If there’s one thing I loved in my cousins, it was their street smarts. They may not know what PS 3 [or it’s 80s equivalent] is, but they could climb a certain thorn tree, harvest its berries, and make the amazingest purple juice with nothing but sticks and a measuring jug. I never admired them more than the day we crossed a panya route and they picked some ‘weeds’, only for us to get home and turn them into the tastiest veg dish I had, ever. From that day I hassled my mum to teach me the ins and outs of traditional greens. 20 years later, I still don’t get it.

So, in these times of recession [when any free weeds are helpful – and note that I say weeds, not weed], and inspired by the magic Nelly worked with some pumpkin leaves and a coconut, I decided to give it a shot. I got a recipe from the Nation and hit the local genge. After ogling the vegetables and asking a few blonde questions, I established that mchicha have red stems, matembel[r?]e have thin leaves, and kunde has a rough texture. My next lesson will be equating those to Kenyan veggies – osuga, mrenda, apoth, managu and…okay, that’s all I can remember just now. Anyway, I bought my pumpkin leaves, a large jar of peanut butter, some milk, and off we went.

Princess was pretty excited about the cooking lesson. She was most helpful with the slicing and the dicing and the reading. The TV was off, for once, as was the neighbours radio, so it was just heat, mirth, and mother-daughter bonding time. Fun!

At some point, Princess got adventurous and tasted the peanut butter. The scowl on my angel’s face was enough to turn fresh milk sour. Home made yoghurt. Take one gorgeous little girl, and a pinkie-full of peanut butter…but I digress. Point is, the scowl set the tone. Princess started eye-ing my cookscapade a little less encouragingly.

I boiled the sliced veg separately, and tasted it. She approved. ‘Needs more salt’ was her only complaint. I threw in some onions, tomatoes, said salt, and veg. So far so good. Smells great too. I tossed in a jar of milk. Mmmmm, she likes milk. “Can I eat now mummy?” “Not yet hun. We have to add the main ingredient.” In goes the peanut butter. My milky white stuff turns a tea-ey shade of brown, and gets all thick and gooey. The scowl reappears.

“Mummy, I’m not eating that.”

“At least wait for it to cook first.”

The instructions say 15 minutes. I turn and stir and thicken [or is it thin?] with the water left over from boiling. It’s looking promising…okay, I lie. It’s looking brown, and nothing like the photo in the recipe. In fact, it’s looking very much like something else. Tastes great though.

Finally I am done, and dollop some spoonfuls onto Princess’ plate. Not very many – just two. She has made it quite clear that she isn’t eating it, but I insist. That’s what mummies are for – to make you eat icky green [and brown] vegetables. Besides, rice and tomato sauce may be our staple, but today we have garnish, so we might as well use it. Princess contorts her face in ways an acrobat would envy. It’s amazing she can do so much with just facial muscle!

I suggest she use tomato sauce to lighten the taste [which she hasn’t even had yet], and she proceeds to empty half a bottle on the two spoons of veg. Her plate is now a vibrant mix of white, brown, green and red.

She’s still scowling worse than the grumpiest gent I know, so I tell her to spoon it up quick and get it off her plate. She gathers some, holds the spoon trembling for a full minute…and starts to cry! Heavens! The scowl was easier! But mummy’s not buying this. I half threaten, half-cajole, and the veg starts to disappear. She doesn’t stop crying, and I’m afraid her food was quite well salted. I kept trying to pull the stern ‘eat up or else’ look, but I just couldn’t stop laughing – those frowns were priceless!!

She did finish the veg eventually, but stayed mad an hour longer because I ‘forced her to eat it’, and even by bedtime she was giving me the silent treatment. She needed her hair tied up and attempted to say so in sign language. Of course I played dumb and forced her to speak to me. She did say please but wouldn’t say goodnight. I may have taken my daughter’s vego-phobia to a whole new level.

Elsewhere, my niece has such a rich meat diet that she’s literally sick of it. If you want her to do something, you say ‘Fanya ama nikupikie nyama.’ So now I think I have a new weapon for my daughter ‘Fanya au ntapika mboga!’ Mwahahahahah!! She doesn’t mind Nelly’s vegetables though…and no, it’s not my cooking. It’s the peanut butter. Honest! At least that’s what Princess said when she finally quit sulking.

