A True Story: Backstreet Scrabble in Nairobi

They say that you never expect the moments which change your life. They come by surprise and only later you stop and think – ‘hey man, my life has changed’. This is the story of one moment in the streets of Kenya that changed my life. It was my introduction into the underground world of Nairobi backstreet scrabble.  A dark world, of gambling, cheating, blood, victory and loss.

It was a hot day. A Monday. I was walking through the city center of Nairobi looking for a local spot to eat lunch, but in the maze of African streets I was lost. I looked around for someone in the crowd to ask directions, and there he stood. A tall black man, forty-seven years of beer belly covered by a cotton white shirt. He wore smart pants and square-toed shoes made of white fake crocodile skin. Still to this day I wonder whether it was me who approached him, or whether he saw me and made himself approachable...

“Excuse me rafiki, do you know where I can find a local restaurant to eat at?” I asked

“Yes I do, there is one just over there. Come let me walk you”. He responded with a smile. “Do you play scrabble?”

And like that we got chatting, chatting about only one thing: Scrabble. Kangethe wasted no time luring me in. He could see I spoke English well. He knew I had the fight within me. He knew I had the money and guts to receive what he wanted to show me. Street knows street.

“We play scrabble in this town. Or should I put it; there are people in this town who play scrabble. There is a league. You can always find a game, if you know where to look. High stakes, no cops, cash only.  This aint no grandmother-old-age-home game my friend. Do you want in?”

I had heard Nairobi being referred to as ‘Nai-robbery’. This was the big city of East Africa. The city of guns, game, sex and lies. I knew I had to keep on my toes in this place, but it had been a while since I had last played scrabble and I always enjoyed the game. Plus English was my first language and that had to be an advantage over the Kenyans who spoke Swahili. Maybe they were right; you don’t chose your games of Scrabble, they chose you.

“Im in, lets roll.” I said.

Kangethe stared at me hard, taking one last once-over before finalizing his decision: “Good choice my friend. But then you must learn the one rule of Nairobi Scrabble Club: You don’t talk about Nairobi Scrabble Club.”

There is an underground world of scrabble that exists here in Kenya. There are games everywhere and Kangethe knows them all: Basements of the best hotels, dark corners of dingy bars, street games in alley ways. The cops have tried to break the syndicate for years, but the games kept moving. Hustlers kept hustling. There was a love for columns, tiles and ‘R’s over A’s that could not be contained.

 “So lets do this thing. Where do we go?” I asked him.

“Not now. There is too much heat on us already. Plus it’s almost tea time – and I don’t scrab at tea time. I drink tea at tea time. Tomorrow. Give me your number and wait for my call after breakfast. Il let you know the time”. He said.

We were walking through the city toward Jomo Kenyatte Avenue when we stopped suddenly under a broken street sign outside a big government building.

“This is the meeting place. Tomorrow when you get my call, come meet me on this spot. And Eitan, come alone”, he said as he shook my hand and disappeared into the crowds of people walking the streets, shopping, chatting going about their daily lives. And like that, he was gone.

Now I was thinking exactly what you are thinking. What the %$#% has just happened? I’m in Nairobi and I don’t really know this place well, but Kangethe looks like a good guy. He had white fake crocodile skin shoes for crying out loud. How hardcore can this guy be? Plus this city is packed with people everywhere – what could possibly happen?

So the next day I waited for his call. And like clockwork, just after breakfast Kangethe called. The game was today and I had to go to the meeting spot outside the government building by the broken street sign. I had a quick lunch with my friends in town, told them about the game and off I went to meet Kangethe - the hustler, Kenya’s unofficial scrabble champion.

