Men who overcompensate with a big car for a tiny manhood to be ‘manly’

The expatriate is the world’s most blissfully unaware hypocrite. For, while he drives a massive Land Rover Defender of the sort that uses half of Iraq’s oil with every journey, he nevertheless criticises Kenyan drivers for buying huge cars.

It’s complex being an expatriate. Back in his home country, the expatriate lived on an impoverished street of tiny terraced houses, and the only car that he could afford was that which fitted his council-provided parking space: an old Toyota Starlet. However, in Kenya, he suddenly finds himself both wealthy and culturally obliged to purchase that Land Rover.

Still, he loves to tell people how, ‘Back in the UK, everybody, even the very rich, drive small, economical cars, because we care for the environment’. This is of course an offensive thing to say, as it implies that every aspiring Kenyan wishes to destroy the natural environment, contribute to global warming and burn trees, which isn’t entirely the case.

The expatriate can’t understand why Kenya has so many gigantic Land Cruisers, Range Rovers, Prados and other such monster SUVs. It is, to him, an environmental sin, and a crime of ‘Rubbing your wealth in the faces of the poor’. He of course says this while glancing at these vehicles through the window of his Land Rover, while stuck in the morning traffic jam.

The expatriate, especially if he is from the UK, is wont to remind any Kenyan who is foolish enough to listen to him, of the old British saying that ‘A man’s car size is inversely proportional to the size of his penis’. And, since people who lust after large cars invariably have their brains in their penises, their brains are also, by implication, extremely small.

Car lust is, the expatriate believes, the greatest and most visible symbol of Kenyan capitalist greed, that hunger for shiny, show-off items that serve no great purpose, but which look glitzy and smart and new and big and brash and in-your-face ‘I HAVE MADE IT’!!! The houses of the nouveau riche betray this glitziness, too, as they stand there, covered in a complexity of roofs and full of an unnecessary number of bathrooms when only one person lives there: a divorced husband, whose wife left him either because he spent all the cash on a new car, or because of that tiny willy.

Status in different cultures in expressed differently. In some places, it comes from the quality of one’s character, a person’s ethical conduct or education, or kindness. In capitalist societies such as Kenya, where advertisements for the newest products are apparently believed, status comes from the diameter of a watch face, the shininess of a shirt, the brand of your smartphone, the weight of your necklace or bracelet, the square-footage of your office and, yes, the fuel-consumption, registration-newness and LED-brightness of your new car.

But what the critical expatriate really objects to in his pathetic racism, is that Kenyans can afford things at all. Expatriates have privileges, and want to retain them.

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