This week my imagination was gripped by a fascinating tale in Cape Town’s best-selling tabloid daily newspaper which featured a married couple with problems.
I know that sounds fairly pedestrian and surely most if not all married couples hit the occasional bump or three in the road. However, this couple’s problems were such that they took the unusual route of visiting a newspaper’s newsroom to share their problem with the world.
Again in a world where TV is wall-to-wall with the so-called reality shows where all sorts of dirty laundry is on display, some of it specially manufactured, this should not be such a shocker, but for me it was.
I grew up in a time and a neighbourhood where if you were dying to know what was going on behind closed doors with your neighbours, you asked their domestic workers.
Often people who had domestic workers said and did things in front of them that they wouldn’t say or do before just anyone else. not because these members of the household staff were considered particularly loyal, but to some extent they were invisible.
The poet, Henry Barlow, captured this sort of invisibility perfectly in his poem Building the Nation, which I remember reading from school. (Dear reader, you really should look it up).
As a result of not really being seen or heard, the domestics knew everything that was going on (and where they didn’t have all the facts they made them up), and if you bothered to tap into their grapevine you would be very well informed.
It is only that in those days and in that place, there were no racy tabloids buying stories from domestics or else many of the people I knew would have had their stories splashed all over the place.
However, as usual, I digress, back to the Cape Town couple – Amien Ajam (66) and his wife Gabby (41). They have been married for 12 years but she cannot believe he is not busy having affairs left, right and centre. Gabby claims to have seen messages on her husband’s phone that suggested he was having affairs.
To prove his fidelity, Amien took Gabby to the newsroom and asked reporters – who were only too willing – to publish a story calling on any woman who claimed to be having an affair with him to come forward.
According to the story in the Daily Voice, “Amien claims people have been trying to break up his happy marriage for years because they are jealous of his young wife".
“I love my wife, I’ve never been in any other (illicit) relationship,” he said. “Maybe it’s family or friends who are jealous of me.”
But a fed-up Gabby says she is ready to walk away from the marriage.
“This is his last chance now. I want to know if he’s cheating, that’s why his face must be in the Daily Voice,” she said.
This “go big or go home” strategy seems to have worked because by the end of the week the paper was reporting that nobody had come forward to admit to having an affair with Amien, and Gabby told the Daily Voice on Wednesday: “We are closer now than ever before. Amien is helping around the house with all the chores, I won’t leave him now.”
So for now all is well in the Ajam household. Of course in my day such a story would have filtered through the Domestic Workers Network News channel and been cross-checked by listening to the Parental News Service when they were not discussing what the writer, Patrick Gale, referred to in one of his short stories as “adult impenetrables”.
Follow me on Twitter @MwangiGithahu