Return of the Few

Remember that evil has never made its way into mainstream life as evil. Its masters work very hard in ensuring it comes clothed with the innocence of lambs. They'll call themselves nationalists, not supremacists; alt-right, not extremists; movement, not terrorists.

Too many good people would rather believe that the shocking darkness that humans have wrought upon each other- holocaust, slavery, genocides... will never happen again. Forget that the daily shredding of flesh is a reality in some parts of the world where bombs and bullets are the norm. But that's too far removed from the ordinary American reality.

Yet what is slowly becoming the norm in this exclusive American world is little "innocent" incidents of the same chilling darkness we assume can never happen again: a black student put in a noose, swastikas and hate-filled insults splashed across schools and churches, whites-only signs cropping up... Some people swat it off and think it all too inconsequential.

Often, I too hide behind the false comfort that American institutions are too strong and balanced to allow a few people to plunge the country into that unimaginable place. False because those few people are now celebrating their mainstreaming, with presidential support, and those same balanced institutions can now easily be run by the forces of our greatest terror.

The only thing that will make this "the few" not go mainstream and become a darkness too great to bear is if you and I care enough to call it what it is and shut it down with all the weapons at our disposal when we see or experience it. Roland Martin used his weapon, you can too.

Beliefs and Bullshit: The Moral Terror in Ezekiel Mutua’s Head

Mr. Ezekiel Mutua, MBS, is a troubled man. He doesn’t know it yet, but he needs your prayers. Let me explain. You see, as the CEO of the Kenya Film and Classification Board, he’s been brandishing sabre and sword in a holy crusade against immoral storytellers. I’m completely awe-struck by his unparalleled zeal to fight what he calls moral terrorism. Imagine that. This man should be working for GSU Recce Squad’s Moral Intelligence Division.

But I can’t just wish him off to the terror-inducing people at Recce Squad where he really belongs. As a Kenyan storyteller looking to contribute content on stage and screen, I’d better get to know Mr. Mutua, because he’s got a big whip and I don't want him lashing the skin off my back for the content of my stories.

It so happens that in my next play there’s a lady in a red mini skirt with the hem just below the Bermuda Triangle, mounds of thigh extending southward into smooth shin-and-ankle stuck in a pair of six-inch heels. There are two men who make lip contact ever so gently, just for a second. There’s also a bridal party scene with a Kiganjo policeman stripper who pops out of a big bible, mundu-khu-mundu muscles rippling as he gyrates out of some massive pages, all while Alikiba blares through the speakers- “haya chekecha chekecha haya chekecha cheketua...” And Mr. Mutua MBS, loves the word “debauchery.”

I discovered we have something in common. We both like to air our thoughts out loud through a keyboard. His Facebook page is an open window to his vain soul. He’s very present, engaging and unafraid of his own beliefs. Only he is blind to the bullshitness of his morality crusade.

In his mind, he’s on an apocalyptic mission to save Kenya, because God forbid Kenya’s storytellers should succeed in putting Kenya in a big envelope and mailing it off to the big bad devil. He believes this. His other sworn enemies are atheists and homosexuals. But we’ll get there in a minute.

Mr. Mutua says he’s on a mission to protect Kenya’s children against the debauchery of family-time programming. I don’t know what’s been showing on Kenyan TVs lately, but there’s a gadget called a remote control. Change the freakin’ channel! And if you have only one debauched channel on your TV, do some creative parenting. It’s not KFCB’s responsibility to police parenting between 5 and 10PM when the moral code is supposedly in force. Don’t spoil other perfectly balanced families’ enjoyment of the sizzling intrigues of life and love, coming to you con amor, from Mexico.

It’s perfectly alright for Mr. Mutua if he’s reading his bible at this time. The problem is that he can’t sleep because images of moral decadence torture his soul. Seductive females and homosexual hotness and mournful orgies at bridal parties float through his mind. I’m not kidding. It’s all there on his Facebook page, in his own words. And he thinks the rest of the country is haunted by the images in his mind. There's some deep private conflict burning within him, a personal moral battle that he has decided to transform into a national pursuit. Now you see why he needs your prayers.

