the world. A very jocular fellow he is.”
“You’ve made him blush,” said Lilly Loveless, as Bobinga Iroko covered his face with his hands in pretentious shyness.
Bobinga Iroko’s drink arrived. “She knows how to have fun at the job, and delivers service with a smile,” Bobinga Iroko complimented the bar girl, his thirsting eyes drowning themselves in her good looks.
Lilly Loveless insisted on paying for the beer. “The drinks this evening are all on me,” she told them.
“Literally or metaphorically?” asked Bobinga Iroko.
“Literally and metaphorically,” replied Lilly Loveless.
“Regardless of whether I literally finish a crate?” Bobinga Iroko teased.
“Regardless of whether you finish two crates,” Lilly Loveless challenged.
“So what are you doing in Puttkamerstown?” Bobinga Iroko asked, taking to her sense of humour and suppleness of mind.
“I’m doing research for my doctorate on sex, power and consumption, using Puttkamerstown as my field location.”
“You Muzungulanders study funny themes. I’ve always thought the PhD was a serious degree. Something to confer power, the power to pull others down. I can assure you that no one in this country would sponsor a study like yours, let alone award a degree to someone who works on a theme that trivialises science. Given our development needs, we go for hardcore science, not soft-core gimmick.”
Lilly Loveless could not tell whether he was serious or had gone back to his joking mode, so she chose to ignore his comment.
“What exactly do you want to study about sex?” Bobinga Iroko was curious.
“In a nutshell, how it shapes and is shaped by power and consumption,” replied Lilly Loveless. “But to get there, I’m interested in everything to do with sex, from love to marriage and divorce, through affairs, cheating, promiscuity, and so on.”
Bobinga Iroko laughed mockingly – kikikikikikiki – before saying, “Cheating, philandering and sexual promiscuity are and always have been the tango in town, the tonic to help people bear relationships that would otherwise be too burdensome to even contemplate. Monogamy is incredibly boring, and this is as true of here as it is of where you come from, whether or not polygamous marriages are formally recognised by the state. If you want fidelity, love is not the game for you. Only a moralising hypocrite or an idle social scientist would think of wasting money on a silly study like yours.”
Lilly Loveless smiled, instead of being irritated or embarrassed. She couldn’t help feeling that Bobinga Iroko was being playfully unpleasant, as his expressive face and eyes displayed warmth that spoke of a man with a good heart, someone who would not go out of his way to hurt a researcher he had barely met.
“Thank goodness DNA paternity tests are not as commonplace as they are dangerous,” continued Bobinga Iroko, “else men would be shocked to know how their wives lead them to take perfect strangers for their offspring. Fortunately, social fatherhood is what matters, as the child belongs to he who owns the bed. I don’t need a study to know this.”
“Lucky you,” said Lilly Loveless, still smiling, a bit awkwardly.
“Perhaps you have a point,” Bobinga Iroko conceded.
Lilly Loveless sat up, all ears.
“It is not because cheating is the order of the day that people are necessarily honest about it. The natural tendency is to forget the speck in our own eye as we dramatize the speck in the eye of our neighbour. We forget to know that each time we point a finger at someone, three fingers are pointing at us.”
Lilly Loveless felt relieved, somehow. It is more than discomforting to have your research written off by locals with opinions on what good research should be.
“OK, let me contribute to your research all the same, for what it is worth,” Bobinga Iroko took her hand, his eyes virtually kissing hers. “We Mimbolanders believe in infidelity, but we also believe in lying to protect our marriages and relationships. Look over there.”
She stretched her neck like a giraffe.
“You see that man sitting with that girl, tiny like a broomstick?”
Lilly Loveless spotted the couple.
“The wife died of chronic gonorrhoea, chronic syphilis, and chronic AIDS, consumed by the recklessness of a penis to which she came as a virgin and stayed faithful, while her husband visited everything in a skirt. Mimboland condoms are spectacularly uncomfortable. They spoil the sex, and I can well understand why a man like that was at war against condoms or why Muzungulanders like you prefer to import their own condoms.”
Lilly Loveless was speechless. Bobinga Iroko certainly knew how to shock.
He was just beginning.
“See that battered car over there?” he pointed.
“It belongs to someone, a colleague actually, in a way, who has made a habit of living above his means, because he believes in keeping up appearances. He doesn’t accept advice.”
“What a pity,” said Lilly Loveless.
“A pity indeed, for many are the times I have told him that having a second hand Pajero is like getting married to a retired prostitute – more headache than service.”
This guy has no inhibitions, whatsoever, Lilly Loveless concluded. He’s good.
“And that brand new Prado over there, still without number plates: Johnny-Just-Come,” he indicated the car with his troublesome forefinger.
Again, Lilly Loveless nodded, curious for what bombshell he was about to release.
“50th birthday present for Dr Simba Spineless, the Reg of Mimbo, by the fellow who has won every single contract at the university since he was appointed Reg by presidential decree 20 years ago in place of someone with real ability. It is one of many rewards that come his way for running the institution extraordinarily badly.”
Lilly Loveless’ eyes dilated with surprised curiosity. “Dr Simba Spineless has been Reg for 20 years?”
“Absolutely,” said Bobinga Iroko. “And he was not a nonentity before that. His bread was buttered even before his father, politically very well-placed in colonial times, had met his mother.”
“How is that possible?”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t done sociology, or that you’ve forgotten the doctrine of your forefather, Charles Darwin,” remarked Bobinga Iroko, feigning surprise.
Lilly Loveless smiled, meaningfully.
“He seldom reads nor writes in any scholarly sense,” Bobinga Iroko criticised. “When he does, he prefers his manhood to do the thinking and the writing.”
This man is incredible, thought Lilly Loveless, but I like him for that.
“And he is unbelievably vain and hopelessly incompetent as he would rather stammer his way to hell than allow talent
