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Heavy responsibilities for elder aunt among the Logooli

With Seenge Fonesi. She is the elder grand daughter of Isagi and elder daughter of Amugasya. She is often present in functions involving the family of Amugasya. Pic taken on 18/4/2024. The elder sister soon becomes the elder aunt. It is this “seenge munene” (elder aunt) tag that she is tied to many cultural responsibilities – back home. To her marital family she may appear as any other woman, but she is not so in the eyes of her people. Marriage does not steal her away as it would happen with other daughters of the old man. To her, as days go and the old man and woman of the estate are dependents, she becomes increasingly present.  Her brothers also need her for almost all traditional markings. They are marrying, she needs to welcome the new wife. They are giving birth, she needs to come to midwife or “bless” the new born. They are paying dowry she needs to lead the women delegate. There is a conflict she needs to come for a hearing.  And many others. Traditions does not expect her to
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Gambling is a vice

Our marble game soon developed. Instead of counting scores from how many times you knocked an opponent’s marble and successfully entered the mother hole on the ground or having come from it, one of us proposed a marble for a successful hit. He must have come from the city or gotten the idea from the poisonous tree. It was a risk to engage in such a game. How does a boy who begged hard to find a marble come to risk its ownership simply for a hit?

The primary purpose of gaming I’d say is to bond and have pleasure. It is not about winning and losing. It serves as a way of passing time and a forum to bring about several topics of engagement. Those who do not know how to play are easily taught and welcomed. There is no joy in continuous wins when your game mate (not really an opponent) is losing all the time. But when our marble game turned to a shilling a hit it was no longer that pastime activity we had been introduced to. A mentality of fraud, opportunism and spontaneous quarrels and fights was being developed.


Jakoyo Midiwo is our modern day super legislature and the people of Gem Constituency should be thanked for giving us a servant leader. I stick to the forums he is hosted in and I guess he has tight schedules because everyone wants to host him. And yesterday on JKF Live I listened to him keenly as he said how dangerous to the state the gaming is, proposing strict regulations, quoting from an American research that only two point something percent jackpot winners may be successful as the rest wallow in addiction, desperation and related vices. Beside him sat the CEO to the current Kenya’s biggest mobile sport betting – Sportpesa.
 
We are after money and the means to it can be justified once we have it. It is a man’s world and he pulls strings to his unsatiatable appetites. When betting companies are used to sponsor sports, make people rich and influence social decisions we are likely to say they have a good side. Even Satan got a good side if so he exists. The timid man who won Ksh 23Million by only using hundred shillings in a jackpot is a joke. Not even the gods of old did such miracles without lesson intent. 

Here is the fallacy. You cannot win more than what the betting companies have in account. You cannot make them go broke. They will make sure that what you get from their kitty is manageable. They are simply thieves. In your desire to get rich your monies could be laundered in seconds from one part of the world to another making them grow rich selfishly. So, when you hear about sending text messages to certain number in a certain code, having it repeated throughout insulting some people’s intelligence, and the sponsors are able to accumulate more than they will dispense. Who knows how much was collected and who won without fraud?

Sometimes on issues like this I get confused whether human understanding has been surpassed by human needs and desire. We may be clinging to a human element that is not ‘modern’. We better call it quits and wallow in trickery, treachery and debauchery. But what will be the gain? Could we not walk to the pool and pay for the table because the man pays rent and enjoy our game? Why bet?

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