He swears on the Constitution so authoritatively you’d think he’s right. He’s not. Kenya is a democracy, not a theocracy. Mr. Mutua seems to have these two all mixed up in the same bowl. There’s a whole bill of rights that guarantees every Kenyan a right to equality and freedom from discrimination; freedom of conscience, religion, belief and opinion. To believe that one must believe in God in order to possess a moral compass is a load of bullshit. There are many atheists with higher moral fortitude than some professed God-fearing people whose morals make a blue-flied pit latrine smell like Suzzana pomade.

Mr. Mutua bears the responsibility to encourage only quality of content. Just quality. The bullshit about doing God’s work as moral police is his personal vendetta against the perverts of his mind.

Beliefs and Bullshit: Getting to Third-Level Heaven

Visit to the Mormon Temple, Washington, DC

My neighbors two blocks across kept on wanting me to go visit their temple with them. My resolve to dodge their relentless invitations was finally eroded and I caved in. Off to the Mormon temple we went. It was all my fault. I caused it during casual conversation when I said, having just discovered they were Mormons, “Oh, I always wondered what that magnificent structure looks like up close.” I say to myself, Self, leave these passing curiosities alone. Now look, you have Mormonization on your schedule.

We arrive. I get a tour of the model of the temple, a miniature structure that sits inside the lobby of the office building across from the real thing. I say, I’m getting a raw deal here, can I get a tour of the real thing? I’m told, no, but you can go in there once you’ve become one of us. Do you have any questions? I say yes, plenty. I can’t help myself.

For almost two hours, my neighbors – quite a sweet elderly couple really, and two missionaries, take me to a room, show me a mediocre movie on family values, and get the proselytization process going. It was pure fun. All that Mormon testimony and all my counter-punches against absurd beliefs. They took it in good stride.

I say, all religions are irrational, except they have rational goals such as the earthly accumulation of power and wealth through membership recruitment, which Christians call “winning souls.” Your church, I say, which you of course believe is the real deal, is no different. All that you believe is in the realm of faith, and I cannot argue with it using logic. So I’ll just entertain it like I entertain the rest of other folk’s absurdities. As long as it does not cause harm to another human being or living thing, I don’t care what you believe.

At the core of Mormonism is the beauty of shared values that makes us all better people. I say, those values are universal and one doesn’t need a conversion to a Mormon Jesus, Catholic Jesus, Evangelical Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Lord Krishna… to find them. Then from out of the blues Miss Missionary tells me that God is a flesh and blood male living among us. Jesus too! That he goes shopping and passes gas. Ok, they didn’t exactly say that last part, but by all indications, the Mormon God farts. I say, but does it have to be a man? It would have been so functional if it was a woman. With massive tits towering above her head and curving out like the horns of a Matador’s bull, aimed straight at evil-doors so there’s no bullshitting with wars and all that hurtful stuff humans do to each other. People would just see the big tit horns coming from a distance and sound a warning to each other- hey, guys, She-God is coming! Quickly, throw Trump in a cave! You Boko-stupid-scumbags, return those Chibok girls! Someone go say sorry to Trayvon mama, and Freddie mama, and all black men mamas! Can y'all bastards stop bombing Aleppo and fix it for cri’sake! God Mama coming! But I didn’t say all that out loud like that.

I didn’t want my neighbors feeling too bad about their hard work bearing no fruit, being such nice folk and all. So I ask them, what are the benefits of signing up to these beliefs? I’m told, after this physical life, I get to go to the sun heaven. There are three levels, you see: star, moon and sun heavens. I say, wait a minute, there’s no hell for the unbeliever? No hell, they assure me. Said straight up- we Mormons don’t do that hell bullshit. O, I love your after-life much better than those fire and brimstone guys, I say. Such terrorism. So if I don’t get Mormonized, my after-life punishment will be getting thrown to the lowest level heaven where I get to float around among the stars. How cool is that. Mormons rule!

I’m given a card, in case I still want to join the no-hell church. I say, I’m not worried about my after-life. When I’m gone, I think I’ll be sap in the trees. I’d love that. Or the wind in the forest. Or one of the monarch butterflies. I don’t think I’ll need a mansion in heaven- all that maintenance and property tax, no. I also don’t care too much for streets of gold, because then I’ll have to wear shoes with suction pumps so I don’t slide, and dark glasses to keep off the glare. And that choir of angels singing endlessly, no no. I’d like some quiet in my after-life, some Stevie Wonder, Richard Bona and Miriam Makeba. Maroon Commandos too. And that Grammy award-winning Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Most of all, my grandma’s soft singing, “Andu iruwa jabuka, hata na andu jiswagha…” 

Sere

A Tale of Horror, Heart and Humanity

Whose body is this?

