DATING KENYAN MEN AT YOUR OWN RISK: ESTHER KAHUHA

 By Margaretta wa Gacheru (May 30,2022

Esther Kahuha gave us the second installment of ‘The Man-Made Woman’ last weekend at Kenya Cultural Centre.

As hilarious as her first-time round was, the stand-up comedian known to some as ‘Madam President’ gave an outrageously funny hour and some minutes, entertaining her audience who were the target of her tall tales.

Speaking directly to us, most of whom were her fans, there were also many who had been following her since her days with Heartstrings Entertainment. She even gave a moment to thank Sammy Mwangi and Victor Ber who she said had taught her so much about storytelling.

She clearly had learned those lessons well, since her Saturday night performance was filled with a myriad of stories, stories which we might believe all came out of her own personal life. But who can know other than Esther.

What those string of tell-all tales featured was a complicated journey through the Kenya dating world as she (or her avatar) had experienced. She made them all feel like true tales.

Starting with a horrifying howling session that every woman in the house knew was meant to express the labor pains that most women go through (if they don’t take the easy route with a Caesarian slice) in the course of delivering a baby. It’s a sound that Esther had mastered, but one she was able to use as a means of digging right into our souls.

That baby’s birth when she was 18 was something she expressed no shame for. Instead, she’d chosen to raise her child and allow her to come along for the ride that Esther was intent on taking, looking for the perfect man to make her complete.

There were many that got chronicled and detailed that night, even as she never lost eye contact with her audience and rarely stopped moving throughout the show.

This woman has mastered physical comedy in a way that corelated beautifully with her stories of Martin and Kioko followed by Sam and finally Nick Ouma. Then there was also Auntie Florence who was the only snooty relation who judged her harshly for having a baby out of wedlock. We actually never find out who the father might be. Instead, all we know is that she went to Mombasa and came back pregnant. No further information was provided.

Where she started naming names was with Martin who was a printer whom she met while working herself in a printer’s place. Their dates were mainly doing his overtime jobs. Otherwise, she was impressed with Martin’s car even though it was old and rusty. He made a point of getting the car painted and buying fancy new seat covers. But then they hit rainy season and the roof leaked so badly, she saw Martin was not the man she’d hope. So she left.

Three days later came Kioko, who she also wasn’t especially impressed with. But for some reason, she got stuck and stayed with him many months. Then he took her to his granny’s funeral and found suddenly, whatever attraction that had made her stay was most likely tied up with spells having been cast on her by the granny in cahoots with Kioko. Once again, she split that scene.

Then came Sam who she met in church. He had baby girl the same age as her daughter so they got together. Believing she was being good by loving her ‘neighbor’, she quickly got bored.

Finally, she met slick Nick while being on a shopping spree. His line was to ask if he could pay for her shopping? It was a query she could hardly resist, especially as Nick had a spiffy car, a white Range Rover which took them to Mombasa, Maasai Mara, and finally to Homa Bay to his family’s place.

That last stop was the killer. That is where she met all of Nick’s many wives. It was they who he was ultimately shopping for and she had effectively guided him to pick up the items every woman would love to have.

So now she recognized she had been very useful to Nick as a ‘manager’ who helped him organize his gift-giving once he got home. Now it was clear, she wasn’t even introduced to the family as a girlfriend since apparently, now she knew she was not one. Any hopes of wedlock with Nick were quickly doused.

Esther had tried making friends irrespective of ethnicity.  After all, she’d made friends with Luo and Kamba and other nationalities. Nonetheless, there is one thing she knew for sure, and that was: “You date a Kikuyu man at your own risk.”