion
long flowing skirt common with rural women. A tea picking basket
hugging her back, she heads home in a robot like trance; Being midweek
and her offspring being school going children, she has spent the night
at the tea
buying center.
From far, her sturdiness is visible, seems she was a beauty in her day. As she draws near, her gnarled crackly fingers, weather beaten face and resigned look in her eye sets one aback. She looks like a deflated football, a shell of her former self.
She is one of the millions of African women who labor the family land, producing world class coffee, tea or cocoa, but the paying account being registered in the the family's patriarch, she and her offspring, on whose backs production relies, have to rely on the benevolence of the family head.
Whether it is a wheat boom in Narok, Timau or the Rift-valley to Maize sales or coffee or tea booms in all highland areas across the country or better, if its a farmer selling substantial kilos of tobacco at Kaanwa market to a nomadic herdsman offloading his stock of livestock, girls and a Tusker are their first thought.
Those who get drunk and are robbed before getting sucked dry in nights of faked passions and get home with empty purses are the lucky ones; there are those, seeing girls young enough to be their granddaughters, genuflect at the alter of the gods of intercourse, and aided by the power of V go on to eat the V and go on to import diseases for their working wife back home. (First V is Viagra, dimwit. nkt)
A bird informs me Koinange street is deserted because apparently the birds have moved to Nkubu, to feast on the Tea Boom. Arume tukuura.
From far, her sturdiness is visible, seems she was a beauty in her day. As she draws near, her gnarled crackly fingers, weather beaten face and resigned look in her eye sets one aback. She looks like a deflated football, a shell of her former self.
She is one of the millions of African women who labor the family land, producing world class coffee, tea or cocoa, but the paying account being registered in the the family's patriarch, she and her offspring, on whose backs production relies, have to rely on the benevolence of the family head.
Whether it is a wheat boom in Narok, Timau or the Rift-valley to Maize sales or coffee or tea booms in all highland areas across the country or better, if its a farmer selling substantial kilos of tobacco at Kaanwa market to a nomadic herdsman offloading his stock of livestock, girls and a Tusker are their first thought.
Those who get drunk and are robbed before getting sucked dry in nights of faked passions and get home with empty purses are the lucky ones; there are those, seeing girls young enough to be their granddaughters, genuflect at the alter of the gods of intercourse, and aided by the power of V go on to eat the V and go on to import diseases for their working wife back home. (First V is Viagra, dimwit. nkt)
A bird informs me Koinange street is deserted because apparently the birds have moved to Nkubu, to feast on the Tea Boom. Arume tukuura.
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