Being a youth is the best part of growing up. The only problem is that it doesn’t last as long as we wish, so we tend to try and extend it by using additives like makeup, hair dye, gym, diet and other extreme measures like liposuction and facelift operations.
A girl going to college back in the day was a great achievement. There would be joy from all quarters. The praises were particularly resounding if the girl was a shagz modo who had to relocate from the village to the city.
It went without saying that she had to come with her cloths packed in her mabati sanduku or one of those cheap Chinese bags that tore on impact at the Machakos Country Bus upon disembarking. By then, she was this innocent girl, maybe with only a boyfriend in the village whom she promised to marry (first lie).
Most of these shagz modo chicks were rural in the fashion department and the only thing you had to appreciate was their natural beauty and genuineness. At first, they were friendly to male classmates before proper ‘urbanisation’ a few weeks later. With their little pocket money, they would buy the latest fashion trends from the streets and do away with the plastic shoes, which were replaced by new ‘take-me-to-heaven’ heels, never mind walking in them was akin to the wobbling of a new-born calf.
Often ‘girl power’ took over and as regular youth, they would go out pretending to protect each other till the mother hen - who was usually the worst-looking girl in the group - got a companion and the sisterhood broke. A college girl’s first jamaa was of the same year before he graduated to fourth year or ‘working class’ (sponsor).
The girl then started being proud, and thought of herself as ‘high class’ who didn’t date obohos (ruffians), since she was now being dropped in ‘colle’ every weekend after escapades. Shortly, she would start boasting that she only rode in European cars and couldn’t date anyone with a jalopy. She would have forgotten that in her shagz, she used boda boda once at the end of the month, and walked the rest of the days to Kondele market.
Born-city dudes enjoyed their brief moment in the sun as they were acting a script we new very well: The girl graduates and starts tarmacking. By then, the sponsor would have moved on to a fresher.
That’s when the girl, now gradually becoming a woman, would realise that witchcraft is real and the only way to survive in this city is through connections, especially with people you interacted with when you had nothing. By then she has withered after the hot Nairobi sun worked on her properly.
Since she came out with an attitude, she would have been fantasising about a perfect man who is rich enough to give her cute kids, not realising that desperation would compete with her biological clock by the time she hits early 30s. She would meet a city loverboy-con artist; a very good actor who promises marriage, but instead puts her in the family way and disappears like Felicien Kabuga. With a kid chances of marriage would thin by half and she ends up joining some feminist brigade group.
My advice to college girls is to remember that nothing is permanent in life: beauty fades like French beans in hot Murang’a sun and every 10 years, a cuter, younger version of you is born. Don’t look down on your collegemates. You will need them for networking in future. And, get your own money, since the good life from the college sponsor is a privilege, not a right.
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@AineaOjiambo