On November 14th,
Kenyans in the diaspora woke up to the sweet sound of good news. One of us,
Mwende Mwinzi, had won a battle fought hard and tenaciously against sleek and
slippery cats of the political jungle that is Kenya. These were Members of
Parliament, some of them suspected to be dual citizens, who had determined that
Ms. Mwinzi must relinquish her American citizenship in order to serve as
Kenya’s envoy to South Korea.
What a slap in the face that
requirement was! But the courts found that this demand by the vetting committee
was not in line with the constitution. Mwende can be any one of us, except she has
worn her Kenyan patriotism on her forehead daringly, consistently and without
apology. Her resume and accomplishments for and in Kenya are a matter of public
record.
Like most diaspora Kenyans, she
has her own family in the US, and it is inhumane to ask any Kenyan to cut off
ties with family in order to serve. Her victory is ours too. It is an
acknowledgement that Kenyans everywhere deserve a chance to use their God-given
abilities to serve and thrive. It is a chance that we can pass on to
generations of Kenyans to come.
What does this victory mean for
diaspora Kenyans going forward? It gives us hope that the constant agitation we
raise against attempts at excluding fellow Kenyans from civic and leadership
participation is never in vain. It gives us hope that the yet unrealized battle
to implement diaspora voting rights for all Kenyans abroad is a victory
awaiting around the corner.
It reminds us that agitation
starts in the mind of just one unsettled soul that will not take an injustice
sitting down. Often, this sense of agitation is shared by many when the issue
is about the exclusion of a people. But when one stands up and refuses to be
shouted down as Mwende did, as Kenyans abroad did when we won the battle for
dual citizenship, others who understand this struggle join in.
If anyone wonders why Kenyans living
so far away keep fighting for civic inclusion and for opportunities to serve as
Kenyans and for Kenya, it is because exclusion is painful, especially when it
comes with contempt and deliberate machinations to keep you out. All
marginalized Kenyans will tell you exclusion is really painful, unfair and
unjust, and it’s upon us to ensure that the least of us becomes a part of us.
Only then can we begin to understand the idea of African nationhood.
For those who say that this
issue was about constitutional definitions of terms such as “state officer”, a
reminder that while the court ruling may have been about constitutional
semantics, the battle was about erasing discrimination. Beyond definitions of
who an envoy is as per the Constitution, this was about the human variable that
causes us to ask: Is this fair, is it humane, is it proper to snatch the
scalpel from the surgeon just because the law might say that surgeon should not
have been born in country X?
This victory is the continued
removal of discriminatory provision against worthy Kenyans no matter where they
live, where they were born or what other citizenship they hold. This victory is
also about evolving as a nation and boldly clutching on to the lessons of
growth where we make laws and policies that serve our best interests and our
humanity.
And because short history of diaspora
Kenyans proves we have never shied away from a battle larger than self, we are
looking to up the ante on the implementation of voting rights. It is not enough
that the constitution allows us to vote. The current situation is like getting
the rights to sleep in the warmth of your mother’s house but being denied the
key to enter that house. We hold sacrosanct the right and responsibility to
vote and understand fully the power of one vote. That day will come soon when
all Kenyans, no matter where they live, will matter, and will belong.
We got there and weren’t sure which of the two houses was the “last on your left” as per instructions we got. They both occupied that same curved stretch of bay at Cape St. Claire. We decided we weren’t going to come out of the car until we were absolutely sure of the house our friend had invited us to for lunch.
Let me explain.
When we were entering the town, we saw kids and their parents gathered at a sports event at a field. My husband asked me- You see anyone black? No, I said, scanning the lily-white crowd as we drove by at a crawling speed. No one around the rest of the neighborhood looked like us either. You get that way in America. You scan your belonging.
So by the time we got to the place of our invitation, our minds had reached that unspoken place of acute caution. We did not need to discuss it. We felt like deer in hunting season, tuned to every snap of a twig in the woods, heartbeats held down by guarded breath. We were a black couple in an all-white neighborhood. And we were not safe.
We knew that our sighting causes white folk heightened anxiety. It’s a very long and sordid story, America will tell you. This is October 2019, and I, an African in America, I found myself caught up in this psychosis of white melanophobia.
I clicked the lock to open the door and heard my husband’s voice snap with urgency- Honey, we’re staying put in this car!
He’s a black man, and he wasn’t taking chances. He asked me to text our friend and ask which one of the houses it was. It seemed the ghosts of Botham Jean, and Philando Castile, and Sandra Bland… were staring us in the face. They knew how a moment of pure innocence can turn fatal.
We sat and waited for our friend to text or call back, knowing that the longer we sat the more suspicious we looked. I said- Isn’t it disturbing, knowing that someone could be watching us from any one of those windows and calling 911 to report two strange black people… We’re both quiet.
