The place had no name. It was a forest, thick with towering indigenous trees that whistled whenever the wind blew. Not the gentle, soothing kind of whistle, either, but the sort that sent shivers down your spine and dragged you straight into the terrifying ghost stories my grandmother told me as a child.
Today, the place has a name: Cohiba. For reasons best known to Dan, a man who claims to be a DJ, this once patch of forest has been christened after what I assumed was a cigar lounge. When I first heard about this new space, I wondered why anyone would set up a cigar lounge in the middle of a forest. Was the idea to smoke out the ghosts?
I had lived in Nairobi’s Ruaka during my early days of hustling. Back then, it was so remote it could easily have passed for my village, the sort of place where you expected darkness, crickets, and perhaps an ancestral spirit or two, not a lifestyle destination.
‘Come see. We have transformed the place. You won’t believe it,’ Dan said over the phone.
Naturally, curiosity got the better of me. I arrived with a companion, and Dan the DJ was at the door to usher us in. We had started as a party of two. By the time we settled down, there were 12 of us gathered around a long table that reminded me of Vladimir Putin’s famously elongated meeting table. I half-expected someone at the far end to need binoculars to catch my eye.
The long table was a gathering of men I had never met, and who, judging by their curious glances, had never met me either.
We were strangers thrown together by Dan’s forest experiment, united by neither friendship nor familiarity, but perhaps by the universal Kenyan instinct to investigate a new joint.
One was an architect, who was smoking shisha with enthusiasm.
Another was dressed like the stereotypical man from ‘mrima’, the sort who seems to have declared a lifelong war against fashion. No fancy capes, no designer labels screaming for attention, no effort to look wealthy. Yet, as is known of these men, are often the ones with deep pockets.
He was busy hammering his beer with the seriousness of a man working toward a quarterly target. His stomach seemed to be losing it.
With every bottle, it expanded until sitting became an increasingly ambitious undertaking. Eventually, he surrendered to gravity, abandoned his chair, and continued enjoying the night on his feet. Perhaps standing offered more room for the beer to settle, or at least gave his belly a chance to negotiate a ceasefire.
The forest whistled again beneath us. The wind gathered strength, and the evening grew colder. But the temperature seemed irrelevant to the Gen Z women keeping the men at our table company.
One wore a backless jumpsuit that left little to the imagination and appeared determined not to let the architect enjoy a moment of his Shisha. Another woman appeared to be having less success attracting the attention she wanted; she turned her attention to a bottle of whisky, draining it with grudge.
Then there was the woman who arrived in pink pyjamas. She had found someone at the table willing to keep her entertained. She was also the reason I eventually relocated to the bougie VIP lounge. The moment she began winking at me, I decided that my evening did not need an additional plot twist.
To be fair, Cohiba’s ambience was exquisite. The setting had character, the atmosphere was inviting, and the contrast between the wild trees and the sophisticated lounge made the place intriguing.
It was the sort of establishment that made you wonder whether the forest had always possessed this much potential or whether Ian had simply discovered a profitable way to negotiate with nature.
But the real comic genius was at the counter. At the counter, cigars were for sale. Actual cigars. The Cohiba cigarellos brand. A hangout joint selling cigars at the counter? That is unheard of. Then someone said, ‘You know, Mrima guys will do anything to earn an extra coin.’