Why our changing world does not make much sense any more

How life has changed this lifetime. What was once certain is now relative.

There was a time when we had only one election every five years.

We have had two in one year, and we are not satisfied. We would have one dictator who jailed the dissidents and stole the money. These days, who knows?

In the old days, music was Don Williams singing about a Mexican girl.

Today, it’s Diamond Platinumz crooning about “ufundi wa kitandani” and warning that “mapenzi ya video yatakutoa kamasi” in Zilipendwa.

Love was very important and poetically communicated in a torrent of letters, sex was, in the main, out of the question.

Diamond’s world is aggressively physical and drowning in the soup of instant, and constant, gratification.

WIFE
The traditional man wore his prosperity over his belt.

His belly, slapping his knees like two separate, massive low-hanging fruits, was a testimony to his good fortune, a product of hard work and disciplined application and the expert cooking of his wife.

Talking of wives, while a man would not want to be seen to be paying too much attention to his wife, he would nevertheless glow with self-satisfied pride at her round countenance and protuberant behind.

A well-fed wife was proof of a man’s great wealth and generosity.

A wife waddling around at kiama meetings was much to be preferred to one who appeared like a stranger to nourishment.

ALCOHOL
Today’s man, when he disagrees with his woman, rather than providing firm but peaceful leadership, becomes an animal.

He looks for people to desecrate the mother of his children, sit on her back and pour poison down her throat.

In the best of times, particularly in some upcountry market centres, the husband is decrepit, withered and a generally pointless human being, bleached dry by ethanol and other chemicals.

Unable to produce and reproduce, the whole goal of his life seems to be to beat money out of his wife to feed his alcohol addiction and is as dependent on her as a child.

NATURAL RESOURCES
It is not unusual that many a wife has resorted to feeding sugar, excessive dairy products, wheat and – on occasion – ground glass to their brew-crazed husbands in the hope of achieving the freedom of widowhood.

Even the earth has become unfriendly. Long ago, rivers were channels where lots of water, which you could drink, catch fish from and swim in, flowed.

Rivers today are small trickles of brackish weapons of mass destruction that can be sprayed, like poison gas, to spread pestilence and death.

Rare is the river, which can cover the ankles of a short man. Seasons were seasons.

The rains came on the 20th of April and the 20th of October and you could set your watch by it.

Today they don’t come at all year-round.

RELATIONSHIPS

Then you wake up one day, the sun is in the sky bright and lovely – and it starts snowing.

Or there is plenty of rain and big storms in the deserts while it’s hot and dry in the so-called wetlands.

It’s all a bit confusing. Just like the evolved concept of relationships.

The traditional relationship involved a girl and a boy with a slim waist and nimble feet on the dance floor.

A boyfriend in the modern sense is often an 85-year-old toothless baron who is dropped off at his “sugar babe’s” place – which he has bought – by his wife en route to her date.

JOBS

He crawls into the premises dragging his oxygen tank and a bagful of currency, I imagine, while his 78-year-old wife goes off, with her tank and bag of cash, to be “girlfriend” to a broke young bloke.

What I mean to demonstrate is that this inter-generational concept has been stretched to unimaginable lengths in modern times.

It used to be that everyone wanted a job. After college, it was a matter of pride and an almost rite passage to “tarmac” – one went to live with a friend in a hovel in Landi Mawe and eat cabbage soup with ugali made out of rough, home made flour.

Every waking moment was spent looking for work, hassling relatives, swamping an unsuspecting public with CVs and pestering advertisers until someone gave in and offered a job.

FOOD
It is not unusual today to see the graduate of an Ivy League university with good grades but no desire to take up a job at all, content to live at home and pretend that life is one long holiday.

And when this fellow goes out for a plate of expensive chips and chicken – paid for with one of his mum’s credit cards – he does not tell his friends, let’s close our eyes and give thanks for this food.

The food is undressed and spread-eagled on the table, photographed from every angle and posted on social media.

Even those who can only afford a more modest fare where the chips give off a steam of transformer oil and the chicken’s genes are scrambled by Frankenstein feeds, the ritual of photography is faithfully followed.

The world makes no sense any more. 

[email protected]