I fill in the black silence, stretching the scenario- And the police come, and all hell breaks loose…
I stop talking. We both stare at that scene as it plays out in our minds. There’s need for comic relief. I say dramatically- There’d better be someone filming this! Preston laughs and takes his hands off the steering wheel, raising them high with equal flare for the dramatic to show the imaginary police he’s not carrying a weapon. I laugh hard, hollow, and stop. It hurts. There’s a wind in our ears. A chill the color of chalk.
Preston says- We’re going to drive out and look for the address while still in the safety of the car. I nod in agreement. We start to back out of the ungated and fenced-up driveway, and then I see the address we’re looking for. We’re relieved.
We look out and see our friend come out to the porch. I open the car door, fill my lungs with the ocean’s air and call out.
She waves with a big smile. She’s with a friend we had last seen at our wedding years back. They’re both the color of friendship. We’re safe. And we later tell them this story as we lounge around enjoying freshly baked cookies and coffee and welcome the cuddle-up chill of Fall together.
In Christian mythology, labor is a curse. A punishment to humans for disobedience. Deity curses the land so that men shall forever toil in difficulty until the day they die. It's a rather grim outlook on labor.
In some African mythology, labor is a gift. One of the Yoruba deities, Ogun, gifts humans with iron from which they make tools of labor. Blacksmiths, farmers, mechanics, surgeons... those who use iron tools, see their labor as divinely predetermined.
In Capitalist mythology, the laborer is a tool. It is meant to sharpen itself and labor to produce maximum profits until it is retired and discarded. Phrases like "cog in the wheel", "daily grind" and "race to the bottom" are derived from this outlook on labor.
"Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you..." - Book of Genesis. Too many laborers return home daily with the weight of sorrows on their shoulders and fulfill this curse. "I hate my job" is perhaps the most common phrase spoken in homes at the end of the day.
But it is not an unseen force beyond our control that makes our labor punitive. It is fellow humans who create oppressive systems of labor. The history of human labor proves that we often have to organize and mobilize against these labor systems that deplete human dignity.
The sweat of our brow, our mind's constant toiling, and the midnight hours of our soul's creative labor can and often do bring us immense joy and a sense of purpose when the conditions are just and fair. It's always in our power to change the mythology that doesn't work for us.
On this day of laborers, I hope we find time to redefine our labor so that it honors us, even if it comes with some measure of pain; fulfills us, even if we had little choice in determining what job to take; and reflects our worth as a human being; even if we are working for someone else.
Ogun Collection, by Jose Bedia, Cuban artist who depicted the god of war and iron; the Orisha of blacksmiths. Bedia also honored the metal workers from West Africa who built the railway in Cuba while enslaved.
When a generation of youth is blind to the sacrifices of the shoulders
they stand on, they become a boot on other shoulders and start a new cycle of
oppression. Back in 2015, I had many personal conversations with the youth of Kenya that left me numb. The collected layers of calloused tragedies from insecurity, hunger, poverty... had become their wretched norm. This is going to be a rip-off-the-bandaid reflection. No time to blow on your wounds. Bite on something.
Kenya has a massive population of youth, bigger than any time in
history. But they will not rise as a united force to support those who stand up
against their oppression. They are old enough to understand that this is a responsibility they cannot shirk.
But they are filled with fear, primal survival and
self-preservation. Kill or be killed. They flock to churches to share in the warmth of desperation and pray for miracles. They lament pitifully, sarcastically, laughingly.
They post nice pictures and pretend all is well. They surrender
to the intoxicating mtu-wetu syndrome one election cycle after another. Like a street child and his bottle of sniffing glue.
They become thugs in poor neighborhoods and steal and kill other
poor Kenyans. In the cities, they have perfected methods of manipulating,
maiming and robbing unsuspecting people.
They line up for new shiny things like Huduma Namba thrown at
them by the government like chaff thrown at chickens to keep them off the good
feed.
They scoff at the words "revolution" "fight"
"stand up"... because they feel judged for not answering to the
collective. They shout back with "You don't understand my
suffering..." Tell that to all those whose shoulders you stand on.
Praying for the country is NOT a revolutionary act unless
millions of you are gathering to pray against the oppressor.
But Kenyan oppressors join their oppressed at prayer rallies. "Tuombe!" They say. What an orgy.
You'd rather believe that a benevolent force beyond you put the oppressor in office and you had nothing to do with it. You have refused
to question this lazy, ruthless and illogical belief. So you become the boot of
oppression on your children's shoulders by consciously upholding and spiritually legitimizing oppressive forces.
The greatest minds that ever changed the world, including those
you have turned into gods and messiahs, were revolutionaries who refused to
comply with oppressive forces. Noncooperation is at the core of nonviolent
revolution. Revolutionary moral change is not about guns and goons.
Cooperation with governments that have sponsored killings,
disappearances, betrayals, sustained poverty, theft and hoarding is the farthest
thing from godliness. Fear and only fear keeps you waking up at the crack of
dawn to line up for the next shiny thing that a rogue government throws at you when all around you are the festering sores of a nation.
But for many, their attitude is - what do I care if those festering sores are not on my body? I'm an individual, not a people. Some say, “I’m doing just fine, better than
Americans, I’m thriving in Africa...”