Leaving Nairobi on Thika highway

"They are going to kill us in Thika. Thika is far. I will need to be identified..." That's exactly what was going through my mind as the hijacked matatu sped down Thika highway at breakneck speed. I was working out logistics of my final moments, what would be needed post-disappearance.

I wanted to ask the skinny guy with the gun to my head to return just one form of identification - my passport or credit card - and place it in my jeans pocket. That way, after they had dumped our bodies, someone could identify mine and allow my husband some closure- whatever that means. Right this moment, I really needed assurance that I would be identified.

But I stayed silent. They had set the rules: one word out of anyone's mouth and you get shot right there and then. I knew they meant it. They were cold-blooded killers. I wasn't about to give him reason to pull the trigger.

The inefficiency of traffic police allowed the hijackers to drive as fast as they wished without fear. Memories of a time when matatu hijackings often ended with all passengers killed and dumped in maize plantations flashed across my mind. This happened enough times during the Moi era. You think things are bad now? You must not have been born during the one-party police-state dictatorship era of dungeons and disappearings. We survived that.

"Unaficha nini, eh?? (What are you hiding?)" Skinny-guy gunman next to me barked as I reached into my pockets to empty them, as per his own instructions. "I find you with anything and I'll blow your brains out right now." He so desperately wanted to pull that trigger. In a flash, his colleague behind him, equally drunk with the excitement of the moment, suddenly struck out and landed a steel-knuckled fist right on my cheekbone. The force was so strong I thought I was about to black out.

Some weeks later, I recall narrating to my young nephews how this guy hit me so hard, "twaaarf!" I had to snatch back my head from where it landed after flying off my neck. They laughed so hard. Times when tragedy takes on the mask of comedy, and laughter allows you a sliver of closure. I really didn't think I had any closure issues to deal with. Or did I? This hitting part of the story always got my adult listeners asking, why, why did he hit you?? I could write a whole book on the "why".

"Habari Mzee"

"Leo naskia kuua, haki tena!" Steel-knuckles behind me said. What on earth were these guys on? His friends, a gang of four all together, told him to quit his bad habit, that lately he'd been killing ovyo-ovyo, and that last time he killed without orders. Well, that established it. These guys were at work, and they were trying to establish best-practice.

"Give me that ring!" Skinny-guy yelped, trying to yank my wedding ring off my finger. It annoyed him that it wasn't coming off easy, as if it was my fault. The ring had lived on that finger going on nine years; it had a right to protest dislocation. The man pointed his gun to my finger, He was about to blow it off and free the ring. I closed my eyes and waited for the blast. I pulled my finger while he made a final yank. Pop, the ring came off. Small mercy. I would be identified with all my fingers intact. One day, I'll tell you about that ring.

The getaway driver, a mature man with enough gray hair to qualify him an African elder on a good day, steadily pushed the gas peddle to its limits, zooming past traffic while the night's drizzle danced its nightmarish patterns on the windshield. Were I to meet this thug driver the next day at the bank while he deposited stolen money, I would not remember his face, and I would greet him respectfully, "habari mzee" on account of his elderly look.

"Miguu juu! Yote, yote!" Skinny-guy screamed at me. He lifted my legs and forced my feet onto the little platform that projects behind the driver's seat. He wanted to make sure I was not hiding anything under the seats. Kenyan matatus have a quarter of the leg-room you find when you're flying economy class. They are made for nine passengers; they fit sixteen. My knees came up to my face so that my whole body formed a poorly twisted pretzel, my butt barely resting on the seat. The thugs had thrown the real driver one row back so that he now sat squeezed up next to me. With all the discomfort, my mind was alert to the moment, calm, just concerned about the lack of identification on my person.

