TIPS FOR KENYAN MEN WHO CHEAT

People who have jobs tell me that Sunday is an easy day. Some spend the morning sleeping in and probably having lazy sex, possibly the only sex they have with their wives or live in girlfriends all week, while others head out to church, not to communion with God but rather to make amends for the sins of the past week and hopefully earn a pre-emptive forgiveness for the sins of the next. These people then spend Sunday afternoon with their families.

I lack the luxury of engaging in such an ordered life. I know no routine beyond trying to exist, one day at a time. I do not have a wife, a steady girlfriend or a live in girlfriend, unlike most of the guys of my age and acquaintance. That allows me a moment of self-righteous indignation at their promiscuous ways.

Your average Kenyan guy cheats on his partner. Incorrigibly so the anthropologist might be tempted to opine that men cheating is culturally acceptable in this society. I do not know that that is true or not but I know it is in my observed experience. (Note that I am not convinced there is such a thing as 'Kenyan' culture and so every time I say Kenyan, let it be assumed that the word is in quotes. So all of you who do not cheat in your relationships and those of you who believe that they are not cheated on, please leave me alone, I am not talking about you and your partners).

The young urban professionals that I know have, consciously or unconsciously grown up into their fathers. They wake up and go to work every weekday morning. In the evening they report to the local bar, or more likely, especially for the better paid lot, a trendy bar downtown or in either Westlands or Kilimani. They have a couple of beers, discuss work and who is sleeping with who and maybe chat up and exchange business cards with the the skirt suited girls in the next table. Though these guys will flirt with the waitresses, unlike their fathers, they are unlikely to end up sleeping with them. Aside from the women they will occasionally pick up in strip bars, Koinange Street and Florida clubs, and pay to have sex with, Kenyan yuppies will make an effort of having sex within their class. But it has to remain clear that the more licentious among them will still end up in bars like Rezorous and Tropez during the weekend intent on picking university, college and even high school girls for one night stands.

That is what Friday night is for. Boys, Booze and Babes. Most people work on Saturday morning so the girlfriends will be content with a Java coffee on Friday evening and maybe a quick drink at Tamasha or Bacchus leaving the boys to their own devices.

Hello Chips Funga!

Now chips funga and whores raise one problem for those guys who are married or living with their girlfriends: where to shag them. Forest Lodge on Forest Road, is a good option. I mean, if you just want to be in and out and do not insist on clean bedsheets, then that there is your Vegas: what happens there, stays there, as they say. As for the Herpes, please! Get over your American movies hangover and be a Kenyan for once; who the fuck in Kenya worries about herpes? So, condom, check; room, check.

Smack that!

But remember, as one of my uncles told me, never, ever shower in a lodging or hotel after clande sex. The soap smells, idiot, and it is unlikely to be the same as what you use at home. My advice is, use a lot of damp tissue paper to clean your penis and makendes. Then jump into the shower as soon as you get home. I mean even if your girlfriend or wife is up, it is not like she meets you at the door and gives you a hug. If she does, tell her to cut that crap.. that shit is too mzungu, and the consequences are emasculating. The ideal situation, though it works for only those with cars, is too keep an extra bottle of the deodorant you use in the car. There is no reason for the girlfriend or wife to see it, unless she is looking in which case she needs, like the girlfriend/ wife that answers your phone, to be replaced.

The one thing, though, that you are never to forget is that you are human. You can make mistakes. Here is what happened to my uncle referred above. He was drinking as usual and hoping to end the night as always with a clande in a lodgo. Naturally, by the time he was goading the clande upstairs with his elongated appendage, he had had too much to drink. So he entered the room, hit it drunkenly, and got dressed.

My uncle got into his car and engaged the autopilot. The car, as it does every night, found its way home. Once there, he banged on the door until my aunt let him in and staggered into the bathroom. What happened next is as clear to him as the mind of a drunk idiot. The last thing he remembers is seeing a condom on his now flaccid penis. Maybe because the last woman he had seen was his wife, the lone brain cell left standing told him that he had just had sex with her. He dropped the condom into the toilet bowl, pissed and obnoxious as hell, walked into the bedroom and slumped into bed.

He woke up the next morning to the yells and curses of a mad woman. The cobwebs in his eyes cleared immediately he saw that that woman was his wife and there was a used condom dangling from the edge of the kitchen knife she was holding. In their ten years of marriage, they had never used a condom.