My cousin’s job was winding down, so I met him briefly at Kettle House on Nairobi’s Muthangari Road to offer moral support—with a few beers, of course. He’s not one to lament, this cousin. Very stoic. He talks about losing a job the same way you’d talk about losing a sock—mild inconvenience, nothing personal. And those are the ones to watch; the ones who don’t show emotion.
I hadn’t been to Kettle House since pre-Covid. The last time I was there, a woman was beating a man with her purse outside by the roadside at 2am. That was fun to watch. The whole place has mutated.
There’s now a massive tented section that looks like another bar altogether, flashing lights and a deejay going by the name Me Super Fly. I found parking inside, a big mistake, as I’d soon learn. Cars were packed like sardines. [Pro tip: don’t park inside unless you plan to leave at dawn.]
He comes here often, my cousin, and he’d warned me that the place doesn’t pick up until much later. At that hour, the deejay was just stretching, warming up, testing the limits of our patience.
Our waitress was a young Congolese girl with an opaque smile. “You are very far from home,” I told her. She tried to talk us into ordering Ugandan food. The irony didn’t escape me, a Congolese selling Ugandan cuisine in Kenya.
Later, I spotted a friend I hadn’t seen in dog years. She was drinking cider with another lady. They joined our table. Mid-conversation, her friend leaned in and said, “That man over there looks familiar. I can’t place him.”
Four men sat at a table nearby. One had that kind of face that you are sure you have seen but can’t recall where. My friend squinted. “That’s Sudi,” she whispered. Her friend groaned. “Oh boy.”
The music got better, or maybe it was the drinks. The crowd swelled with night’s usual suspects: everyone chasing something they wouldn’t find. Kettle House, I noticed, isn’t for the fainthearted. It’s for people who take fun seriously, who go home at sunrise, or sometimes, not at all.
