REFLECTIONS: Why the Nyagenkeans are mourning

TRIBUTE: You have definitely heard it before that the Nyagenkeans don’t grow meat in their farms.

It therefore goes without saying that growing up in Nyagenke denied our teeth frequent interaction with meat and relatives of meat.

Relatives of meat include things like hoofs, tongues and heads of cows and goats that lost their lives to be eaten and for their skins to be slept on.

The fact that I witnessed my grandad Onyinkwa Rimena and his peers puncture a cow and tap blood should tell you that not less than six decades have passed since my mouth housed 32 teeth.

You can now start seeing that I am now on my way to losing the spikes in the mouth, one at a time, and a time is coming when I will only afford to eat meat by swallowing water that gathers after seeing it.

In the days of Onyinkwa Rimena, only Okiabera Tariki owned a shop where he sold meat.

Although something different now stands where Okiabera’s butchery once stood, my head has not grown cobwebs and the image is still intact with it.

Located along Nyagenke-Nyakoria path that has now been improved to bitumen standards, no Nyagenkean who had eyes at that time can forget Okiabera’s shop of meat.

For the dotcom generation of Nyagenke and foreigners who are booking the next flight to Nyagenke after reading this, Okiabera’s butchery is not far from Nyagwaya Avenue and today’s Ondara Interchange.

If you approach Nyagenke from Nyagachi, then you can choose to walk under trees from Nyagachi Bodaboda and Allied Locomotives International Airport to Riomari spring.

The spring is as old as Nyagenke and it never dries up.

The photograph in my memory tells me that the spring is at the foot of the very land Okiabera’s butchery stood.

Two posts stood behind the butchery and they were joined by a crossbar.

Before the cow found itself in the butchery, it had to leave its life and skin at the kijinjio.

While they made the animal past tense, Okiabera’s wife lit a fire nearby.

They then cut pieces of meat for roasting and it smelt to the high heavens, converting the mouths of potential eaters and those who had zero chance of tasting it into small lakes.

I don’t have the video to table but I suspect that some Nyagenkeans sat in the nearby bushes with ugali in the basket when Okiabera went about his business.

The Nyagenkeans in the bush were there to secretly rescue the ‘vegetable’ before the air that flew from Nyamiranga hills pushed it to Nyankarangania for the Nyankaranganians to harvest what they didn’t plant.

I am on my way to Nyagenke.

I want to go and find out how the butchery eventually disappeared, so that I come to complete this story.

For now, it is sad for me to report that Okiabera Tariki, the first Nyagenkean who ever owned a butchery at the heart of Nyagenke is not with us😥

The old man, was called to join the angels for a dance, and he didn’t refuse because his time had come.

He will probably join other Nyagenkeans, including Onyinkwa who left ahead of him.

Go well, Mzee Okiabera Tariki!😥

• TheIdlerIsBack!