Hundreds of Kenyans have either been blinded or killed by deadly illicit brews in recent years. It all started suddenly in Kenya’s sprawling slums where life is known to be more difficult and less bearable all year round. In such circumstances, men gradually give up family leadership and take to drinking cheap but potent local brews to temporarily make them forget their miseries. In these dens, the more men drink, the more they get addicted and the more they stop being financially and sexually productive.
A story is told in Kenya where whole schools in a district have been closed down for lack of children to attend such schools. Women in these areas are known to have complained loudly to the government that their men stopped meeting their conjugal and marital obligations a long time ago due to alcohol abuse, hence the women’s inability to conceive and bear children.
When it comes to the deadly brew, the first such case was reported a few years ago in mathare Kosovo slums where brewers hand graduated from making the usual changaa, a product distilled from molasses, a residue from sugar mills to a higher version laced with all manner of spirits that can cause instant death if consumed. At that time, scores of mathare Kosovo slum dwellers lost their sights instantly as others were already dead when it dawned on their neighbors that what they had drunk was not the usual local brew appropriately nicknamed the “tears of a lion” or “kill me quick”.
A few years later this year, the deadly brew claimed the lives of more people in mathare korogocho 25 km from Nairobi city. Like before, the killer brew blinded scores as others were pronounced dead on arrival at various clinics in the area.
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