We sat in a boardroom to thresh out a marketing drive for The Nairobian – a weekly tabloid hailed at the height of its fame and infamy as Kenya’s fastest-growing newspaper.

Our headlines were lewd, the scandals epic, and the stories shocking and addictive.

“Let’s target salons,” one editor suggested. “They are a beehive of scandalous gossip. We could tuck a small quiz into each paper, conduct a draw, and offer the winning salons a complete makeover. If every salon buys a copy, we’d be talking a stampede.” Brilliant!

Except we were nibbling on an old stereotype (none of the men in the room had ever set foot in a salon!). It turned out that our avid readers were not salon women, but Members of Parliament, religious leaders, and all manner of professionals.

None of them would be caught dead reading our racy publication, though. Supermarket sales barely moved. Instead, the scandalous “rag” was clandestinely grabbed from vendors in traffic jams, and slipped into handbags, tucked between “serious” newspapers, or flipped onto the backseat – beneath a pile of coats, books and fluffy teddy bears.

“Too sleazy. I could never carry it home; I have children,” a company executive told me with a sly grin as he slammed the boot of his European sedan shut – after dropping the latest succulent offering onto an untidy pile of old scandal.

Why was I surprised? As a seven-year-old, my older brother and I stole my father’s copy of David Mailu’s After 4.30. Papa was a stern-faced senior police officer. His wife, my mother, was a firm, no-nonsense school teacher. But there it was — After 4.30 — hidden in the bedside drawer of their bedroom like a gonorrhea diagnosis.

Like most of my generation, that book introduced me to reading and maybe led me to a career as a satirical columnist and tabloid editor.

I recall my brother and I picking out the naughty words in the book — vagina, penis, sex — and giggling our silly heads off. This we did between the covers, afraid that Papa’s cane-wielding wife would burst into the room and uncover a crime that must have boggled their minds to no end. How would they have inquired of us the whereabouts of their After 4.30 with a straight face, anyway, when they were the standard of virtue?

Africa then as now reeked of taboo. In my Luhya dialect, sleeping was “spreading oneself out”, and taking the good old piss was “washing oneself” lest the two actions were confused for sex or ejaculation – words only whispered in the dark.

The petticoat’s gone

Riding in a matatu in Nakuru town decades after the publication of After 4.30, I eavesdropped on a ridiculously amusing conversation between two middle-aged kinsmen speaking in hushed tones in my mother tongue.

“That woman stood in the middle of the room and removed all her clothes – everything! Imagine…” the first chap exclaimed.

“She did? Everything? Even the petticoat? Wah!” his mate gasped. “Oyo nomutamba (she is a wh**e). A good woman should never remove the petticoat!”

It would shock the two gents that the petticoat has long been thrust into the dustbin of history and that women strut around company boardrooms bare-bottomed, nether regions waxed clean by strangers. Worse, the trusted missionary that dutifully served Zinjanthropus Boisei has given way to sexual norms and acrobatics that would make the biblical Eve’s navy blue visage flush crimson.

That women have binned the petticoat and the traditional armour-plated underwear or “mothers’ union” by choice is, for me, a powerful act of defiance and protest — a metaphor for the vast distance they have trod since After 4.30 was published fifty-one years ago. Like a butterfly emerging resplendent and free from an ugly and suffocating cocoon, they are, by dint of increasing financial independence, clawing back and winning previously denied spaces and sexual freedoms in a patriarchal society where “African and religious values” still fight to subjugate and trumpet women into silence.

Hunter becomes the hunted

Lili, the long-suffering secretary in Mailu’s After 4.30, is mostly extinct, replaced by an erudite personal assistant with an undergraduate degree and a six-figure salary. This butterfly the boss would never dare ask, “D’you have your period?”  Nor would she helplessly mourn: “Yesterday, you spent too much time going around me like a clock, slapping my bottom, telling me silly things, that I didn’t want to hear…”

It has to be consensual, or she would get the randy bastard fired or led out of the office in cuffs. The Sexual Offences and Employment Acts are her shield. These two laws, by the way, also protect the cowering junior male worker from the unwanted sexual advances of an obnoxious and randy lady boss. Talk of the hunter becoming the hunted!

It gets worse — for men. In today’s open working spaces, the boss is a caged fish in an aquarium, scowling away in a roofless cubicle where he can’t slap women’s bottoms or walk around them like a clock, telling them silly things. He would be a fool to inappropriately proposition his juniors on the phone either, or send them pictures of his engorged member via WhatsApp. He must, therefore, keep the piss, negotiate a consensus, prey upon the trembling intern (poor child), or be preyed upon by a rapacious kept woman.  

The randy male boss who leered around the office, forcibly pressing his potbelly on every female thing that moved, has been tamed: caged by the Beijing Women’s Conference; by educated and assertive women who know their rights; by HIV which isn’t the clap our fathers treated with a penicillin prick on their ashy bottoms; by fear of laws that could get them fired, jailed or compelled by the children’s court to pay for their sins; and, above all, by fear of his woman.

The woman of the 1960s and 1970s was subservient, keeping her legs firmly shut in the village for months on end while her man flirted with syphilis in the city. The modern wife may be no “slay queen”, a Kenyan alias for the deceptively coy but ruthless, empire-crashing predator whose tools of the trade are voluptuous tits, a magnificent tush, and a perfumed Bermuda triangle. But Mama Watoto, the mother of the children, is a deadly tear gas canister who won’t take nonsense lying down.

If her man left her high and dry because he was flagrantly strumming a junior’s G-spot, she would have options. Like acquiring a younger and trimmer toy boy, or suing for divorce and milking the philandering bastard dry in alimony and child upkeep costs.

This woman is, unfortunately, still in the minority, and the caged, modern man has turned out to be a more vicious and lethal adversary than his polygamous, fornicating forbearer.

Across our towns and villages, millions of poor and not-so-poor women remain shackled to men who abuse them sexually, emotionally and physically. Some are battered and murdered, sometimes with their children, for simply telling their lovers and husbands: “What you are doing is unfair and wrong.”

Poor college and university girls are particularly in peril, butchered by lovers who pay their rent for merely winking at other men, or led to slaughter in hotel rooms and rented apartments through the falsely incandescent lights of fame and social media.

Maillu the feminist

That Mailu discerned and attempted to lift the veil on the unfair circumstances of women way back in the 1970s makes him our bravest, most beloved but least acknowledged feminist. Unfortunately, his After 4.30 was read behind closed bedroom doors, and a profound message lost in the recoil of feigned righteousness and taboo with which Kenyans regard sex. “He wrote ‘vagina’ and not ‘private part’? How dare he?!”

An old British expatriate photojournalist once told me that when he set foot in Nairobi in 1966, Kenyans never talked about sex, but they were bonking like rabbits. “These days,” he cracked, “everyone talks about sex all the time, but no one is getting it.”

The wild sexual chatter on radio and social media is, however, deceptive. If After 4.30 was treated like contraband in the 1970s, and grown men hid The Nairobian in the boots of their cars only five years ago, it is no surprise that some established bookshops won’t stock the new edition of Mailu’s trendsetter today.

The old veil of religion and tradition remains a formidable and airtight sheath, and the harrowing tales and pains of the incredible life-giving, society-building and orgasmic vagina are still taboo.

Ted Malanda is an independent environmental journalist and former editor of Crazy Monday and The Nairobian weekly. Email: ted.malanda@gmail.com