No sex, please, we’re Swiss? Geneva’s nights throb to the beat of nocturnal commerce

Scores of Swiss men are dying in brothels —victims of heart failure “on the job,” according to the press reports.

It reminds you of “commercial sex workers,” the name that NGOs have given to the denizens of such houses.

NGOs, you must agree, are the nonpareil in euphemism.

But, if you find it embarrassing to call it “prostitution”, Okot p’Bitek, the sardonic Ugandan philosopher-poet, has a compelling name for it —“nocturnal commerce and industry.”

According to the report, even octogenarians and nonagenarians have refused to hang up their gloves.

They attack the job with such gusto and energy that the heart simply uncoils and never rebounds. They perish by the hundreds.

This surprises me a great deal.

Either Swiss men have been deceiving the world for all these centuries or we have always underrated them.

For – by reputation hitherto – the Swiss are by far the most unexciting European nation.

Sex and other forms of frivolity are the last things you associate with them.

They compare sharply with the Italians, their extremely excitable and extremely unruly neighbours to the south.

The Swiss compare, too, with the French, their western neighbours who spend a great deal of national time swaggering labout their finesse in romance, cuisine, haute couture, literature, suchlike.

Unlike our own Africans, who boast a great deal about their “Negritude,” the European in general does not boast about his “Euritude,” leave alone about his phallic ability.

He simply does his thing. Only former slaves —out of a profound inferiority complex — ever feel the need to advertise that they also have such wares.

As Wole Soyinka used to chide Leopold Senghor, Alioune Diop, Dundusu Chisiza and other African, Caribbean and North American Negritudists, a real tiger does not proclaim his tigritude. Only a paper tiger does.