Why gossiping could be healthy

Why gossiping is healthy (Photo: iStock)

In the village, there is always one person who knows all the gossip, the same person who moves it around. It could be the shopkeeper, the mama mboga or the nduthi man. Five minutes with them, and you end up with an extended list of people having illicit affairs, imagined or otherwise. You will know which couple had a recent tiff, who is smoking what, and why the local drug dealer has not been arrested.

Because the gossip is essentially by creatives, they cannot resist adding a spice here and there, and the more scandalous, the better. They are something similar to a certain clique of social media content creators, who are not really content creators unless creating lies can be termed as such.