By JOHN KARIUKI

A few weeks ago, the most virulent topic in the social media and public places was the Mombasa case where some local girls were allegedly caught in a bestiality act with a dog. Many people are still in shock that such depravity could be the newest form of moonlighting for some campus youths!

This latest hedonistic escapade underscores our youth’s vulnerability. Many of them are often lured into criminal activities and exploitation by unscrupulous people on the loose.

The tricks used to lure them have evolved from the offers of lifts and gifts by strangers to the more subtle induction by fellow youths on recruiting missions. Others are lured via the social media. 

In today’s technological age, hard-core lesbians and homosexuals are openly soliciting for young and fresh mates via dating agencies and the social media. Others prowl some resorts frequented by youthful clientele and which are veritable alters for these new sins.

The entertainment industry had gone a notch higher and some club owners have factored in strippers under what is euphemistically called “beauty contests!”

Indeed, the most prosperous “nudity entrepreneurs” owe their business success to a constant supply of youthful, multicultural and seemingly sophisticated flesh.

Personal depravity

But promiscuity is often the first step to greater personal depravity as Kingwa Kamencu expounds in her book: To Grasp at a Star (EAEP, 2005).  The late Barbara Kimenye also addresses this trap of glamour and easy riches that often mesmerise the youth.

While she is best known for her Moses series, Kimenye has two young adults book Pretty Boy Beware and Beauty Queen.

Incidentally, both are Kimenye’s last books, first published in 1997 by EAEP (and reprinted 2010).  Pretty Boy Beware revolves around Mathew — the pretty boy. The slum in which Mathew and his parents live is levelled by bulldozers one fine morning. His parents push the last of their savings into his hands and bid him goodbye as he leaves to the Kenyan coast to live with an old family friend.

They hope he will finish his education there, just as the parents of the 11 girls allegedly suckered into the latest dog sex saga. But Mathew gets duped into child prostitution.

Will he finish his schooling and realise his ambitions?   This remarkably told story renders a real and present danger of the boy child. Danger lurks along our sandy beaches and especially for the disadvantaged boys hustling among some pederast foreign visitors.

Pretty Boy Beware has a stark warning of the decadence of some predatory tourists, like the alleged dog-sex merchants we have been hearing about all week, and indicts our lax child prostitution laws.

In this book, Kimenye explores the unspoken topic of homosexuality, nay sodomy, amid a backdrop of the scourges of HIV/Aids and drugs in a way that young adults will easily understand and empathise.

In Beauty Queen, Adela and her friend Keti, jokingly enter a village beauty contest in rural Uganda. They win and proceed to higher levels of the beauty pageantry.

Adela is especially beautiful and her agents and handlers will stop at nothing to cash in from her unique endowments. And in a whirlwind of beauty shows, Adela travels to Nairobi and London and is eventually crowned Miss Universe!

Adela drops out of school to pursue a career in beauty.

But she is a veritable prisoner of her agent Joe. This man is a heartless entrepreneur and the major beneficiary of her amazing fortunes. The rancour that Joe leaves in one’s heart is not any different from the resentment that one shouts at the newest dog-sex merchants predating on our youths.   

Adela’s life is fast and furious, full of illusions and showbiz glamour. But she commits a grave mistake, a blunder that catches up with her, spelling doom for her life and the court of greedy leeches by her side. As in Pretty Boy Beware, the HIV/Aids scourge and drugs hover over this mesmerised Alice-In-Wonderland heroine.

Beauty Queen is a blow-by-blow account of the behind-the-scenes intrigues of the beauty pageantry industry that every girl aspiring to strut on the catwalk must read.

Overall, Kimenye succeeds in tackling current and pervasive youth issues in the two books.

Ultimately every youth must take charge of his or her life!