Comrades, do not think I have gone to school to read love issues but over the years, yours truly has narrated to the column readers his true life experience and the experiences he witnessed around him over this long life. And as a result of this experience I have found my self in a position where I have to advise the young generations to fall in love “carefully”. Some question the legitimacy I have to assume the role but given the record I have in marriages and divorces, I would comfortably render services like I have pro bono.
Comrades, do not think I have gone to school to read love issues but over the years, yours truly has narrated to the column readers his true life experience and the experiences he witnessed around him over this long life.
And as a result of this experience I have found my self in a position where I have to advise the young generations to fall in love "carefully”. Some question the legitimacy I have to assume the role but given the record I have in marriages and divorces, I would comfortably render services like I have pro bono.
I now understand the agony people who fall out of love go through and I am very sorry for these poor souls since in my career I have not experienced major heartbreaks.
A few weeks ago our brothers and sisters in Haiti suffered a catastrophe that shook the world. But the people of Haiti are the ones who felt the actual impact. When you break people’s daughters’ hearts you may simply walk away but when it happens to your very own, you feel the weight of that punch.
Two months ago, Hodari, one of my grandsons, came calling at my retirement villa in the volcanoes of Ruhengeri where I have lived with the gorillas since my retirement from public activities.
Society has never been fair to females. That’s why whenever a boy sleeps with five girls in the neighbourhood; he might be given a blind eye. Let a girl just be seen with boys and she is castigated and portrayed as a prostitute.
Hodari had been dating Jackie for four years and they had cohabited for two other years after proposing to marry each other.
They had on several occasions visited me in the mountains with love blowing in the air and I had concluded that Hodari would take up the mantle when I passed on.
I looked at his unusually dry lips and out of experience combined with his solo visit; I knew the love of his life was no more. "Hullo son?” I immediately provoked.
"Grandpa, why would girls do this? Please, tell me,” he looked at me hopelessly thinking that I had a magic wand that would bring back his Jackie. "What is it son?” I investigated further.
He told me that for six years, Jackie had loved two men and had promised both of them marriage. This was not the first time to hear this but the devastated state in which my son was, worried me most.
"Papa, she has been finally caught up in her own lie and she found herself in a dilemma and she had to devise evil means of jumping out of it.”
I was by now all ears.
He went ahead to tell me that both men in the picture had paid dowry and as the two weddings approached, she found herself between a rock and a hard surface.
"As a way of getting rid of me, she accused me of cheating on her.”
"She came home with a used rubber hidden in her bags and threw it under my bed!”
Oh, what a devilish woman she is, I was thought.
"Papa, she raised an alarm that I was a cheat and went home to tell her parents lies about me. So I suspect she chose him over me,” Hodari concluded his sad ordeal.
Like Chinua Achebe said when man learns to shoot without missing, birds learn to fly without perching. Jackie is the devil and the real shooter instead.
I think if I was to come back today I would be a blunt shooter not with how crafty they have become.