My mind raced back to the moment I boarded that number 23 matatu at Odeon. I'd been in the country all of 2 months, having traveled to produce my latest play at the Kenya National Theatre. On this particular day, I had come from a rehearsal session at Kenyatta University, preparing my cast for opening night in about a week's time. My husband and I had taken some insane risks to get this production on stage. It was terribly lonely doing it without him around, and phenomenally unsettling to walk the tight unsecured rope of dream-weaving. Little did I know the rope was about to get even tighter and snap right beneath my feet.

You're far, far away

The matatu from KU had gotten to town late on account of the rains. I got off way-way downtown as the traffic was not moving, and started inching my way towards the city center. It was dark and raining harder. I got completely lost, ended up in a place in the outskirts of the city that I could not believe existed. Dingy street after dingy street, people e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e, thousands of them, in the pouring rain, walking about, laying on the pavement, darting eyes following you, a man jumped in my path to scare me and laughed his head off. I felt as if I'd fallen off the edge of Nairobi into a purgatory of grotesque human forgottens.

I walk-raced briskly, making sure I was a constant moving object. I clutched my back-pack tightly. It had my entire world. I took off my glasses as the rain on the lenses kept blinding me. It seemed to me I was walking endlessly, moving deeper into a Dante's Inferno. I darted into a store and asked for directions to Odeon.

"You're far, far away!" With the directions I got, I got back on to the dense forest of humanity and relentless rain, through the darkness, shady aisles, breathing in air thick with the night's dreadful awakenings. There was an entire city, unknown to the world, that arose in the night. Did you know that! You did not want to be found in it if you did not belong to it. It almost felt like eternity before I saw the familiar sight of Coast Bus station which guided me towards Odeon where I quickly jumped on to the first number 23 Nissan matatu I saw. I was on my way home! A man sat next to me. I relaxed, took out my phone, and sent a text to my husband.

me: honey, you best get down on your knees and thank your God your wife is safe in a matatu heading home

him: [after a while] ok i just did. what happened

me: had a horrible experience... it's about 9:30 right now

As the matatu left town and headed on towards Westlands, I texted on, narrating my walk through Dante's Inferno. Then I suddenly had this nagging feeling that this could be my last conversation with my husband. This is the truth. So I started doing goodbye-speak, telling him what he meant to me, that I loved him, and never you forget that...

him: hon, is everything alright?

me: yes, just a little shaken.

My eyes were glued to my phone as we started texting between two worlds. It was still daylight at home in Baltimore, and at home in Kenya, the last of late-night hard-working Kenyans raced home to rest. We texted on about the mundane- what came in the mail, the fall leaves that needed raking, his discovery of a new omelet recipe that he couldn't wait to make me, the wonderful rehearsal session in KU...

Squinting through chaos

Then suddenly, there was a whoosh. It wasn't a sound. It was the feeling of a dark force descending in a split second. Like being enveloped in a vacuum where not a ray of light or life existed. It lasted but a second, before awareness came in. This must be what evil looked like. So often in life, we touch that line between the physical world and the metaphysical other, but the experience passes so quickly that we do not capture it, we do not let it linger, we move on quickly back to the world of dense matter that is easier to grasp and explain. Back to the moment of sudden chaos.

I had no idea what just happened except that the matatu had pulled up and the man next to me was holding a gun to my head, three voices were commanding that nobody screams and commenced to harvesting all valuables. My phone was snatched mid-text. My bag and all the studio software with complete soundtracks, computer, camera with fresh video clips and photography, voice recorder, scripts, loads of documents I had painstakingly saved up over a period of two years, and all my back-up memory chips - gone.

That morning, I had taken a world of valuables I never carry with me. I had anticipated I would need to be well equipped for my KU session. I had also taken my credit cards and passport so I could facilitate production payments. The thug holding my bag could not believe his luck as he went through his loot. My eye-glasses were in there too. I squinted through the unfolding chaos as it dawned on me that I was in big trouble. I had a production opening in a week, and everything I needed to get it on stage was gone.

I was in pain, my head throbbing from the blow, my limbs numb from bad posture as we cruised through traffic. The whole vehicle with its nine passengers, all in different stages of shock and muffled terror, was quiet as death while the thugs discussed raping the women. They made jokes, asking the hijacked driver lewd questions about women. He trembled, clutching on to his unbundled mukorino turban that had been yanked off while they threw him off the driver's seat. Whatever religious identity that turban held, I suppose it felt both defiled and false, as if a non-existent deity had been unmasked. Times when God became a spectator.

