Intercourse to Arouse Lost Communication

When I joined secondary school, we had an interesting lady teacher. She had this tendency of going back through the ages to bring us literary items just so that we could understand how the English language developed. She once brought us what we had initially assumed to be a poem. It turned out to have been a song that was apparently written by a 16 year old girl in the 1950s. It went something like this;

            

            Oh my boy lollipop,

            You are like candy,

            You make my heart go di di up,

            My boy lollipop................

One morning the teacher came to class, called us to attention and said, “Let’s have an intercourse!” For a moment, we didn’t know how to react. We just stared at her, mouths agape. She suddenly burst into laughter calling us evil minded. She explained that intercourse was just another word for an exchange of thoughts and that was all she wanted us to do. Sex, she said, was only one of the many forms of intercourse we could have.

I have come to realise that intercourse is not the only word whose meaning has drifted over the years. Other words have had such a drastic change in their meanings that they now mean the exact opposite of their original versions. We know a bully to mean a person who is habitually cruel to weaker people. Originally however, a bully was actually a superb or wonderful person. To be sad is to be unhappy. Previously, being sad was being satisfied or content.

If you say you have heartburn, we know you are suffering from a physical health condition. If you had said so a long time ago, we would wonder why you are filled with so much jealousy and hatred, for that was the meaning then. If someone called you nice, you would not have been happy about it. This is because the person would have considered you to be foolish or unknowledgeable. It is what we would refer to today as being ‘clueless’.

Some bodily functions have taken over words which previously meant other things. To ejaculate, for example, did not mean the enjoyment of conjugal rights. It meant ‘to utter suddenly or to exclaim’. Defecation did not require to be done in a private room with good ventilation. It could be done anywhere because it meant to purify something.

Accident reporting would have been a very different matter from what it is today. If you heard of an accident in which all the passengers died, that would have been a very bad accident, and not in the way you think. A passenger was someone travelling on foot. It was therefore impossible to have all the passengers on a road being killed simultaneously, unless of course it was genocide.

It was very good in those days to have more villains. In fact, the more villains a particular area had, the better food security it was assured of. This was because, villain was the word used to describe a farm labourer. On the other hand, it would have been disadvantageous to have more pretty people. Nobody wanted to associate with the pretty ones. You may wonder why but a pretty person was a tricky, sly, or cunning character. Guys were also undesirable unlike today when everybody wants to be referred to as one. A guy was a person of grotesque appearance.

In those days, you needed to be nervous in order to attain success. A nervous person was a person of strength and vigour. You needed this to handle success. Success was any outcome, whether good or bad. A nervous person today cannot achieve much, and success is restricted to the very few who come out on top.

The last was also the highest or utmost outcome. It would therefore have been quite appropriate to say, “Last but not least”. It would actually been an ambiguous statement. The last was also the best and so there would have been no point in stating the obvious. This was an intercourse, remember! Let me also have your views.

P.S. I finally have an inmate in my house after looking for one for so long. Hey don’t worry my fellow laymen, am not harbouring an escaped prisoner, I just mean I have new tenant.

The Evolution of Social Media

“My Dearest Xxxxxxxxx,

First and foremost, receive many greetings flowing like River Turkwel. Secondly, is to know how you are faring on in this life. As for me, I am fine these sides of ours. I received your letter and I read it four times to believe it was really you. Even this morning I read it and it was as if you were really here with me. How are the books treating you?.........”

The above is an excerpt from an actual letter I wrote to my then girl friend when I was in form two. The name has been scrambled to protect her identity (she is somebody’s spouse, and I am somebody else’s spouse). This was more than 2 decades ago (Yes! I am that old, or “antiquated”, as my 75 year old boss would put it). So much has changed since then.

Before I had a girl friend whom I had actually met, I used to have pen pals. For those of you too young to understand what I’m talking about, pen pals were the equivalent of today’s Facebook friends. We used to put adverts in the newspapers (They had a Pen Pal section on Sundays). The only way to send the request was through mail (Post Office Mail or Snail Mail, as it has been derogatorily renamed) and it was also the only way to get response.

Writing a letter was serious business. No person worth his salt could write a letter and send it immediately. He first had to make a rough draft, correct any grammatical errors and poor flow, then (and only then); carefully rewrite the final draft. The final draft was usually written on special paper from what were known as ‘writing pads’ (I don’t see them anymore).  These would be beautifully designed with pictures of flowers or animals – Some were even scented! Any letter written then can qualify to be a literature set piece today. It was communication straight from the heart (and sweat).