PS: Our regular shopkeeper has traveled for Easter and left us a temp. He’s not doing too well. Today he gave me low fat milk, the nerve of that man. I just noticed the pack is blue instead of red. I wonder if that affected my recipe.

For more information on 3CB, click here.

So today, a new followee asked a question that a lot of people are too polite to ask [except for my pal Z, the only chick I know who’s more brazen than me! Bow down!!]

‘What’s with the name?’

When I first started blogging, I did like three posts explaining the name. But as I have this annoying habit of deleting stuff, I’ve lost the gist of the original post somewhere. So I figured, why not ask – who is Crystal balls.

Well. Now then. It’s about nuts. Not that kind of nuts, I don’t own those. But I do like nuts. Peanuts, cashew nuts, hazel nuts, coconuts, all kinds of nuts. Loose nuts too, I’ve been accused of having those.

And nuts rhymes with…guts. I have some of those. Used to have a lots. Not so much lately. See, the way I saw it, it was okay to say anything as long as it was true. And the more outrageous the truth, the louder I yelled it. My first blog bio was Crystal balls: telling it like it is. I was a no-holds-barred kinda girl. As long as ni ukweli, then anything goes. I was the girl who’d tell you your nose was big and your feet were small, and gift you a giant mirror. I figured people would learn, would open up, if we could all just be honest and say how we really feel, screwdriver diplomacy.

But I’ve grown up some, and I’ve seen that truth hurts. A lot. So I’ve toned down. I’m still painfully lucid with myself, not so much with other people. And just last week I lost one of my dearest friends to honesty and my big mouth. So lets just say the balls, though just as tough, just as clear, and just as loud, are currently cushioned in black un-see-through velvet, and not Victoria’s kind.

CB was also about telling fortunes, so to speak. I’m INFJ, future oriented. And I figure the best way to improve the future is to be truthful here and now. I still believe that. Plus gypsies are kinda cool. Long dark hair, haunting strings, misty pasts, gold hoops, romantic scents…and the bohemian look so rocks fashion-wise.

So. That’s who CB is now. I came up with the name Crystal Balls when I started blogging an some site called Blogit. It didn’t really work out, but I met my favourite sailor there, so yay!! My good friend Archer shortened the name to CB for his blogroll, and the nickname stuck. It has a nice ring to it, I rather like it, and cuts the shock down some, from people who can’t say B… without blushing.

Why three? Well, I’ve deleted my blog several times, so this is, technically, the 3rd CB. And why C? Now that one…you can check my ID…if you can get your hands on it, coz that photo is so … let’s just say those gover camera-people should be shot, hung, smoked, and buried, and not in that order.

PS: My first thought when I hear Crystal Balls is some dark misty room with a scary long-nosed, pale-faced lady talking eerie and telling my fortune. It’s always a tall dark handsome stranger, which, btw, most gypsy males are, and I can bet there were lots of them hanging around said booth, no? Fortune-telling success rate = WIN…

So it amuses me how everyone else’s mind jumps to the other kind of crystal balls…

For more information on 3CB, click here.

This question is asked so many times by so many people in so many ways. I could go philosophical and talk about the love of the flag and the [not] knowing the words to the National Anthem…and by the way…I just realized that’s very Kenyan too. I was trying to teach princess the words, with the following results:

1. She declared it boring. The TZ anthem is far more funky.
2. She sang, with no prompting from me ‘And our home London Kenya’. It’s in the genes!
3. I still –umpteen years later – mix up the lyrics to verse two and three.

I could also talk about the way before twitter, local news was more popular with diasporans. In Dar, I read the Nation religiously. At home, well, there’s always Gerry Loughran…but catch me dead surfing capitalfm.co.ke in a Nairobi cyber. Or actually watching the news. For what now? Or I could quote the famous Kenyan Chick.

