Kenya's Love of Alcohol

Kenyan's love to enjoy themselves, to laugh, to dance, and to relax. At the root of this enjoyment is alcohol. Streets are lined with small bars, open from before noon until after the sun rises. Men stumble drunk down the streets at all hours and women too an be found pounding back 500mL bottles of Tuskers long after midnight. Mutisya too lives by this cultural dictate, spending every night at local bars with friends who seems to be mostly women. He starts in the early evening and rarely comes home before 5am Not once during my 2 1/2 days here did Mutisya see his wife, Theresia, or 5 year old son, Willy. And only for a few fleeting moments did he interact with his 18 month old son, Jeremiah. Mutisya is an arrogant man who lives his life to his fullest enjoyment even at the expense of his family. He claims to have 3 or 4 girlfriends at only given time, travels to far off places like Brazil, Cancun, and Europe, always alone, while his family goes about their lives in Nairobi. He claims this is normal, this is the Kenyan way. Men and women married, but living separate lives, enjoying the company of other men and women at will. I somehow don't fully believe him. This may be his reality, but I hope its not the norm for the majority of Kenyans. Mutisya's arrogant, cockiness turned me off to him almost immediately, but this morning I learned more about him that scares me even more.
He's not just newly dabbling into politics like he originally claimed, he's right in the middle of it, in the thick of the violence, the corruption, and turmoil. His neighborhood, Eastlands, is where much of the fighting and protests happened after the elections and he was one of the major ringleaders. He's got friends in all corners of Nairobi, and enemies too. The opposition government has tried to poison him several times, gangs were sent to his native village where he was organizing people in violent rallies to spray his car with bullets in attempted murder. Even now he's got security that follows him and friends that watch his every move. Last night we watched coverage of violence erupting on every news channel, "That fighting is just on the next street over," he proudly announced. I sat silently stunned, unable to respond. "Aren't you scared to be in politics?" I later inquired. His response was that "its just all part of the game. It's like dating a woman and then she dumps you. It's just the reality of it." Mutisya expects the fighting and violence to begin again within in the next 4 days as the upcoming election gets closer. "Have you ever seen a person burned alive?" Mutisya asked me as he was driving me into town to catch my bus for Tanzania. "What?!? No, of course not." I replied, disturbed by his question. "If you were staying here longer, you'd probably see a lot of that. It's common in Nairobi." Thank God I'm leaving.