For the nouveau riche, you need to shake off that comfortable individualism that makes you think you’re ok if you can just protect your
success with the tallest barbed wire, steel gate, electric edge, glass-shards top,
thick brick fence. There's no freedom where there are prison-like fences of middle-class trauma.
For the poor and oppressed, you need to shake off that
cowardly individualism that makes you think you can change things on your own
if you just pray hard enough, work hard enough, beg enough, manipulate
enough. Kenya is a population of 50 million manipulated by a paltry few because the majority have chosen the foolish and cowardly comforts of individualism and all its hidden trauma. Just remember, evolution is a heartless scalpel. It will scalp
off willful cowardice and reduce to unmemorable extinction those who refuse to
rise. If you must die, die with some dignity. Die with your fist up.
In one of the high schools I went to (those were the days one graduated from secondary school to high school), we were not allowed to speak Swahili. Only English.
The reason given was because since the language of instruction was English, and the national exams were set in English, we needed to get used to understanding English. Every Sunday the Christian girls held a loud service singing praise to Jesus and getting saved. But to tell you the truth, we needed Ngugi wa Thiong'o to save us from our colonized minds far more than we needed Jesus to save our souls.
If you were heard speaking Swahili, you would be handed a disk which you would wear around your neck until you passed it on to the next Swahili-speaking victim. At the end of the day, all those who had touched the disk would be punished. You did not want to be the last one with it because you would be punished the next day too until you passed it on.
So one day... eh? I tell you, I have no idea how it happened. I spoke Swahili. Mimi! As far as the Queen's language is concerned, I had maringo mingi sana in that particular school. Kwanza I had come from a Nairobi school, so there. Fake Us-guys airs.
Then I enjoyed twisting that Queen's language in my tongue from daybreak to light-out as if I was being paid per word. Uncommon words that I discovered in Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, Anand's Coolie, Shakespeare's King Lear... were retained in my head like a shoal of fish caught by a diction net. When I spoke them, I was simply enjoying my catch of the day. I never feared that disk.
Until this one day- pap! The damn disk was slapped on me. I was marked. Like Hester Prynne and her scarlet letter. So I went hunting for a Swahili-speaking criminal to dispose of the disk. It was hard! But no way I was going to bed with this thing.
Then I saw these two girls in deep conversation, just the kind of intensity that could not be communicated in a third language. I could smell Swahili! When they saw me approach, they went quiet. But one of the girls just needed to say something to me. She knew me. Seeing me wearing that disk deserved a fitting comment. She should have laughed at me and let it go. But nooo!
A snide remark was burning her up but her mind refused to translate it to English. She blurted it out with complete uswahili -- a waving of the hand with its middle finger arched forward just so -- "Haaa! Today is today, if you say tomorrow you are chitngi!" Pap! I slapped that disk on her right away.
She protested angrily, still struggling to balance between her mind thinking in Swahili and her tongue being forced to speak in English. "Hee! I didi noti!... I didin'ti noti!"
I argued back, "You did, you did! You said Chitngi!"
She wasn't having it. She shouted back, "Aa youuu! Chitngi izi an Englishi word sure!"
I wasn't keeping that disk. I fought back., "No! The word is Cheating!"
She was trying to say something you just cannot translate to English: "Leo ni leo, msema kesho ni mwongo" (direct translation, "Today is today, if you say tomorrow you lie..." or as the Brits taught us, "...you cheat"). She was trying to say that today was my day, and if I ever thought tomorrow would never come for me, well, here it was. I was at last a criminal for speaking Kiswahili just like the rest. She clicked her tongue and took the disk in defeat.
*This blog is a personal account of the past, an exorcism of sorts, and does not seek to target any specific individuals.
Power:
They were only 16, give or take a year. But so powerful were
they their mere appearance caused dread in girls no matter what we were doing. You
could be sitting quietly during study hour and see a red sweater pass by from
the corner of your eyes and your blood pressure suddenly rises. Most of us have
forgotten that dread, but the effect of bizarre, unfair and extreme punishments
remains, like an old scar that has created a limp in our personalities.
They carried around power like a hammer that was too heavy
for their untrained muscles to carry. So it often came down and smashed the
fingers of those they felt needed to be punished. They did not mean to be
cruel. They were only 16. They were just being true to the duty of prefecthood
that had been placed on their small child shoulders. They were used by an
administration that somehow thought cruelty shaped character.
The prefects were the victims of adults who never taught
them the nature of power. They were only 16, and that was too heavy a burden to
place on a child without proper training. It is not fair, because no child at
the age of 16 should be given a chance to test out the drunken joys of unhinged
power. Some turned sour and punished their way out of their own pain. There are
many adults in power right now who are clueless about how to handle power, and
they wreak havoc on citizens every time. How on earth were 16 year-olds
expected to know?
