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Phones are the real 'El Niño'

My Man

October is here, and with it the real fear that after sunny September, 'El Niño' will pay us a deluge before October is done.

Amadhioha forbid-o!

But there is a kind of 'El Niño' that has been blowing across the land, from Buruburu to Budalang'i, and this is the kind of ill wind we call cell-phones.

I remember the October of 2002, that is when I think I saw my first cell-phone in the hands of a commoner – this campus beauty called Julianna Mwaura, and we all were like, 'waahh, what?', never mind it had those long antennae that can catch some random 'District Focus' programme from rural China.

These days, though, smart phones are relationship woe and war.

As Muiya, a sociology lecturer in KU puts it, 'these technological devices are heightening crimes of passion in this country.' Whereas in the past a suspicious spouse or partner would have to rely on rumours, feign trips or if they were rich, hire those 'Private Eye' spooks from the back of snoopy gazetis, these days all it takes is one of those sneaky partners who go through your phone when you are in the shower – and if you are either careless with 'delete' or a sentimentalist who likes to hang onto 'sweet nothings' in your SMS section – boom and kaput!

There goes your relationship. And if you are from Buruburu, your life.

I saw the case the other day of one Ruth Kamande, 21, who could easily have graced the cover of our 'Eve Magazine,' but who allegedly murderously disgraced herself by stabbing her 24-year-old lover 22 times with a dagger for 'daggering' her lady friend, in 'Buru' parlance.

This after she found a chance love thread on his mobile phone, in his SQ. Another fellow called Odhis strangled his lover with an iron box cable in Buru in June after a phone message he 'discovered' – no doubt while on his Detective Sneaky operations – that suggested when she had gone shopping at 7pm earlier, the goods she was buying were the unleashed kind.

Yet a third gentleman, the aptly named Ediot, shot his wife to death last year after an angry flurry of accusatory text messages from him, as she stubbornly kept her phone on 'mteja' only to come home in the wee 3am hours we spoke about last week – and die. This also happened in Buruburu.

In fact, I had suggested to my upstairs neighbour, Beryl, that we should combine resources and go live in a compound house in Buru, but with all this 'El Nino' there, I have decided I cannot risk her crossing from the SQ to my main crib and finally finishing me physically the way she has tried to do on paper.

In Mlolongo, a man called Mwenga 'malizad' his wife of ten years after buying her a phone, but with the strict instructions that the only male calls she should receive should be from his cell-phone. He will hang for it.

Then there is this week's terrible case of the teenager who reportedly committed suicide after some European lured her to Mombasa, through her cell-phone, only to degrade her through weird sex, take naked pictures of the acts and threaten to use his phone to spread them.

I have this book, 'Princess Adhis' (Storymoja, 2012) where I vividly warn of the horrors of these sex safarists, but that is a dark tale for December, after El Nino.

For now, people, stop sneaking through the phones of your partners like mice in a dust-bin at night. For 'guilty' folk, learn to press 'delete.' It may mean the difference between your continued good health or being perforated two dozen times like a pin cushion.

Caution – especially if you're from Buruburu.

 

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