The mother , rightly proud to have produced a male heir , proceeded to protect the boy child in the style of a mother hen and slowly turned the boy into the now proverbial mummy ’ s boy who is identified as a man in touch with his feminine side , whatever that means .
that he was the father of their babies and wanted to be enjoined on any settlement .
It is already unsettling that a lady needs to go to court to get a court ruling directing the man to take responsibility for his activities let alone the hapless girl who has several siblings she does not even know exist .
She also learnt that the young man with the boy with a wheezing cough and a maid was there without his mother because five months earlier the mother had declared that she could not put up with a man with no ambition .
She was a career woman with definite goals to achieve and she claimed she felt trapped and unsupported and needed time alone to figure things out . The boy ’ s health seems to have deteriorated since her departure but they were coping .
The Bleak Picture Of The Kenyan Young Man
These scenarios paint a bleak picture of the Kenyan young man . Why are young men from well to do families depressed and committing suicide . Why have the young men become substance abusers and why are their families falling apart ?
At face value , the common thread in all these scenarios is of an immature adult who is unwilling or unable to take charge on his life even though he has had all the necessary advantages to allow him to soar .
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The mother , rightly proud to have produced a male heir , proceeded to protect the boy child in the style of a mother hen and slowly turned the boy into the now proverbial mummy ’ s boy who is identified as a man in touch with his feminine side , whatever that means .
A man was heard complaining to another that he had been impatient to get a son when he married because cultural dictates have it that one needs a son to continue the family name . He stated that no expense was spared to ensure he takes over his rightful role .
But that son does not show any inclination towards taking over as the head of the family . He is forty , unmarried and still does not know what he would like to do when he grows up . Worst of all , he still lives at his parent ’ s home .
Intrigued we set out to find out what was causing this apparent emasculation of the Kenyan young man and also cognizant of the fact that this is happening at a time when the global arena is in turmoil politically and socially .
The young men in question , those born from 1980 are children of the generation that transitioned from colonial rule to independence and are the ones that took the reins of the country as free Kenyans .
The people that took control of the country were basically young people who had gone to school . The ability to read and write allowed them to take on positions of authority left vacant by the departing Britons at a fairly young age .
They were thrust into privilege and power before they had had enough experience and they found themselves in unfamiliar territory where their fathers now called them ‘ sir ’ because they had stepped into the positions of their colonial masters .
The African cultural progression of an individual was based on the age group . Those born at the same time got initiated at the same time , got married at the same time and became elders at the same time .
Now education with the help of Christianity had upended this organized cultural system and the children were now their father ’ s bosses so the fathers were unable to pass on their wisdom to their elevated children .
Without the guiding norms of the cultural system , the newly created class of Kenyan leaders molded themselves in the cast of the departed Britons . It was a common joke among Kenyans that some of the new leaders were more British than the British .
This group , who were clueless about what it takes to bring up a family with values , since they had had no values inculcated in them since school and church had disconnected them from the traditional ones , raised their children by trial and error .
Since the boys were the first to be surrendered to schools and hence the church , the boy child had a head start in his severance of ties to his roots and he most likely married an educated girl thus compounding the cultural disconnect .
The married educated girl was likely to have a career since there was a shortage of educated people to run the country and this was the start of the double income families , which was splendid financially but a disaster socially .
Their children were brought up by nannies , in the style of the white man and the stayat-home mother became a sign of nonprogress . The dislocation from the cultural roots was now complete and exacerbated by an illiterate nanny .
These dual income families treated their sons as though they were made of glass and ensured that they lacked nothing and all the real and imagined deprivations that the parents had gone through were compensated on the sons . They inadvertently raised brats .
This type of entitled upbringing divorced the children from reality and they did not learn the crucial lesson that all rights have corresponding responsibilities and what it truly means to be independent since everything was done for them .
That was the period that feminism was taking root globally and the fight for gender equality was at its height and all attention shone on the girl child . This attention shift assumed that the Kenyan boy child was okay and it is the girl child that needed propping .
Fathers , lacking cultural identity , were busy creating a new tribe of those who have made it and their lives revolved around bars , golf and sports clubs , even though sports were secondary but the men needed a sense of community . They did not involve their sons .
Mothers took the international clarion of the girl child with gusto as it was not only benefiting them but their girls too . Fathers were caught up in their careers and aping foreign lifestyles and the boy child was left in a predicament .
The mother , rightly proud to have produced a male heir , proceeded to protect the boy child in the style of a mother hen and slowly turned the boy into the now proverbial mummy ’ s boy who is identified as a man in touch with his feminine side , whatever that means .
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