Chinko shoes and Chinko love
One of the words I’ll never forget learning from my dear Ugandan friends is ‘Chinko’, that is ‘cheap products made in China’. Just look down the next time you are strolling in the streets, and notice the shiny, plastic, bright-coloured shoes adorning the feet of every other woman. Chinko shoes are known for three distinctive things: their availability in a vast array of colours, their cheapness and their short life- span.
Just like in downtown Kampala, the traders here in Nairobi have discovered the convenience of taping their sales messages then playing them over and over on low-quality speakers at volume 300- the devil’s preferred volume. My mother calls shoes bought in such establishments “The- shoes- that- are –cried- out- for”. This is a direct translation from my mother-tongue (which, curiously, also happens to be my father-tongue). Barely a month after purchase, your Chinko shoe will inevitably develop a tear, which will evolve into the shoe falling apart piece by piece until you are forced to throw it out with last night’s supper remains.
Chinko love is just as unreliable. It starts with a bang and overwhelms you with its suddenness, like an unsuspecting ant caught in a pot of malwa. Chinko love comes dressed up, smelling of intoxicating perfume and persuading you to take leave of all your senses, to forget about tomorrow, and think only about today. Chinko love stuns you into saying “But you mean I could have been this happy all along! What a blind fool I’ve been!”
A few weeks later, just as Chinko shoes are nearing the end of their time on earth, Chinko love begins to wear off as well. Ask any pensioner who abandoned his family as soon as the pension shillings hit his account and disappeared for months, only to come back, sheepish, repentant and empty-handed. Ask any woman who ran away into the sunset in the arms of a lover who promised her relief from all her problems, only to wake up one day and realise she had left her mind somewhere along the way.
Don’t trust Chinko shoes, don’t trust Chinko love.
