The Bahatian

As painful as it is for your man to cheat on you with a clandestine lover, it pays to note that his behaviour is nothing out of ordinary and is to be expected. If you thought the African man is monogamous by nature, then this stuff is not for you.   Let’s first interrogate the African man’s sexual behaviour from the time he married you to the time his marital infidelity became apparent.    To begin with, you are not the first lassie he first cast his eyes on to literally sweep him off his feet. He ‘practised’ for marriage by deflowering a couple of girls around and you happened to be the tenth in the pecking order that he married as a ‘last resort’.

  Marriages in Nakuru seem to be going bonkers at unprecedented rates. It is not unusual to see unions break up within three months after much public fanfare where couples blew up colossal sums in grand weddings. In some relations where partners do not part ways, or cannot stand the sight of each other, putting up as brothers and sisters, rather than legally married partners, has gained traction and become an ‘in-thing’.   And there are strange reasons many, especially ladies, are calling it quits and walking out of unions.

To a villager, water rationing is an unheard of thing mostly associated with urban places. But for most villages in Bahati Constituency in Nakuru County, especially for homes connected with pipes or those sharing water resources trickling down rivers, this is a reality they are grasping with.   To begin with, the rivers dried long ago. River beds cutting across some villages serve as testament of once live l y rivers that housed aquatic life at one stage in their lives. A look of the Wanyororo River, which for long had been the lifeline of several villages downstream from D u ndori hills, where it originates from, captures the sad state of vital resources.

  There’s a joke about a miffed tenant who sent his landlord a queer text message. The message simply read, ‘This is to inform you that the tenant next door is smelling’. Whether this sender wanted the fellow tenant kicked out or to be allocated a room far from the smelly occupant is not evident. But the pun aside, many people lead harried lives that they scarcely have time for personal hygiene or keeping orderly houses.   Oftentimes, tenants complain of being overcharged for run-down rental units without landlords providing reasonable, pleasant places to live. Many argues this amounts to extortion as it doesn’t make sense for one to keep putting in drab rooms they dearly pays for. There could be merit to their arguments but landlords are cagey instead blaming their tenants for the dire status of houses they rent. According to some landlords interviewed, some feels tenants are negligent failing to acknowledge that damage to properties they occupies comes along with c...

courtesy photo Today’s man cuts a pitiable figure. A silent feminine revolution has increasingly seen women taking over key roles that traditionally have been a male’s preserve. When the likes of Maendeleo ya Wanaume (men's welfare)  chairperson, Nderitu Njoka, sounds alarm over increasing cases of men being battered or subjugated by women, something has gone horribly wrong in our society!   That the macho man of yesteryear is a wimp of today is incontestable. In name of gender equality, the male voice had been lost in Babel of confusion. A typical man in former days cut a fearful image that demanded total respect, submission and obedience in his house. No one dared contradict or question his authority. When he barked, everyone cringed. But today, the narrative is different. He is all barks but no bite, or faking a pseudo-masculinity image when his wife apparently has the upper hand. He cannot admit he is a hen-pecked or, appropriately put, kaliwa chapati man.