Punishments:
They had girls kneel on hot tarmac cooked to a boiling point
by the tropical sun, their hands raised up as the punishing prefect kept a hawk
eye on them, daring them to drop their hands. They had girls sort sacks of rice
for endless hours, their eyes getting into a blurry pain as they flicked
through grain after grain like sorting out sand on the sea shore, removing tiny
black stones so that it felt as if the mind was drowning, backs broken from the
pain of bending over a sea of rice at the end of the day.
They put girls out in the field to clean a long drainage all
day long on empty stomachs, and forced to redo the punishment if the inspecting
prefect so much as saw a smudge of imperfection. They forced some girls to travel
back to school during holidays to do punishment for a whole day, no matter how
far you lived, failure to which you were punished for five consecutive days when
you got back to school, and you missed all the classes for those days.
I did all this, even the holiday punishment part. My dad
asked me, “Why do you have ‘Holiday Punishment’ marked on your report form?” I
said: “A prefect crossed me.” I had challenged a prefect and her ego had caused
her to give me maximum booking. Minus 50. Dad said, “You mean she crossed this
way and you crossed the other way?” I knew right there and then that my dad was
secretly always on my side. He made it funny and it lifted the weight of being
a disappointment off my mind. He wasn’t going to get me on a
bus 7 hours to Nairobi to do punishment for crossing a prefect. I ended up
doing five days of slashing grass when I returned to school. My desk mate took
notes for me for all those days.
I could handle being punished, zap it off with a joke. I
couldn’t handle seeing my sisters being victims of overzealous prefects and
cold administrative power. We were three sisters in the same school. I had seen
my big sister cry over being unfairly punished, and to me there wasn't a more
conscientious human that her. I had seen my other sister sick with malaria for
days in the hostel, neglected without doctor's care. I remember how angry I felt
when I learnt that one girl had chipped her tooth and quickly been whisked home
for special care because the deputy Headmistress was her relative. Meanwhile,
my sister lay sick in bed for days. Of course it wasn’t the chipped-tooth girl’s
fault.
Looking back, that was a great deal of anger to bottle in
for a child. I carried those sorrows with me like an open wound in my chest. I
was only 15. Since my first protest at the age of 10 over black kids being
forced to drink all milk that Indian kids did not want – that was in Aga Khan
Primary School in Mombasa – I knew I internalized injustices easily. I had
taken all my “maziwa ya nyayo” packets and poured them down the sink in the
hallway, all the time hoping the teacher will see what I was doing and confront
me. She never noticed. It’s not that I didn’t need the milk, but that I hated
the obvious discrimination. Indian kids were the “whites” in our black lives.
One of the best experiences of Precious Blood was the administration’s deliberate
creation of material equality while in school. We never knew or cared who was
rich or poor. Traditional bullying was non-existent. The excessive punishments
by prefects were a product of untrained power.
Surviving:
When I was barely 14 and in Form 2, the deputy Headmistress
told me I was provocative, a word I first learnt from her. When I was in Form
3, I was suspended for sneaking out to buy a pack of Marie biscuits. A prefect
had spotted me that early morning down at the gate and sounded the alarm,
leading to a sudden stampede by other prefects hunting me down like hound dogs hot on the heels of an escaped criminal. When I was in my final year, the
Headmistress, a German nun, summoned me and told me my graduation testimonial
will not be good. I have never picked up that document, good thing she warned
me.
I also came to the brink of leading a strike when I stood at
the window of the school's top-floor hostel rooms and shouted my voice hoarse
over the Nazi-style running of the school. As I spoke, some girls gathered down
below and listened, and I felt a strange kind of power. The story made it to other
schools, I don’t know how. I know this because years later a Starehe Boys alum
said to me, “I heard about you! You led a strike!” I wish I had, I said.
I was tired and angry over seeing students faint so regularly.
Acute stomach ulcers became a common ailment. The stress was overwhelming. We
were vessels being seared in the furnace of cruel academia so we could get As.
Sure enough, the school was always right at the top in academic ranking. What
parent wouldn’t want their kid going to this exclusive school! I think I did
not catch the fainting and ulcers like so many girls did because I didn’t
bottle up the stress. I resisted, I complained, and I developed a wicked sense
of survival humor.
Heads held low:
One day, a prefect who had graduated came by to visit no one
in particular. She was idle and I suppose missed the school. But she was
powerless, and I think unprepared for the feeling of being a nobody. She had
been one of the mean ones. I noticed how she constantly looked down. When she had
power, it had not fazed her that she was disliked. But they weren’t all
power-drunk. In fact, I hardly remember the prefects from our senior year. Mostly,
I remember the ones from when I was in Form 2 and 3. I remember the one who
said to me, “Who do you think you are, the queen of Sheba?” I swear she said
that! I was so tickled. I must have confronted her.
When we got to senior year, Form 4, the prefects were my
classmates. Either they were uninterested in the games of power or I had become
too immune to their ways by then. Or perhaps they punished the lower classes
more. I don’t know. Some, I remember clearly, did not reflect the dark nature
of wanton power; they remained friendly. They breezed through that heavy
responsibility of prefecthood with a quiet discomfort. Years after graduating
high school, I ran into another mean one at the airport. She had been a class ahead of me. I’ll
never forget how she looked down, just like the one who had come to visit.
