Chinua Achebe in his book Things Fall Apart, he talks about old ladies getting afraid when word bones are mentioned in a proverb. The context of it is not because old ladies fear to see bones but because in the evening of their life, hardly a day passes by without the cracking of their skeletons. In the past, I have received stick from radical feminists simply because I have decided to narrate how I interacted and sacrificed them (ladies) at the alter of love (my bedroom(s)) and I am not about to stop since it’s the only way I have lived along my female counterparts. But I don’t expect to apologize on behalf of Achebe since even men like me in their mid 80s would not want to hear the word bones; we still want to live another at least half a century. Few of my agemates who still have the chance to see another day on earth such as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu decided to retire from public life and announcing they would soon disappear respectively, yours faithfully thought I should also close the column and retire to my country home in Kayonza. And for almost a year that you have not seen this column, it was the reason. I betrayed my conscience this Christmas when Anita my youngest child and her husband rightly decided to take me for an evening out. While I have obeyed my doctors about what to eat and what not to, when it comes to beer I have passionately defied them and they have come to terms with it. So on the evening of our saviour’s birth, in one of the pubs in the upper suburbs of Kigali, with my daughter and son in-law, I settled for a cold one trying to analyze the difference in generations. Let me come to the gist of this piece today. While in the pub, on the dance floor I spotted a man of apparent Asian origin who was a few years younger than me and I bet we were the oldest around but alas the gentleman behaved like a 30 year old. The Asian chap (we shall call him Rakeshi herein), was sandwiched by two young belles, young enough to be his great grand daughters but Rakeshi was going wild. He shouted out to everyone “ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention please? DJ, turn down the music”. Holy jeez, I thought he was going to apologize for cross generation erotic dance strokes on the floor but how wrong I was. “Ladies and gentlemen can we all get crazy?” in a split second he threw away his shirt remaining in a vest and threw away his belt as well. I prayed to Mary the wife to Joseph for the man not do the worst and thankfully he didn’t remove his pants. Rakeshi was very unpredictable as he rushed to the DJ’s box shouting “play Justin Beiber, play Kanye West don’t you have that music old fashioned DJ?” embarrassing the man spinning the discs. Everyone in the pub was looking at my table thinking I was friends with Rakeshi and I would soon join the craziness that he had called for. I just kept to my beer and as Rakeshi went on dancing calypso and a one ‘stamina’ to everyone’s amusement and to my disgust. When the mzee donning his cheap golden bling bling pulled out his leather rucksack and started organizing a few tables to dance on top of to the cheers of the two young ladies who were enjoying the beer he was buying, I felt like throwing up and I had to quit the bar. Kwizera, Anita’s son, who stayed behind and seemed to enjoy everything Rakeshi did, later told me that he had been hospitalized after cracking his backbone while pulling off a Chris Brown dance move. But I will not condemn Rakeshi since I also managed to get a few female contacts that we have met this week and I will tell the story in this column next week. Ladies and gentlemen, yours truly is back albeit frail and senile due to old age. Sshooter4@gmail.com
