Fret not if you missed it; here’s my speech at the men's conference

As we recover from the week of ‘love’ and men’s conferences, I thought I’d share with you my great speech at the men’s conference. I hope it is as insightful to you as I thought it would be to my audience.

***
“Good evening Gentlemen and gentlemen sufferers, my name is Livestock. I am rodent Inspector in my county in the Big Mountain. I am in charge of 102 rodent catchers.

Allow me to quote a great sufferer from China, Aristotle. He once said, ‘The life of a sufferer is a game of chess: the poor King can only make one move while his wife can do whatever she likes.’

This is the story of my life.

Oh, they invented this story that we were favoured against them. Yet, when growing up, there was no difference between us sufferers and livestock.

Imagine. How do you favour livestock?

As little boys, we would hunt grasshoppers before graduating to quails and later dik-diks. The reason we hunted grasshoppers and wakahares (squirrels) is because we didn't have anything of our own.

The kitchen cabinet owned all livestock, including us, and land. And my old man swallowed that fake news that he was part of the enterprise.

I remember my mother teaching me how to catch squirrels. Later, I discovered that these exercises were meant to prepare little sufferers to provide for the family in future.

The hunting was a source of meat for us little sufferers because the meat my old man brought home from the butcher would somehow disappear in the pots.

I would also convince Fr Genneli, the Italian priest in the village, that squirrels had very great meat. He would buy and I would use the proceedings to buy short trousers.

This is because at one time, they had refused to buy any more trousers for me. You see, Oh skirts! There were so many skirts under the roof, that if there were no more short trousers for me to wear, they would simply stitch one of their old skirts in the middle, and voila! I would have something to wear.

And skirts those days were called ‘tights’, and that is why I was nicknamed ‘tight’ in primary school.

So in our days, they (mother and sisters) did not differentiate between livestock and boys.

One day, I returned home from school in evening to find my bed transferred into the goat shed. You know who had engineered this? It was my mother and my sisters: the kitchen cabinet.

Later I understood the reason for this forced transfer. They noted that I had begun to understand their language. I tell you women have a strange, secret language, understood only by themselves.

Anyway, since there was not much difference between my existence and those of goats, it was easier for me to adopt in the goat shed.

Inside the goat shed, everything was tit for tat. Goats would urinate on my head, I would do the same on theirs. If they became stubborn, I would tie their beards together.

I also learnt the art of bleating from goats. I still bleat after imbibing what my friend Kwambata Wajerican calls ‘sodas’ at Kamakis.

Now gentlemen, there are two types of bleating men. One is my type that bleats after taking ‘sodas’.  Then there are fellow sufferers these days that bleat after persuasion from their Madam Boss. They bleat if madam boss just as much as clears her throat.

These are sell-outs, I say!  And we have a duty to liberate them!

Bleating is on the rise my fellow sufferers. Kwa ground sio sawa!

**My sisters**

Sisters were protected because they were considered important investments.

My old man also joined them in treating me like livestock.

 See, he saw me as competition, a liability, waiting in the wings to take over the boma.

My sister was there for a short time. I was there to stay. 

Put yourself in the shoes of my old man. Won't you want to annihilate your competition?

So, to get rid of livestock like us, they took us to a very hostile place called school. Because inter-ethnic raids had ended, it was unwise to keep a lot of livestock, including me, at home.

So we went to school where we learnt things like periodical tables, mitochondria and monochromic seeds.

My old man actually thought that mitochondria and periodical tables could make me disappear from home.

You see my point, no?

Even today, little sufferers learn things like photons, quarks, quantrinos and antimatter, may be to prepare them to be effective digital rodent inspectors.

Thank you fellow sufferers!”

***
Do you have feedback on this article? Please e-mail: [email protected]