The Suspicious Heart

Distrusting Good Things

There is a particular kind of Kenyan, and I suspect you are one of us, who receives a compliment the way one receives an M-Pesa message at 2 a.m. With deep suspicion. With one eye open.Someone says, “You look nice today,” and instead of saying thank you, your brain immediately starts running diagnostics. What do they want. Is this the part where they ask for a soft loan. Did I leave the house with a stain shaped like Lake Victoria on my shirt and they are mocking me with the gentleness of a kindergarten teacher.

We are a people who have been disappointed by professionals. Politicians have promised us laptops and given us tarmac that dissolves like Milo in hot water. KPLC has trained us to never fully commit to plans because the moment you say “I will iron my shirt tonight,” the lights go off with the timing of Storm over Paradise. Kenya Power is the original toxic ex. They come back without warning, they leave without explanation, and somehow you are the one apologising to the neighbours.

So you understand why, when something genuinely good happens, the average Kenyan responds with the emotional range of a person being handed a snake. Joy is a foreign object in the throat. We do not know how to swallow it. We chew it suspiciously, looking around, waiting for someone to say “Surprise, it was githeri all along.”

Take the matter of free things. A Kenyan does not trust a free thing. If you tell a Kenyan that an event has “free entry, free food, free drinks,” that Kenyan will arrive carrying their own water bottle, a small packet of biscuits, and a deep philosophical conviction that they will be charged for something at the gate. “Free” in this country has historically meant “you will pay later, possibly with your dignity, definitely with your time.” When the food is actually free, we eat it standing up, ready to run. The mouth is chewing but the legs are warming up. This is not paranoia. This is heritage.

And love. Oh, love. Let us talk about love, because this is where the wound lives quietly, like a tenant who pays rent on time but rearranges your furniture when you are away. When someone good walks into your life, someone who texts back without playing chess with their replies, someone who shows up when they say they will show up, someone whose love does not require a translator, you panic. You wait for them to do the Kenyan thing. The ghosting. The “niko busy” that stretches into a national holiday. The slow disappearance that begins with shorter replies and ends with you stalking their WhatsApp profile picture at 11 p.m., interpreting their new sunset photo like it is a Dead Sea Scroll.

When they do not do these things, when they keep being good, you become destabilised. You start manufacturing problems. You ask questions like, “But why are you so calm?” “Why don’t you ever get angry?” “Are you hiding something, like a wife in Kitengela?” You are not crazy. You are just used to chaos being free and peace being a paid subscription you cannot afford.

The Kenyan with a suspicious heart has been trained by a thousand small betrayals. The mama mboga who weighed your tomatoes with the cunning of a forex trader stay guided brokies. The matatu that promised to leave “saa hii hii” and left three hours later, after the conductor finished a full romantic relationship outside the vehicle. The boss who said “we are like family here” and then paid you in October for work you did in May. The friend who borrowed two hundred bob in 2017 and now greets you in church like you are the one with a debt to settle. By the time anything good arrives, you have built a small fortress around your heart, with security guards, a logbook, and a sign that says “Hatuwezi kuingiza wageni baada ya saa nne usiku.”

The cruel comedy is that the good things knock politely. They do not bang. They do not threaten. They do not demand. So we miss them. We are too busy listening for the loud bad things, the way a Nairobi resident sleeps through the call to prayer but wakes up immediately if a leaf falls suspiciously near the gate. We have tuned our ears to disaster. Joy comes wearing soft slippers, and we mistake it for nothing.

I have a friend who got promoted last year. A real promotion, with a real raise, in real shillings, not the kind of promotion where they just give you more responsibilities and a new title that sounds like a Wi-Fi password. Do you know what she did when she got the news? She cried. Not from joy. From suspicion. “It must be a mistake,” she said. “They will call me back tomorrow and say sorry, it was meant for the other Wanjiku.” For three weeks she did not tell her family. She was waiting for the email that says “Kindly disregard our previous communication.” That email never came. The good thing was real. And she had to learn, slowly, painfully, how to live inside a piece of good news without flinching.

This is the work. This is the quiet, embarrassing, deeply Kenyan work of learning to receive. To let the compliment land without checking it for landmines. To let the love stay without auditioning new reasons for it to leave. To let the money come in without immediately listing the seventeen people who will want a share. To stop treating peace like a scam. To stop assuming that anything soft must be a setup.

Maybe it is not that we cannot accept good things. Maybe it is that nobody ever taught us how. We learned to dodge, to brace, to flinch, to negotiate, to hustle, to make a way out of no way, to laugh at our own pain before someone else does it for us. These are survival skills. They have kept us alive. But survival is not the same as living, the way ugali is not the same as a meal. You need the sukuma. You need the meat. You need the company. You need to sit down.

So tonight, when something good happens, do not run a background check. Do not call your sister to ask if it is a curse. Do not look at it sideways like it owes you money. Just sit with it. Let it stay. Drink your tea. Breathe.

The good thing is not a trap.

It is just your turn.