Modern men carrying phones instead of meat as our forefathers

Our forefathers obviously carried weapons daily — clubs, spears, knives, bows and arrows and such. I find that a bit laughable because the world was much more peaceful than it is today.

I mean, freedom fighter Mekatilili wa Menza, a woman, walked 800km from Mumias where she had been detained, to Giriama land at the Coast. Try that sort of nonsense now and see what happens.

You will be killed before you reach Shamakhokho, and not by hyenas of the wild but people with Christian names and unhealthy appetite in your mulika mwizi phone.

I think in our forefather’s day, you carried weapons to demonstrate your manhood (bit of an overkill if you ask me, because men dangled around naked away). Besides, there was also the chance that you might bump into a porcupine and back then, women absolutely loved a man who brought home porcupine meat.

By the time my grandpa came onto the scene, things were getting tight and he was only allowed to walk around with a walking stick. His wife carried a borrowed umbrella when she was visiting serious people — a fad I suspect she picked from a colonialist’s wife.

My father’s generation was worse. All they could carry were smoking pipes, newspapers, radios and pieces of meat.  Their wives meanwhile had just discovered handbags, which were empty anyway.

Now enter our generation. We don’t carry weapons because we can’t fight anyway and in any case; the Inspector General of Police holds a very dim view of fisticuffs.

Unlike our fathers, it is rare to see a man carrying a newspaper back home — or a kilo of meat. That porcupine business is beneath us. Our women do the shopping. Us, we hunt, skin, roast and eat the porcupine in the pub. The only things we carry to define our masculinity are our mobile phones and wallets. So the more expensive the gadget and the fatter the wallet, the more manly we are presumed to be. Imagine!

In fact, the only men allowed to carry weapons are sleazy businessmen who, instead of using their guns to protect their wives, shoot around in pubs to show the barmaid how ‘tough’ they are.

But our women? Wah! Those bags of theirs are mobile homes. What, however, tickles me, and I have been observing this for years, is that a woman will carry a handbag that weighs 200 kilos to the office. She will place it on her desk without once reaching into it for the whole day.

In the evening, she will carry the darn thing back home — day in, day out. But you know what amuses me most? When the men of my grandfather’s generation made a 50km hike to pay dowry, they never carried water in bottles. These days, laggards who take matatus to the office where they sit the whole day on Facebook must carry a bucket of drinking water daily.

Well, men of old could always step into any homestead and ask for water. Try knocking on someone’s door to ask for drinking water in Karen today and see what happens.