Ashamed. Power had scarred them too.
Excelling:
Fast-forward. Most of these girls have done phenomenally
well, in spite of Precious Blood. Getting A’s gave many the advantage of
climbing a very steep Kenyan academic ladder. But I think resilience,
discipline (yes, the school can take some credit for making us perfectionists)
and a sense of competitiveness that came with simply having attended a certain
school, gave us the drive to become who we are. We have bonded, even with some
of the prefects.
Years bring wisdom and maturity. But so much else remains.
That emotional limp that never goes away. Memory about neglect and overreach
that should never have happened, some that destroyed lives. Only recently, I've heard one of the teachers has been
offering profuse apology for his role in gleeful torture-discipline of the
girls. I don't know if this is true, but it's enough relief to imagine it being
true. Years bring awakening to those who have a heart.
Perhaps in my next blog on Precious Blood chronicles I shall
talk of the music we made, the food we shared on parents’ day, the hockey games
we won and celebrated through the night, the depth of sisterhoods we built, and
all the old jokes that still floor me with punch-drunk laughter whenever I sit
down with an old friend. We were only 16.
Precious Blood's music program can be traced back to a revolutionary nun called Sr. Mary Dominica (later left the convent and reverted to her name, Catherine Belmore), who first got us into the music competition, taught us how to play the guitar, clarinet and melodica, then in her own way, fought to change the stressful way the school was run. She suffered for it and quit.
One day, my mother pulled me out of school. Just for a day. I
was 17. It had occurred to her that I needed to be given a rite of
passage. That rite turned out to be an Anglican one. The Church of
England had erased our cultures and bequeathed us theirs. Yeah, some aspects of some rites needed to go but we threw away the baby with the bathwater. I was an African child born into an Anglican identity. A thing like
that. One day we will talk about life as a hybrid creature.
So my mother sent one of my aunts to come to school and get me
home. "You are to be confirmed today," my aunt said. "Oh?"
I said. This will be interesting. I had not done the learning that qualified
one for this rite.
When I got home, my mother showed me a white dress I was to
wear. I loved it. It was new and it fit perfectly. It also awakened in me my unknown
attraction to ritual drama and its therapeutic powers. My godmother was there with the gift of a tote bag
decorated with big beautiful flowers.
In its years of existence, I had gone on to love that bag until
it melted away, literally, because it was made of plastic material and years
later someone had accidentally placed it too close to an iron.I had taken it to the fundi for mending and he sewed on a mismatched plastic patch where the big hole had formed. But that poor bag was never the same. Something was stolen from it, and the replacement made it dysfunctional, the stitches never quite holding it together. Things die strange
deaths.
A goat had been slaughtered and chickens dispatched to poultry
heaven. The soil had soaked in the sacrificial blood of these animals and the
ancestors grudgingly accepted the shift in customs.
The compound was coming alive with festivities and before long,
we would all be trooping back from church and I would be the center of
attention. Had I been older and wiser, I would have requested for mwazindika drummers and their healing drums that sent old ladies into a trance when the boom of the beat was just so.
For that one day, the world would revolve around me. I have
never forgotten just how special that felt. You carry this gift of love in you
forever. That's how my mother had planned it.
In my mind, I figured my mother had pulled off a mafia move with
the church authorities. I could see her whispering to Don Corleone to tell the
Padre to tell the Bishop that I needed to be part of those to be celebrated on
the special day the Bishop was visiting the village.
I could see Don Corleone hesitate and ask, "Has she taken
her Confirmation classes? The Padre will not like that."
I could see my mother not entertaining any questions, "The
child is ready. Tell the Padre she will be celebrated."
I could see Don Corleone go, "I'm gonna make him an offer
he can't refuse." And just like that, my name was on the list.
Heck I don't know how my mother pulled it off, but she did. She
knew the Bishop would not be visiting that village in perhaps another ten
years. He would be coming to lay hands on a cohort of young people that had
completed their Confirmation classes and could satisfactorily recite the Ten
Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, the Creed and other required Anglican chants.
Me? I'd have failed that test miserably and been denied the
opportunity to have the Bishop place his hand on my head and declare me
officially confirmed as a wiser human ready to bear the responsibility of being
a moral being.
As a newly minted Anglican adult, this also now meant I could
legitimately eat the body of Jesus and drink his blood too and it wouldn't choke me.. oh,
wait, the chocking part is Catholic. They come up with the strangest things these
religions.
All I'm saying is, thanks to my mother, I got rigged in to the
gift of passage that brought a whole village together to celebrate me. She knew
I didn't need to go through that curriculum. I suppose I already had morality
knit into my conscience. To love my neighbor, to do unto others, and to make up
stories.
