The older the sugarcane, the sweeter it becomes

I am not very good at celebrity gazing, seeing that I rarely watch TV. However, the recent wedding between a young man in his early thirties and a woman in her early fifties kind of piqued my interest.

Predictably, the wedding caused a storm in social media that basically coalesced into two groups. On one side, there is that progressive lot that responds to such social dilemmas with the cliché’ ‘as long as they are happy. If a man refuses to marry and adopts the rare Himalayan mollusk instead, they will respond with the same stock phrase-as long as he is happy and the mollusk is happy. Pray to tell; how do you tell a mollusk is happy? Anyway, so much for that lot.

The second lot is the pro-ethnic group that posits that it’s against our African mores for a young man to marry his mother. These African keyboard warriors will angrily type using their Chinese phones on an American social media site while wearing ex-UK suits that they refuse anything foreign for they are 100% African. Interesting lot, this one is.

Back then, I used to be in that group that argues that we Africans don’t allow marriages between older women and younger men. Until one day, my cousin Kamaley strolled home with a buxom lady old enough to be his aunty but still young enough to wet his wick-as he would put it. She was hot enough to cause global warming in many a man’s hearts and cool enough to trigger ice of envy in the plain Janes of the village. Which she did from the word go.

The heaven-bound Mother’s Union brigade consisting of my mom, several aunties and other aggrieved parties immediately formed an ad-hoc committee of inquiry into this grave matter. After lengthy deliberations in which a copious amount of tea was consumed, they raised bus fare for one of them to go to the city and tell Kamaley’s dad-my uncle- that his son had married a woman old enough to be his mother. However, the report that reached the uncle is that his son had married a hag old enough to be his grandmother.

After a few weeks, uncle comes down to the village one weekend, swinging a kilo of meat from one of his sides. He went to his compound and saw the buxom lady, easy on the eye, going to draw water from the river, her hips going to and fro-like the ebb and flow of passions in a man’s heart.

A short while later, she mumbled back to the home, her ample derriere almost eclipsing the sun. Uncle pretended not to have seen her and lazed around his cows, but with his eyes stuck elsewhere. My aunty, who was now getting restless, reminded him that his sole duty of coming to the village was to chase away the ‘old woman’ he was now stealing glances at. Uncle, who was now sited on a stone munching on sugarcane noisily, paused, planted his machete into the soft loam and asked her:

‘Nikii we! Don’t you know that the older a sugarcane gets, the sweeter it gets towards its bottom?’ Then he resumed his chewing, his mandibles going back and forth in a regular rhythm.

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