Pornography in the Universities in Kenya

A Third Year engineering student went for his fourth HIV test in a week. It confirmed his worst fears.

He tested positive, but he could not recall when he could have been infected or by whom.

However, he was sure of his numbers. He knew that he had slept with 56 female students since he joined Egerton University.

He wrote out his list of 56 and posted it on a notice board at the campus. Several students say they saw the list that caused panic at the institution.

But the university administration was reluctant to comment on whether there was ever such a list.

“Ask the chief medical officer,” a senior administrator who is not authorised to speak on behalf of the university told DN2.

Dr Joash Kibet, the dean of students, was tight-lipped.“Just give me the list and I will tell you whether they are my students or not.

Nothing further from me,” vice-chancellor James Tuitoek told DN2.The sad story of the “Ocampo 56”, as the list has been cheekily nicknamed, has opened a Pandora’s box of the moral health of our universities.

Due to peer pressure and the ubiquitous nature of the Internet, students are more exposed than ever before to pornography and its glorification.

A click on their Internet-enabled mobile phones and lap computers and voila! a moral cesspool of a website appears.

But it gets worse when the starry-eyed undergraduates record themselves in lewd acts and post them on the Internet as they try to rival their “role models” in steamy music videos or X-rated movies.

It may earn them the dubious “hot chick” or “hot dude” accolades, but do these students pause to think about the embarrassment they subject their close relatives and colleges to?

Since the beginning of the year, numerous nude photos and steamy video clips featuring university students, some shot in campus hostels and lecture halls, have gone viral.

Viral is the marketing term for an idea or incident that rapidly spreads on the Internet within a short time after its posting on the global and virtual meeting place that knows no borders.

DN2 has seen, on-line, several photos of nude and semi-nude students as well as dirty clips of the growing immorality on campuses.

Some of them feature girls deep-kissing each other. When one of the girls was asked what the photos were doing on her FaceBook page, she chuckled, “A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”

Mr Silas Nyanchwani, a member of the UoN Caretaker Committee, is aware that there is material indicating the involvement of some students from the University of Nairobi in sex rings.

He calls it “an embarrassment.”In one of the interviews, a United States International University (USIU) student admitted that morality among Kenyan university students was dwindling.

In one incident, a popular FaceBook page by the name usiuchics posted steamy videos claiming that the “cast” was from a Thika Road university.

Moments after the video went on-line; most of the readers criticised the “cast”. Another university FaceBook page, jkuatchics defended the cast, alleging malice.

On April 8, jkuatchics wrote on its fan page wall “the apparent/rumours Jkuat sex tape is NOT even from Jkuat. It’s from a university in Ghana.

The rumours are fabricated. Jkuat chicks are BETTER than this!”That was before they pulled a shocker. “There is one that’s actually from JKuat.”

We did see such a clip whose “stars” we confirmed were Kenyan college students. Last month, word had it that a student from a university run by a religious organisation took her laptop for repair.

Photographs of nude students said to have been taken in a hostel room and stored in the machine were later distributed on-line. Peer rivalries have found their way into some of the lewd Internet displays.

In one case, a FaceBook account created by three female students, among them a Bachelor of Commerce student at the University of Nairobi and a Kenyatta University Education student, listed the names of seven colleagues as being behind the shooting and releasing of X-rated clips, popularly referred to as jnguats.

We decided to call the seven. Three of them expressed shock and claimed that they were not aware of the clips. “Our pals cannot expose what we do in private,” one of them said.

In the student community Internet porn is a mouse click away. There are a number of adult sites run by university students and anyone can run a virtual sex web from a hostel room.

Last year, steamy photos of the artiste Avril, then a University of Nairobi student, and another female student were leaked on-line.

“It was a class (photography) project,” Avril defended herself. Lecturers at the university insist that they do not give assignments that entail an element of risqué. But how do universities handle the situation when such material is leaked?

“You get to deal with it when you are sure that it is from your students and when it is in your possession,” Prof Tuitoek says.

Maybe the good professor should listen to Peris, a student from a Nairobi-based university. To her, the issue is not why people record lewd acts but “why not?”

But is the Internet the ultimate devil? Not really. Nothing has eased research and learning than this medium.

Consider this: A student researching on, say, the works of William Shakespeare need not leave his desk, walk to the library, and peruse tens of tomes on the playwright.

Typing “William Shakespeare” on a search engine’s toolbar and hitting the enter key will present valuable information on the writer, which the student only needs to digest and present in his own words.

The network also enables students to share ideas and discuss issues besides creating networks across borders.

It even allows virtual universities, meaning that a student in Nairobi can follow a lecture in Amsterdam on-line.

He can also sit an on-line examination with a web camera capturing his every move, thereby considerably reducing the possibility of cheating
From Consolation East Africa