Because here is what Kangethe refrained from telling me the day before. Kangethe began playing scrabble when he was 20 years old and had been playing the game for over two decades. However it was not until 2001, ten years ago, that he began playing professionally. At first he could not find a game anywhere. He was an amateur and no one wanted to let him sit at their scrabble boards. However he practiced. He fell deeper and darker into the world of underground scrabble and within five years he was almost unbeatable.  He has played at every table, against every player. For a brief stint he played on the public circuit and was accepted to compete at the scrabble world championship in England in 2005. However due to visa complications he could not attend. After that incident he went back underground and now he pretty much runs the block when it comes to East African scrabble. He sells boards and timers, he sets up games, he brings young blood into the scrabble circles. He knows the games in Uganda, he can link you with a board from Kigali to Bujumbura, and he drops tiles like they are homemade chocolate chip cookies.

And here I was. A lonely traveler, whose last game of scrabble was last Christmas at against Jo and Dorian. I had won. But I mean; they weren’t exactly tough competition. My first language was English, but Kangethe’s first langue was African-gangster-street-hustle. A language spoken by few, with no grammar rules, and so rough sounding it makes South London slang sound like the queen’s English.

As we looked for a spot to play, I could sense that this was a hustle. But I was not about to back out now.  I was like a sheep, calmly walking into the shepherd’s pen. He so tenderly broached the subject of cash stakes. He so elegantly neglected from explaining the complex set of rules that they play in Nairobi street games. Kangethe wasn’t a bad guy, he just played a hard game. And I was no fool – I could see what I was stepping into. I just forgot to care. I had let go of emotions, let go of memories of home, threw my inhibitions to the metaphorical wind, and stepped happily into his world. There was only one thing on my mind: I wanted to know if I could sit down with the champ and beat him at his own game. It was going to cost me some money, it was going to mean the spill of blood, but fuckit, I had come this far. It was on like donkey kong. Plus, maybe I had some tricks up my sleeve. I have a pretty good vocabulary, and my first language is English for god’s sake!

We finally found a dingy hotel in one of the many isolated alleyways of Nairobi. We walked up three flights of dark, creaky stairs to a restaurant/ shabeen/ brothel type place. We walked straight through the front room to a small enclosure on a completely covered balcony and sat down at the table in the corner. A couple got up and walked out the room when they saw us sit down. Maybe they knew what to expect. Maybe they had seen this scene before. Kangethe cleared the table and took the big, heavy, blood-stained, wood-chipped board from the brown paper bag he was carrying. He laid it down on the table and removed the green sack of tiles from his jacket pocket.

I wish I could say something like: “The game is simple – just use your letter’d tiles to make words in columns on the board in order to attain the biggest score, allocated by the points indicated on the corner of each tile.” But I cannot, because this game was not simple. Either that or Kangethe cheated a lot. I would put down a word and a rule would be recalled as to why it was invalid. Kangethe would put down a word and state a rule which doubled his points or allotted him an extra 50 points for his technique. In his game; syllabus were permitted, columns could be broken by specific methods and even phoning a friend to settle disputes was allowed.

This was not a simple game. It ignored the rule of law and disregarded legal positivism. Kangethe subscribed to the laws of Louis Suarez and not the conventions of Ronald Dworkin. In his game, anything went, and his word was final.

We drew tiles for service. Kangethe won and played first. We had no timer, so the length of one’s turn was determined by reasonableness. Kangethe had also conveniently forgotten his official scrabble English dictionary at home, but luckily he had a good friend on standby who had a dictionary and could be called for confirmation of a word at any time. By using this system, classic and fantastic words such as “qae”, Xoie” and even afeets” were allowed and often resulted in a reward of double points for using certain letters in sequence or for ‘creditable creativity’.

But I was no push over. I would challenge almost every obscurity.

“Troging” is not a word”. I insisted.

“Yes it is” he replied with a shocked and half disgusted gasp.

“What does it mean then?”

“You know to trog. You know, pertaining to water. People trog all the time. It’s a verb. An abstract verb. Kind of like a noun…but different. It’s a bloody word, I’m telling you!”

“Mate, I speak friggen English and I have never heard of ‘troging’. And I’m around water a lot. I think I would have noticed if it was ‘troging’. Plus wouldn’t it then be ‘troGGing’ anyways?”

