Thursday, November 13, 2014

In support.

I thought I would be surprised at the degree of misogynistic vitriol Njoki Chege would attract. I was wrong. I was shocked at the depths Kenyans On Twitter, the hashtag army known as #KOT, would go to find material that would paint her in the worst possible light. She is attracting online hate, haterade in the online lingo, that seems completely devoid of reason. She is not the first woman to face this mass animus; Caroline Mutoko faced down a #KOT mob with courage, her customary acerbic wit and a fierce determination to protect her name - and her brand.

Kenya is fast joining the rest of the online world in the hounding of women who dare to play by boy's rules. It might be true that Ms Chege is too young to have such a cynical view of male-female relationships in the rubric of economic and academic considerations. But, as Patrick Gathara would put it, what does that have to do with the price of tea in China? Absolutely nothing; Ms Chege is expressing an opinion, based on her experiences, and expressing it with wit and style. I hope the Nationa Media Group keep her on for a few years more; her style can only get better with time and she'll have matured in her writing and social commentary.

What is almost certain is that Ms Chege will not lack in online enemies. They will have superficial reasons for devoting, collectively, hundreds of thousands of man hours and hundreds of billions of bytes to digging up unflattering information on her and they will take a misogyny-laced perverse pleasure in sharing this information with their online cohorts. I hope she has a strong mental constitution and she is capable of letting the hate wash off at the end of the work day.

In the United States they have started targetting women attacked online offline too. I hope this is never the case with Ms Chege. It is one thing for someone to violently disagree with an opinion expressed by a brash, witty and sassy woman. It is something else for that disagreement to be expressed out of the strict confines of the Letters to the Editor page or online chatrooms where these specimens of misogyny reside. So if she hasn't considered it yet, it is time Ms Chege started taking a keen interest in her personal safety.

Something notable of late has been the desire to attack the person of Ms Chege without arguing coherently whether her basic premise is correct or not. I think it is naive of her to believe that the path to marriage has only the one map. She was erased an entire demographic from her universe, but in the matters of the heart, the heart wants what she wants. If she is truly determined to check-list her way to marital bliss, we can only ask success for her. But a warning might do her a power of good. There might be a diamond-in-the-rough in the blue Subaru-driving, mutumba iPhone-wielding, cheap-lager-swigging, Roysambu-bedsitter-living, Nax-Vegas-frequent-flier jackanape on the make. It would be unwise to shove him out of the nearest airlock simply because of a checklist.

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