What Facebook posts say about the villager in you

A long, long time ago, we got tired of running around after goats and boarded buses, trains or simply walked to Nairobi.

The trauma of growing up in villages filled with fresh air, clean water and tasty vegetables and meat was so much that we elected to place as much distance between us and the place we called shagz.

But they say you can take a man (or woman) to the city, but you can’t take the village out of him. If you doubted that, log onto Facebook.

Of course you have heard about Kilimani Mums Uncensored, that wild online gathering where city women congregate to discuss matters below the belt and their sexual cravings, fetishes and frustrations.

That is nothing new. For millennia, African women have always congregated at the village spring or in chamas to exchange banter about sex amid naughty giggles.

They would discuss their husbands and describe what they can and can’t do in the most explicit of terms. Well, those raunchy village talks by the spring just went online, baby!

 Dirty pictures

Then there are men and women who are always posting dirty pictures on their walls. Do you remember the village boys who used to tuck mirrors beneath girls’ skirts in Class Three?

And the girls who just never seemed to understand they were supposed to sit ‘properly’? Now you know.

Now, if you have lived in the village long enough, there is this dark fellow who walks around with a panga, mumbling to himself.

He believes the whole world is against him. He takes offense at the slightest opportunity and is always reporting people to the village headman.

He lives on blind rage and he has this strange habit of blocking communal footpaths, chasing people’s cows from his shamba and poisoning neighbours’ dogs. And privately, many people suspect he is a witch.

 Quarrelsome

On Facebook, that is the quarrelsome fellow who, depending on his or her tribe, is always ranting about Uhuru, Raila, Kikuyus and Luos.

This fellow will spend the whole day posting insults. In fact by 5am when other people are brushing their teeth, he or she will have insulted Uhuru and Kikuyus or Raila and Luos six times.

Closely related to this villager is that fellow who strolls into people’s homes seconds away from mealtime and pretends to have been ‘in the neighbourhood’.

Such a fellow is always an authority on everything: When to weed, how not to weed, which seed to plant, how to discipline an errant child, how to sit on a wife properly and so on.

The only problem is that he does none of these things himself. I mean, if he was such a tough guy, why is he not the headman but a pest who hovers around people’s homes at mealtimes?

Well, that villager is on Facebook too. He is the one who is always giving advice to Uhuru Kenyatta or Raila Odinga. Uhuru should do this, Raila should not have done that.

Just like the assistant chief, who is a very tough chap, doesn’t walk around telling people how to sit on their wives, the people with the capacity to advise Uhuru and Raila don’t do so on Facebook. They have their phone numbers.

And then you have this villager who never seems to know what is going on.

They are just there. They don’t go to the church or mosque, don’t chat with other folks at the marketplace and never visit. people’s homes or get visited. These are the fellows who open Facebook pages, but never post a thing. They are just there!

Of course there is the know-it-all villager who has an opinion on every subject under the sun and will argue for hours (about something he knows nothing about). You will be discussing the Pope on Facebook and then he pops up with a stinging tirade against Nairobi Governor Evans Kidero.

Acid-tongued

My favourite villager, however, is what I call the ‘mouthy one’. This is the acid-tongued wasp whose lips are folded in a perpetual sneer. Such fellows have a ball of fury in their chests.

Their voices rise like thunder, unleashing acerbic Probox-sized insults, often unmerited, that cut to the bone and hurt for years.

To them, everyone else is evil, hateful, jealous, boastful, stupid and ugly. Well, go to Facebook and you find mouthy whiners who are always embroiled in a senseless fight over nothing.

And when you read through their posts, you will find not once have they ever said a nice word about anyone or anything.

But the characters who advertise all manner of merchandise on a thread where people are discussing the Garissa massacre... even the village doesn’t know where they came from.