Or I could retell my favourite story of how Suki, my nutty friend, smiled at the homeless beggars in New York so often saying ‘I’m from Africa people, all I can give you is a smile.’ After a few days, instead of begging from her, they were giving her money. Homeless people! In New York! This same Suki says how she saw some people in Disneyland who just HAD to be Kenyan so she tested in out. ‘Kss Kss’. Only one group of people in the entire Disneyland turned. 🙂

I forget what my point was. Oh yeah. Right. Being Kenyan. I always thought it was pretty wow that you can spot a Kenyan anywhere. I mean I’ll be walking in Dar and see someone, before they say a word or do a thing I just know they’re Kenyan, and it’s like that all over the world. I have watched movies where a crowd of extras was milling about, and I could spot a head that just had to be .ke, and sure enough, in the credits, they’d be some name to prove me right. I even watched Tellytubbies once, and saw these kids talking with a Jamaican accent, but I was like no way, hao wakenya. And sure enough, come mealtime, their grandmother was yelling ‘Kula nyinyi!’

But Kenya is so vast and wide. 42 tribes, 8 provinces, a million different backgrounds. At first I thought ‘kenyanness factor’ I can recognize so easily was just an urban thing, a slang or mindset among Nairobians. But now I see it even in pure shagmodoz abroad. So what is it that makes us so alike, and makes us stand out so much from everyone else?

Simple. KBC. Stop laughing, I’m dead serious. It’s the only thing we all have in common. We all grew up watching VOK/KBC/Channel1/Metro TV [select appropriate one based on your age]. The younger, funkier ones will claim they only do Capital sijui X Fm sijui whatwhat, and that some channels are sooo shao/shady [fill in appropriate to mark yourself as a baabi/odinari hehehe …and do people still say that?] But keep in mind all the original Capital DJs that weren’t imported and Kenyanized were weaned on Voice of Kenya, and that stuff rubs off.

We all go goofy at the mention of Pepe kale and Kanda Bongoman and Mbotela’s Je, huu ni ungwana?, that seven year old girl from madaraka who Aced Kwasa kwasa, Rare Watts, Music Time, [Fred Obachi Machokaaaaa], Rick Astley, Top of the Pops [RIDE on tiiiiime] etc etc etc. The tois may quote Churchill, but guess who his role model is. We are ‘kenyan’ because we watched mamboleo and dunia wiki hii and yaliyotokea and junior schools quiz [someni vijana, sth sth tia bidii, mwisho waa kusoma, mtapata kazi nzuri sana **insert tulii tulii guitar effect], sing and shine…because we listened to Cofta and Good Morning and A-S-P-R-O.

Because we watched the ORIGINAL transformers and Saber Rider and Doom and these influences taught us to think alike. We are all little VOK-programmed-autobots…or Decepticons. We passed this on to our kids [and younger relatives], and they too will be truly Kenyan, via their VOK-taught anchors on NTV and [insert appropriate letter of the alphabet – I’ve lost track – I know there’s an X and Y and a Q…and…?]

I was once in the campus common room at an international university, and KBC news started. It was 6.55 p.m. and we were waiting for the cafeteria to open. For some reason that I can’t explain, we all just went ‘Mtukufu Rais Daniel Toroitich Arap Moooooi’ synchronizing with the newcaster [it was LD, circa 2000]. Nobody even noticed what they’d said, till an Ethiopian asked how we knew what the guy was going to say, kwani it’s a repeat of news? Another time somebody in the computer room started singing those Kenyatta day songs and everybody joined it, it was hilarious! Of course the foreign students were amazed at how 200 plus people ranging from age 20 to 60 with 69 different ‘accents’ all knew the words to that song.

Yes, we have the accent, yes, we have the insane capitalist spirit that sends us to ‘study’ anywhere from Finland to Uzbekistan, yes we have the uncanny knack of producing Slum Dog actors [apparently Jamal Malik’s parents are Kenyan born] and scientists who cure cancer in the US and…need I mention the obvious? But we have to admit, what makes us truly Kenyan, what shaped our mindsets and thinking, what made us who we are is good ol’ VOK. And maybe Kenya Times with Rastafari Bongoman.

Signed, CB

Proudly Kenyan.

PPS: They always say media shapes culture, but clearly, it shapes nationality too, and not just in Kenya. Who’da thunk 🙂

For more information on 3CB, click here.