08/01/2022
The men we became has a lot to do with how we were treated as boys- Ihii.
I walk through today’s supermarkets dragging my jaws seeing how mothers treat their Liams and Jadens. I wasted almost seventeen and a half minutes in Juja City Mall watching a fierce exchange between a mother and a nine-year old boy. Apparently, the boy wanted a Pizza and the mother had ordered fries. The mother did not have money for a pizza and constantly soothed the boy to eat the fries. She was also constantly on the phone maybe trying some Mshwari, Fuliza, or even texting her husband the details of the crisis. My mother would have decapitated me with a slap and ate the fries herself.
We grew up with a constant reminder that we were worth nothing, and deserved nothing. In my village boys were called Mikuna to mean the hard ones. During school holidays, boys could go for weeks without a proper meal. Just scavenging around the community granaries, while gathering and hunting for squirrels, avocados, mangoes, and mapera. We could also help the community with light duties like testing carcasses. You see, most people in our village could not afford to bury a dead animal and could not afford to a veterinary to test whether the meat was fit for consumption. To solve this dilemma, the elders came up with a brilliant plan. Boys would be served with liver of any dead animals and the entire community would observe them for hours. If three hours later we were still playing, they would conclude the meat is safe- then they would eat the rest and give hooves and hides to the boys.
I remember one day when wazees almost killed us for deceiving them. After realizing that we would not get any more meat after the test liver, we came up with a heinous plan. On one occasion we ate a pig liver and after one hour, we all stopped playing and became really sad. Some tough boys induced vomiting, others lay in the sun shivering- we generally told the wazee we weren’t feeling well. Well, they declared the pig unfit for human consumption, cut it into pieces and instructed us to give it to village dogs that were rated slightly below boys. We took the meat and roasted it along the banks of Gitige River. The entire community (elders, parents, young adults, teachers, chief, mad people) beat us for months after the incident but at least we ate. We won. Boys of our time were nurtured to be tough.
Most men above thirty years are not entitled, they are not crybabies, they can go for days without food, they e