Success cards appear to have stood the test of time as I can still see them today. E-Cards however, seem to be taking the limelight away. People are sending fewer and fewer cards through the post. I guess we will soon stop seeing those beautiful (paper) cards of flowers and couples. I still have one couples card which was sent to me by none other than – My Dad! When I received it, I was very excited because I thought it was from a girl. I was sorely disappointed to see the salutation, “Dear Son”. I don’t blame him for bursting my bubble. He must have picked the card for the message which was really nice, the ‘insignificant’ picture notwithstanding.

Back in the 80s and early 90s, very few people had telephones installed in their houses especially in the rural areas where I grew up. In my whole village for instance, there was only one home with a phone and the owner was, thankfully, a family friend. My elder siblings went to school in Meru where my father used to work and when he dispatched them home  with a driver for the holidays, we would all troop to the place with the phone to tell Dad they had arrived safely. I used to look forward to the holidays, not to see my brother and sisters, but to talk on the phone. I was one of the few boys in school who had not only seen a phone, but actually used it.

When I got my first girl friend, who was more of a pen pal because we rarely met in person, I was happy to know that they had a phone at home. We had a telephone booth at school and I would save up my coins to call her whenever they were at home and we were still at school. I remember the queue that used to form outside the telephone booth at our school and at all other booths which were common those days. I wonder what happened to those beloved red booths and their voluminous directories.

When mobile phones first came, only a few select Kenyans could afford to buy and run them. The first time I saw one, I was really impressed. I couldn’t believe that a phone without a wire could really work. Looking back now, I find it funny because that hand set was as big as a policeman’s walkie-talkie. It could not fit in any pocket, and could stand unsupported on a table.

A few years after the first mobile phone, everybody could afford one. Now people could talk and SMS unhindered. With this advancement in information technology, came the death of real communication. Now people could replace “S” with “X” in their SMS’s and write the sort of gibberish that can make a doctor’s prescription scrawling look like calligraphy. Mobile phones now have cameras and internet and we can all log into our favourite social media sites to post the photos of corpses at accident scenes and videos of women being stripped naked as we stand by and do nothing. I preferred the old layman’s way of being compassionate and saying what we felt instead of the present so called social media that is actually an “antisocial media”.

P.S. I wish Facebook could introduce the option of “Acknowledge” to the existing ones of “Like”, “Comment”, and “Share”. I don’t want to have to click “Like” when someone says he has lost a loved one and I don’t want to comment or share.

Could Mount Kilimanjaro Have Once Belonged to Kenya?

When I was a small boy, there was an old man who lived in our village in Central Kenya. He was a family friend and very wise. He loved coming to visit our home where he would have long chats with my Dad. Unlike many chatty old men, this one was different. His stories were positively interesting. We could never keep away from him whenever he came to visit. In those days, it was considered improper for children to crowd grownups when they were discussing serious matters. My siblings and I were however willing to risk getting into trouble with Dad to sit close by and just listen to the old man.

One thing that amazed me about the old man was the way he could describe places and directions. He used to recall his travels with relish and tell of how he and his friends would travel great distances, on foot, in search of pasture for their livestock. They would walk for months with their animals over hundreds of kilometres. The man, literary, had an atlas saved in his head. From my geography in school, I could tell exactly where he was talking about just from his descriptions.

There was one time he came and told a story that was so interesting it has stuck in my memory to date. He was telling of how he and others had travelled from what is present day Ngong hills area towards the South East in the area where the Amboseli national park now lies. He talked of direction the way the Agíkúyú used to define it using their terminology of east and west, and also north and south. I can still recall his booming voice, talking as he drew lines on the ground with his walking stick while leaning carefully from the traditional stool that he preferred to sit on when he came to visit.

On that occasion, he talked about something we had always read about at school. He talked about Mount Kilimanjaro. It really aroused my interest because it was one of the famous landmarks that we could see on some occasional early mornings in the distance from right there in our village. He talked about the way the Agíkúyú had always stood in awe of the mountain. The first thing they had done was to name it. He told us about the origin of the name. He explained that the rump of a cow was known as “Njaro” in the Gíkúyú language. When the Agíkúyú looked at the mountain, they observed that it had the shape of a cow rump. They therefore named it “Kíríma kía Njaro”, which literally meant “Mountain of the Rump”. This was eventually shortened to Kírímanjaro.

