Driving a taxi in Nairobi is dangerous. Thugs want your money, drunk married women want you to ‘prove you are a man’; prostitutes want to pay you in kind after a bad day at work. It’s not a job for the soft hearted.
Silas Kamau, a taxi driver based at Nairobi West, says he has over the last five years, seen hundreds of drunk couples romping on his backseat as he drove them home.
“The latest was one week ago when a man and his date asked me to drive them to a lodging but started their business in the taxi. By the time I got to the lodging, they had finished. The man asked me to turn back and drive to the bar since they no longer needed the lodging. But I insisted that he pays me the Sh800 he was to pay at the lodge for turning my taxi into a bedroom!” says Kamau.
Sometimes, Kamau saves lives. Last weekend, he stumbled upon Street boys trying to molest a young woman, who had just left Tamasha.
“I chased the boys away and the woman, who was very drunk, asked me to drop her in Karen. By the time we arrived in Karen, she had puked all over my car and didn’t even know where she stays, so I drove her back to Nairobi West, booked a room and locked her in. I came back in the morning, picked her and dropped her home,” Kamau recalls.
The girl, upon being told what had transpired the night before, was overcome with emotion and, in tears, gave Kamau Sh5,000.
But it is not all rosy: “Last week, I had file a police case since a woman I had ferried to Lang’ata sexually molested me,” says Kamau.
“The woman, a regular client, started touching me in the wrong places on the way home. Her hands were all over my crotch and on arriving at her court, she told me to get into her house for my money. I was hesitant. I knew she was up to no good. I reluctantly followed her and when we got to her house, she grabbed my face and kissed me. My knees gave way and I collapsed on the carpet. I was thinking, what if the man of the house walks in right now?
“What I regret is I lost a client, and also didn’t get paid. I am an old man now. I have done all those things during my youth and my priority right now is to earn a living and take care of my family. Had I been younger...” Kamau adds wistfully, trailing off.
But it is the younger women that shock taxi drivers the most. In a career spanning 13 years moving around the city’s numerous suburbs and outskirts, 55-year-old Nahashon Mwati has encountered horrors and shocks but none is as baffling as the transformation of the Nairobi woman over the years.
“Well, they are mostly young, some even in college, but they can afford a taxi, week in, week out,” says Mr Mwati matter-of-factly.
Mwati now has about seven female clients whom he ferries from anywhere at night to wherever. They regularly go home with different men, or they visit different men in different parts of the city, on different nights. And they are not call girls in the conventional sense of the word.
“All, I know is that they have multiple men, young and old, and they neck in the back-seat as I drive. You become immune but it is impossible to believe what the young women in these colleges do,” says Mwati.
Just about everything has happened in his back seat. He has seen fights. He has seen couples quarrel and trade insults. And he has seen men being left in the cold without money — or thrown out by their wives.
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