Think of those crazy reality shows that invade our sitting rooms. You know, the ones in which contestants get paid hundreds of dollars to get lost in some remote place or ingest vile creatures raw, or get rolled off a cliff in an ancient Volkswagen Beetle.
If these shows turn you on as much as the prize megabucks do, then downtown Nairobi is the place to go for a real reality-show experience. Unfortunately, though, no camera crew will risk its costly equipment to cover your foolhardy ventures into places where eagles would fear to fly. Getting mugged inside the bowels of the capital is not exactly anybody’s cup of tea. And even though some truly nasty things could happen to you in this reality, you won’t get a nickel for your efforts.
But if you have a taste for danger, a trip downtown would certainly be a notch-on-your-belt adventure to beat eating a cockroach. The first thing to do is put on your favourite shoes, especially if they’re made for running, which you might need to do at extremely short notice once your adventure begins. Now venture boldly into your chosen arena and the action begins.
It won’t take long before you come across three or four hoodlums who will stare at you menacingly and start walking towards you. If you want to leave the game at this early stage, run away from them like a bat out of hell — these guys are unlikely to be interested in finding out what the weather’s like in your neck of the woods.
But if you’re committed to the kind of extreme experience that will become the gist of your next letter home to the folks, then keep on walking towards the hoodlums. The first thing you’ll really notice about them is that they are scrawny characters who look as though they are likely to bark rather than bite. Wrong.
So let’s get on with it, hero. As soon as the spare-bodied toughies are behind you something very hard will be pressed against your throat, threatening to rip out your Adam’s apple.
The contraption is actually a half-metre or so plank of wood, held hard at both ends by the guy trying to snuff the living daylights out of you. Known in Nairobi parlance as a ngeta, it’s the assault weapon of choice for Nairobi’s backstreet goons. You will try to holler, but all you’re acutely aware of now is the feeling of your eyes rolling in their sockets as you desperately gasp for breath, even as your pockets are systematically riffled at lightning speed.
Suppose for a moment that you were able to let out a mighty yell — which you now, technically, can’t — don’t kid yourself that the Nairobi crowds would bother to come to your rescue. They learnt to mind their own business long ago, even when a foolhardy fella like you is being done in in plain daylight by some puny characters. Anyway, the crowd has become inured - watching the same reality shows on telly that you do.
But let’s get back to the business at hand — unlike the long-running reality shows on the tube, getting mugged in Nairobi will be over in just a few seconds. You realise this as you lie on your back blankly staring at a beautiful equatorial sky, and feeling — correctly so — that you’re likely to be in a neckbrace on the flight back home.
By the time you regain full consciousness, you understand that your assailants are long gone. All around you you can dimly hear a small crowd wondering how you got yourself into this reality show.
Ciugu Mwagiru is a freelance writer, editor and French-English translator based in Nairobi