The driver suddenly made an exit from Thika highway and got onto an unlit road that quickly became rugged. We bumped in and out of potholes, and I surrendered to the twisted discomfort of my body as a new normal.

Ruaraka Member of Parliament

"Shame on the MP for this area! He's the one we should kill!" Steel-knuckles barked. Now that was funny. I almost laughed out loud. The killers wanted good roads to ease the hardships of their job.

"Let's not follow the usual route. We get to base from the road further down." Their leader said. Their eyes could somehow do a quick scan in total darkness and decide what route was safe. They were creatures of the night.

As the vehicle made its way into the dingy backroads of an unknown neighborhood, I begun to see shacks similar to those in a slum. Cardboard shelters strewn here and there, and the population got a little thicker. I could see shadows, the wretched of society going about their daily business well into the night.

The matatu came to a stop, and the hijacker-driver ordered his men out. There would be no raping tonight, and no killing, at least not in this matatu. It had been a fruitful raid, all passengers had complied and kept the peace, no need to create inconveniences. They alighted, so that it seemed as if they were just passengers getting off a matatu. They blended in with the moving night figures of the hoi-polloi, no one knowing they were armed hijackers. From the open door, I saw a woman walking by with a big basket on her head, perhaps a hawker heading to her cardboard shack to feed her children.

The real driver got back to his seat and together we started finding our way out. No one knew where we were; we just wanted to get out of this hell. But the driver insisted he has to make a police report, and I agreed with him. After driving a distance trying to find our way out, we were guided to Ruaraka Police Station.

Making that police report turned out to be a lengthy ordeal and gave me a lot of thinking time. I had became aware of being surrounded by a different kind of existence, a world of struggle, squalor and social marginalization not too far away. I thought, if the slums are where the thugs come from, they still did not represent the oppressed proletariat; their occupation was not a protest against the immoral excesses of a capitalistic society.

They were not the disenfranchised youth doing a Robin Hood for their hungry families. They were not the struggling jobless citizens simply doing the only thing they could to survive. They were men who had made the conscience choice to become robbers, killers, cold-blooded terrorists of the night. No amount of poverty, bad politics or misfortune could stand as an excuse for one's inhumanity against another.

I have lived long enough to observe that there is a lot of noble struggle and triumph that rises daily from the lowest ranks of society, from those who refuse to wallow in victimhood and demand dignity through hard work, from the left-out who empower themselves through education and restless protest that awakens the spirit. The slums are also a boiling pot of unsung inventions, rebirths and quiet victories.

The others

My linear thought-track was momentarily derailed by the sound of sobs. I got to comforting a lady, one of the passengers, who couldn't stop crying. She was a student at University of Nairobi, lived alone. I started stitching together parchments of stories from the other passengers.

A young man, a student in Architecture, told me he lost all his homework and had no idea what he would tell his professor. Another had lost his medicine that he picked up from the pharmacy, and how was he going to afford it. A quiet fellow who escaped with his phone shared it with everyone who needed to make a call, the fading battery clinging on bravely until everyone had been served.

I asked the conductor what his story was, hoping he wasn't a part of it all. He looked lost, shaken, said he knew in his gut they shouldn't have done this last trip, now look. The lady who sat by the window next to me told me her day had started off with bad luck, woi-woi, and she broke down and wailed bitterly. There, there, I said, you came off with your life is all that matters. With each passenger, you could see a thin coating of anger begin to build up right above the swollen hollow of violent assault. With time, it could turn to bitterness or apathy or righteous outrage.

"Sir, what is your name?" I asked the police officer.

"Tuta," he replied. Inspector Tuta of Ruaraka Police Station was nonchalant. This was daily routine. He said the hijackings were common, no need to arrest them because they're always released anyway. He was like a waiter, wiping off the table after a meal. Sigh... the gangrened arm of the law. From the recesses of the grotesque, I did a double-take of Inspector Tuta's arm, just the off chance it could actually have gangrene. Insecurity was an epidemic Kenyans had mostly chosen to be silent about. May be if we called it Insecuritephalus-Kenyatosis...

