By Ted Malanda
The biggest thing that worries a middle-aged African man is not insecurity, the poor status of the roads, the performance of the economy or God’s wrath. It’s whether his wife will leave him.
I don’t mean leave in the sense of packing her wigs, handbags, dozens of shoes and shooting off with another man. That is bearable. I mean, he could always shave his beard, clean up his socks, brush his teeth and woo a replacement.
What really frightens a middle-aged African man is that the wife will grow horns when her children come of age, turn them against him and declare economic, political, military and social sanctions.
Bark off
This means that the man is reduced to the status of a pariah state like Syria. He is ‘just there’. The children don’t give him money for tobacco. His wife doesn’t give him food (you know what I mean) and everyone in the home treats him like a good for nothing mongrel that should bark off and never return.
He studies the children keenly when they are growing up. He frowns upon those who hang too much around their mother. He looks for hidden traits that suggest future treasonous behaviour. He takes note of children who always remember to share a banana with their mother without once looking in his direction.
By the time the children reach adulthood, he knows (or suspects) which one is capable of taking a bank loan on the family land title deed and disappearing to Mombasa, the one who might conspire with his or her mother against him, the one can poison him to inherit his plot at the market and, worst of all, that scoundrel who is most likely to marry from the ‘wrong’ tribe.
That is why when it is time to distribute his land among his sons, he rigs the whole process. Whereas custom demands that the last-born inherits the land where his father’s homestead stands, the old man instead hands it out to the son he thinks will take good care of him in old age.
The violent son is taken furthest, hopefully near an equally violent neighour so that the two can hack each other to death during a petty squabble. The one who gave the old man the biggest headaches is sent near the swamp to be disciplined by mosquitos and croaking frogs while the meanest son is consigned to the most unfertile and rocky section of the land.
It used to be easier in the old days because a man had several wives. Even if they all came from the ‘wrong’ clans, at least one of them would sire a son a father would count on in old age.
But these days, a man is stuck with two postcard babies, a boy and a girl. If the boy becomes rotten, the old man and his wife spend the rest of their elderly days cursing why they ignored contraception.
One thing hasn’t changed though. If those boy turns out great, something always goes wrong. If he doesn’t die in an accident, he gets cancer or is killed by gangsters or a stray bullet. If that doesn’t happen, an evil neighbour bewitches them.
And if that fails, the fool marries a beautiful woman who hides him in Nairobi!
