32 Days of Christmas: Day 17
It’s sometime in 2014, and your sister has just come home from high school carrying a CD. On the cover are five white men in baggy trousers and identical black t-shirts. They look like a boy band or something. You’re not particularly interested. At the time, you’re more of a Diamond Platnumz and Willy Paul kind of guy.
Besides, you’re too busy rummaging through her bag for snacks and flipping through her bulky Biology and Chemistry textbooks. You notice she scored a B in her end-term Chemistry exam, her second-best subject. You wonder how easy Chemistry must be, you ignorant soul. She’s doing well in Home Science too, a B+. The last time you visited her spotless school, she showed you their Home Science lab. You remember being underwhelmed by the sewing machines, convinced they were strictly for girls. Girly subjects. Still you’re pleased she’s excelling in those “girly” departments.
Speaking of school, you don’t know it yet, but years later you’ll learn that Bunyore’s pristine environment wasn’t maintained by coincidence or luck. It was girls on their knees every morning, scrubbing the concrete with raw elbow grease. Years later still, you’ll discover that the highways of Starehe aren’t clean by chance either. In fact, you’ll find yourself supervising those very clean-ups every morning. Your 2014 naïve self would look at you in awe.
Back to the CD.
Before Spotify found its way into our homesteads, music meant buying physical CDs. Sometimes you even took a gamble on upcoming artists, so woe unto you if you wasted your money on a boring album.
Also, authentic Adventist music from OG choirs like Kurasini, along with a then-upcoming Saints Ministers, has you in a chokehold. You don’t want to hear much else, certainly not white people music. Partly because you don’t understand their English very well yet, but mostly because you’re racist. I’m kidding, it’s because you don’t understand it as easily as Diamond’s Swahili.
Your sister on the other hand dances to these new, annoyingly slow songs in the living room, robbing you of your SpongeBob and Discovery Channel time. She’s been waiting three months to come home and watch TV and listen to her music; she’s not about to entertain tantrums from someone who’s had access to the TV every single day. So she kicks you out to go play with the councillor’s son a few yards away.
You’re furious, but you go anyway.
When you return hours later, she’s still dancing to the same CD, a few tears clinging to her cheeks. You sit down and listen, curious about the music that’s made her so emotional. It’s not terrible. It’s just not your kind of music. Or so you think.
Years later your Spotify Wrapped drops, and there they are again: those familiar white-boy faces. This time in full color. Westlife. Not the East Coast–West Coast kind of West. Just Westlife.
They’ve been your favorite boy pop band for years now, alongside acts like the Backstreet Boys. You’ve never openly admitted it though. You don’t want people knowing you’re a lover boy like that. That when Better Man dropped in early 2019, your primary school crush was the first person to tell you about it, and the two of you sang it along the railway tracks like the hopeless romantics you were.
Good times.
Good music.
✍🏽Reagan.