It wasn't until 1 AM that we were leaving the police station.

Home

We got back in the matatu, and the driver dropped us off at our various stops. When I got home, I narrated my ordeal to my sister and my brother-in-law who were waiting on me, puzzled about my whereabouts. I asked for a phone to talk to my husband. It was evening in Baltimore.

"Hi love," I said

"Hi. You went to sleep?"

"No. I almost got killed..."

A few weeks later when he joined me in Kenya, he said to me, "That night, when you told me what happened to you, I lost my faith."

"Why?" I asked

"You asked me to get down on my knees and thank God that you were safely in a matatu heading home. I did. I got down on my knees and said thank you, God, for keeping my wife safe. And soon after, someone had a gun to your head. Tell me, what kind of God does that?"

"I don't know, honey." I too couldn't defend the God that we were putting on trial right then.

My husband got the sordid details, all else that I have left unsaid to the rest of the world. He's a man with an emotional IQ that goes far above the average guy and can handle depths of emotional detail. His presence was the soft rain upon my bruised mind.

"It's ok, baby. I'll find them."

I remembered that the next day after the ordeal, my sister had organized funds, chauffeured transport and medicine. And later, she had brought on my biggest audience. Love surrounded me. 

feb/14/2016

sere

What If

I've always marveled at a marathoner's staying power. Have you ever watched those Olympics marathoners? I watch them, especially the Kenyans and Ethiopians, how they start off on an easy trot, as if on a romantic jog in the park, their feet going, step-lift-jump, step-lift-jump, carrying a light body-frame round and round the tracks, overlapping those who cannot keep up, without ever changing rhythm, not a drop of sweat on their brow it seems. And just before they get to the finish line, they lurch forward with a sudden surge of power on their heels. Just like that, they win, and walk off the tracks as if they just came from visiting the next-door neighbor.

It's amazing, really is. An astonishing work of art. Seems so easy, until you take a pause and think about what got the marathoner to winning the race. Years of practice, defeat, frustration, getting up from a fall, and running again and again. It all started with the question, what if? A young lady sitting by the fireside with a bowl of porridge, tired of the humdrum in her life, knowing there must be more to existence, and while looking intensely at the burning embers, she feels a certain itch in her feet and goes, what if I ran? That simple what-if becomes the Olympic triumph of a villager.

You've probably answered to a certain itch yourself. What if... A dream you got to work on, daring to tell the world about it and got an audience to watch you as you built it. Then things didn't go too right. You ran out of bricks, got bruised building it, started slinking back into the lonely darkness of your struggles to face the frustrations, fear, defeat, rejection, and you decided to readjust the size of your dream, cut it in half so you can survive. Those who saw it thought it excellent, gave you applause, awarded you, but it was a far cry from what your mind had conceived, a mere drop of water where you had promised a full calabash. You still need to get back on track and finish it. It's never a one-shot deal.

At JKIA. After 4 months of a what-if, getting back to rebuilding

Life on earth is very short. In the blink of an eye, we're come and gone. We depart from this world in mid-step, mid-sentence, half-way through our marathons. No one ever says, “I have finished life, I'm ready to depart now.” We usually just keep on moving from one task to the other, hoping to live long enough to experience something spectacular. Departure is a certainty, and life as we know it is totally meaningless unless we imbue it with meaning. Let your slice of life on earth not run out before you give your what-if a shot. It's spectacular really, just daring to make a what-if become what-is.

Einstein asked, what if I moved at the speed of light and saw the unseen? Mother Teresa asked, what if I touched the untouchables and defied a religion? Gandhi asked, what if I became non-violent against an empire's army? Maathai asked, what if I spoke for the trees and stood up to brutish men? Jesus asked, what if I became the son of God and dined with outcasts? You can expand the list. They, ordinary people with feet of clay just like you and me, changed the world spectacularly. They had a marathoner's staying power and did not care when their lives would end.

What if I told a story true and gathered a nation to listen to it?

Sere

About Nerea's Baby

Flashback, 2-3 months ago. I'm in a matatu in Nairobi, and a beautiful song is blaring out through the speakers. The lyrics are quite a story. Guy is begging his ex-girlfriend, Neria, I think is her name- not to abort his child, because when God makes a child, he brings its plate with it. I burst out laughing, passengers think I'm schizo for sure. You know that's hogwash. No, love is not an issue; there's plenty of that. But you find the plate yourself to feed that child- work, beg, borrow, steal or hope “the village” raises it. Then if you're a person of faith, you thank God for doing it.

