Every Saint Has a Past — The Easter Pullout (Part 1 of 2)

Exposure. Inheritance. Consequences. Same Forest. Different Monkeys.

Easter has its own language.
Not the church version. Not the sermons. The real one.
The one that moves through WhatsApp groups, Facebook timelines, office banter and nyuma ya tent conversations.
That meme you’ve already seen this week.
Bottles lined up like soldiers.
Someone captions it, “He is risen… so are we.”

You laugh. You forward. Someone says “hii weekend hatuhesabu.”
It feels harmless. It feels normal. It feels like culture.
But Easter is not interested in what feels normal.
It is interested in what is true.
And the truth is, most of what we call normal… many of us did not choose.

Start with something small. Innocent even.
Gripe water. (aptly named)
Every Kenyan home (in the last century) had a version of that story.
Mtoto analia. Mzazi amechoka.
A few drops. Silence. Relief.
No one asks too many questions because the result is immediate.
But buried inside some of those early solutions was alcohol.
Small amounts, controlled, functional. It worked.
That’s all that mattered.
But solutions have a way of travelling.
From medicine to habit. From controlled use to normal use.
From something we administer… to something we participate in.
No one stands up and announces the shift.
It just happens. Slowly. Quietly.
Until one day, you are not asking why anymore.
You are swimming with the sharks.

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To combat malaria in India, British soldiers mixed bitter quinine with sugar and lime. The addition of gin transformed a medicinal necessity into the “sundowner.”

It’s a classic bait-and-switch: What begins as medicine in one century becomes a lifestyle in the next. Packaged better. Marketed louder. Sold smarter.

What was once a solution for survival is now an identity for the weekend. The “refreshment” we defend loudly is often just a habit we inherited quietly.
We think we are choosing the drink, but often,
we are just following the script of the system.

But systems hate interruptions.
In my opinion, the uncomfortable truth about the Kenyan narrative isn’t that we drink more—it’s that we drink fully.
Intensity over frequency.
The “release” becomes the ritual. And that is where the meme stops being funny, because what looks like culture starts looking like a cage.

Then you move from the pattern to people.
The Lion of Muthurwa
this time, the Lion does not just move;
he changes forests.
Victor Wanyama.
From Nairobi to the world.
Four countries. Six clubs. Over 400 professional appearances.
UEFA Champions League nights.
Captain of Kenya.
Not stories. Not hype. Data.
Now place that next to the system we just described.
The weekend partying. The release culture. The inherited patterns.
Wanyama did not come from a different Kenya. He came from this one.
But somewhere along the line, choice interrupted the pattern.

Not every story ends where it begins.
Same country. Same streets.
Same exposure. Different outcome.

That is the uncomfortable truth, because it removes the excuse.
Wanyama did not come from a different Kenya. He came from this one. And somewhere along the line, choice interrupted pattern.
That is what makes him dangerous. Not the tackles. Not the goals.
The interruption.
Because once one person proves it can be done, the system loses its power to explain everything.
And that is why the Lion of Muthurwa matters. Not because he escaped, but because he returned with proof. That even inside the system, movement is possible.
He was never just noise. He was always carrying something bigger.
Kenya’s hope.

Godspeed, Big Vic.

Wanyama does not fix the system. He breaks the excuse.
Because now you’ve seen both sides.
The pattern… And the interruption.
Same country. Same streets. Same exposure.
Different outcome.
So the question is no longer what is happening around you.
The question is what you are choosing inside it.
Because at some point… you stop observing the system.
You become part of it.

Every saint has a past.

👉 Continue to Part 2: Every Sinner Has a Future — The Resurrection
Because the story doesn’t end here… it turns.