“No, its troging with one G. You want me to phone my friend again?... I get 10 points for using the 4^th right square of the 2^nd column.”

And the game went on like this. The room grew thicker with smoke and the light was disappearing outside the windows. Kangethe sat on his phone while I pondered my moves. Sporadically, random people would show up to chat with him or negotiate a price for a new board or more modern tiles. Old men, young students dressed in baggy jeans and tight t-shirts, men dressed in suits and carrying briefcases. How deep did this all go?

I lost the first game convincingly. It seemed that my plain English was no match for his imaginary language of vowels and consonants.

“Now you pay up” he laughed.

The bank roll of my lunch and accommodation money burned in my pocket. Lucky for me I was staying with an old friend here in Nairobi, so I had a little more paper to play, and I was not going to let him have it that easy. My money was at stake, but so were my pride and my name in the scrabble movement.

I stared at him hard through crisp eyes. “Double or nothing”, I said.

He stopped and looked back at me with surprise and respect together.

“You want more? Okay, again”. He agreed as he began resetting the board.

Sweat poured down my face as I dropped my first tiles on the board. Double points. He replied with a double worder, but I smashed him back with a string of vowels bigger than his bag of tricks. He came back hard, narrowly missing emptying all seven tiles in one go. But I saw the gap and dropped a monster, creating words in two different directions with one move. He slammed his fist on the table, grunted loudly, and pulled his chair in closer to the table. I got no congratulations for my efforts. In this game sportsmanship ran a distant second to winning.

By halfway through the game I was point leading, but not by much. I chewed hard on my toothpick and stared at the board willing the tiles to run out while I was ahead. Kangethe was behind, but he was not beaten and I did not want to stick around for long enough for him to make up some new rules or words.

The board was packed with words and the atmosphere was packed with anxiety. It was at this point, when the real trickery began. I placed the word ‘h e a r t’ over a triple letter word, but had accidently switched the ‘a’ and ‘r’ in placing them down. We had been playing scrabble for three solid hours; my concentration had taken a beating.

“That’s a foul” He said. “You lose 50 points and I gain 36 points”. That’s the rules. We can phone my friend if you want to confirm?...”

The game was mine to lose and Kangethe was stealing it right before my eyes. I had sat down at a table with a scrabble hustler, a behemoth of the board games, a doctor of the dice. I was never going to win the money, but the pride was mine to take.

“Is that how you want to play?” I asked. “Fine, have the points, it’s your own face that you have to see when you look yourself in the mirror in the morning”.

And it was his face that he had to see in the mirror in the mornings. A face that was a little bit richer and a little bit happier. I don’t think he minded too much. So the game ended like that. The extra 34 points, the deduction from my score and the extra few points he gave himself based on a complex calculation of how many pieces were left in my bank when he had finished his, gave him enough to narrowly beat my score.

I was English first language. But I was playing backstreet scrabble in Nairobi. I was way out of my league. I was never going to win. But that was okay. I was in it for the pride, and I had mine intact. Kangethe was in it for the love of the game and the lust for money, and he had his intact too. I handed over the winnings, and he suggested I pay for the coffee as a sign of good sportsmanship. I suggested he paid for his own coffee and maybe use the rest of the winnings to buy new shoes too. Kangethe grabbed the score sheet, wrote something on the back and slid it over to me.  We shook hands, shared a nod of mutual respect and I left.

As I broke through the downstairs doors of the hotel into the alleyways of Nairobi I felt the smog on my face and the days-end sunlight in my eyes and I turned to walk back towards the busy streets to find a matatu back home. I had sat down with the Kenyan scrabble champion in a backstreet game of scrabble and I had held my own.

I put my hand in my pocket and took out the score sheet. On the back was a message scribbled in black pen.

“Well played rafiki.

If you are looking for a game in Uganda; call my friend.

 Tell him I sent you. Godfrey -  Kampala +261 343 4993.

Sincerely, Kangethe.

And like that, my life was changed.