Last word
On Blind Loyalty
The location of Ochieng’ s first heartbreak was during a competitive football match against their perennial arch-rivals who had managed to beat them two years in a row and a loss for the third-year running would be catastrophic.
Of course, this was long before Kenyans transferred their football allegiance wholesale to the English Premier League and adopted teams whose clubhouses requires a GPS to locate but whose players they know better than their clan members. matches which allowed the victorious teams to participate in interprovincial tournament was the holy grail for any team and Ochieng, as the team captain wanted to reverse their poor run.
On Ochieng’ s shoulders lay the onerous reputation and pride of the school and he had not yet learnt that the support of Kenyans is fickle. Kenyan’ s Ochieng was to soon find out that love to be on the winning side even when the winning side is the opponent. referee informing him that if he sends off the player the team would lose. Ochieng was puzzled since he would have assumed that was the outcome that she would have wanted.
Ochieng was to learn later that bets had been taken not only on the fact that they would lose but by what margin. Ochieng would not believe that his girlfriend would take a bet against him let alone object to rival’ s removal just so that she would be right on a bet.
How Ochieng wishes that a fraction of this fanaticism for the foreign clubs could have survived in Kenya since by now Kenya would perhaps have a vibrant football league and divert male frustrations away from the dismal performance of‘ Ligi Ndogo’.
But in those days, interschool football
The best player on the rival team had just caused a rather serious infringement and the referee was considering whether to eject the player and of course the spectators became very animated and vocal about the incident.
That is when Ochieng heard his girlfriend from the neighboring school chastise the
The police were previously known as the police force, since the only response they have to any situation is force. They have rebranded to a police service but what they do now is serve injustice, as usual, except now in a new‘ expensive’ uniform made in Gikomba. It’ s a well-known fact that there are no such things as peaceful protests in Kenya. The Kenyan police is irrevocably violent.
As fate would have it, the player was not sent off but was warned that any such further infringements would result in his expulsion, which might have subdued his exuberance since Ochieng’ s team pulled off a surprise win on that particular match.
But it was a victory with a bad taste, Ochieng could feel the pulpable irritation of the spectators who were behaving as though they had been cheated of a win and it was as though the victory songs they had pre-composed were going to waste.
Ochieng received a smiley congratulation from his girlfriend but it could not appease his disappointed and sense of betrayal from her earlier remarks which she didn’ t know he had overheard and wondered if she had also prepared a fitting commiseration had they lost.
Ochieng on that memorable day won a match and lost a girlfriend since he couldn’ t trust that in future endeavors, she would not prove disloyal. Ochieng had cause to later wonder if that disloyalty was not preferable to the blind loyalty that
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