My Rant On Public Display of Affection.

For those in the dark about what PDA is, it is Public Display of Affection. This is when a couple with love and affection swirling and twirling in their heads decide to show all and sundry how they feel about one another. You may as well be aware of the public displays disaffection, disregard for human life like the human butchers we hear around and about. I mean, what father gets a machete and butchers his own kids, flesh and blood in a horror blood bath? 5 kids? Ah! That’s a topic of another day.

I meant to rant about PDA. 

Back to PDA, My ken relays that it is a range of behaviour that runs the extent from holding hands, hugging in public or even kissing. As you are aware, this open form of displaying affection is frowned upon here in Kenya and I guess, also in this wide Africa. Though you might see the occasional person hold the hand of his partner in public or give a brief kiss but hardly will you see two people engage in a kiss-fest in public where the tongues are engaged in fencing and entwined in the romantic bliss of bacteria exchange and let their saliva become one so to say. If and when liberal cases of PDA are witnessed in public you should not be surprised to have people ogling at you and your partner in crime. Who knows, you may even be lynched. No. that may not happen. But you may not survive being berated by a vexed public.

I don’t want to say that PDA is not in our culture because I am sure there are probably traditional forms of PDA. Perhaps when a wife brings food to her husband and kneels down before him and says in front of the visitors, ”My husband food is ready” she is engaging in a time honoured ritual of displaying affection for her man. Perhaps when the husband is given a chieftain's title and the wife is the one who shouts the loudest at the conferment ceremony that might be her own way of displaying affection in public. When a man beats his chest in front of the village and proudly celebrates the birth of his new son or daughter in a naming ceremony with his wife beaming by his side perhaps that is a public display of affection. When his wife dies and the man observes the ritual rites or if the man dies and his wife rolls on the ground as in some cultures and wails loudly perhaps that is a public display of affection. Maybe I am getting ahead of myself. When a young man spies a young lady for the first time when she is fetching water by the stream and he proceeds to escort her in a snail’s pace or even corner her by some thorns under the falling dusk is his form of PDAs. There he will be telling her that if she agreed to be his wife, he will buy her the longest and most colourful shawl she ever saw. Or even have her bank account bulging. After all, who does not love money?

I strongly think that in our African way of things, the men we usually see walking some distance ahead of their wives is as a result of the ingrained school of thought that a real man walked ahead of his wife so as to ensure that the way was safe enough for his queen. He was to look out for hyenas and even the lions that lurked within and without. A real African man never held his wife’s hand or even hugged her let alone a simple peck on the cheek. He had to portray the macho image that he is.

Come to think of it, I have never engaged in any act of PDAs that is if the occasional hug is anything to go by. Perhaps I am still as conservative as my grandfather. Who knows? This is because I never or rarely initiate a hug. Hapana!

Don’t even think of giving me a peck in public and so on. I would probably sweat blood!! This is because when it comes to such, I am still socially awkward somewhat. Come to think about it, the first time I held a girl’s hand in public it was as though electricity was coursing through my veins and I was an insulator that was bound to get burnt due the resistance I was posing to the current she was passing through me. My mouth was desert dry, a heartbeat as fast as a Formula 1 engine and sweaty palms that were enough to wet a table. The first time I kissed a girl in public… Ah! I have never done that! Thank God!

You can’t blame me either. I grew up in a house where my parents weren’t the PDA type to each other anyway and probably not in front of me. I got all the hugs and kisses I needed not to be a psychopath and to be a generally likeable guy. All I saw of them was the hugs they exchanged. Just that. No more. I was in this mindset that hugs were to be shared between husbands and wives. Naïve me.

Pet names like sweetie, pumpkin, honey and the overused sweetheart were as rare as witnessing a donkey being milked. I recently overheard them use the word ‘Dear’ though I have no idea if it qualifies as a pet name. After all, even letters to our bosses begin with Dear…

Anyway I am sure a lot of folks did not grow up with parents who always held hands, kissed all the time and called each other pet names but I bet a lot of folk’s parents have been together for a long time. That must be love. Right? Wrong? After all, divorce rate is on the rise among these folks with this syndrome of PDAs. Wrong? Right?