Talking about IT is taboo in most African communities, mine included. Methinks we have even made it sound pervert. That is why when Jimmy Gathu appears on the big screen talking about Mpango wa Kando, dad buries his blushing face in last week’s newspapers pretending to have found something new and engrossing in the Young Teenz Section. Mum bends over the stove. And me wonder what the two are hiding. I would love to hear them confront it heads-on, “Baba jimmy, do you keep mpango wa kando’s, yes? Tell me you use a condom for chrissake! Tell me that!” Ok, maybe they talk about it under the bed sheets or probably in the bathroom. But what about something like, “Hey son! You know I can’t keep you from banging them north, east and south, but take precaution. Always use the wrapper. And try to specialize.”But we are so African. No. not African. We have become something else coz if I can remember well, our ancestors used to teach sex education. Yes they did. But we won’t. And you know why, do you know why your old man won’t sit you down on a lazy Sunday afternoon and talk sex with you, or why your dear mama won’t talk menses with yah as you wait for dinner to cook in the kitchen? I blame it on the media; the television and the fucknots. What more is there to learn from my old man when Nameless has already told me ako na yake? What more lessons do I need when ken-Razy tells me how I should rarua those uchi? And that other Always ad?
We are losing it big time. Where are the aunties to tell us what the media won’t tell us? To teach my daughter that starting to menstruate doesn’t give her a license to keep her legs at ease for every Tom, Harry, and especially Dick? We have lost it, and we will continue losing it if we keep shoving responsibility to and fro between the teachers and the parents and the media.
Don’t you think we are losing it? Why, for example, does a brilliant lady have to cut her university education short because she got pregnant? Didn’t someone somewhere teach her about safe days, chilling or some form of birth control? Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. But one thing is certain any talk of family planning grates on our daughters’ ears, yea; get into any institution of higher learning in the country. Bump into any hot looking mamma and suggest to her that she use family planning. Watch the look that she gives you, try to measure its temperature and tell me if it isn’t colder than a witch’s tits; she wouldn’t look at you more coldly if you suggested she was androgynous, would, she? But wait for nine months then watch her or watch her friend or her friend’s friend. Do you see that protrusion on her stomach? That is not overeating, my dear. That is an unexpected pregnancy… And do you know what brought about this sad culmination… of course we blame it on the media, don’t we?
Because of the media, mama won’t talk to her daughter about sex. After all she’s is getting everything from that dubious Always ad and the sopras, isn’t she? And because she has the media to define how she should behave daughter don’t want any sex education crap from nobody. And because the media’s sex education syllabus isn’t comprehensive, there are somethings that daughter don’t know, yet believes she knows it all, until she can no longer keep her goalposts secure, and she gets the ‘ball’ and realizes when it’s too late that she doesn’t know as much as she thought she knew, kapcha?
Methinks we have to really really start setting our priorities. Teaching our sons and daughters sex education and all that. Do you have any article on sex education that you would love to share with the sons and daughters? Please contact us, and let’s make the world a safer-sex place.