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 to shine,” Bobinga Iroko continued. “He is a perfect example of what is wrong with Mimboland when it comes to public service: Between word and action, between concept and reality, between desire and gratification stand a wide, deep chasm and a thousand and one obstacles.”
“It must be these qualities which the President finds irresistible,” Lilly Loveless ventured, then immediately apologised. Although Bobinga Iroko and Dr Wiseman Lovemore were not the company to be cautious about, she knew she must avoid airing her opinions or taking sides on sensitive local issues during her fieldwork.
“With a big fancy car like that and in his position, the Reg doesn’t need words to sleep with a woman,” Bobinga Iroko laughed cynically.
“How is that?” asked Lilly Loveless.
“The car speaks for itself, so all he needs to say to any woman he wants is: ‘enter we go’” Bobinga Iroko explained. “And for a man who stammers the way he does, the car is a real speech enhancer.”
“There’s no such thing as romantic language with him?” asked Lilly Loveless.
“Romantic language is for the poor,” Bobinga Iroko mocked, “those who are always suffering from an over-inflation of empty words. Power and money open doors that most can only dream of; they are the poetry of the dumb, the humour of those too busy or too important to flatter, the corrector of those ordinarily too ugly to be noticed. With the rich and powerful, it is all about instant gratification.”
“Isn’t that too hard?”
“The only thing too hard is their sex drive, which they use as evidence of the opportunities and impunities of wealth and power,” said Bobinga Iroko. “Thus the Reg’s persistent erections are as rock-hard as they are reckless. They’ve always been, only more so today with the advent of Viagra – ‘the secret weapon to empower little warriors of love’, that has made horizontal jogging his favourite sport. He is convinced women worship rock solid hardness and the prospect of all-night staying power that come with the feeling of bigger, wider and fuller that he believes he induces. He has a queue of university girls at his service every day, and is known to be