I got into a bit of a tiff with three young ticketing officials
at the Voi SGR train station over legitimate tickets that needed name-change to
indicate the travelers, not the buyer. They said the only solution acceptable
by the system was to cancel them, get fined for it, and take a 50-50 to zero
chance that we will get new tickets for the same day we needed to travel to Nairobi and take our
flight. Unacceptable. I knew they could resolve it if they dared. Let me tell you. If you are a Kenyan who travels to Kenya and fails to seize opportunity and deeply interact with its Generation Z, you do not do yourself any favor. This is the population that is beginning to own Kenya, as the working force, as the hustling majority, as the very near-future decision makers, fresh out of high school or college.
So we challenged the three ticketing officials to become conscious decision-makers who rise
up to solve human problems, and not merely act as cogs in the system's wheel. I
told them they owned that country and all its wealth and that they had the
brainpower to fix any challenge with integrity, without fear. I told them I've led organizations before and I've learnt the power of my position as a problem solver called upon to affect human lives, even just one. "My hands are tied" is a cop-out, a laziness of the mind when you know you're dealing with an honest situation. They were
frustrated with me and my sister because we simply wouldn't walk away without
them resolving the issue.
While we watched, one official had also made an innocent passenger pay
20% fine for the computer's mistake in printing the wrong date on his ticket. The system was set up to force them to reach into a poor Kenyan's pocket and demand
20% of ticket-cost for even mistakes made by SGR officials and computers. I
was pissed off by how easily the passenger accepted the punishment for
something the official admitted was the computer's fault. "Oh, it did not refresh. Give me 200/- for that mistake." She said so casually. And the guy forked out the money. I said, "That's just wrong!"
Meanwhile, a Chinese official had come in and sat quietly
listening to all this racus from one of the booths. It was also for his ears that we
spoke authoritatively.
After an hour, our indignation and lecturing finally led to the
lady taking up our challenge and resolving our ticketing issue. For that
moment, she became a leader, not a cog in a system that tells her to punish an
honest customer. She had kept her cool while her two male colleagues got their
egos hurt and walked out. If she cursed me under her breath for forcing her
mind through a paradigm shift, she didn't show it. She just kept a nondescript
smile.
When one of the ego-tripping guys came back, I told him his
female colleague deserves a promotion. Her name is Karen.
Later on, I had a rich conversation with another Generation Z
young cabbie who took us to the airport. Kinyanjui. He had fought really hard
to win our business when we told him he was no competition against Uber cabbies
who would charge us half his fee. I liked his hustle and his attitude and I
took him on. He took us to Naivas so we could get our Kenyan coffee and tea and
roico for survival in exile. We talked business, politics, handshake, etc.
In all this, I felt the invisible weight of the country on these
young shoulders. A massive amount of debt forced on them would soon be breaking
their backs, souring their dreams, crumbling their efforts, making them wonder
why it was so difficult to survive through honest labor in a country bustling
with new impressive infrastructure.
The current leadership has signed them up for economic slavery
through noose-tying Chinese deals and mind-boggling institutional corruption
that leaves these kids responsible for paying off stolen money. Life has taught
me some tough lessons. I've had big debt before, fully paid off some, still
have some-- college loans, hospital bills... But I've worked out a
peace-of-mind relationship with these responsibilities mainly because I own
them and no one else.
I've deliberately kept my husband's name off of any school loans
as guarantor because I would never tie that noose around a loved one's neck. I
couldn't sleep at night if I did. Of course kids can use their parents as
guarantors because they fall under their parent's responsibility. But how did a
bunch of greedy adults get to use their children as guarantors to pay off
future debts after those adults are long gone?
How did Kenya get to a place where a bunch of politicians tied
that noose of debt around an entire generation's necks? I know they can turn
things around, if they choose to rise up to the challenge of fearlessly
breaking brutal systems and reclaim their country.
Ernest Kinyanjui, the ambitious Nairobi cabbie with big dreams. His generation deserves better.
Willpower is overrated. I’ve heard about people going cold
turkey on bad habits - too much smoking, cracking knuckles, alcohol,gnashing
teeth, biting your lip, etc. “Yeah! I woke up one morning and decided enough! And
from that day on I never touched another cigarette!” I don’t know about that. I
just don’t believe in superpowers. But I believe in powerful and persistent intention
subconsciously leading to realization. If you train your mind to want
something, believe in it, try it over and over again, one day you will achieve
it “cold turkey”. For me, I was consuming an inordinate amount of cane sugar in my tea. Sackfulls. Boatloads. I knew if I didn't do something about it I'd probably join the long list of those making big pharma very rich on my meagre resources. But my willpower had failed me too many times.
Quitting
So by the time I decided to try quitting on sugar consumption
in my tea, it was almost just to humor myself because I'd given up trying. I had just watched that TED talk
on the 30-day challenge where you try to change a habit by doing something for
30 days. I got my cup, wrote “Sugar-free zone” on it, and used it as a visual
reminder to stick to my challenge (that trick was not on the talk). I posted it on Facebook as my contract with the
universe.
