LAST WORD
On Online Shenanigans
Ochieng was rummaging through boxes in his store room on his annual clean up when he came across a box marked ‘ personal ’ and in it , among other things was a bunch of letters tied in a blue ribbon which he recognized immediately as letters from his high school sweet heart Achieng .
Ochieng untied the bundle and read the top letter , which was the last he had received from her and it was a plea written in her neat handwriting asking him not to write any more letters to her since his last letter to her had created quite a commotion in the school .
Apparently Achieng had decided to re-read her romantic missive from Ochieng during her boring geography class and the class teacher had spotted her reading it in-between her Atlas and made her read the letter out loud to the giggling class of girls before calling in the deputy head-mistress .
In those days one never signed off letters with their real names since romantic dalliance between students especially if you were enrolled in a Christian school was frowned upon . Any attempt to pry the name of the sender from Achieng was met with the same answer that she did not know the sender .
As a result , the deputy headmistress shaved a cross over her head with scissors and she had to attend school looking like that for the whole week . That humiliation was nothing compared to the wrath she encountered at home from her parents who fully supported the teacher ’ s action .
Achieng continued to deny knowledge of who the sender of the letter was and stoically bore her punishment . To the other students she was a heroine as she not only had an admirer but she was able to demonstrate her love by protecting his identity . They were envious .
Ochieng had calculated that he would let things cool down for a while , then reconnect because he knew the school would be monitoring and intercepting any letters to Achieng . She had even been banned from participating in any inter-school social events for the rest of the term .
But after that fateful term , her parents shipped her off to an aunt somewhere in Nakuru and that was the end of that budding relationship . In those days a girl was expected to be prim and proper and await a church marriage negotiated by her parents to a suitable suitor .
“ The information shared and forwarded on social media platforms depicts a society that is losing its soul and the rot paraded therein is a direct affront on families . The problem is that bad behavior has been glamourized because it involves celebrities who in Kenya includes slay governors .”
Family honor was so revered and the institution of marriage so sacred that any action that would threaten it was quickly stamped out . Things have changed so drastically today that what happened to Achieng seems so archaic and uncharacteristically harsh .
For the record , Ochieng never did reconnect with Achieng since communication was not so easy in those days . Ochieng has had time to reflect on what may have become of their puppy love but was also thankful that those strict social norms were what kept their youthful hormones in check .
Given our now fashionable laissez faire cultural attitudes one begins to wonder if we have not taken giant steps backwards in terms of social cohesion and respectability . How did we shift so fast from the ultraconservative values of yesterday to today ’ s disintegrating moral fabric ?
A good pointer of how bad things have become was the fact that a few years back , no less a personage than a former president called a weird press conference in the presence of an obviously irritated and angry first lady to declare publicly who his family members were .
It might have appeared bizarre to the rest of the world , but Kenyans understood that this was a cornered man sorting out domestic issues in the glare of the public because an over-nosy media and especially the social media was rife with information about another first lady .
Piqued and annoyed at the innuendos from the media , the first lady had taken the media head on in an attempt to quash their stories . Obviously she had either grossly underestimated the power of the media or perhaps overestimated the power of the office of the president .
The first lady had had several run ins with the media and realizing that she was unable to censure what the media was writing , she took the unprecedented step of what she assumed was putting the record straight by having the president declare his family status .
Now before one gets all judgmental and declare the first lady naïve and
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