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Two weeks ago, the front page of The Saturday Nation carried a picture of a guy who had been thwacked by his wife so hard that his face looked like an instruction manual on how to sew the perfect cross stitch.
Following this, there has been a huge outcry about the increasing incidences of hubby battering, especially in Nyeri.
To be honest, some of the jokes have been rather distasteful, painting the Nyeri woman as a blood-hungry creature hell-bent on exterminating all good men from this side of the planet.
While I do not support this or any form of violence, I think we should show some sympathy for these Nyeri
women.
It must take something very painful to turn a soft-hearted, born-to-nurture human being into a monster with little regard for human life and little respect for the law.
Let’s look at the history here: Since the 1900s, Central Province has been rocked by land issues, what with too many men and too little land.
That is the reason why many folks from this area are quick to rush to other provinces to acquire some land.
It is the same reason why a ‘floti’ (or ‘plot’, for the rest of us English speakers) is an aspiration for those of Central Kenyan descent.
Most families live in postage-stamp sized plots usually set in a compound occupied by usually annoying (and hard-to-escape) extended family.
Every day is about treading carefully so that no family’s egos, loyalties and alliances are shattered. It is about balancing family politics.
Many women find themselves becoming wives accidentally following some innocent village hanky panky in the bushes.
So here you are, a young lady having to confront issues and arrangements that would confuse even the UN General Assembly.
It does not help the Central Kenyan man is a poor shadow of himself. He is likely a squatter on his father’s land, since he cannot find a job in the super-competitive city.
If and when he is lucky enough to get a menial job, it pays close to nothing and does nothing to meet the needs of his young family – and, of course, those of the extended family.
So to escape the misery that surrounds him, he drowns his sorrows in the nearest bar with the cheapest liquor he can find.
The wife, in the meantime, does not understand her man. She cannot understand how he can squat on his father’s land yet cringe at the thought of doing jobs that appear to degrade him.
She cannot understand why this man will keep tally of Man U’s football scores but fail to remember that he has a family that needs to have their bills paid.
She gets frustrated when he takes the pittance he earns straight to the bar to buy drinks for his equally jaded friends rather than take care of his family.
Since they are queens of improvisation, many Central Kenyan women shed off their garments of pride as they do anything and everything to provide for their family.
The culmination of all this is that the Central Kenyan woman is an angry woman; angered by her circumstances and angered that the man who brought her into them will just not pull up his socks.
Unlike her city sister, her choices are limited. She cannot disappear to the pub for a girls’ night out and erase the pain with a slew of tequila shots.
She has no spa to visit to have her aching shoulders rubbed, or a nanny to delegate the children to as she burrows herself in a book.
She has no time for the over-hyped, self-absorbed Alabastron and Landmark forums to help her understand her situation.
So imagine her fury when her man comes home reeking of illicit brew. The quiet fury builds up day after day – then turns into a volcano that erupts and emits serious domestic violence in its wake.
Somewhere in every female’s DNA is what I call the fury gene. We can cause havoc that can leave humans and nations scarred for life; is it any wonder that all hurricanes are named after women?
Such is our anger. So, instead of showing off our collective funny bone as a nation, we should be doing something about the Nyeri woman.
Maendeleo ya Wanaume is making all the right noises about how the poor hapless men from near the Mountain are about to be wiped off the face of the earth.
(To be honest, though, given the current state of most of them, it is hard to put up amoral case in their defence.) Someone needs to treat the Nyeri woman before she exterminates all the men from that area.
