Africa-Press – Lesotho. WHAT happened to ovens that once baked men of character and substance? Now we have thieves, morons, liars and lazybones masquerading as men. Muckraker can live with those because there isn’t much the world can do about them.
We can only guard our possessions, take what they say with a pinch of salt and hope they just do enough work to feed themselves. What Muckraker will never stand is the new breed of weaklings that has acquired a taste for proposing marriage to girlfriends in public and on camera.
The chief culprits are the sissy boys born in the 90s and entered manhood when social media was just taking root. After a few weeks of dating, they connive with friends to waylay the girl to a mall or restaurant.
Then as their friends clutch cheap phones with lousy cameras rolling they go down on one knee and look up to the girl as if they are a naughty toddler peeping into a woman’s skirts.
They pull the cheap ring from the back pocket and mumble some nonsensical clichés about her being the most beautiful woman in the world and wanting to spend the rest of their life with her.
Such unoriginal waffling is supposed to mellow a woman’s heart into making a lifelong commitment. As if on cue, the spectators will say: ‘Oh my God!’, ‘That’s romantic’, ‘Oh, sweet!’, blah and blah.
Someone in the crowd will start a chorus to nudge the girlfriend to say yes. Women are the main cheerleaders in this drama because it reminds them of some inane romantic movie or want to blackmail their lovers to play in the same theatre soon.
Until recently, those stories had happy endings. The girl accepts the ring, the sissy boy rises from his knee, as if he is emerging from a Wasco hole, and wraps the girl in a shaky embrace.
There is ululation and whistling. The video of the charade would be widely shared on social media, to the delight of some impressionable minds and the agony of haters.
Well done! But the tables have now turned. The girls have seen through the ruse and are rejecting the proposals in toto, as lawyers would say when pretending to be sophisticated.
When the malls and restaurants ceased to be ideal for the charades, perhaps because they were now sites associated with rejection, the sissy boys shifted to churches.
They were hoping the gospel would have softened the girls’ hearts. That change worked for a while but the girls quickly figured they could still reject marriage proposals and remain ushers or sister mang-mang.
Now they either tell the weakling to get up from his weak knee or simply walk away. It serves the men right. It’s a spectacle to behold. Some of the most thrilling scenes Muckraker has ever watched.
As the girl walks away, the man will remain on his knee holding the ring with two fingers like a KFC potato fry. There is a moment of silence before the crowd bursts into laughter through which the man has to crawl as he stews in his embarrassment and misery.
The cameras will continue rolling as the hero transforms into a sick joke. And within minutes the disgraceful episode is plonked on social media for the world to enjoy the sight of a pathetic man having his grovelling rejected.
He will be remembered as the man who confused mjolo for a journey to marriage. The excitable one who invited the whole world to witness his moment of shame like Ntsekele did at the recent ABC conference.
You don’t have to be a psychologist or sociologist to know how some men got to this. They are watching too many western movies – fairytales about love, romance, engagement and marriage.
At some point those manufactured stories were going to get to their heads and embolden them to imitate. African men don’t marry that way. They don’t propose marriage.
They just marry. It just happens. And if they do propose marriage, it’s always in private. Otherwise they impregnate or send their uncle to the girl’s family to talk about cows.
It’s not a request but an announcement. If you don’t want to be married you simply end things and move on. Why is Muckraker talking about this? Well, Valentine’s Day is coming and some men might be tempted to embarrass themselves by proposing marriage in public. Perish that thought. Don’t do it because it will end in tears.
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