Coffee Break Conversation...

Mgcini Nyoni: He is man first and doctor second. There are limits to what he can do and see.

Noma.Ncube: That does not justify him fondling my breasts in the name of searching for a heartbeat. If such a notice was hung on every male doctors doorpost, women would think twice before entering.
Shall we say the same then for female Prostitutes,-She is woman first, then prostitute second?

Mgcini Nyoni: Yes Noma; woman first, prostitute second.

Noma.Ncube: Are you saying the doctor should be allowed to entertain his natural urges over and above his professional duty?.
Are you saying the prostitutes craving for sex overrides her need to make money?
If so doctors should with immediate effect be put in the same category as sexual molesters. And prostitutes as sex addicts.

Just how much nature,
is too much nature,
expressed?
At what juncture,
in our 'civilised' world,
should nature give in,
to reason and logic.?

What say we as women,
if our doctors touch us in excess to what is necessary,
If our policemen, drooling,
ask a woman to describe the graphic vivid details of a sexual assault, over and over and over again,
or we are manhandled ,searched for dangerous weapons at roadblocks and border posts.

Is it not you then,...men... who plant weapons of mass destruction in our minds
,birthing hate and anger?

What say we, as women
if you masquerade...
as Zion Prophets...
Luring desperate barren women...
and laying your 'holy hands'
on our Vaginas!!??
Man first, Prophet second?

Is this what man first, doctor second means?
If so,
IT is our libraries combust
not our bodies ,
that are incense to the gods.
It is our books that will be in heaven...not us.

(Echo): Yes Noma; woman first, prostitute second.

Noma.Ncube: I plead the second. So help me God

By Nomakhosazana.K.Ncube. Inspired by Mgcini Nyoni - 18 June 201

Everyone is HIV+ until proven -ve

People now live out their fantasies these days; sexual orgies, threesomes, foursomes. A cousin once told me of a time when he and his friend hooked up with three girls. To balance out the equation, they invited another friend, who brought a friend. So it was now four guys and three girls. My cousin left them and went out to seek out other ‘prey’. He came back in the morning and the girls were walking around the apartment naked. One of the girls invited him to have her and within two hours all the guys had slept with each one of the girls.

The crucial question that has to be asked is this: Is protection used when people apparently live out their fantasies? For all its cleverness and amazing achievements and breakthroughs, the human species is astoundingly stupid when it really matters most.  We have advanced. We have become civilized. We have dropped some barbaric tendencies that our ancestors used to practice. But we should have stayed uncivilized in some aspects of our lives. We don’t get shocked at all when we hear that a couple had sex the first day they met. It is now common place

 Recently I read a newspaper report that was talking about a minister who had called for stiffer penalties for those who intentionally infect others with HIV. I take it intentional infection is when someone who has been tested and knows they are HIV positive sleeps with someone without protection. This can be either out of stupidity or as an act of vengeance. A broken heart can turn the meekest lamb into something of a monster.

                But then we cannot limit intentional infection of others to that: My take on HIV is that everyone is HIV positive until proven negative – and includes you and me. If you sleep with someone without protection, the assumption should be that either you are infecting him/her or he/she is infecting you until proven otherwise.

                As of 2009 about 1.2 million of Zimbabweans were living the HIV virus and that’s about 15% of the adult population. Other estimates have said that one in every four Zimbabweans is HIV positive. So the odds of bumping into someone who is positive or yourself being positive are very high. That’s why I stick to the, ‘everyone is positive until proven negative’ mantra. If you are having sex with someone without protection, what are the odds of either him/her infecting you or the other way round? Knowing the odds are not stacked in your favour or the person’s favour, can’t we then say you are intentionally infecting the other person or intentionally infecting yourself.

                I have talked to and heard of a lot of people who use birth control pills when they know perfectly well that they sleep with multiple partners whose statuses they know nothing about! Holy Christ, should we be more scared of pregnancy than we are we are scared of HIV/AIDS? It astounds! Honestly how can a person walk around feeling self important after having sex with someone whose status they don’t know about without protection?

Vanity of Facebook chat

I don’t particularly like chatting on Facebook. This is mainly because most chats go like:

‘Hie’

‘Hie. How are you’?

‘I am okay and you?’

Then the chat crumbles. How is that supposed to add value to my life? So basically, if someone initiates chat, I immediately go to their profile and check them out and try and find interesting things we can chat about: Honestly, what good is chat if it is not moving forward? There has to be potential for a relationship of some sort with the people you chat with. What’s the point of chatting if you are not going to remember who you were chatting to the next day.

                It can be argued by most guys that if the initiator of chat is a hot girl, that is exciting enough in itself. But I disagree; the planet is populated with millions of hot girls and that in itself is not enough – there has to be something interesting about someone for me to be interested in chatting with them. Am I being too serious, too rigid in my approach to socializing? I don’t think so. I hate it when someone on facebook asks me what I do when there is a whole paragraph of that on my profile. I ask people what they do, because most profiles don’t say and honestly I will not waste my time on someone I don’t know i.e. what kind of career are you pursuing? What are your interests? We have to have something in common before I waste my time chatting to you when there a lot of important things to be done.

