Underwear is a tiny piece of garment that yields a lot of power. Men are known to have strange fetishes. Tales have been told of men who have an obsession with female underwear.
Jack is one such man. While living in a plot where he shared a bathroom with a bunch of other tenants, he once found a pant in the bathroom that he just couldn’t resist. He, in his words, “fell in love with it” and had to search for its owner whom he began dating.
“I can’t really explain it, but I have a fetish for good underwear. My face melts into a blush when I see one. They sort of turn me on. This particular one smote me and I couldn’t resist, I looked for its owner. Interestingly, we became lovers,” he narrates, as he chuckles.
SEDUCE MEN
Call him a pervert, but he is not alone. Finley Odhiambo is another underwear-seduction victim. Odhiambo says, while living in Landimawe, right behind the Kenya Polytechnic in Nairobi, he shared a bathroom with his neighbor, a lithe young female Polytechnic student.
“There were four houses in our plot, with two bathrooms, so we split the bathroom to serve two household each. The girl could wake up earlier than I, go to shower and leave her wet underwear spread on top of the shower.” Says Odhiambo, rather enthusiastically.
Every time he stepped out of the shower, he would find the girl standing outside the house, either cleaning her shoes or combing her hair. “She always had an amused face whenever I came from the bathroom, its like she was asking me, ‘how did you find the red one? Or do you prefer the white one’?” says Odhiambo.
A man can only take so much, and to cut the long story short, today, Odhiambo has two kids with the woman, and they are happily married.
“Had she not displayed her underwear, I wouldn’t have even bothered to say hi to her,” muses Odhiambo, who adds that most men have this strange fetish but just won’t admit.
Unfortunately, men can never use their underwear for seduction because most of the time, the darn thing is old, tattered, patched severally and most of the time, dirty.
When it is clean or new, then it is some cheap uncomfortable low quality cotton thing with Chinese characters written on the waistband.
USED TO CURSE PEOPLE
Underwear is the identity of a woman. So revered is the female underwear that amongst the Luo, if a woman hits you with her underwear in a fit of anger or protest, you may well meet your death soon because, it is a curse.
Different communities, too, hold underwear in high esteem. Among certain Luhya sub-tribes, so much premium is put on that tiny piece of cloth that it is not just disposed off carelessly, lest it lands in the wrong hands. Tales have been told of men who have remained bachelors for life, impotent or given birth to mentally challenged kids, just because someone envious of them took their underwear to a witchdoctor. In such communities, however tattered and old that said garment is, it has to be disposed off appropriately.
RESPECTED THAN SUITS
In the older days, female panties were sacred, as they covered the ‘cradle of mankind.’ In most homes, the female underwear is hang to dry in the darkest place possible, away from fresh air, sanitising sunlight and bewitching gazes. In Africa, there is nothing more private to mankind than the genitalia and its housing unit—the underwear.
“Growing up, I don’t remember any single day that I saw any female panties in our house, those things were washed, aired, and worn in absolute privacy.” Says Arnold Mwai, a father to two teenage daughters.
“Even in my house, I have never seen any female undergarment wandering about the house. In school our good old teacher would warn the innocent girls not to ‘Mulika’ the school by not wearing underwear,” he says.
Joan Ogolla, a 32-year-old woman says her mother warned her when she was still a little girl, “Your panties cover a very special part of your body and who knows what can happen if a bad man see or gets hold of your underwear?” Joan didn’t know what would happen but she also wasn’t willing to find out. To date, she never even lets her house-help wash her panties.
In Ukambani, a female underwear is all a man needs to take to a witchdoctor, and like magic, the woman, who owns the underwear will fall in love with the man.
Most women know the gravity of the situation and that’s why lost panties can make a woman loose sleepless nights. A story is told of a married woman, Mama Mike whose panties disappeared and she accosted the househelp. “I swear I didn’t steal your panties. I don’t even wear panties” cried the househelp. To prove her point, she added, “You can even ask Baba Mike, he knows I don’t wear panties.”
Joan says the flat where she stays in Embakasi came to a standstill when a lady who owned a saloon on the ground floor said she had lost three panties. “She called a meeting and said whoever had stolen her panties from her bathroom window was not going to be successful in all her endeavours. Although it was late in the evening, she immediately packed and went to her Kaweithei village in Kagundo ‘kutengenezwa’ to guard her against harm, stemming from the lost underwear, befalling her,” says Joan.
USED TO EXPRESS MOODS
Whether lacy, granny pants with Disney characters, mothers union or a g-string, the type of underwear worn by a woman reflects her moods and whether a man will get lucky that night or not.
Twenty five year old Harrison Wanjala says the mystery surrounding female panties has never stopped him from having fun.
“I have vast experience in the undergarments issue, and most of the time, there are only two reactions to my efforts. Either, I get my wandering hands slapped away, or I succeed in lowering the garment. As an underwear connoisseur, I can confidently say that when a girl comes visiting and she wears lacy see-through underwear, then, it will be my lucky night.”
As Harry says, gone are the days when panties were hoisted or lowered under the cover of darkness, nowadays, panties are used as a tool for seduction.
Ladies will wear low cut jeans, and when in the presence of the man they admire, they will drop a pen and then bend over to pick it. The man, as always with roving eyes, will not fail to see the red g-string that peeps from the woman’s waist. That alone is enough to excite a man into ‘tuning’ such a woman.
Men’s boxers can be hung to dry on the public clothes line, but exposing female underwear to all and sundry can bring dire consequences, as Mkalla Mwagesha, a victim of underwear seduction found out.
Upon securing a job in Nairobi, Mkalla moved into a flat in Githurai 44.
“A week after settling in, my next door neighbour started using the line outside my house to dry her provocative and attractive panties, which were extremely colourful,” says a giggly Mkalla. Considering it was his clothesline and the neighbour had her own, Mkalla read seductive mischief and a test to whether he was a ‘real man’.
Apart from that, the girl would wash her clothes, while bending outside his house with only a leso wrapped on her curvaceous body. This mostly happened when Mkalla was around, and working on the airy balcony outside his house.
“You could see her underwear beneath the light leso and it was imperative that I got lured.”
Generally, there is a lot of mystery that surrounds that special garment that still remains unsolved.