Certificates of Doom

By David onjala

Certificates of Doom is a novel that strives to elaborate Raymond William’s theory of cultural materialism by showing how the economy influences culture. Kepha, a young, educated African man marries Selina and suffers a strained relationship with her because he has no well-paying job. Kepha even fears to have a child with Selina because of their miserable life circumstances.He foresees the child as a burden he is not ready to carry in his dejected life. Kepha must fight norms that associate marriage with conception and childbirth. Later, he clashes with pseudo-feminists who put much effort into criticizing men while ignoring the fact women also need to change their perceptions of gender, especially in such hard-economic times.
Kepha is not alone. Every youth around him is experiencing the same challenges. Young men are not marrying, while young women, out of despair, are increasingly turning to older men, something that never used to happen. Kepha symbolizes youth disillusionment across the African continent where countries fail to create employment and improve the living conditions of their populations. In the end, Kepha’s brother contemplates suicide, something that must have also rung in his mind on several occasions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David onjala
• Release date: Oct 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463659625

David onjala

David Onjala works as a content writer for CopyPress, SteadyContent, and Writology. He also runs a website named Onjalazbroz, where he discusses a lot of topics and subjects about Africa. David Previously lectured at the Nairobi Aviation College, Kisumu Branch. He has also worked as an intern at the Ministry of Health, Kenya in Bondo. He spent most of his life in Manyatta, Kisumu, Kenya where the poverty around him motivated him to question the socio-political structures of 21st-century urban African societies their contributions to advancing poverty and influencing culture.

Book preview

Introduction

My life with Selina begun suddenly. Everything just fell into place. I started courting her after she left Aviation College for Maseno University because of sham scum that had trampled on Aviation College’s reputation. Selina was and is still beautiful just like the first time I met her. She had this baby-doll like, perfect face that I often found hard to describe. Maybe a picture of her would do better.

What startled me about Selina was her constant broad smile. She was always pleased. I rarely saw her sad, until I married and settled down with her. It is disgraceful to say that she started experiencing spells of unhappiness only after settling down with me. However, I believe that her grief was caused by frivolous reasons that are common in most marriages. Averagely, I would conclude that we were and still are a happy couple.

Selina’s departure from Aviation College presented me an opportunity that I could not pass. I was able to get close to her without minding the restrictive student-teacher relationship ban that had prevented me from courting her earlier while she studied at Aviation College. She was no longer my student.

My quest to win her heart was further boosted by her fallout with her cousin Kevo, who was her guardian. Kevo married this plumb, wide-eyed, dark, jealous

woman, who hated Selina because Kevo loved her so much. Unable to compete for his cousin's love with his wife, Selina left Kevo. She came to stay with me. That is how our marriage started.

In the next few months, I got to know Selina better. I learned that she was intelligent, social, daring and passionate. She had so many desirable traits that it took me almost a year to find her with fault. Her immaculateness worried me a little, especially when she spelled out my many weaknesses during our arguments. I often reassured myself that I loved her much, even more than she loved me, and that is why I could not find fault with her.

Indeed, Selina was far better than her age and me. She had found her way into our family and settled there slickly at the helm of its power close to her audacious mother in law. She loved mother and mother loved her back. At times, I hated this close relationship between them. It was the peak of feminism in a family where real African men were reduced to mere observers and non- actors like the Indian men in the soap operas. Mother was the ruler of our household. Father was just a quiet a man, who often minded his own business. Amazingly, such family set ups were virtually everywhere.

Mother and Selina formed a tribunal that judged and ruled against me in most cases. Surprisingly, father, a traditionalist, always supported their wrong decisions that usually leaned towards Selina’s side. Father’s support for them made me question my knowledge on a proper marriage. I never thought that traditionalist like father bowed so much at the feet of women as I had started

learning with marriage. In the end, I admitted that I was still a rookie in my new marriage profession.

Besides mother, the whole family also loved Selina. Brodrick, my youngest brother, had become very fond of her. Selina, in her openness, went as far as discussing our matrimonial issues with Brodrick, a young man who did not have a girlfriend at the time, and barely had any experience in such relationships.

Moses, my older brother, showered Selina with presents, such as peanut butter, sodas, and cakes. He also loaded her phone with the latest local tunes from the internet, and, like father, he took her side in our quarrels. He usually advised me that a man was purposefully built to coddle a woman. We had no business with getting angry at them. Our duty was to fulfill our purpose of cossetting them no matter what they did to us. That is how men have maintained relationships with women since time immemorial.

I learned from Moses’s advice that men also bore the brunt of maintaining relationships.

It reminded me of a piece of advice from a father to a son, Don’t be harsh and stern with her, even this your mother, you would not have seen her if I was hot-tempered like you.

Men had to learn to develop a quiet spirit to survive marriage. Traditional matrimonial philosophy assumed that women were the only beings entitled to get hurt, even when they did wrong. Men had to hold in those emotions and keep smiling even when wronged outrageously. This philosophy downgraded men to stone-like creatures with no feelings or emotions, except for a broad smile in the house. Within no time, I found my‐ self-absorbed in carrying out this lousy philosophy.

Selina Unsettled

Mother was humble. She made sure we assimilated extended relatives and workers into the family. We viewed one another as equals, although, powers varied with age. The older you were, the greater control you commanded. We respected our older brothers, sisters, relatives, and workers equally. It is this nature of the family coupled with Selina’s openness that made her settle in quite fast and comfortably. We treated her as the as the last-born of the family and gave her excellent care and respect.

However, Selina started becoming unsettled when she began a quiet war with Brodrick. She developed resentment towards both Brodrick and Moses after encountering their lazy behavior severally, which was pathetic and insolent. Brodrick was destructive. One could think that his hands were cursed. He destroyed anything he touched. Now, he was on the verge of ruining his new laptop computer worth sixty thousand shillings.

Additionally, Brodrick often misplaced and put things out of place. He shared this foul behavior with Moses. They never cleaned their spots of eating and left utensils scattered around the house like toddlers. Only very few people could stand them.

I learned to live with them and their foul behavior because they were a part of my life since birth. Unfortunately, I also expected Selina to do the same. I knew it would take some time to adapt to them, so she had to be patient with them. We could not blame mother in raising this to gentle men because we saw her put a lot of effort to root these undesirable traits in Brodrick and Moses, but all was in vain. Laziness were