                Same goes for when I am traveling: I will not initiate conversation with someone unless it is going to be a sustainable conversation; I don’t want to be talking about the weather five minutes into the journey and proposing love thirty minutes into the journey. It is stupid. We have to find common ground as humans before we move to other trivial matters like a romantic relationship: I admit I prefer sitting next to a woman when traveling. This is because I find it easier to interact with a woman: Honestly, what do you talk about with a guy besides soccer. After a pleasant journey next to a hot woman, I usually say goodbye without asking for a phone number: I don’t know how that has been taken by the numerous women I have sat next to. I only ask for contact details if something interesting leaps at me like coming across a fellow writer or someone who has managed to grapple at some intellectual level of some sort.

                A friend once asked me how I find partners because I don’t seem to be aggressive in my approach towards relationships. The answer is, I don’t: A relationship will happen if it is supposed to happen. There are things we can be aggressive about like career and the like. But aggressively pursuing a relationship is stupid: That is one sure way of messing things up and setting yourself up for a major heartbreak!

The polygamy puzzle

If I were to have another woman besides my wife – the so called ‘small house’- would it be because of something my wife has done or not done? The honest answer is no. But the supposed shortcomings of the wife or girlfriend number one helps with the conscience and in a few cases accelerates the process: What could have happened in five years might happen in two. She drove me to it is an easy finger to hide behind and will be used until - forever. Honestly the only valid reason for leaving the wife or girlfriend number one is infidelity; even the holy book says so.

                So if it’s not the wife or girlfriend number one’s weaknesses and they are varied: Lack of respect, ubutshapha, she has gained some weight and so on – why do men stray from the nest? We might look under every rock, debate until sunup, look in all the psychiatrist’s drawers and even consult an inyanga or two. But we will not find the answer to why men tend to drift towards polygamy; all 95% of them. Maybe society has let men get away with it for too long? Or maybe it is in the men’s genetic makeup to want to ‘posses more than one women? It has to be pointed out that women also stray from the nest – about 20% of them.

                It also has to be noted that there are people who will cheat on their partners no matter how good they have it: about 50% of men and 10% of women. But the focus of this article – if you can call it that – is the men who cheat. And since the lofty standards set by men for them not to cheat are not attainable, it is safe to say that all men cheat – well, to give myself a bit of immunity, I will say 95% of men cheat and most with a clear conscience. Why? The small house will kneel before me when serving me my food, the small house will run the bath for me and scrub my back…I will not ask the wife or girlfriend number one to kneel before me and even if I did, she would laugh at me and anyway it wouldn’t feel as good if she is doing it because I asked her to. So the answer is polygamy!

                Moslems openly embrace polygamy and before the white men came and ‘civilised’ the African man; polygamy was an acceptable practice. Now polygamy is going on at a much larger scale than before the white men came and it is being done the white man’s way: Have a mistress hidden away somewhere or even a second wife that no one knows about. I once heard of a police officer who had two wives who got three days a week from him each and as far as both wives were concerned, Daddy was on ‘night duty’ for half the week and that worked for the guy for more than a decade.

                The fact that men always stray from the nest in any part of the world is something that we will never have an answer for and the fact that some men will leave their highly educated and sophisticated wives alone in a big mansion and go and stay in a ramshackle shack with a small house who barely went past grade three is even a bigger mystery. But I have heard small houses know how to treat a man like a king. But then, if man was treated like a king by his wife or girlfriend number one, would he not stray from the nest?

Setting the benchmark

Photo by Mgcini Nyoni

I once saw someone getting very shocked indeed at the suggestion that he buy a phone for US$80.

‘Yikuswelin’ingqondo, ngithenge ifoni ye80 dollars? Ngcono ngiye thenga idonki yami ekhaya’. (Buying a phone for $80 is madness, I would rather go and buy a donkey at my rural home).

There is a certain bliss in such simplicity. I already had a hundred dollar phone then and I wondered if that guy was happier than I. Surely I had the stress of wanting a better phone than the hundred dollar one I was carrying. Should we aspire for such simplicity? I am one guy who used to think that buying bottled spring water was total madness when the taps are gushing with clean water. But I have come to realize that I was just broke then: Now that I can sometimes shock some people by paying for lunch what they would rather spend on two weeks’ worth of groceries for the home, I am no longer so sure about the whole issue of expenditure.

Where do you draw the line between careless extravagance and reasonably spoiling yourself? I believe once in a while I should get a glimpse of the world I cannot afford to keep myself focused on my goals. To constantly remind myself of the life I would want to live, not the life I live now. But where do you draw the line? It doesn’t make much sense to stay in a five star hotel and then rush to the neighbour to borrow a cup of sugar a few days later. Five star hotels are sometimes booked for me when I travel and that is a good life. But should I book a room in a five star hotel out of my own pocket each time I am away from home; to get a glimpse of what I cannot afford but should work towards?  In other words to set benchmarks for myself.

I don’t have a thousand dollar phone, but would buy it if I had the money. If I had the money; so that’s what my aspirations are aimed at, right? I don’t have a house of my own and I would want one eMatshamhlophe not in Makokoba. So I should constantly take a glimpse at that right? Even though my finances tell me that what I can realistically afford is a two roomed house in a high density suburb, I should aspire for more. Food for thought.