We are in J—’s house for game night. J— and I go way back, specifically 13 years back, specifically The (dying) Moi University. We met in a film class, and since God blessed me with the third eye for spotting talent, we hit it off. She was the brightest in class, still is. She’s probably one of only two women I can call and ask for money with no strings attached, and she’ll send it. The other one being my wife, of course, but I am not married, so there’s that.
Game night is where the claws come out, and M—, says as much. M— has a mouth on her and was in high school with J—, as well as W— and K—. They’ve all made it in their respective fields, but other than K—, the rest of the girls are single.
I’m not the only man here: there’s A—, who minds his business by minding ours, and there’s KM, who also went to university with J— and I. KM is the only one here who doesn’t drink, has been two years sober, has been trying to stay sober for his faith. I admired him for that, and to celebrate him, we all did shots. KM had accepted (or tolerated) our sinning drinking selves because he figured that if Jesus could resist temptation in the desert with the Devil dogging him, then he, lowly KM, could face temptation with a bunch of drunks. But the Devil had gotten smarter in two thousand years, and now he had less to work with.
Yet it’s not the devil showing his hand when the 30 per cent ABV proves its potency; no, this is all us. We are playing SEQUENCE, that it’s a logical game is all you need to know; and we are in teams of two, and I don’t want to be that guy, but my team is winning, and has been winning since we started. Suffering from success if you prefer. People are saying nasty things to each other, names are thrown around. Liar, thief, —those are names I’d answered to at one time or another during the game.
Maybe we should have stopped, maybe we should have known better. But you know how it is. You turn the other cheek, and people think you are weak. Better channel your inner Gachagua and say what you really think of W—’s drinking problem, of K—’s flashy lifestyle, of M—’s daddy issues. But you must be prepared to get as good as you give. And the women here ain’t no joke. Kenyan women are fighters. I don’t mean that as a compliment.
If you haven’t caught up, the game’s done by now. We are bantering, arguing that there is no softness in women anymore. Everything’s about proving a point, and that could go from zero to violence in six seconds. Like dating a counterrevolutionary who thinks of you as Satan of a lesser order. Every conversation we have degenerates into a verbal fist fight of who’s right. Whatever happened to Michelle Obama and women taking the high road?
Look, you may say, but why don’t you be the bigger man? Funny you should ask because 2,000 years of evolution can’t be fixed in a night. Like say, for instance, a lady friend of mine whom we hadn’t been in touch for a while recently texted, “Kwani huezi nipigia simu?” and I was like, you too could call. You have my number.
And I am not talking about the ambition to go after your goals, no. It’s that Kenyan women have lost their softness, every conversation is a gladiatorial combat, something too manly about them. Could make a problem out of a paper bag. Defensive and aggressive and mad over- reactive. They cannot get their point across without first getting cross. Because Kenyan girls believe in shouting, and they believe in Brazilian ‘human’ hair, but they do not believe they can be heard without a fight.
It’s almost as if every man is competition. But most men, at least the ones I know, don’t even consider women as their competition. It’s a mean thing to say. It’s also true. You can tell a Kenyan woman the sun is shining, and she’ll argue it is the moon. The traditional virtues of kindness, empathy and softness, while not necessarily tethered to women, but even more pronounced when not in them, are all missing. Trying to squeeze femininity from a Kenyan woman today is harder than exorcising a demon.
Maybe it was how they were raised—everyone knows the trope about African mothers and their legendary insults. Of the silent rivalry between mother and daughter, of mothers bitter with their willowing drunk husbands, of mothers who want to raise daughters stronger than them so they wouldn’t go through what they went through with their men; but who wants to be with a woman who sees a man as the reason their mothers split their dreams down the seams and became an extension of their husbands?
Kenyan daughters then grow up swearing to avoid becoming like their mothers, and all the roads they take to avoid that end leads them exactly there. Their mother’s daughter, period. Like boarding a train that never takes you in the right direction. The farther it travels, the less point there is in going on, and the lesser in getting off. Is it not our elders who said that what a mother owes a daughter pays back?
“Weka mawe!” M— says, and I realise she is about to win her first round. She is one chip away. But I have a trump card, and I play before her, and that trump card means I can place my chip anywhere, which means I can block any sequence. Well. If I were a different kind of man, I’d ask you to guess what I did, but you already know that, don’t you?
