Alex Rants: Get A Mzungu-Lower Your Expectations and Self-Esteem
What with this bizarre trend of Nairobi women going through the dregs of the internet in order to find the illusive “white-in-shining-armor”? It’s utterly strange to us that some of the young (or shockingly not-so-young) ladies trolling the internet with utterly earnest sincerity thinking that they may actually score the man of her dreams, taking her to some unnamed first world country and providing for her unconditionally within minutes of her putting finger to keyboard?
An internet profile cannot possibly warrant “soul-mate marriages” as the websites, phone messaging services and chat rooms would suggest. It’s a bit dark and falsely hopeful to put your faith in someone you haven’t met and wish to “love” forever. It comes off unnerving. The very notion of meeting someone only interested in your nationality as the pre-eminent criteria to find a life partner may as well be labeled “looking for a meal ticket.”
Those internet venues are perfect places to find the real creeps; serial killing men with bodies stuffed into their mother’s wedding dress and night-walking escorts with vials of drugs in their cleavage that can induce terminal narcolepsy. People rely far too much on the all-powerful internet anyway; and getting some loving from it is a bridge way too far.
That’s the surface issue; the slightly more sinister one is an almost neo-colonial attitude of some sort of bullsh*t superiority among foreign guys. What a crock, and what shame that perceptions continue to somehow spiral in this direction. It’s really cringe-worthy and promotes a standard that lowers the perceptions about Kenyan women.
Most people seem very turned off by the idea. Ngugi Muthoni is one of them, “There is more to finding love than finding people that are perceived to have more money.” It is an opinion that seems to reverberate more and more with middle-class Nairobians and Olivia Omungoh chimes in “It seems like something that gold diggers would do.”
Gold digging isn’t a lifestyle choice that should be striven for or admired but all too much it’s starting to happen. Looking only at the “mzungus” on both dating websites and social media only plays into the ridiculous idea that white is right “It seems discriminatory,” says Chandni Shah “Its only about foreign white men and there are Kenyan men here!”
Want to be sure we aren’t just making this up? Read our previous article on Craig’s List Kenya Personals that proves us right.
