Professor Mandakoi had a silent but cancerous hate for one of his students, Mako, a third year undergraduate studying Anthropology at the National University. Mandakoi was not his name. During this discussion, for our legal security, we are forced to conceal his identity. Professor Mandakoi bears a peculiar name matching his heavy facial features which, we’ll also play down on the disclosure.
Nobody had ever questioned Professor Mandakoi’s academic credibility and how he had earned his professorship in America, since he had worked for a reputable college out there until, one day, he barely touched a white American woman on the wrong joint. The racist woman filed a misconduct case on him based on sexual harassment, which cost his job. After being fired his best option was to return to Kenya after his fourteen years of academic sojourn.
His biggest gains were multiple pluses when he got the job at the National University where, to his dismay, the academic tempo was played with the instrument of laxity by majority of his colleagues. He felt like he had been offloaded a giant burden. For, out here, as long as you carried the title of professor, if you are smart, you could get away with any academic murder to your students. That, indeed, was unlike in his previous college where he had been subjected to endless toil of reading and research in order to keep abreast of his expected grade. From where too much of him was expected to where too little of him was expected, where the National University was gravely funded for any academic research. He could use his yellow notes for teaching and sound progressive because the academic thermometer, he found out, was faulty. Nearly everything, including the library and teaching equipment, were decaying and where, if you knew the right joint to cut, you could cut and buy your academic certificate.
After he had got the job, he had maintained the academic excellence and discipline that had earned him his professorship in the States. His performance was coloured with punctuality, precision and professionalism. But, soon, he discovered that there was no better place than home where toil didn’t pay at all and the academic was almost sold to material god. The National University paid lecturers peanuts and majority of the smart lecturers had discovered how to make lemonade out of the government lemon. “The government is eating,” Professor Mandakoi joked to one his colleagues one day, “that’s why it doesn’t bother about the rot in this National University.”
He felt justified to give way to professional bleach. He slowed down his pace and then, with joy, got engaged in other money-making matters to supplement his mean salary. Besides, he also discovered that back home sexual harassment was a foreign paranoia. In corridors of power you can poke any woman with your finger at her bottom or touch her breast and she would run short of saying thanks for your recognition of her femininity.
He finally succeeded in descending from his academic ivory tower and became a man of the people. Man of women, to be precise. It didn’t take him long to discovery that at the National University he held both the yam and the knife for particularly for his female students. He fell in love with one of them in her third year undergraduate, called Molly. Unfortunately, Molly was so sweet and sexually insatiable to him that she so easily drained him out. The consequences were expressed by his sexually starved wife, Sophie. He took care of Molly’s academic homework papers in marking them and giving her the best grades for which she repaid him abundantly. The affair was eaten with term prospects that one day Molly might succumb to polygamy and bless the professor with a second and sweeter wife.
It was during that time that the sexual starvation of his wife started discovering other frontiers for self service. The matter kicked off when necessity pushed her to begin acting seductively to Sondeli, one of her husband’s ambitious and dear male student. Sondeli who was given to visiting the professor at home for extra-time couching. Least did Sondeli know that in a given time he would find a sexual sanctuary in serving the professor’s wife freely; a fortune fall for a student. Unfortunately, Sondeli was on course to collide with Molly one day.
It didn’t take long before class students discovered that Professor Mandakoi was biased in giving Molly the best grades at the cost of being mean to other students, just because he wanted to boost Molly’s ego. Molly began to stink when she walked around throwing her pride and weight about and stepping her classmates’ feet. They nicknamed her Processor.
The Processor spied for Professor Mandakoi. She earned his pride one day when, using delicate words, she reported, “Professor, I don’t like the way Sondeli and your wife exchanges looks.” Pressed further by the professor to reveal more information, with the hope that the revelation will lay ground for a divorce, Molly uncovered, “The two have been having good times together privately in a hotel.”
Professor Mandakoi nearly murdered Sondeli. However, he played it cool and planned a strategy to implicate Sondeli as one of the ringleaders in a student strike that was in the offing. In fact, he funded the move by looking for agents and bought fuel for them to pour over the strike. It didn’t take long before Sondeli’s discovered that the cat had come out of the bag regarding his good time with the Sugar Mummy. He retaliated by scandalizing the professor. He didn’t hide his anger one day when he was drunk and crossed paths with his professor. From a distance, he cried out a ridicule, “Hi Procancer!” Mandakoi misheard the word for professor and answered pretentiously, “Hi Sondeli!” Sondeli screamed with laughter and disappeared, leaving the professor puzzled until a colleague asked the professor, “Didn’t you get the insult from Sondelei? He didn’t call you professor but procancer!” To make the matter worse Sondeli roughed up Molly one day.
Just a fortnight to go before the planned strike took place Sondeli had in fact wedged himself in as one of the strike ringleaders, now determined to campaign for the removal of Professor Mandakoi from the University foracademic corruption.
The storm of the worst student strike took place on a Monday when students demanded walking to the Parliament Building to launch their grievances. However, the General Service Unit, GSU, disbanded the marching with tear gas even before it fully crossed the University. During the riot and some hungry students reached out some shops, broke glass windows and looted while others pelted passenger cars with stones.
The University was closed for indefinite time on the same day. Sondeli, among others, would live to tell the horror when he was caught up and beaten up by the security men and then left for the dead. The chaotic strike caused a lot of the University’s property damage. He survived broken hand and skull only to be charged in caught for being a ringleader in causing the strike. He together with his colleagues was sentenced for two years to serve in prison and that terminated his University education.
Two and a half months would pass by before the college was reopened. However, nearly four months after the opening Professor Mandakoi was shown the way out of the college. This time it was not because of sexual harassment but because of academic corruption. Molly was six months pregnant carrying the professor’s child and the scandal was at its highest pitch. By then the Professor’s wife who was a journalist, had reclaimed her matrimonial territory uccessfully particularly when she threatened publishing in a daily newspaper her husband’s sexual scandal. He plead with her for her clemency. Furthermore, she saved her husband’s skin from Molly’s advancement to destroy his marriage. He did not want to see Molly for the rest of his life.
Miss Molly Masumba failed miserably in the exam. She tried abortion in vain and ended up in getting a son with Mandakoi’s copycat features in place of getting her Bachelors of Arts. An uncle of hers who was a lawyer and sympathetic to Molly’s misfortune, promised to take up the case with Professor Mandakoi for the cost of bringing up the child. By then the General Election was at the corner and Professor Mandakoi had declared interest in campaigning for a Parliamentary seat. Everybody knew too well that Professor Mandakoi would capture the seat. He was particularly loved by women.
By the time Molly’s uncle was readying for taking up the matter, Professor Mndakoy was already a Member of Parliament, appointed as an Assistant Minister in the Ministry of Education. Although he was a happy man who was earning more money, he was determined to use his political power to destroy two particular personas at the University Administration who had engineered his firing. He was one the lucky dons who had abandoned the materially academic sinking ship for political bonanza.
When he received the news regarding Molly’s case demanding his responsibility in the upkeep of the child, he sent some chilling oral message through a friend to Molly saying, “Woman, dare engage your lawyer at your peril; choose between the life and death of your son.”
Ironically, he should thank Molly for having created the crisis that promoted Professor Mandakoi to the capitalist world. Molly dropped the legal case against Professor Mandatoi and resigned to the graveyard of those who have surrendered to the ethical inertia of the new Kenya. Thank God, by then, the uncle had helped her get a job as a nursery school teacher in the city, from where she now reviewed the historic Tsunami that destroyed her academic dream.
