I was giving a creative writing lesson somewhere in a college recently, and asked the college age students to pen down something spontaneously on a specific topic I assigned.
To my surprise, one or two of them flipped/switched on Smartphones. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ I asked, quite flummoxed at their impertinence.
‘Research!’ a young lady replied, looking a little perplexed at my consternation. Let’s get one thing clear here, ye millennials. In our day, they called that ‘dubbing’ and since we were not digital, exam cheats hid their sheets of paper (Mwakenyas) in their bras or between the cracks of their bottoms – like the pieces of cheat they were. They were not brazen and open about it, like the millennials of these days, calling it ‘research.’
Research is what you do when you are studying the larvae of mosquitoes to see what causes ziki! No wonder the wannabe digital pupils of today are busy torching dormitories when they are told they will not be able to gain access to the examination questions they had already paid their headmasters (principals were Kibaki and Raila, no others) for; when they realize that November itakuwa ngori.
And you wonder why there has been an epidemic of As in recent years.
In this age of Google and so on, wannabe millennials have gotten very lazy – and expect everything at the touch of a button. But as Aenea Bolingo will tell you, there is a value of hard-work ingrained by going to those KNLS libraries (like the one in Buruburu) as we did, to painfully hunt down facts and figures.
There is even a cottage industry going on, online, where well off lazy western millennials pay their bright Third World counterparts to do their academic papers for them. I personally know three university students in Nairobi who make money this way.
When you see a super daft MCA (or a very busy governor) getting a tough degree at the end of this year, and wonder where s/he got the time (as they wear those silly Xmas tree thingies round their neck), you can thank a millennial. (Except in the case of one Waititu, a deep Chandigarh mystery that even Sherlock Holmes would ‘chew a lock’ on).
Wannabe millennials have been weaned on the age of Instagram and Snapchat – no lining up outside red phone booths, ever, in their youth. And you wonder why they want everything in an instant, at the snap of a finger, whether it is ‘the good life’ or even something as simple yet sacred as sex.
Hard work, and especially patience, is an anathema to this generation. They want the spoils of a lifetime, and the symbols of a hard sweated for success, without the struggle.
Whereas courtship used to be a long play with looks, words, winks, letters and gestures before the ‘grand’ prize, sex for these funny young fellows is a matter of quick goods consumed between pillows. Or outdoors! It does not much matter. And why should it in the era where technology has given these wannabes tabs to ‘sext,’ inboxes to send ‘nudies’ to and even hashtags like #WCW ( #WomanCrushWednesday, with its counterpart *Man Crush Monday (#MCM) for the wannabe women), eh?
‘Selfies,’ that useless invention of this decade, has also made these young wannabes very selfish. I call them ‘selfishes’ once done in excess. And it is not only the young wannabes who are afflicted by this digital wannabeism disease, as was witnessed in the recent case of a middle-aged lawyer who reduced Biblical verses to justifying his wannabe show-off-ism after he was ridiculed on social media.
Wannabe millennials are also expert apers of the West when it comes to social causes. You want to whine about ‘heteronormative patriarchy’ and other words you learned from somewhere.
But verily, I say unto thee, a General Election is descending upon thy millennial head in less than a year.
Instead of quarrelling about ‘transgenderism’ on Twitter, you better worry about the less sexy ‘tribalism.’ And whether Ababu Namwamba will get a cuckoo over the head over Wycliffe Mudavadi, and beat him to the creation of the mythical Omurembe nation.
tonyadamske@gmail.com