A principal on the loose

Friday evening was a nightmare.

As one lady put it, one of the principals was on the loose.

Yes, Baks was in transit and half of Nairobi was held hostage. There was nowhere you could go to. The traffic was at a standstill. The only fellas who were lucky were the ones who could simply walk to their destinations.

I left work at five. Normally it takes me forty five minutes maximum to get to town. I got there after seven, two and a half hours later. The only consoling thing was that I didn’t have to go to work the next day, so it was all good. I knew it would be stupid to attempt to get home considering everything, so I opted to stay longer in town and wait it all out. Probably I would get home around the same time with the guys who were already on the road.

So I called up a couple of friends and hooked up with them. Only they didn’t come alone, each brought along a guest. Among the guests was an uncle who was visiting the city from the village. And he had a lot to say about different issues.

At some point, when we were discussing marriage, he was of the opinion that women should respect men for the men to love them back.

“There is nothing like a man respecting his woman, that is the modern bullshit (ok, he didn’t actually say the word) that you young people of today have invented. Women are not supposed to be respected!” 

We were rendered speechless a few seconds after this statement was made. The niece attempted to change the topic since I guess she knew where this conversation was headed, but the uncle wasn’t to be deterred.

“The woman’s role in any relationship or marriage is to cater to the man. She needs to feed him, pamper him and treat him like a king. Everything else is secondary.” 

No one wanted an argument on their hands so the rest of us just kept quiet and listened meekly. It seemed that this was a subject that was really close to his heart since he kept going getting more impassioned by the moment. Other people started turning and looking at us. It felt weird, I wished I could tell uncle to lower his voice but I didn’t dare. There is no telling what that would bring about.

So we sat and let him rant. Sooner or later we hoped he would exhaust everything and move on to more quiet topics. 

It took awhile.