Rage.

I am not a violent man; I have very few violent inclinations against my enemies. I am not a coward, though. I have faced down monsters and nuisances alike. But I abhor violence; I prefer the faux combat of the football pitch, the boxing ring (though there's nothing faux about a knock-out punch) and the adversarial arena of the hallowed chambers of justice. Every now and then, though, the desire to kick, hit, punch is overwhelming, and it takes the best part of a minute to recall all those yoga deep-breathing exercises designed to restore mental tranquility and relieve cranial agony.

But that is all within the ken of men. They are all capable of controlling their base urges. But only when they act as individuals. When they are part of a mob, when the scent is in the air and their blood is well up, they are akin to a pack of jackals on the hunt. They are unlikely to permit reason to prevail. They are likely to be swept up in the passions of the mob. They will commit atrocities in order to be in solidarity with their fellow base men. They will do it without conscious thought. The outcome is frequently injury, destruction and likely death.

There is always a trigger. The circumstances that lead to the trigger being so potent are varied and variegated. They are complex mix of family dynamics, social values, tribal customs, personal circumstances in relationships and money, and perceived places in society. The men who, with maniacal hormonal glee, violently attacked a woman pedestrian, stripped her of dignity and her dress, filmed it and uploaded it on the internet are the cautionary tale, the conscience (or lack of it) of our society, the proof that we are led still by base instincts, primal urges, violent inclinations.

It is a man's world, Kenya. The Cabinet Secretary for Devolution and Planning has been caricatured by male cartoonists in the base language employed by men of even baser tastes. We need not dwell on her caricatured portrayal except to observe that it reinforces the stereotypical perception of women as objects of men's basest desires. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the forces of law and order would take three days to ask for the victim of the violent assault to come forward and file a complaint; they did not "swing into action" and "launch investigations" promising to "leave no stone unturned" like they are wont to do. I will remind you that the law and order firmament is firmly in the grip of men who would happily have joined in the lynch mob that stripped that poor woman. It is no longer enough to presume that they would not have done that; by their actions we cannot be sure any more.

In a man's world there are always calls to protect the womenfolk, keep them safe from other men. In a man's world, it is not enough to have a constitution; its strictures and exhortation of rights and freedoms are meaningless unless men use their masculinity to guarantee the womenfolk's constitutional rights and freedoms. And what a man can guarantee, a man, too, can limit. You can see this insidious arrangement when we acknowledge that women were always meant to play second fiddle to men: it is in scripture and so shall it be in all walks of life. It is divinely ordained that women shall be No. 2. It is why men see no irony in decreeing what women will wear with the same immutably certain fiat that they decree whether women will stand for public office. As soon as they become men, it maters not one whit that they have mothers, sisters, wives or daughters: the men are men, the womenfolk are...not. And since women are not men, men must decide what women are by deciding everything about women. Clothes are the tip of an icily supercilious iceberg.

Even accepting the unfairness of it all, the desire to hunt down those men that demolished that woman's life remains undiminished. To hunt them down, to surround them with other cackling jackals, to push, prod, kick and slap the, to strip them to their naked balls, and to frog-march them along the streets of our fair city in broad daylight, filming it all and broadcasting it for the whole world to see. There isn't a twinge of masculine solidarity that might suppress the violent thoughts about those beastly men. There is only rage. Rage, rage, rage.