Mama Ka-baba used to be my galfriend back in the day.
She was very very cute and as it usually happens, she thought I didn’t fit vegetables and she ditched me for a 'better" prospect. She got a baby - ka-baba - with the jamaa and was promptly dumped. That was 23 years ago.
As often happens, Mama Ka-baba drifted from one relationship to another, using her beauty to live off men, miaka ikasonga.
Ka-baba, like most single kids of single mothers, was spoiled to high heaven. A super brat. Calling him a Mama’s Boy would be an understatement. I mean, he could go home drunk while in Uni and wake his mother to warm him food (his mother told me once when we bumped into each othet in town). He didn’t wash his clothes. He didn’t do a damn thing that a man should, you know, it was like he was the husband to his mother in all ways but sex.
Yesterday, sadly, we buried Ka-baba at a Nyeri village called Gatuyaini.
He died along Langata Road on August 17, drunk as a skunk. The spoilt brat was driving his mother’s car, as usual, and had been given some handout that morning. Mama Ka-baba is devastated, its like her life is over, but I can’t help thinking she was all to blame. From what she told me the few times we met, Ka-baba was a train wreck waiting to happen - over-drinking, womanising, getting arrested now and then, skipping Uni classes —and THEN GOING HOME TO BE CALLED Ka-baba by his ‘loving’ mother!
After the burial, it got us elders talking.
Is it safe for a woman to just have one child, whether married or unmarried? How can we help our women to bring up responsible men, and not these overweight spoilt brats that we see walking on the streets of Nairobi like overfed ducks? Perhaps the government should introduce compulsory paramilitary service for all young people to try and give them backbones? Perhaps introduce a law that after 19 no man should live with his mother (culturally those laws existed).
The jury is still out. What are your thoughts? Know such a family, and is there a way they can be helped?