The Gíkúyú language does not have the letter “L” as can be seen from the spelling above. The “L” was probably introduced as a way of ‘Kenyanizing’ the name. And so, my fellow laymen, that is how the tallest mountain in Africa, and the tallest free-standing one in the world, got its name. Since the story by the old man, I have researched to see if there is another credible explanation as to how the mountain came to be called Kilimanjaro. All that I found were theories about how it must have been the Wachagga in Tanzania who came up with the name. Even Wikipedia buys the story, albeit half-heartedly. They rightly assert that the origin of the name is not precisely known, but now it is!

A strange story is told of the time when Kenya was under British control while Tanzania was under the Germans. It is said that the German ruler then was King Kaiser Wilhelm the Second while the United Kingdom was under Queen Victoria. Apparently, the two monarchs were related although I cannot establish the exact way how. Some sources say King Wilhelm was Queen Victoria’s Cousin while others say he was her grandson. I do not know which is which. What I know is that she was very fond of him. So fond that she gave him Mount Kilimanjaro as a birthday gift in 1886. Now all they had to do was carve Kenya’s border with Tanzania to encompass “our” mountain.

You have now received your history lesson from the Layman. Whether you choose to believe it or not is totally up to you. Alternatively, you can conduct your own research.

P.S. Instead of fighting for the control of Migingo Island, shouldn’t we have been fighting for “Bigger things”? Just wondering.

Good Lessons from Terrorists

The first thing I ever heard that could be considered an act of terrorism was the assassination of Indira Gandhi. She was then the Prime Minister of India. I was quite young then and I can recall the shock I felt to imagine that someone could kill the very person he had been charged with the responsibility to protect (she had been killed by her own body guards).

Years later, when I was a teenager, I heard on the news that her son, who had taken over as prime minister after her, had been killed by a suicide bomber. That was the first time I heard of suicide bombing. It was unimaginable in my young mind that a person could hate another so much that she (the bomber was actually a woman) could choose to die in order to see the person die. I had just been ushered into the harsh reality of terrorism.

Acts of terror have now become so common that hardly a week passes before we hear of reports from across the world. Terror has become the equalizer between rich and poor countries, between democracies and dictatorships, between communists and capitalists. There almost does not seem to be any criteria in who terrorists target. I guess the title of ‘terrorists’ is appropriate since they keep all of us adequately ‘terrified’.

For the longest time ever, I hated terrorists with a passion. They appeared to have made our lives very difficult. The endless metal detector tests and strangers going through the contents of my bag every time I want to enter any building is almost as bad as the terror itself. I have however been wondering of late what makes terrorists tick. I have been thinking that there must be some inherent good in the hearts of terrorists. I truly believe that we can learn a good thing or two from them.

One quality I admire in terrorists is their conviction. A terrorist is someone who is ready to die for a cause (and don’t tell me it’s for the 70 virgins otherwise there would be no women suicide bombers). This separates a terrorist from say, a robber, who can kill to get money or some other material benefit. If all of us could have the same level of conviction as terrorists in the things we believe in, the world would be a better place to live in. The only thing we should not emulate is the nature of their beliefs.

I have never in my layman’s experience been involved in an act of terror. I can however imagine the vast amount of courage needed for someone to blow himself to smithereens. It definitely takes someone with single minded focus to do the things that terrorists do. They lack not just the fear of death, but the fear of pain. Personally, I fear pain to a fault, and it’s not that am cowardly or anything, it’s just that I can’t consciously and voluntarily put myself through pain. For instance, I cannot willingly take myself to a doctor if I know I will get an injection.

I have been thinking that we need to promote a new kind of terrorism. Let me call it ‘political terrorism’. We could use a few ‘political suicide bombers’. These are people who will do what needs to be done at the risk of never winning an election again. They would go and do those things that will guarantee them political oblivion since they would not be willing to suck up to their cronies, kinsmen, and sponsors. I know one needs lots of money to win a political seat in Kenya. This money is almost always “borrowed” from “supporters” who would recoup it back through favours. A political suicide bomber would just ignore these supporters and refuse to grant favours.

I am not a politician and so do not know the finer details of how one gets himself elected. I can only deduce from what I hear about what happens. I am however sure that courage and confidence are good lessons we can learn from our, unfortunately ‘departed terrorists’.

P.S. When guards at malls pass a mirror under your car or swipe a metal detector over you, are they in essence declaring you to be “bomb-free”? How do they expect a bomb to look like – A long cylindrical shape with fins and written “BOMB!” on the side? Just wondering!