Wonderful Friday, isn’t it?
Greetings.
I am in no mood of wasting your time with lengthy pleasantries this evening so I will go on and tell you about my love for music. I am one of those people you would describe as a person who is liberal with his taste for music. My phone playlist which boasts of a 200 song playlist at any given time contains songs by Atoht Manje through Tekno Miles, Ndirande Anglican Voices, The Weekend, Frank Josiah, Slaughterhouse to Avalon Band. It is not so surprising, therefore, that I at some point found myself listening to a Joe Gwaladi song. I don’t know the proper title of the song, but if I am not mistaken it only had one line that was repeated through the three minutes or so. Kumangozazitsa tauni, geni yake yogulitsa minkhaka. You got me right. You are just filling the town but all you do is sell cucumbers.
When I first heard the song, I found it demeaning. I walked in the shows of those who do the good job of bringing cucumbers from whichever corner of the country (I don’t even know where they rear or grow them, whatever it is) to town so that we can add them to our salads as we strive to trim our big tummies. The artist was probably insensitive but there was no such outcry. This was the Gwaladi of the N’nafa Bulu and Khoswe Chipongwe fame and people were used to his lyrics.
I probably fell in love with Gwaladi’s songs in late 2010 prior to joining college but more than seven years down the line I found myself relating with the cucumber song. Reason? I actually had my brain oscillate at the same frequency and wavelength with Gwaladi’s. I feel like there are some people whose presence in town should be brought to question based on what they do. Before you label me as a self-elevating discriminatory idiot, my point here is just that I find it hard to imagine how some people survive town based on how expensive town life is. There are many groups of people prying on their trades in town but one that strikes me is the army of young men selling plastic carrier bags in town; anyamata a majumbo.
If you are the kind of guy who buys imported tomatoes and potatoes in Shoprite, you wouldn’t relate with what I mean. If you are the kind of person who goes into these fancy shops to buy Gucci wa Tanzania for clothing, you wouldn’t understand me wither. These are guys who are all over Blantyre and Limbe markets, opportunistically waiting for the shopper to make a stop at a potato vendor’s bag so that they can provide the much needed “jumbo ya K50”. These are the same guys who wait for you to buy 3 kilos of rice before they come running to give you a lecture on how thin your plastic bag is and how likely you are to lose your rice if you don’t protect your stuff with an extra plastic bag.
I have always wondered as to whether these guys make enough money to keep them thriving in town and this question has always lingered based on the assumption that these people are here in town for one thing alone; kugulitsa majumbo. I have always thought of it as an impossible venture considering rentals, food, clothing and all. You possibly wouldn’t make enough for all that out of plastic bag sales.
My new habbit of buying things in bulk turned me into a regular visitor of Blantyre market and one things I observed is that there is always a pack of boys following you as you go into the market. These, of course, are not carrier bag sellers. They are sellers of mbatatesi ya Ntcheu who always pester you by “forcing” you to buy their merchandise or not regardless of whether you are going there for food products or just a hair cut. Once you manage to get convinced by one of them, the other follows with a plastic bag. They never do their business together but their operations are heavily linked and one depends heavily on another. One day, I happened to carry my own durable plastic bag when I was going for some shopping in Blantyre market. That was the last time I did it upon interaction with mnyamata wamajumbo who wondered as to how he was going to survive town if we continued using the plastic bags we got from our big shopping centers for potato shopping. That was the turning point for me, and whenever I don’t carry a backpack, I find myself making these guys a couple of bucks richer by buying their products.
My interaction with these guys who sell plastic bags has given me the answer to my question as to whether life is easy for them. The discovery was in line with what I had initially theorized. Life is generally hard for the guys and they do not have it easy. One of them, who had offered to carry my stuff and see me off the market once got over the lane and started to ask me if I had an extra K1000 to help him pay his rentals as his landlord was on his neck. He went on to tell me how he was finding it hard to find his basic needs and was hardly getting by. The poor guy was just unlucky because I was broke and half functional, having splashed on some hydrocarbons prior to the emergency shopping stint.
I once got into a discussion with my sister who happened to be sharing some shopping tips for Limbe market with me. She gave me some unsolicited lecture on how I needed to pay much attention to where my money is, especially when navigating the most crowded of places in the market. In her knowledge, it is anyamata a majumbo who steal from people in the market. It is not a far-fetched assertion, if you are to think about it.
Perhaps this is just one example but there are many who are really struggling. Like Gwaladi’s minkhaka song, this isn’t meant to demean them. They are out here serving a certain purpose. What I tend to wonder is just this thing of whether the return are worth migrating from kwa Kalimezako in Neno to kwa Gayesi in the middle of Mbayani… whether running around town and struggling with rentals is relly something to leave the simple village life for. Perhaps some of us cannot have the best answers to these questions. I can only hope that I will keep having enough so that I can tell wa jumbo to keep the change whenever I give a K200 note and get my K50 plastic bag. It may not be much, but we never know how much of a difference that could make.
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