I meant it when I wished you a happy New Year. I also meant it when I wished you a happy Valentine’s Day in February this year. But boy, I feel my wishes have largely come to naught, if not delayed. Did you see the newspaper’s headline declaring “The End of Man”? When the 80-year-old US preacher announced the end of the world on October 22, last year, I did not worry one bit. Well, that would only mean we go to Heaven right? But in February, precisely a week after Valentine’s Day, when “the end of man” was declared I gnashed my teeth. You see, humanity has been warned about the end times since time immemorial, and so anyone found unawares will have only themselves to blame. But who had warned us that our women would turn against us with such lethality? A man comes home from his local Mama Pima, as he does every other day of the year, gets home at midnight, asks for food, as he has done since Mama Toto agreed to be his better half, and then goes to bed as is normal practice. Then,Slash! Slash! He thinks thugs have invaded his house. He is wrong. Dead wrong! It is an angry Mama Toto with a panga. Next thing we hear, Baba Toto is in hospital with his face all “crocheted.”
A day later, another man goes to the kitchen, “takes” one of Mama Boy’s sufurias as he has been doing, puts the sufuria in a polythene bag, which he carries to Mama Pima’s. He trades the sufuria, together with the polythene bag, for a couple of glasses of his favourite drink. Later, he goes home, knocks on the door, which Mama Boy opens. But what follows is like a scene straight from the movies. Mama Boy takes a sufuria full of boiling water and pours it on poor Baba Boy.
Tell me brothers! Isn’t it better to suffer in hell than in the hands of an angry woman? To make matters worse, a fellow brother suggests that we refuse to eat any food prepared by our wives for six days in protest. Is that not akin to using petrol to put off a fire?
But my question to my brothers is why we are stooping so low to the point where our wives label us “Most Wanted.” What are we doing, or rather what are we not doing, for women to say “no more, not again?” To the best of my knowledge, women are quite tolerant creatures and they are known to bend over backwards to put up with men’s wayward behaviour without even raising a finger.
I think most men have lost what makes one a man. An uncle once told me that the word man stands for Master of Nature. This is what earns men respect from society. But a man who drinks himself silly and soils his pants; a man who steals sufurias from his wife’s kitchen and at times even her farm’s harvest to sell so as to buy a drink; and a man who absconds from his parental and marital obligations leaving his wife to agonise over rent, food and school fees, and about her sexual needs, is not a Master of Nature.
I pity the men who are undergoing this kind of ordeal in the hands of their wives, but I won’t sit to defend nor reason with them. Even more, I won’t curse their wives. These women must have put up with too much already. They must have agonised in their hearts and minds for years on end wondering what they did wrong to lose their husbands to alcohol. The last thing they would take is an irresponsible being, since he doesn’t qualify to be a man, who comes home late, after stealing money meant for dinner, and demands to be served with food.
If there is one out there who feels that he needs to win back his wife’s favour, let him take the heavy cross of responsibility and take care of his family. The last time I checked, women were not against our bottle. They just want us to be responsible. I met a man whose wife locked him out of their house just about dinner time and then proceeded to sleep with another man in the same house.
What? You may dare say. But what if everything in that house is courtesy of the boyfriend because the man of the house took all his salary to Mama Pima? This woman argues that conjugal rights are to be given only to those who deserve it.
To end where I started, I still wish you a happy year in 2012, but this happiness must be earned, brother.