By Taju Tijani
It started like a harmless fun. A harmless fun any rational man will find agreeable. I mean becoming a member of that bright, beautiful, bracing, and diverse online community of chattering classes. To salvage my ebbing ego, I became a reluctant conscript into the platoon of online glory seekers called WhatsApp forum. To many starry-eyed and bewitched fame seekers, WhatsApp is a hot digital platform.
WhatsApp is versatile. It is user friendly. It can handle calls, messages, video, files and just about everything any computer can and, because it is encrypted end to end, nobody can read, see, or hear any of your stuff unless you want them to. Since adding the WhatsApp feature in April 2016, Facebook the parent company has sold its “end to end encryption” as the reason to use it above all other smartphone message applications. The pitch has been a roaring success. WhatsApp is currently the world’s most popular messaging app, with over two billion active monthly users. WhatsApp is used in over 180 countries. 54% of millennials and just over a third of baby boomers (36%) use WhatsApp daily.
To me, it is over-rated, over-bearing, intrusive, gossipy, divisive, controlling, thought numbing, marketing-oriented, immoral, crowded and addictive. It encourages our longing for nostalgia and searching out. It enables material and social comparison. It inflames our craving to be seen, heard, appreciated, and even respected. Its video feature turns us into zombie peeping toms forever looking to see what our friends, colleagues, girlfriends, wives, and enemies are up to.
With WhatsApp, we submit to the errant conduct of virtue, vice, pride, lies, deceit, hypocrisy, and cyber flirting. With our phone, we can now connect with a WhatsApp glamour-model that encourages our voyeurism, our libido, and our appetite for bohemia. There, you will meet Lotharios with baby-lotion smooth skin and eyes crying for ravishment. It is a place where we put our best mask on. It is a place where we hunt for willing babes to add to the treasure trove of our philandering.
To my writerly eyes, WhatsApp is where we swing from nothing into something within minutes of uploading an enhanced displayed picture. It is where you will find long lost charmers begging for a comeback. It is where perpetrators meet their victims and on bended knees beg for forgiveness while invoking the alibi of juvenility as the devil behind their timeless evil.
It is the insufferable heaven to those who want to feed their ego and line it on the cyber highway of endless but fruitless search for fame, fun and frolic. It is equally a place where one can tap into and harness the enormous human resources scattered all over the world. It is one of the greatest vehicles to act as agent of change in a fading, degenerate, and unhappy world. Activists, particularly, use WhatsApp to communicate everything from places for emergency demonstrations to important announcements to the latest information about their personal lives. Today Yoruba agitators now deploy WhatsApp as the control and command weapon for Yoruba foot soldiers scattered across our forests. They need video evidence of Fulani atrocities across the land.
My initial cynicism and trepidation of the monster of online engagement melted into thin air the moment I began to lap the razzle-dazzle atmosphere of WhatsApp forum. I began to embrace WhatsApp warmly as a God-sent anchorage to hone my social skill, advertise my intellect, connect the connectables, engage the engageables and pore endlessly on global inanities from different sharers across different time zones. The auguries of social dilemma that lay ahead had not taken any form. My rubber has not yet met the road. I thought I was winning in the thought-for-thought combat war of the WhatsApp platoon.
Then a rootless, raw, core, WhatsApp warrior called Babatunde heralded himself into my contact list. He got my number from a friend. I learned my first online lesson. WhatsApp is a small world where professors comingle with the hookers, illiterates, the dropouts, the Okada riders in a happy, real time of harmless fun and frolics. Then my zippy, dippy Babatunde began to act like a despot. He began to forward all kinds of fanciful, flesh-and-blood distillation of odd videos and stories. First, he sent some male performers yanking their crotches. Then another set of black women dancers in flexing thongs as they roll their ikebe in authentic Makosa rotation before the cameras.
I learned my second lesson. WhatsApp is a place of colliding paradigms where the primitive hordes with nasty, perverted heart can co-opt you into the hall of pornographic titillation. Then the greatest storm of it all hit me like a tornado. Babs forwarded the video of erect phallic symbol of a rap artist. A woman may fantasise at the sight of a shattering 9incher in its turgid, menacing look as a boon to her Friday night, but I found his immoral assault quite rude. I blocked him! My digital gavel brooks no nonsense. It came down hard on Babs.
Someone said it was a phallic jealousy. Probably! I began to realise that there is no limit to what one can discover on WhatsApp info-socio democratic highway. A right turn may lead you into a world of experience and socially beneficial interpenetration. A wrong turn may land you into the realm of the absurd where a totally, unknown gnomish spirit from Lagos, despite the digital divide, can lay claim to your soul as happened to me. Then I met Folakemi through WhatsApp community. She fished me out of our forum and send a personal hello to me in what is called side chatting. I was initially hesitant and wanted to know the reason why I was chosen over the multitude on the forum.
‘Oh, I have been following your writing and I enjoy your articles a lot…and I also like your beard’, she began. Flattered, encouraged, and appreciated, I welcomed her into my world. It started like all good things. Harmless and entertaining. In our video chat, she looked fragile, funny, and fabulous. She is an educated, saintly-looking woman with no obvious care in the world. Once we became friends, we got on famously without any perverse motive. After two months of boundless humour, laughter, and shared wisdom of how to manage our lives, she morphed into something else. Hmmm….
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In our video encounters, she began to speak in uplifting and futuristic terms about her desire to meet me anytime I visit Nigeria. Each time we collided online; her effusion was usually a projection of her cannibalistic credential. Here, I must confess that I forgot to heed the warning of Thomas Hardy that, “A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.” She told me all the nameless horror I would be subjected to anytime I set my London foot in Lagos. Lagos, that city of endless paramour was where Folakemi is planning to hatch her cannibalistic ritual on me. Help!! Ravening, threatening and raw-boned Folakemi will not only squeeze me but has also threatened to eat me like shawarma.
In the active, addictive, fraternal, and mysterious medium of WhatsApp, we are constantly faced with a state of adrenaline tension. Such is the case in a real-time community space where we leave behind our genetic code for millions of WhatsAppers to stalk, feast and preyed upon.
Help! How do I prepare for a woman who had been slacking her carnal talent in cannibalistic terms? ‘I will squeeze you and eat you like shawarma……I will eat you like shawarma…I will eat you like shawarma…’ Believe me, when your life stagnates through the imponderable demands of mid-life reality, something, whatever, and anything ought to rekindle the back end of middle age. Who knows if Folakemi’s pre-emptive strike on my libido is what I really need to earn my badge of honour as a frontline WhatsApper?
Note: First published May 21 2021.
