Recently, a major Kenyan newspaper took steps to sanitise the “Personals” column in its Classified section.

Many God-fearing readers had complained that the Devil was plying his trade in the classified pages.

The personals advertised “massages” that were more than massages, all manner of erotic aids, miracles cures for men with, well, male problems.

And there were all sorts of cures for infertile women, or those seeking to bolster their attractiveness to the male of the species, if you know what we mean.

Some things, though, you just cannot hide. Thus when an advertiser offers “Newly arrived Indian girls” and “European ladies,” you don’t need a PhD to figure out the kind of trade going on.

Newspaper industry sources have a large collection of adverts that were rejected. Obviously, they can’t be repeated here either, but there are some things that are striking about them.

Among them is that there is quite a brisk trade in East African hostesses and erotica in the region. Various outlets offered “Ugandan,” “Ugandan and Rwandese,” or plain “Rwandese girls.”

And, of course, Tanzanian medicine men are always promising to turn women with unfaithful men into domestic tigresses who will have their straying husbands waiting at their feet.

Uganda, a country with a far more liberal attitude towards the affairs of the sexes (its vocal born-again hardliners notwithstanding), would shock the Kenyan God brigade.

Indeed, even by world standards, the personals in some of the classified sections of the Ugandan newspapers are more than explicit. That is saying something, considering the array of soft and hard porn newspapers with names like Volcano and Bazooka.

While one can argue, rightly, that these classifieds have no place in family newspapers, the media have not taken the trouble to explain why, over the past decade, there has been a proliferation of the marketing of erotica and striptease joints in East African capitals.

In Nairobi, many people who use personal cars were recently shocked to hear the police appealing to matatu owners to stop screening pornographic films in their mini-buses.

Apparently the CD and miniature screens allow matatus to offer stressed, inflation-battered and crime-weary commuters the distractions of pornography in the evenings as they head home.

Before the police issued the warning, no passenger had complained publicly.

The crisis must be deep, because cases of drug use too are considerably up in East African cities.

All over the region, the number of second-generation urbanites is increasing. Their ties to the villages are weak to non-existent, and therefore they can’t fall back on Africa’s famed extended family system.

Our cities are now beginning to be home to more and more lonely people.

Companies, facing ever more local and international competition, are laying off older and long-serving workers in record numbers and replacing them with recent university graduates to avoid paying high salaries and hefty terminal benefits, thus sharply increasing uncertainty.

There is nothing unique about East Africa here. This is the realities of cities all over the world. Lonely, stressed, and frightened people often fall back on drugs, pornography, and the ephemeral offerings of the flesh industry to maintain their sanity and avoid suicide.

If these changes and stories are not reported more thoughtfully and acknowledged honestly, the people who are “victims” will never get any help, because no one will offer any.

All said, we should not despair. People who are not afraid of what their parents, aunt, or grandmother will think of their actions, often find they have greater freedom to be creative.

The work of the Devil might just save East Africa one day.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s managing editor for convergence and new products. E-mail: [email protected]