If you recall your childhood, you will remember that age when kids were prone to saying things like ‘mbwa wewe (you dog)!’ or ‘matako (ass)’ when they were upset.
It could be a coincidence, but most kids who walked around insulting others tended to have their noses caked with yesterday’s mucus and couldn’t fight. The moment whomever they insulted charged with fury, they curled their tails. Could those boys run or what!
Annoyingly, when they got home, those scoundrels had a habit of lying that it is them who had been insulted. They also tended to have scatterbrained mothers who would charge out of the house, their annoying little miscreants hiding in their skirts, to come and jaw it up with your mother.
Sadly, those fellows never grew up. Years of schooling, hours wasted on school debates and no amount of caning taught them that an intelligent man or woman doesn’t shout – he or she argues. More important, they never learned that an argument must not always be won and should be based on facts, not the anatomy below the belt.
Thus, when an educated person uses the colour or lack of teeth, foreskins and the size of genitals as the basis of an argument, then their parents wasted scarce resources taking them to school instead of drinking busaa or fooling around foetid whorehouses.
Two recent cases come to mind. Last week, controversial columnist Njoki Chege wrote a stinger against men whose economic past time is gambling on sports. She was insulted for days on social media. But not one of her foes took time to disassemble her argument and prove, with cold facts, that she is a moron who had no idea what she was talking about. Like that boy with a running nose from our childhood, the most they could come up with was ‘matako!’
Earlier, the economist David Ndii published a scathing newspaper article calling for dismantling of Kenya into tribal regions (the defunct provinces if you may) because we have stupidly refused to live with each other. He was insulted for weeks and called ‘stupid’ by Kenyans who wouldn’t present a cogent argument at a nursery school parents’ meeting.
But you can’t blame them. Parents insult children. Fathers and mothers insult each other. Teachers insult kids and politicians insult each other.
We have a whole generation that has grown into adulthood without listening to a fine speech from a political figure. These are people who never had the privilege of listening to Dr Robert Ouko, Mwai Kibaki, Tom Mboya, James Orengo and Martin Shikuku unleash an insult dripping with wit and sarcasm; an insult so intelligently framed that everyone laughed, insulted of taking offence.
These are people who have been weaned on the verbal diarrhoea of the modern day politician whose intellectual emptiness is directly proportional to the anger they radiate verbally and physically from the podium.
So, when they pick up their phones and type ‘mbwa wewe,’ we should understand. The process of gathering facts and packing them into a rebuttal requires effort and a fair amount of brain matter, which is not in abundance on social media.
