OF CIVILITY AND COMMON COURTESY LITERARY DUMPED IN THE TOILET

Its five o’clock in the evening and the sun is lazing west in a manner to suggest there was a circular issued for late sunset today.

My neighbor’s two little ninjas and I are warthoging out and about the hood; the literal Sunday evening hapa kule here n there strolls eh! Right next to our first mutura the afro sausage base is a couple; or rather two idiots, who decides to spoil our nostalgic moods by a ‘steady discharge of hardcore obscenities’ emanating from their two big pocas (mouths). 

As if that’s not enough, they decide to exchange a few blows to the amusement of onlookers. The lady blows up the guy who in turn gives up the physical fight and goes on with some serious verbal diarrhea as he lies flat on the ground lamenting how the last blow may have broken his jaw.

The whole spectacle attracts a rather curious crowd of on lookers, who seem less concerned about separating the two and are rather enjoying if from the looks on their faces. No one cares to ask the seemingly drunk love birds quails what let loose their bolts to at least solve their problems amicably.

In such a situation, like many others that we see every day, sort of what we would call behavior erosion of our time, Cate’s grandmother would have left all her chores, got her nicely crafted walking stick and whipped the two fellas hard and told them, “You fools need Jesus in your lives.” But for these onlookers this is just a normal occurrence, a by the way roadside cinema that they even can afford to watch with their kids (as I did with the ninjas), worse are those who’d been to church earlier in the day, preached to about peace building and conflict resolution in their  societies and did nothing on the same.

Just taking my imaginations onto a broader scale, I can only imagine what the kids learnt from the spectacle; that you can fight in public and get away with it; that you can beat up a man till he start mourning and groaning how his jaw must have gotten broken; or last but not the end of my imaginations, you can fight in public and seemingly attract quite a huge crowd of onlookers who’ll be more than happy to get entertained.

I’m not sure what has let loose the ‘mind your own business’ feeling-cum-conclusion every time anything bad happens before your eyes and it doesn’t affect you in one way or another however bad it may be.

Back in the day, when decorum and discipline were un-negotiable and strictly observed in the traditional African Society, in such a situation, fellow onlookers and I would have politely but firmly sought to know what the hell had gotten between the two idiots, take them away from the glare of children, literary wash their dirty mouths with soap, then install a little discipline in them, make it known to them that they do not  ‘own public places’ and they’d better confine their petty  wrangles and the silly show to their shanty the next time they feel to exchange blows.