Why foreplay and lingerie are overrated

Everyone loves a caress, but what the sleek people who smell like flowers in Nairobi don’t know is that a touch in the dark from a lover is pure agony for rural folk.

There is no empirical data to back my argument, but my learned view is that the only mashinani people who engage in foreplay are barmaids, boda boda riders, petty thieves and the lazy vagabonds who hop from one lonely widow to another spreading kaswende like a houseflies.

When you earn a living weeding people’s shambas, picking tea, harvesting sugarcane and scaling fish, your hands get so calloused and rough that when you rub someone’s back, their first reflex is to recoil. It is like a lizard is crawling on their backs!

These rough palms explain why a farmer will blow his entire tea or sugarcane harvest in a Ugandan barmaid’s bosom because for two years, hers will be the softest hands that have touched him. It also explains why a good-for-nothing boda boda operative is likely to vroom the farmer’s wife – and her daughter. Because the oaf does nothing physical anyway, apart from lounge at the market the whole day, his hands are bound to be smooth as a baby’s bottom.

Farming is tough business. If those boda boda fellows were hard working, they would be tilling the land, not lazily breaking people’s limbs on Chinese motorbikes. If farming was paying well, the rural barmaid would be planting tomatoes, not getting her rump smacked by randy old men reeking of old sweat for Sh20.

What, therefore, annoys me about farming is that after a man or woman has sweated for one year and gotten his hands calloused to the extent that he can’t caress his spouse, he sells his produce for a miserable Sh250 to a middleman.

The middleman is mostly an oily operative with political ambitions or connections who fancies multi-coloured shoes and a shiny suit. He is always talking on the phone and dropping names like confetti. Bugger will buy that produce at Sh250 from the farmer and sell it two hours later for Sh2,500. If you think the fellow pays tax on that windfall, think again.

I am appalled that tea farmers have to pass their produce to some chaps sunning themselves in Mombasa, who then export it and make a tidy sum for doing naught. It is criminal that sugarcane farmers live in penury while sugar barons operate like sultans. They even oil campaigns for political leaders who pretend to love the people.

I find middlemen as dishonest as the pastor who says, “I will intercede on your behalf and ask God to heal that boil on your bottom, but only if you M-Pesa me Sh310.”

Let’s get rid of these fellows so the rural farmer can earn a decent wage for his toil and acquire soft hands with which to give his long-suffering wife a caress.

Psst: The high fertility rates in gichagi, where women have as many as 12 kids in six years, is a clear demonstration that foreplay, lingerie and white sheets are overrated.

Share and Enjoy