Plight of the Girl with a Twisted Future

If you studied ‘Looking for a Rain God’ as a set book in high school (in Kenya), you may recall one of the short stories with the title ‘The Girl With A Twisted Future’, by Mia Couto of Mozambique. It was a prose fiction that abound in the themes of exploitation or victimization of women [particularly daughters] for economic gains

The imagery from that story is still etched on my mind at how a father [who right now should be rotting in hell] could tie the back of her daughter, Filomeninha on a drum for a whole night, then in the morning pour hot water on her so as to soften her bones. All in the name of launching a career for her as a contortionist, who would wreck millions for the family.

Ultimately, Filomeninha’s back bent over backwards, her blood flow became irregular and her bones went out of joint… she was crumpling for all to see. She looked like a hook without any more use, an abandoned rag!

Over the weekend I had an interesting conversation that sparked this memory, but left me feeling very much ashamed to be a man. So this lady is barely 24 years old, having a curvaceous body plus her sassy looks that would halt in his path a straightforward thinking but lustful man, for a glance or two. Her face had all the make-up, which my female colleague once informed me is supposed to make a lady look natural and not any other way.

According to my colleague, when complementing a lady for her made up beauty, the verbatim should be ‘you look natural’. Really? But this lady had applied blue eye shadow and pitch dark eye pencil that made her tender eyes sparkle in a very unnatural way. Anyhow, it reminded of Jacob when he got up in the middle of the night after the wedding to see he’d been duped with Leah, the tender eyed and not Rachel, the beautiful one.

For the purpose of this narrative, let’s call her Gerties. She recently moved out of her mom’s house leaving behind her 4 year old daughter. She lives in an apartment, adjacent to the road for convenience on public transport considering that she wakes up with the birds and retreats with the bats! She works at the grooming section of a barber shop that involves washing men’s hair after they’ve been shaved, doing facials, pedicure, manicure and a wide array of body massage for the metrosexual urbanite.

Her work dictates that she is tender and dresses to appeal and kill in one straw. And so, if all the male patrons of the barber shop were to open up their hearts on the sensations they get upon visiting the barber shop and grooming parlor, then the road to hell could be widened! On the converse, if information on these sensations were to be exposed to their girlfriends and spouses, the latter would quickly enroll for a crush program in shaving men’s hair and grooming their bodies so as to keep their men away from these places that stand on the brink of morality.

Gerties separated from her baby daddy about a year and a half ago on accounts of infidelity, despite his having completed a big residential house in a posh estate in the suburbs of Nairobi. He joins the list of deadbeat dads who live well while their progenies and minders are squatters at the homes of their maternal grannies or other well-wishers.

Looking at her nearly visible stretch marks and narrowing eye pupils, one could tell that Gerties lives from hand to mouth on the meager pay from the massage parlor besides the fact that she needs to talk, dress and walk like a city queen to match her profile of clientele. The lethal combination you get here is that of a city girl who needs to fit by hook or crook, into a social class that she doesn’t belong to or can’t afford.

After falling out with her baby daddy, she hated men (as one would naturally expect) but soon after felt the pressing need for male company and what she calls ‘service’. Unwittingly or otherwise, she fell prey to a mama’s boy who moved into her apartment since he was jobless with much of his time spent with the boys at the muguka base talking politics, football, and women, in that order.

Her second pregnancy was the product of this arranged marriage, which she lived to regret in the first trimester of the unborn. Short of two months of gestation, she terminated the pregnancy with the help of God-knows-who, using a pair of drugs, administered through the oral and vaginal body entries. Just like that! And the fetus and his father were out of her way!

Back to the high street of city life, Gerties kept her job of massaging and grooming the urbanite men though she also joined a lady’s chama with obligations of contributing Ksh. 6,000 weekly. I could bet, she earns less than Ksh.10,000 monthly at her day job and silently wondered how she raised such an amount weekly, let alone afford house rent by the roadside.

Unfortunately, that is where the sad tale of exploitation and victimization by men begins. While at college I was naïve about sex matters and in fact I recall a group session for peer counseling where the facilitator was discussing about being ‘sexually active’ and I was audacious enough to ask ‘what’s that’?

Fast forward to life after college where now I should be all the brighter with knowledge that sex for economic gains is no longer confined to the red-light streets. As though on a free fall, gullible men and women are daily negotiating for quick punches within veneers of cool, seduction and haste.

From the conversation, I learnt that Gerties has sex with different men for different reasons. She has a category of (married) men who pay her weekly contributions at the price of her body and dignity, and another category (of bachelors) who give her ‘service’ as and when she needs to play.

I muse at the lamentable state of a relatively young girl in her early 20’s whose understanding of dignity has been twisted by the pressures of survival and keeping up with the Jones for such a high price. At her counting, [as said one of the Divorce Court episodes on TV] she has opened up her legs to at least 32 men although she is desperate for a husband.

She defiantly looks forward to a church wedding and blissful marriage. It bemuses me, why a married man would still go after another woman for passion while his wife should meet his sexual needs. Even if she doesn’t, he is bound with life chains on her (pingu za maisha)!

It’s not a straight answer, since we live in a world of relativism where responses to such questions are either ‘it depends’ or ‘he must meet her needs before his needs are met’. Just like the Jewish soldiers who were reprimanded for not being satisfied with their salaries, to purge the problem of corruption, I bet married men should be rebuked for not being satisfied with their wives, to abet immorality.

Again, what does it benefit a male chauvinist or macho man to add to his CV that he has slept with all the women in the pub, market place and church (yes, I said church!), despite the fact that others have done the same with the same women, albeit ahead of him?

Methinks, although the world is full of evil and obscenities, we are yet to see the full breadth of moral decadence. Perchance it is a wake up call where men of courage and responsibility to stand out of the masses. and be counted. I can bet with my ten fingers and ten toes that Gerties represents a host of ladiesalong the continuum of life (in high school, fresh from high school, in college, fresh from college, new in career, besides innocent or opportunistic women caught up in economic hardships).

How selfish it must be for the man who prowls for her wine in the streets or market place and easily ignites himself with unguarded passions to take advantage of her situation.

He dangles money and pleasure at her with all the motives of a dark monster, while blaming it on high testosterone levels. Whether he is a husband of a heavily pregnant wife or nursing mother, there is no justification as to why he can’t zip up and control his sexual urges.

Self-control seems to have been shoved off by some to the list of optional moral values, with others consciously pursuing the philanderer’s woman and drinking of her debauchery. Such behaviors in mature men should be wrapped on a great millstone and cast into the deep seas.

Gerties may appear to any lay man as an individual caught up in the struts of life who is trying to put her best foot forward. However, she carries with her a future and potential wife or mother who will bring up her own children. Who knows whether she will pass onto another generation the twisted mentality about sexuality, morality and most importantly dignity?

In my view, she is tending towards getting out of joint on the meaning of womanhood and will soon lose the vigor of her youth on the laps of carefree men who are happy-go-lucky. Soon enough, Gerties will become like Filomeninha, a hook without any more use, an abandoned rag!

Although my anger is stirred up… I still have to think more about what to do. In the meantime, I leave the narrative in this space as I retreat back to drafting the upcoming ‘Chronicles of my 7 years working in Somalia’.