Heritage

Former addict’s unflinching story of battle with drink

alcohol

Parents would also greatly profit from a reading of this cautionary tale of teenage alcohol addiction and why junior’s habitual sip from the dregs of daddy’s glass of beer is not a good idea. Photo/Courtesy

Chris Lyimo was but a very young boy when I left Kenya. Our families lived two doors away from each other and our mothers had known each other as young women years before they settled down to start their families.

I remember Chris as a sweet-tempered child, bright and well spoken; nothing about him foretold a future blighted by the scourge of alcohol addiction.

My Side of the Street is a starkly rendered account of Chris’s years in the alcoholic wilderness. It is an unsentimental journey back through the wasted years, a brave book shot through with a searing honesty and, in places, a wry humour.

I read it in one sitting and came away convinced that Kenyan lawmaker John Mututho would do well to lobby the Minister for Education to have the book imposed as compulsory reading for all secondary school students.

Parents would also greatly profit from a reading of this cautionary tale of teenage alcohol addiction and why junior’s habitual sip from the dregs of daddy’s glass of beer is not a good idea.

In his book Chris evokes his childhood playmate Ejaaz, the only son of the Farukis, a family that had fled Idi Amin’s Uganda and had settled in our neighbourhood.

Mr Faruki worked at the Nairobi station of the Belgian national carrier, then known as Sabena. A good-looking man, well over six feet tall and of athletic build, Mr Faruki cut a striking figure in his company uniform as he strode down the road to catch the bus into town.

On Saturday afternoons, shortly after lunch, Mr Faruki and little Ejaaz would head off to the Gymkhana in their identical cricket whites, showing off their fine sporting form to handsome effect.

It was typical of Mr Faruki that, after parts of Nairobi experienced a frightening earth tremor one night in the early eighties, he would get his family out of harm’s way and then go around the neighbourhood enquiring after everyone else’s welfare.

While preparing to visit Brussels on business shortly after I arrived in Belgium, Mr Faruki called on my parents offering to bring over anything they might wish to send me.

Mother worried that, being a Muslim, Mr Faruki would object to taking Uplands pork sausages and bacon in his luggage but such concerns were waved aside and I was able to enjoy a proper Kenyan fry-up in my kitchen on campus shortly thereafter.

Alas, Sabena is no more and in its place we now have Brussels Airlines, a less beguiling name, devoid of that sense I had experienced in my youth —as I dreamily watched Mr Faruki make his way to work —of a beautiful, exotic siren beckoning me to set forth and discover the world.

The demise of Sabena was blamed on a compromised management board, an injudicious partnership with the defunct Swiss carrier Swissair, and intransigent trade unions unwilling to recognise that the airline was navigating dire financial straits.

Dense network

Founded partly with funding from Belgian settlers in the Congo in 1923, the airline had developed a dense network of destinations to Africa—27 in total by the time it folded — and, fittingly, the last Sabena flight flew out of Abidjan.

The navigators and crew landed at Zaventem airport to an emotional welcome by hundreds of their colleagues and on that evening in November 2001, Belgians watched in dismay news of the demise of a national monument.

I am told that the Farukis eventually moved to the United Kingdom. As for Chris Lyimo, we are back in touch after these many years and he tells me that he is to be found at the Nairobi Place Addiction Treatment Centre in Karen where he has recently taken up residence as the General Manager.

Should you feel the need to reach out for help for yourself or for a loved one, I could not recommend a better person.

Ms Guchu is a Kenyan resident in Brussels. Email: [email protected]