Heard of the slowest speed?

What you need to know:

Slowth. The degree of slowness in thought and deed.

You have heard of speed, and you have heard of the speed of sound, watched the Grand Prix, or the Safari Rally or simply a cockroach scuttling away for dear life as you try to crush its miserable life under your heel. Whatever the case, you understand speed.

What is more difficult to understand is slowth. Slowth is the degree of slowness of thought or movement. For example, the pace of a snail versus the pace of a tortoise. Basically what you are measuring is how slow their slowness is-this is slowth.

Slowth can manifest itself in thought or movement, sometimes, in very unfortunate cases, in both. University students at this country’s most renowned institution of higher learning are the masters of slowth in motion.
They have perfected the art of walking at zero km/h without actually starting to move backwards. It is a delicate art, one that requires much dedication and practice to perfect.

It is not for the quick-footed, definitely not for people like the hurried Kenyans who look like they are practising for a marathon even when they are simply walking from point A to B.

Slowth of thought, for example, is when you go to a restaurant for lunch. You ask what food they have and the waiter rattles off the usual.
You order something simple-matooke, posho, greens and beans. The waiter goes off only to return empty-handed after five minutes. “Sorry the matooke has finished.” You are irritated but decide to do without it. Five more minutes.
“Sorry the beans are not ready.”

At this point, your hunger has grown teeth and is using them to attack the tender lining of your stomach. You wave the boy away and grunt “I’ll just have posho and greens then,” praying that you’ll be able to handle this dry foodstuff combination. And when he finally reappears like an untreated infection and begins reciting “Sorry sir even the posho it is not enough” you stand up enraged and storm out, wondering why they didn’t tell you in the first place that there was no food ready at all, that is slowth in action!