Has any country ever prospered without addressing its population issues? I think not. China did with its brutal one-child policy; European countries did, to the extent that some feel they now have an underpopulation problem; the US did, with its historical controversies still raging, re- Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood. Good or bad, they connected a child and its plate of food to policy.

The only mention of Africa in Obama's SOTU address was with regard to America feeding Africans, fighting AIDS, and eliminating Malaria. Stay with me; I'll post on good stories from Africa later- a thousand pages of it. Back to population and the economy. Kenyans like to say we don't have an overpopulation issue, because, look at how much land is still unoccupied. Overpopulation is not about square-foot per person, more like plate per person.

So imaginary Neria's baby will add to Kenya's population explosion, which no one is addressing as a matter of policy. I don't want her to abort it either, but that's a long debate for another day. Tackling population explosion will always be a sensitive issue, deeply personal, none-of-your-business stuff. But there's no plate of food that automatically drops from heaven with the birth of a child. You want to talk about the number of abandoned children in Kenya alone? Visit any odd police station in Nairobi and take a look at that massive poster displaying countless faces of abandoned children, with the caption- have you seen their parents? Abandoned, not stolen. Their plate of food may well be coming from America. Darn it, I await the day a sitting US President will mention Africa, prosperity, trade partner, all in the same sentence. Not food-plates and AIDS and Malaria.

I found that song! Nerea, by Sauti Sol. Enjoy it.

About Nerea's Baby: Part II

So it was brought to my attention that those lyrics to that beautiful song, Nerea, say that if God brings a child, he brings it in his own time. I checked them out. The Swahili lyrics provide both aural and linguistic ambiguity with the words “analeta saa ni yake”, easily heard as “analeta sahani yake”, because that's what makes sense to the mind. It's rather meaningless from standard Swahili point of view. Perhaps it's an attempt at poetic arrangement, or it's Sheng. Art being art, it makes room for both the composer's intended meaning and the consumer's interpretation or thematic deconstruction. Music is always first subject to aural interpretation, mis- or re-interpretation.

So, I'm thinking about this imaginary Nerea's unborn child again, and why its father wants it to escape an abortion. His reasoning, it could become the next Lupita, the next Obama... a long list of greats. Ok fine. Hey look,  I'm not for ending a life in gestation either, with exceptions. But it could become a serial killer too, or an abandoned baby.

That image of a massive poster with faces of abandoned children at Ruaraka Police Station, it's hard to get over it. I had enough time to stand there and peer into the faces of all those children ranging from 3 months to fifteen years. They represented only but a few of thousands of mothers across Kenya who abandon unwanted babies. Kenya went through an intense abortion debate during its Constitutional reform period. This debate should now extend to the formulation of policy and legislation on unwanted children- which includes the exploding number of street children.

So many times (I find myself addressing Kenyans here), we surrender our responsibility to think and when we make severe mistakes like having thousands of Nerea's babies ending up on an abandoned children's poster, we get all spiritual- God will provide a mother, a loving family, today's food, school fees, etc. Yeah, ask that 15 year-old boy still waiting on God's timing, having been abandoned at birth. Kenya's God must have one heck of a cynical sense of humor if we keep making him responsible for the birth, abandonment and street-raising of unwanted children.

So what's the solution? I said before, it's not easy addressing population issues. Effective national solutions will get emotional, ugly, even brutal. Every time I visit Kenya, usually after a year or two, I'm overwhelmed by the additional swarm of people in the cities and in rural Kenya. You have to be away to notice it. If we fail to do anything, nature acts. I remember in high school we learnt about the Malthusian theory in a Geography class. When a population overwhelms available resources, disasters (man-made or natural) will create an extermination factor and resolve the situation.

Valid theory or not, we have to do right by a generation before we conceive it, especially when we have the power of wiser choices, and the better mind to instruct or legislate. Aren't we tired of seeing the littering of cities and townships with children we treat like garbage. It's not God's timing that conceives them; it's ours.

Sere