Don’t let the chicken bite Jayden! Don’t let Jayden wander off into the pigsty! has caused a sudden sweep on social media during the festive season.
After a short video went viral by TikTok user @katsandtimo venting out on “Kampala people” who flock to the village during the festive season.
He particularly warns them about controlling the behavior of one Jayden, a spoiled Kampala boy visiting the village for Christmas.
“’Don’t come here and create rules like, ‘Don’t let the chicken bite Jayden,” he said, “and don’t let Jayden wander off into the pigsty.”
He concludes by expressing dissatisfaction for the annual visitors’ children, who he says are not well behaved and should not attempt to return to the city having finished all the foodstuffs they carry along.
His opinion was quickly followed by TikTok users sharing videos ridiculing exotic children in rural areas finding themselves overwhelmed with village life during the festive season.
Relatedly, the idea of ‘Jayden’ could be perceived as a metaphor for the children of a certain demography—the middle class.
Individuals that are usually graduates from lower middle-class or poor backgrounds that are deliberately trying to shield that past.
These tend to want to look cool and dedicate a lot of their resources to manipulating a vague impression of the urban good life.
In an attempt to seem insufferable to the pressures of the ‘old and backward’ life, these individuals throw away names like Mary Goretti and John Peter, among others, and christen their children modern names like Princess, Cairo, Kai, and ‘Jayden.’
This sharply contrasts the ‘usual normal’; these children look exotic, having spent most of their lives in urban areas and speaking only English.
A vivid explanation as to why the young man in that video warns “Jayden’s parents” against bringing their wiseacre behavior to the rural areas and risking exerting their superiority over their relatives back in the countryside.
It is intriguing to think that small aspects like these, children’s names, can be the litmus for social classes in Uganda today, as the population at large incorporated “Jayden” into memes about the universal behavior of elites’ children in urban and suburban Uganda.
