Thread by @CSakwah

When I landed back in the village as a dropout, many people tried to figure out or come up with reasons why I had absconded my studies. I used to tell people that I had grown to hate the degree that I was awarded or I was awarded a degree that was not compatible with my brain.

Many people, however, did not buy my reasons. Some said that I had been bewitched by an old witch lady in my village. I had been bewitched beyond redeemable. They said the woman had witchcraft powers whose pedigree would leave the Nigerian witchdoctors envious of her powers.

A month after I went back home, a relative told me that one of my pictures, taken when I was a kid, had been retrieved from the hut of the old witch. They found the photo after the villagers raided her house in suspicion of practicing witchcraft.

‘She reared a big black snake in her hut. And the snake used to sleep on your photo and those of other people in the village.’ He said. I heard this from two more people. Sometimes I struggle to believe in the existence of witchcraft, sometimes I do it does exist.

Some people said that I had been involved in high school exam malpractices, earned a place in the university to pursue a course that was too difficult for my brain to crack. I attended a high-end high school in Kitale, St. Josephs Boys’ National School.

For unknown reasons, I have never understood why people always believed that students in such schools were exposed to national exam questions before other students.
While walking in the market one evening, one woman said to the other in Luhya,

‘nokhalola nukhakhumba khario, sonyala wamanya ori kheva marevo high school khatsia university masomo ka university kakhakhira tawe.’ Roughly she said, ‘Looking at how blatant he walks, one wouldn’t imagine that he cheated in high school to a place in the university

where he failed to keep up with the mental demands of university education.’
From 2014 to 2016, all these allegations used to get to me; that I was dumb to deserve a place in the university, that I had cheated in my high school exams, that I had been bewitched beyond redemption.

In 2015, an uncle prophesized that I will end up splitting firewood for hotels in our village market and working on people’s farms for a living for the rest of my life.
The consequence of all this is that I started believing in what everyone was saying about me.

I thought of myself as the village failure who could not redeem himself. I did not imagine or dream anything beyond life in the village.
In 2016, I found myself standing next to 4 guys. None of them had seen a class 6 classroom. They were lower primary school dropouts;

Samuel, Linus, Fito, and Bonny. In these guys, I found a common identity, dropouts. I became their friend. They had spent all their lives in the village working as farmboys, in Luhya we call them, vandu wa ikatala.

They used to wake up in the morning with their jembes to work on people’s farms for a 200 bob pay.
For the better part of 2016 and 2017, I became part of their manpower. While working for those long hours weeding maize or sugarcane farms, you need stories.

I joined them equipped with very funny Nairobi stories detailing university escapades, life in the Nairobi streets. They particularly loved stories about the University of Nairobi student demonstrations or unrests. They loved Babu Owino ahead of the 2017 General Election.

I always lied to them that Babu Owino and I had been great friends on Campus. In return, they narrated the village stories. They always knew which boda-boda guy was shagging the sub-chief’s wife, or which teacher had fought his wife the previous night,

or whose daughter had procured an abortion, or whose wife was practicing witchcraft, or whose father was suspected of night running. Or who fought who during a brawl in a Busaa den.
While working in those fields, we were the same, dropout farmboys.

However, I only became different in the evening when we joined the rest of the society in the evening at the market. In the market, I was not just the usual dropout, I was the biggest village failure, a bad example to kids, a letdown who wasted people’s money in form of sch fees.

This was a total contrast of yesteryears. Before, I was one of the brightest kids in the village, one whom parents hoped their kids would aspire to be like.
One day, just a few days after the 2017 General Election, I received a phone call from

the only friend I had kept from the university. His name was John Gitau. Jokingly, Gitau asked me how many village girls I had impregnated since I dropped out of school. I told him none, I had lost my attraction the moment I dropped out of school.

‘Even village girls that dropped out of class six think that I lost my attractiveness when I dropped out of campus,’ I joked. We had a 5-minute phone chat, In English. At the end of the call, I turned my face to find the 4 guys with frowned faces.

They all glared at me as if I had been insulting them on the phone call. I wondered why, because I had known them to be convivial guys. Plus, I had received the phone call in the middle of a very funny story about a fight the four guys had in a disco matanga

against boys from another village. I anticipated going back to the story only to meet rejection-bearing-wrinkled faces looking like they were ready to fight me.
Linus was the first to say it. They no longer wanted me to work with them or hang out with them.

They had agreed to expel me from their group. Reason; I was fooling myself. Boni asked me if any of them could speak English as fluently as I did. ‘You are fooling yourself. You don’t belong here, Sakwah. Leave this village and make a better life out of yourself.’

The phone calls I was having in English while we worked or hanged out in the evening convinced them that I was better placed working as a teacher or a secretary or clerk somewhere in a town or city.
From that day, they stopped tagging me along to farm hustles.

I could not get a contract on my own because the whole village contracted the four guys to weed or plow their farms because of their efficiency and hard work. They were village cartels who earned every farm tender. Sometimes they earned tenders by simply walking past a homestead.

Plus, I was very naive or too embarrassed to walk into someone’s home seeking a farm plowing or weeding contract. The 200 or 300 or 400 I used to earn per day used to go a long way in sustaining a simple village life.

I afforded airtime credit, afford new clothes, afford to watch a Manchester United game in our market’s football hall, and sometimes afford to buy food or anything for my family. I had become accustomed and comfortable with this life.

I even envisioned myself living that way for the remainder of my life.
In the village, there are few jobs one could get. In the end, life in the village became unbearable without the farm vibaruas. Since that day, I started thinking about alternatives ways to survive.

Coming back to Nairobi to seek employment started making sense. In Nov, after the repeat election, I traveled back to Nairobi.
That day or that phone call from John Gitau was my reality check, my turning point in life. And it took rejection from 4 lower primary

school dropouts to make a campus dropout realize that he was not as useless as the society defined him. Sometimes we become captives of societal judgment the moment we live by the way it defines us. There is much satisfaction when one starts living by his or her life definition.