Whatever you do in this country, try not to be poor. You cannot afford to be poor. Here, a poor man’s greeting is mistaken for begging. That’s why I understand when ladies use what they have to get what they need. You know what I mean.
In my heydays, I had what the philosophers call moral absolutism. To me everything was linear, you were either right or wrong (mostly wrong). The world was black or white—now I understand that the world has more than 50 shades of grey. Again, you know what I mean.
Because the cold (and mean) Nairobi weather reminds me of being in a former flame’s heart, as I found my way to Mombasa, club hopping like a man who doesn’t pay taxes, when my attention was drawn to a peculiar creature that exists in the imagination of our nation’s conscience—the Kenyan man.
There, as we pigad sherehe , I noticed that every single man had a wedding ring on. Read that slowly. But the lust-inducing 20-something-year-old sirens with stomachs flatter than my Kariokor chopping board and nyash rounder than my circle of happiness didn’t seem to mind.
In fact, they were hahaing and tihihing and loloing what I can only assume to be (dad) jokes from these well-read and highly educated men with MBAs (married but available). I don’t think these men were talking about taxes with those girls. If you ask me, I even think those girls file nil returns. So why was I taking mara moja for someone else’s headache?
In matters like this, I prefer to use my reptilian brain which says only one thing: do not date a gold-digging girl. They are just after your money. You may think that the 1995 Beijing Conference would have done a number on me by now but I have proven to be surprisingly stubborn. I want to tell you that I am progressive or progressiveish but I am not thaaaat progressive, despite my well-documented nyash weaknesses.
I digress. Gold-digging. Truth is, we castigate women for using what their mamas gave them, in this case, their Nyash, to get ahead of the pack, but have you studied men?
Men will tell you that they come with a clean slate but no. Men are the true scavengers. Men are the real Golddiggers.
Recently, I stumbled upon some book, ‘I Love Dollars' by a young electrical engineer named Zhu Wen, documenting how China became the factory of the world, driven by the insatiable appetite to own, to possess and to have a soft life. He might as well have been writing about the 21st -century Kenyan man who is in his bad girl era, what you might now refer to as ‘baby-boy syndrome.’
We, men, love to throw mud at the wall claiming that today’s wife materials are not up to par, that soko ni chafu. But as my Chinese sub-sub-sub-contractor would tell you, material is material. Men, in my experience, are even more materialistic than women. Men—laggards and intellectuals alike—are easily for sale as Zhu captures in the book:
“…keep the dollars flying at me and inspiration will never dry up; poverty is far more corrupting than money. I respect my forebears, but those long-suffering earlier generations of writers who weren’t interested in money or sleeping with more than a dozen women doomed themselves to mediocrity…my generation is different: greedy for everything, everywhere, smashing, grabbing, swearing.”
I hear a term thrown loosely around about ‘adding value.’ What is value other than the convoluted way of eliminating those whom you perceive as lower in rank than you? A thief, it must be said, who has no opportunity to steal considers himself an honest man. This power play is regularly plagiarised in male relationships: often, the least financially secure friend is the last to know of anything, if ever at all.
And oh, men can treat you like a defaulting loan fugitive: the less you earn, the lesser you are, the lesser you speak. Male relationships are a gangster state, running on gangster economics, a giant octopus wrapped around the face of every “Bro”, “Brathe” and “Fam”, relentlessly sucking the authenticity of intrapersonal relationships such that you have to justify why you need to be part of a friendship.
It’s what we call, how do I put this in an expensive way? Let’s just say it rhymes with duck. It’s duck you money, or as it is iterated in Kenya, “tumia pesaa ikuzoeee” which is the reason most male friendships are as deep as a bottle top full of water. Money is the oxygen on which the fire of male friendships burns.
And this is before I even co-opt that social media joke of how men behave around rich men. Have you seen how men behave around rich men? They make pilgrimages to the rich man’s shrines.
They will defer their masculinity, laughing like a politician who has just bulldozed his way into a lucrative government tender, falling over themselves to take pictures and caption “Met a King Today #NiGod.” Honestly, it would be tragic if it weren’t so comic. Show me a rich man and I will show you a bunch of sycophants.
My people say if money were to be found in the trees, most people would be married to monkeys. I don’t blame them. I blame the government. And Judas. Especially Judas. We are all worried about money in Nairobi. Whether you need it or have it, we are a society where everyone is looking for and worried about money.
It’s much worse in men. Because just like women assume having Nyash is a personality trait (it isn’t but it helps), men too have sold their souls for money, only to discover that you may be the seller, but you are the one who is paying. Poverty is far more corrupting than money. Do you know why men look for wife material? Mmh. Because, in essence, we are materialistic.
