The barber on Tom Mboya Street

There is a barber on Tom Mboya Street who has cut hair for forty-three years. He does not own the shop. He does not own the chair. He owns a comb, two pairs of scissors, and the precise length of his attention, which he rations to whichever head is in front of him and to no other.

He charges three hundred shillings — which is what he charged in 2019, and which is what he intends to charge in 2031 if he is still alive. He is told once a year that he should raise his prices and that everyone has raised theirs, and he says, calmly, that no one is forcing them to come to him, and that the people who come to him are not coming for the price.

I asked him once what he thought about cryptocurrency, because I was younger then and thought that was a question. He looked at me for a long moment without stopping the scissors. Then he said: a man's money is the time he is willing to wait for it. The phone in your pocket is full of new ways to wait less. That is all.

I have repeated this sentence to myself for nine years. It is not a sentence about cryptocurrency. It is a sentence about why the things that make you wait less very often make you poorer — because the waiting was the work, and the work was the value, and stripping the work out leaves the price unchanged and the meaning gone.

He is still on Tom Mboya Street. He is still using one of the same two pairs of scissors. He is still three hundred shillings. And people are still in line at eleven on a Wednesday for a haircut that takes thirty-five minutes, and the haircut is worth the wait, which is the same as saying the haircut is the wait.