Folks, before HIV, there was Kaswende!

 I know of no woman who will proudly announce that she got syphilis from her boyfriend and spread it to six other boys

God has a wry sense of humour. He created the world, looked around and proudly announced that the labour of his hands was beautiful. But being a King who loves a good joke, he placed nasty roadblocks in the pursuit of all things beautiful.

Thus, if you visit butcheries regularly to partake of burnt offerings aka nyama choma, and especially if you insist on washing those offerings down with spirits fermented from plants, you get a load of fat piles around your heart.

So one morning, when you are counting your sheep in your mind and plotting your next beautiful pursuit, a massive heart attack renders your wife a widow.

But nowhere did God place more roadblocks than in matters between men and women. There are very few things in life that are as pleasurable as knowing a man or woman the way the biblical Abraham ‘knew’ his wife Sarah.

First, those gymnastics cause real labour for women and the horror stories I have heard from my female friends are so shocking it is a miracle girls still scratch the earth stupidly with their big toes when boys are lying to them on footpaths.

Worse, the process of coitus leads to the birth of an extremely expensive, ravenous, often sickly and ridiculously noisy bundle of noise.

So three seconds of pleasure cause women to wail for hours in maternity hospitals while their nervous husbands calm their nerves in a nearby pub. And thereafter, parents have to feed, beat, house, treat and educate the future high school dorm arsonist and campus stone thrower for two solid decades.

When the rascal finally leaves, if he or she ever does, the same long suffering parent spends years providing marriage counselling between the quarrelsome child and their spouse. On many occasions, parents die wheezing and cursing where they didn’t use protection on that fateful night when the bundle of noise was conceived.

But babies are real cool compared to a really naughty roadblock that God placed between men and women. We are talking kaswende, kisonono and their relatives who congeal in our genitals.

I first became aware of these ailments when an uncle who had dropped out of school to become a carpenter started peeing green coloured urine. It made him a celeb of sorts because to the best of my knowledge, no one in my village had been so favoured by the elements.

But as always happens, the mystery was revealed through the village grapevine when news filtered in that the 19-year-old boy was shacking up with a woman of loose virtue who was kissing the wrong end of 30. She was kissing a lot of things, too, it appears, and that is how my uncle ended up swallowing ‘capsules’ that turned his pee green.

In high school, a guy whose name I cannot mention because he is now a respectable junior church elder started walking funny three days after half term.

Realising he would face a great deal of ridicule if he went to the District Hospital, he sauntered to the school nurse and bravely announced that he was suffering from “ugonjwa ya wanawake”.

The nurse, a budding feminist, was aghast. “What do you mean ‘ugonjwa ya wanawake’? Are you a man?” she hissed.

The brave soul wasn’t a man to scare easily and looking her straight in the eye, he explained to her that it was a woman’s disease because he didn’t get it from a man.

That was back in the Stone Age, of course, when men hadn’t started catching diseases from fellow men. Nonetheless, his ailment sort of made him a cult hero because in those days, young men carried their venereal disease like a badge of honour. “Yule dame alinichoma jo!” one sick fellow would announce smugly to raucous laughter from jealous mates who had yet to muster the courage to draft a single love letter.

Not surprisingly, this is one field where women never demanded equality and I know of no woman who will proudly announce that she got syphilis from her boyfriend and spread it to six other boys.

That nonsense of bragging about kaswende stopped the moment one got married. The wife would travel from Kericho three days after our chap tumbled in the hay with some barmaid.

But just when he was picking her from Machakos Bus Stop, a wriggling worm would announce the onset of kaswende and our man would spend five horrifying days feigning headaches and explaining why he was drinking black tea (the medication for venereal disease was allergic to milk).

It could get worse by the way. Those who dread infecting a spouse with HIV have no idea what hell it was to pass kisonono to your wife!