Last weekend I was invited to a shindig in the tail end of the city —Rongai. That’s something you wouldn’t expect in October. A party in mid-October—in this economy—and me actually going.
But off I went, because I still want to have friends who can say I show up for them, and because I was promised there would be free meat. If you can get anything for free, modern-day economists would tell you to take it. I am a modern-day economist.
The night was young, yes, but the revellers were even younger and throats were being irrigated in a manner likely to suggest this was actually the El Nino some chap in the Kenya Met Department had predicted. And you know what happens when beer flows like water? Tongues break out of their cage, words are let loose—which is where I thrive, mopping them up with my ears.
We got talking with this 20-something-year-old sod. 23, actually. He could be my younger brother but the things he was telling me, I felt the naïf in front of his eyes. A rather absurd figure, as bland as he was unintentionally amusing, at 23, he has three children. That’s okay, you may say, mapema ndio best.
But, at 23 he also has three baby mamas. Three! Has any man ever produced so much hard-end product from so little foreplay? This is a man shaving the garlic so thin it liquifies in the pan.
Less is more? I don’t know about you but having one child and a wife is more or less a headache. Now three from three different women?
I pressed further. Why stop at three, I wanted to know. “I am taking a break,” he says. From the children or the baby mamas? He laughs.
I stood there taking notes, me the elder statesman, who has evidently misused my 20s. Here I was, with the world’s favourite youngest professor from the Harvard College of Street Life. I blame the president.
His mantra of life purports to be pragmatic and practical, but the only parties who are going to be truly satisfied are his loins, and you, the reader, for living vicariously through this column and getting served hot gossip of my friends. Maybe we could argue on the morality of the issue, but this was a willing buyer willing seller market. Those children will/might/should grow up without a father, but isn’t society culpable here? What happened to mtoto being wa jamii?
I have a 50 per cent success rate. I was at my wits’ end. I was blowing hot air. The odds were not in my favour. Hii, imeenda.
He has no self-control and there is more than a 50 per cent chance he is still sleeping around. Ladies take cue. There is a reason men say they will rarely start a match one-nil. The desolate soul knows this immediately, and only the trivial pretend that it can be otherwise.
People much wiser than me say this: The owner of the well does not queue for water.