Day one of sugarless tea was nasty. So was day two, and
three... By Day 10, I knew I wasn’t cut out for this sugarless shit. I needed my
fix. That was also the day I read about the sugar poisoning in Kenya. Some political
mafia had imported tons of sugar not meant for human consumption and released
it to the market.
The Sugar Mafia
Behind every addictive personal habit, there's a shadowy mafia reaping big from your weakness. An inquiry was launched by the government, and the report that came out was also
contaminated with bribery, sugar baron names missing from it, and total
acrimony in parliament. The issue died there. Kenya’s parliament is a
graveyard, not a birthplace of a people’s aspirations. Calls to boycott sugar
consumptions were met with a profuse production of funny memes by Kenya’s
social media. The very people who were victims thought the whole issue was
funny. It's what people who get schlonged by the system over and over again do.
The Spell of Tenga
It was on the day I read about that sugargate that I decided
I was going to finish this sugar-free race. This was proof that when you sign a
contract with the universe and make it public She will throw you a lifeline at
your weakest moment and bid you finish your race. 30 days was nothing. I merged
my personal challenge with a national quest for justice, and I didn’t care who
was or was not boycotting. I was under the spell of Tenga, the Mossi people's goddess of justice. I posted my boycott and dared to look silly. I was
all the way in the US, far from ground zero of Kenya’s sugar contamination war.
Winning the Saccharide War
By the time Day 30 came around, my taste buds were adjusting
very well. I decided since I had done very well, I was going to reward myself
with a replacement for sugar after the completion of the challenge. I started
taking tea with honey. Science told me the metabolism of honey, a monosaccharide, is different from that of sugar, a disaccharide. Knowing my digestive system issues,
I knew there were benefits to be reaped from that mono guy. I also knew I wasn’t
necessarily changing the eventual saccharide content in my body by doing honey. Making it easier for my small intestines to absorb the sugars was apparently the only gain, and a very good one too because we don't want to talk about leaky gut syndrome. Oh, I also got a little bit more nutrients from raw honey.
Then a wonderful thing happened. About two months
down the line, I ran out of honey, and my tea has tasted just fine without it since then. My
taste buds had come full-circle into a joyful saccharide-free zone. I get plenty of my necessary sugars from other food sources.
Chance
Of course I’m healthier for it. This journey has
improved the quality of my life because my body has been thanking me. It was personal. As for
longevity, that’s not for me to worry about because the way human existence is
configured, chance lords over us all.
“I returned, and saw under the sun,
that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet
bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men
of skill; but time and chance happens to them all” – the bible, Ecc 9:11
Let’s just say it’s agreed that healthy living often has
longevity as a side effect. I’ll take that side effect if I experience it. More
than anything, I’ll take the high that comes with winning small personal
victories. Hurry up 2019, I’m dying to meet you because you and I have life to
live!
A painting of Tenga, earth Goddess, by Zonagirl. "Tenga’s themes are balance, justice, morality and freedom. Her symbols are soil. Among the Mossi of Senegal, Tenga presides over all matters of justice and morality."
One day, true story, the toilets in the senior dorm broke. This was in one of the high schools I went to. A school that turned out to be a perfect fit for my mind.
It had no fence and no prefects and had the most beautiful view of fog cascading down the hills every morning right in front of our classroom. I thrived there.
Until one day shit literally hit the floor. The decades-old toilets in our dorm blocked and overflowed. The stench was unbearable. The Headmistress decided rather than overhaul the backed-up sewage system, they would have the students scoop the shit everyday.
There was a revolt, and girls went bang-bang on their desks. The administration came down hard and told us whoever does not comply with the shit-scooping fix will be suspended. That did it. Everyone went back to class and agreed to become shit-scoopers.
Except two of us. Maureen and I stood our ground, and we were summoned for interrogation and pending suspension. Facing the Headmistress in her office gave me an adrenaline high. I spoke with all the dare God ever gave me and said how wrong it was that the school is not fixing the toilets. I don't know what Maureen said, all I know was that we were not suspended, and the school agreed to fix the toilets "very soon."
Between then and "very soon", girls still had to take turns to clean the overflow of slimy goo, lumpy feculence, greenish-yellowish stench and rivulets of urine. Has it disgusted you enough? They had to look at it to clean it, and they had to scoop it all with buckets and without gloves. The toilets could not be shut because there was nowhere else to go to the bathroom at night. You cannot escape the system; you have to fix it.
Two things happened: One, the girls in that dorm honored the two of us rebels and gave us special beds next to the front door and farthest from the toilets. These were singles, not bunk beds. Two, the same girls exempted us from cleaning the overflowing feces. I suppose they felt if we were ready to take the suspension bullet for them, we were good for the honor.
But what I'll never forget was the humor with which one girl did her shit-scooping duty. She laughed and made rib-cracking jokes as she carried that bucket all the way to a pit outside. It was her way of getting through it. A very Kenyan way.
