Who wrote on the toilet wall?

By STANLEY ONGWA

On a tissue paper dispenser in a washroom at a university college in Nairobi is an arrow drawn pointing to the mouth of the dispenser.

Alongside the arrow, written in bold, capital letters, goes: ‘PULL OUT YOUR BACHELORS DEGREE HERE AND GO HOME AND DUMP IT THERE! On the same wall, somebody wrote: ‘This is where Napoleon tore his born apart.’

Ordinarily, when a person enters the toilet and closes the door, his or her privacy starts. In fact, some people describe toilets as the only place where one can have ‘me time’, a place to think straight and sort out deep personal and emotional problems. But who are these people who lock themselves in toilets to vent off?

Skunk

Adams, 45, teaches Literature at a school in Western Kenya. From drawing human reproductive organs on toilet walls, to scrawling simple quotes and vulgar stuff, Adam believes toilet graffiti is a vast canvass for educating society. In fact he sees it as a calling.

He remembers how he changed the lifestyle of a mathematics teacher who didn’t seem to be aware of his foul body odour while still a primary school pupil.

“His armpits used to stink so much that we almost suffocated whenever he bent over us while marking assignments around the class,” he recalls.

He confesses to have made sure the teacher know how nauseating his body odour was by launching a ‘smear’ campaign against him on toilet walls around the village.

“Of course, there was no way I was going to tell him his armpits were stinking like a sewer,” he says, “so I shamed him by writing about his foul smell in every toilet I could find.”

He first wrote in the gents’ washroom of the church where the teacher was an elder: “Mwalimu Juma ananuka makwapa kama skunk (teacher Juma’s armpits stink like a skunk!”

The same message was replicated on all toilets where he knew Mwalimu Juma visited. Although Mwalimu Juma or his sympathisers made spirited efforts to rub off the writings, Juma would rewrite them and recreate his teacher’s worst nightmares.

Addict

Toilet graffiti artists are never short of marker pens, pencils and pieces of chalk for the job. But according to Adam, everyone who writes on toilet walls or any confined place is an addict. This would explain why those who forget carry writing material, and unable to control the urge to write, go as far scribbling on toilet walls using their own excrement.

The teacher says he started writing on toilet walls in primary school and has never looked back.

“There are issues that I can’t say freely in public because of who I am in society, so I use toilet walls,” the teacher says. “For example, I cannot abuse somebody in public because as a teacher, I have public image to uphold and protect.”

For strange reasons, funny graffiti is confined to public toilets and not toilets at home. If that were not the case, battles between parents and children, and between spouses would have been fought artistically on toilet walls, and not through machetes or cold war.

Waswa, a toilet cleaner at a city university never tolerated graffiti in the toilets under his care. But that was till the artists turned their guns on him when he erased a series of adverts scribbled in one of the washrooms by students who offer business services in the campus.

An angry student wrote on the same wall:

“When Waswa, the s**t cleaner finally retires, I will erect a monument of s**t in his honour,” read the writing done using a marker pen.

The writing attracted a conversation that watered down the insult. But underneath it, another comrade wrote: “I am sure you can build that monument alone because you poop like an elephant!”

In no time, it had become like an online blog with comments getting posted furiously as an ‘analogue’ conversation ensued:

“At least you will never be jobless because you will have created a job for yourself as a curator of your stinky monument!”

Of course, none of the authors bothered to identify themselves by writing their names below their comments, same as what happens when foul-mouthed goons pen abusive comments on Facebook and Twitter.

The last person to add on the conversation proved to be the funniest of them all.

“M*f* ya kuku nyinyi nyote (you are all chicken droppings)!”

But another who read the sentence felt there was a spelling error on the word ‘m*f*’ and made a correction. He underlined the misspelt letter ‘f’ and above it wrote letter ‘v’. A teacher in the making?

More interesting was the material one writer used. You didn’t need to ferry in forensic experts from USA, Germany and Britain to conclude that the ‘ink’ in question was human waste. This university student clearly has a unique manner of writing his ‘papers’

Waswa, who is something of an authority on the subject, says he has seen so much literature on campus lavatory walls that he can even recognise the handwritings of all the elite graffiti writers at the university.

Why people write on toilet walls remains a mystery. Graffiti dates back to the golden Egyptian era when colourful stick-men walking were etched on coffins to depict the afterlife. In that epoch, artists also wrote on pyramid walls too.

Graffiti has been also found in Greek temples, the Roman ruins of the city of Pompeii and the tower of London, which contains graffiti depicting 16th century dates carved into the stonework.

Offensive

Today, however, the toilet wall is the most popular canvas, a public bulletin for messages related to vulgarity, insults, love, romance and politics.

Not surprisingly, research by a scholar in Bangladesh on restroom graffiti and gender relations found out men are fond of writing on toilet walls than women, and that graffiti that is written by men is more offensive and explicit than that by women. In his study, the scholar tried to focus on inscriptions made by both men and women in their toilets.

He found out that men beat women when it comes to politics, insults, poetry, proverbs, humour and intellectual expressions. On the other hand, women dwelt more on romance, religion and affairs because women tend to express their feelings better on matters that affect them directly.

This writer spoke to Joyce Kerubo*, a third year university student who is a confessed toilet graffiti artist. She says most of her graffiti is on quotes of love and current social life.

In high school, she remembers to have scribbled many writings like “The boy is mine,” “Love is when you are with him in a cold July weather,” “Never under-rate a woman like me” “men are the same behaviorally,” and many more.

Interestingly, social media is slowly edging washroom graffiti out of the way because surfing on the Internet has become a pastime for most people, even when attending to calls of nature.

Online tirade

As a result, graffiti writers are migrating to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flicker, Instagram, Myspace I-google and other social media platforms, explaining the foul and angry online tirades ordinarily associated with toilet graffiti.

According to Waswa, the number of writings on restrooms is on a decline and maybe, with time, there will be no toilet graffiti writer standing. Certified addicts like Adams, however, believe the art will always thrive.

Are you the tough, big man at the office who, like Mobutu Sese Seko, leaves no hen in the backyard? You might stop walking around with a swagger if your learnt that one of your female employees has scribbled, “Nick is a ‘one minute man’” on a toilet wall in the ladies washrooms!