The Loop of Things

The matatu had been stuck outside Globe Roundabout for ten minutes, its engine humming like a restless animal. I sat by the window, watching a hawker chase after a moving bus, his hands full of phone chargers, socks, and those fake Ray-Bans that glint like hope. I was already late for my Data Structures exam. The driver had thought it fit to take a turn to try and escape the busy traffic only to get back to where he had started. My palms were sweating, not just from the heat but from the code that had refused to work last night. I had tried everything. Each attempt returned me to the same problem — the same stubborn logic that refused to yield.

Outside, the morning sun had turned the city gold. A boda boda zigzagged through traffic, its rider yelling at a driver who pretended not to hear. The radio in the matatu played a call-in show — people arguing about the cost of unga, about politicians who had promised heaven but delivered potholes.

The conductor squeezed past me, collecting fare with the aggression of a man who had already lived a lifetime by 9 a.m. His jacket was torn at the elbows, but his pockets jingled with coins — a metallic rhythm that matched the impatient tapping of my foot. I wanted to tell him to hurry, but I knew he couldn’t. Nairobi moves at its own pace: slow enough to frustrate you, fast enough to leave you behind.

As we crawled up University Way, two women started talking behind me. Their voices cut through the noise like sharp wire.

“You know my nephew, eh, he’s in college,” the first woman said, her tone half-boast, half-worry. “But I hear he doesn’t stay in the hostels anymore. He says life there is too hard. Now he’s staying with some woman in Ngara. A big woman, grown woman, you know.”

“Eeeh,” the other woman replied, chuckling softly. “These boys nowadays, they call it sponsorship when it suits them. But who can blame him? Things are hard. Even campus doesn’t feed them like before.”

The matatu jerked forward, the driver forcing it into a narrow space between two buses, curses flying like arrows from both sides. I held onto the seat in front of me, my heart racing. The driver laughed. A dry, fearless laugh , as if danger was his oldest friend.

Somewhere in the noise, my mind drifted back to my laptop screen from the night before. The recursive function. The numbers spiraling into themselves. I hadn’t said it out loud, but the pattern had been haunting me for weeks. It started with something small, something harmless, one number calling the next, the next calling another until suddenly, the whole system was repeating the same story, larger each time.

Like this city. Like this country.

Every election, every speech, every promise.
Different digits, same pattern.

I looked outside again — a street preacher shouting by the pavement, a shoeshine boy squatting beside a banker’s polished shoes, a mother holding a baby with one hand and selling mandazi with the other. Life in Fibonacci — everything building from what came before, endlessly expanding, endlessly familiar. I wondered if anyone ever reached the final term. Or if, like in my code, it just went on until memory overflowed.

“Umesema Chiromo?” the conductor asked, jolting me back.
“Eeh,” I replied.
He nodded, smacked the side of the matatu twice, and the driver swerved out of the jam with the elegance of chaos.

My phone buzzed. A message from Brian, my classmate: “Bro, hurry. Lec amekam. Wameanza kupeana papers.”

My stomach tightened. I imagined walking into the hall, late, everyone turning to look. I tried to breathe, but the air inside the matatu felt recycled , everyone’s sweat, everyone’s fear.

The women behind me were still talking, now about politics.

“They said last year it will change. The new government, new faces. But look now, same hunger, same excuses.”
“These leaders,” the other woman said, “they just rename the ministries and start again. New function, same result.”

New function, same result. I smiled as I remembered my code.

The matatu sped down Uhuru Highway, past the university hostels where laundry hung like tired flags. Groups of boys were on the balcony brushing their teeth while scrolling on their phone. Probably going through the notes before the exam, viewing the new dance trend on Tiktok or what the local celebrity had done on the Instagram blog accounts.

As we neared the gate, the same song came on the radio, again. I realized they had played it twice already that morning. The chorus looped in my head: “Tujiangalie”

The matatu screeched to a halt. I jumped out before it fully stopped, my backpack bouncing against my shoulder. I started running up the hill toward the department — my shoes slapping the pavement, my heartbeat syncing with my thoughts. Each step felt like a line of code being executed.

Step one: breathe.
Step two: run.
Step three: hope the lecturer is late too.

The university compound smelled of wet grass and old buildings. I passed students sitting under the jacaranda trees, cramming, laughing, or pretending to. Everything was alive with nerves , the kind of morning that tests not just knowledge but patience.

As I reached the door of the exam hall, I paused. My reflection flashed in the glass — tired eyes, wrinkled shirt, a brain full of half-formed logic. Somewhere behind that reflection was a young man trying to fix his own function, to make sense of a system too large to debug.

Inside, pens scratched, chairs squeaked, time moved in disciplined silence. I took my seat, the paper already in front of me. Question 3: Write a recursive function to generate a Fibonacci sequence up to n terms.

I almost laughed.

For a moment, the noise of the city returned in my head — the matatu, the conductor’s coins, the two women’s voices, the looping radio. All of it was Fibonacci — each moment born from the sum of what came before.

I wrote slowly, the pencil moving like it knew something I didn’t.

f(0) = 0
f(1) = 1
f(n) = f(n-1) + f(n-2)

But what I saw wasn’t numbers.
It was people.
One generation building on the last, adding struggle to struggle, love to loss, hope to disappointment. We keep calling ourselves, expecting a different output.

Maybe Kenya itself is a recursive function.
It keeps calling itself, growing bigger, older, more complex, but never escaping the pattern that defines it.

Yet somewhere in that pattern, I believed, there was beauty. Because even in Fibonacci, there’s order — spirals of sunflowers, shells, galaxies — proof that repetition can still make art. Maybe the same is true for us. Maybe our loops aren’t mistakes, but reminders that growth takes time, that progress hides inside repetition.

When I finished the exam, I stayed seated for a while, staring at the last line I had written.
It didn’t feel like an answer. It felt like a mirror.

Outside, the afternoon sun had softened. Students walked in pairs, laughing, relieved. The world felt slower now, like a loop finally reaching its return point. I walked toward the gate, the city roaring below me.

A hawker was still selling the same chargers, the same fake Ray-Bans. The matatus were still shouting destinations. The two women from earlier might still be talking, their words spiraling through the air like code being re-executed.

I didn’t mind.

Because maybe the point isn’t to break the loop but to understand it, to live through it, to find the beauty in its rhythm. Maybe every time we repeat ourselves, we inch closer to something clearer, something truer.

As I walked past the gate, I took out my phone and opened the notes app.
I wrote one line:

“Everything repeats, but never exactly.”

And for the first time that day, I felt no rush.
The code, the city, the country, even my own heartbeat , all of it was running, and this time, it made sense