Humour:Crying for a society on the brink of moral decay

COUNTY ROVER

Crying for a society on the precipice of moral decay

BY   PASCAL MWANDAMBO

The seemingly distraught chap walked straight to my table and planted himself next to me.

My apparent indifference to him did not seem to move him as he kept casting cursory glances at my bottle of beer without any indication that he intended to buy himself one.

I looked at the chap with a mixture of disdain and pity and asked the waitress to give him a beer too.

I could see the warm glow on his face as he pursed his lips as though to say something interesting.

                    mean scribe

I must admit that getting a drink from a scribe who lives from hand to mouth is like getting blood out of a stone, but on a positive note, a generous writer might end up getting some good lead on a story from the likes of the chap I am talking about.

The beer came and I could see some other chaps near us turn green with envy, since I am not the type that can go wasting my hard earned cash buying idlers and clumsy louts beer.

“The world is ending. I swear by God these are end times,” the chap prophesied with a doomsday tone, without elaborating how he had obtained such nonsensical and unsettling predictions.

He took a sip of the beer, wiped the foam from the corners of his mouth and went on, “Such people should be castrated, or thrown to the bottom of the sea”.

At that juncture I had to disturb this boring monologue . You see, one  personal attribute of yours sincerely is listening keenly first and asking questions later.

“You will save me a lot of pain of doing guess work on whoever and whatever you are talking about”, I said to the chap who apparently knows I am a writer.

                                            bestial

He took a deep sigh and said ruefully, “Two days ago I had traveled to see my ailing cousin to my wife at the border town and got very disturbing news. A neighbour to this cousin to my wife had been caught…sigh…sigh… sleeping with a goat…sigh.”

Despite the fact that I had now gotten an idea on what had driven the chap to prophesy that the end of the world was nigh, I deliberately decided to jog his mind by asking a rather foolish question, “ A man sleeps with a goat? Does that mean the fellow was so poor not to afford even some small space to let the poor animal rest in peace?”.

The chap looked at me as though to suggest that I was among the most clueless scribes on earth, sighed again and said almost shedding tears, “No, bwana mwandishi, the fellow turned a goat into his wife”.

With such events unfolding and the beer beginning to work on the poor fellows emotions, I felt like buying the chap another cold Tusker just to console the fellow who was so concerned and touched by the unfortunate incident, you could think the goat that had been turned into a wife was his very own.

But this is a sad reality that we keep on getting reports about, day in day out.

From chicken to donkeys, mentally sick women to grizzled grandmothers, this matter is grave.

                             beating rains

I am not a very superstitious fellow, but could these strange happenings be the reason why we hardly get  any rains in Mavumbi County? Well as the name suggests, this dusty county which might as well be the headquarters of anopheles mosquitoes in the country, only gets rains once in a blue moon. And when the rains come, they fall with such fury, destroy homes and property, erode roads and create huge gullies and then disappear till the following year.

In fact it might not be an understatement for me to opine that even though the end of the world might be neither here nor there, something has gone seriously awry with our moral fabric. Here is a morally bankrupt society where men live worse than beasts, with some turning into cannibals and feeding on the flesh of friends and kin alike.

I sipped my beer and wondered how my Taita ancestors were feeling in their graves.

You see in my community, in  those years gone by, such fellows were either hurled down the rocky cliffs of Taita hills or buried alive after digging their own graves.

I felt more pity for the chap as he rose and melted into the night after realising that his  donor(read yours sincerely) was no longer loosening his purse strings.

As the music began to blare to deafening decibels, I could only recall the  words of wisdom  by one of Kenya’s celebrated playwrights… “When the madness of an entire nation disturbs a solitary mind, it’s not enough to say that man is mad”.