Kenyans laugh too soon. We laugh through shit we've been forced to carry. We carricarture the stench with rib-cracking memes that we share widely. We get sick from handling buckets of shitty maggots wiggling through every shitty situation. The middle-class carry the shit-buckets too-- loads of debt, expectations, keeping up appearances, getting robbed...
We wait for the next toilet-blockage so we can accept it and make new jokes all over again, which is just about every other day. Kenyans ease the tension too soon, and the value of tension gets lost. Tension creates energy, and energy diverted into a just cause gets things done.
But we surrender tension too soon because we think it wrong to show anger. We're embarrassed by the sight of those who express that tension - the activists - and we call them losers. Yet they are the ones who force systems to change. Carrying shit-buckets becomes normal for those who choose a civilized don't-get-angry response to tension.
I've been following the Pumwani saga, and I said-- there goes the civilized shit-scoopers who've been working tirelessly to make a long-ago broken situation work, and now they're being fired. And as sure as the sun rises, there will be rib-cracking memes on Pumwani Maternity. Its dead babies and dead mothers will continue getting scooped off the tables three times a week until Kenyans forget and move on to the next jokes-worthy tragedy.
Chris Ofili's feces-adorned "The Holy Virgin Mary", sold for $4.6 million. My take of this art that offended many prudes: There is sanctity in our shittiest tragedies that stare at us defiantly, in all their ugliness, daring us to clean them up.
I was reminded that the 20th anniversary of the bomb attack in Kenya and Tanzania just went by. August 7th. Perhaps with very low-key commemoration. I saw an article in the Washington Post about Godec (US Ambassador to Kenya) saying the terrorists wanted to divide Kenya and US good relationship. Gobbledygook. That attack had nothing to do with Kenya.
It was a foreign war brought to African soil. Kenyans had no inkling on the rising tide of global terrorism. Local terrorism was a completely different animal — shiftas, cattle rustling and all. On August 7th 1998, Kenyans were going about minding their own business as they should, and suddenly, 213 of them and 11 in Tanzania were killed. A bomb blew up American embassies in both countries
Why was an American war being fought in countries thousands of miles away from America anyway? Easy answer to that can be found in history where powerful countries have the privilege of fighting their wars on other people’s soil.
It’s easier for a weaker enemy to target a superpower’s presence in less-secure countries, and many times, America itself has taken its wars to weaker countries. It’s like having dinner in your own home and going to shit in someone else’s bathroom because you don’t want the stink in your house.
All of Cold War between the US and then USSR was fought in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Citizens of countries like Mozambique who had no business taking up arms against each other in the name of Communism vs Capitalism went at it and slaughtered the daylights out of each other for years.
Ronald Reagan beefed up the war chests of mad butchers like Liberia's Samuel Doe to avoid a rise in communist opposition. Humble peace-loving Jimmy Carter fueled the brutal Somoza dynasty of Nicaragua. Five US presidents led a massacre of countless Vietnamese in a senseless anti-communism war. Meanwhile America thrived.
The Cold War was replaced by gwot (global war on terror), a well-orchestrated war machine that is still chugging along profitably. Unfortunately for the US, the gwot came with one of its most puzzling shockers- the use of American soil as a battleground on 9/11. Whether you take the conspiracy or no-conspiracy versions, that attack remains mindboggling and leaves American intelligence who dismissed obvious warnings with blood on their hands.
Remember by the time 9/11 came along Kenya and Tanzania had been tested as possible battlefields for gwot, an experiment that almost failed but later gained a measure of success very slowly, thanks to the ease of raising local proxy enemies through neighboring Somalia (enter Al Shabaab). Some devastating blows were dealt on innocent Kenyans, the worst being the slaughter of 148 University students in Garissa.
Kenya's current president gulped the kool aid on gwot like a champ. He waxed lyrical about our valiant troops in Somalia (who were either being used for racketeering in the charcoal and sugar trade or getting slaughtered). Kenya was outsmarted by Tanzania. The land of Mwalimu would have none of that send-our-troops to fight a proxy war they have no business fighting.
Meanwhile, America and all its power quickly diverted their 9/11 to Iraq and Afghanistan where hundreds of thousands of Middle-Easterners, and American troops (always the sacrificial pawns) died. Meanwhile astronomical profits were made by the US corporatocracy. Gosh, the money they've made.
Remember the famous words of General Smedley Butler: "War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives."
So, after being tested as a battleground for a new type of war profiteering and losing over 200 citizens, Kenya’s innocent victims are still fighting for compensation through US Congress. Just to remind you, the same Congress made compensation a priority for its citizens caught in the gwot attacks anywhere in the world.
Had the dead and maimed Kenyans been Americans, they would have been cushioned by very necessary, deserved and available financial compensation. Ask them about their lives now, how they’ve struggled to make ends meet, loss of jobs, limbs, eyes, minds.
For the rest of Kenyans, victims of any violence are often too quickly discarded into a gaping void of willful disremember. We tell them "kaa ngumu!" That's on us. America made sure the world never forgets 9/11. The world does not remember 8/7.
