ANIMISM AND THE GREEN AGENDA

 

"Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children." Ancient Indian Proverb

The Mau imbroglio is for me a primal cry for a return to the old ways. A native call by the land for due reverence. And the most authentic shout for a return to our animistic values.

Our environment is more than what surrounds us. It is what structures life from its beginnings. It is alive, and is an integral part of the rhythm of existence. The black African therefore, a fanatically religious animal, sought always a oneness with nature pursuant of the equilibrium which to him shaped future good or evil. The African’s mindset was foremost animist in that he believed in the spiritual idea of souls existing not only in humans but inhabiting natural objects as well. His first thoughts were to appease and placate these beings. It is this that makes him so rabidly pious. He could not cut a tree or kill an animal without offsetting this disequilibrium with a sacrifice. Allowing for a reclaiming of the natural state. Here, the spirits controlled the flow of life.

 

The environment, possessing totemic importance could not conceivably be altered; humans couldn’t be separated from the land. ” The American Indian is of  the soil, whether it be in the region of forests, plains,pueblos, or mesas. He fits into the landscape, for the hand s that fashioned the continent also fashioned the man for his surroundings”

After the romanticism of self-rule and independence waned, came the cult of urbanization and modernity which radically overturned our conceptions about our surroundings. Colonization is perhaps the single greatest upset to a people’s way of life. Our colonial masters forced their materialism on us. Of course it was prettily called enlightenment back then. They came with a new world view, and those who aspired to live in this world had to shift from the values that morphed their cultural identities. First was the discarding of the hazy notions towards land. It had to be viewed simply and solely as a factor of production. It could be modified even to irreversible extremes, exploited for resource. This all culminated to a lack of direct touch. Sacrificed at the alter of white imperialism were the old ways, the spirits, the notions of balance and our moral consciousness. And with the advent of Christianity came a very biased reading of the ‘subdue and conquer the earth’ scripture.

 

It is not enough to plant a few trees, pass resolutions and draw up action plans. Nature, per Francis Bacon, to be commanded must be obeyed. She understands her ways better than us. And she’ll give as good as she gets.

 

After independence we could not fully comprehend imported goals; the newly acquired zeal for rectangular houses instead of circular huts, for cognac and cigars instead of locals brew and the hunt…we were on the verge of  the ‘good life’ and there was a forgivable greedy rush to have it all. These are, par Zola, ‘the convulsions that accompany the birth of a new world’.

We too wanted to conquer.

 

The first and logical thought that strikes any tea drinking Kenyan (Coffee is so terribly nouveau riche here) when they see the carrion and carcass of cattle on T.V during the droughts is: Why don’t they just grill the damn cows! The Kenyan love for roast beef, a tad fanatical, might dim understanding. Perhaps it is too much to ask one to comprehend a people’s way of life.

‘A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.’ And maybe livelihood transcends belief because belief is accompanied by conviction. A livelihood entails customs, age old- following blindly without conviction.

It entails cows.

 

And the sustenance of this livelihood requires the adoption of traditional views, the incorporation of the Shamanism of animism.

Beyond the doomsday incentive of global warming and melting polar ice, rising water levels, cataclysmic shifts in weather patterns: beyond the momentary fad of ‘Inconvenient Truths’, the geopolitical power plays over an unsigned Kyoto and the horror of a Samburu child feeding on poisonous berries to soothe hunger pangs, shouldn’t’ we try to save the planet for the simple reason that, it is the right thing to do. At this rate the only thing.

 

GAY IS COMING TO TOWN: coming out in Africa

 

 

So it’s time things got awkward, or at least controversial. Man-love. And before I put my foot in it any further, I want to state, unequivocally, that I love all of God’s children. Being gay after all is a generally accepted excuse to be interesting. That said, Kenyans need to loosen up. Seriously, before something rips.

 

The part that most enraged my friend, a guy, about the recent and oh so shocking Daniel Chege-Charles Ngengi nuptials in London under the then freshly enacted Civil Partnership act was the “passionate kissing’. It reviled. It sickened him. Had he been there he would have smacked them straight. He meant that also in the figurative sense. Is that what bothers us most? Adam and Steve type PDA? Would we be okay if homosexuals kept their romantic lives not just secret, but discreet. No held hands, no subtle gesturing.

 

The first argument against homosexual acceptance or at least recognition in Africa is its ‘Unafricanness’. It is, per some ticked netizen ‘a de-africanisation exercise’ ‘a western export meant to destroy the family unit, the only moral upper hand Africa has’. This was in support of an October 14, 2009  Anti Homosexuality Bill tabled by a Ugandan MP which most liberals view a nihilistic turn of what smelled much like government endorsed bigotry, which to me was poor logic and if a joke was surely one in poor taste. It calls for life imprisonment for the offence of homosexuality. Interesting, since I can recount salacious stories of the then Kabaka Mwanga that would leave a small kingdom scandalized I’m sure. All stories.

What is homosexuality? Or rather, how is it?

 

Is sexual orientation a matter of caprice? Is it nature or nurture?  The homosexuality question gathers dust in empirical science’s shelves along with pertinent human queries like God, aliens, the origin of life…e.t.c.

How can homosexuality be rationalized?  Is it, in the immortal and summed up philosophies of Freud the effect of a smothering mom and a dead-beat dad?  Is it Dean Hamer’s gay gene or Simon Levay’s half-sized clump-neurons-at-the-back-of-the-hypothalamus theory?

Does it all come down to whose urinal hormones you like sniffing –yes, apparently there is such a test. As per the moment, the law dictates that men like women’s pee and vice-versa.

 

But perhaps this too isn’t the question. Does love require a legal or even moral definition? And if so does that invalidate the feeling that falls outside an adopted scope? Is it any less a love?

 

We are conditioned to think a certain way. Collectively, and perhaps in the most indiscernible of ways, humanity most unified purpose is survival and propagation. It is the ingrained concept that haunts any species. The most straight forward way for this to happen is for men and women to shack up. So two men factor rather unfavorably in the equation. Our innate instincts work for the preservation of the nuclear family. Yet homosexuality is a tale as old as time. Alexander the Great, for example, played for both teams. Should we them be as nonchalant as the old Greeks accepting it as some rite of passage to be outgrown? A sort of perverse phase?

 

Is there a place for the gay community in Black Africa? Or do they belong in Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell: ‘Those violent against nature’. Those guilty of a love that ‘dare not name itself’.

 

My neutrality appalls me of course. I am not amoral. But this to me, like most, is a grey area. Yet by labeling a certain class of people, branding them colorfully degrading names we are denying their humanity, their right to life. So it becomes okay to ostracize them, to torture them, even to kill them. I do not know whether homosexuality is a choice …in past decades it was called an alternative lifestyle which then to me implied will. I do know this though, that to eliminate choice is to extinguish responsibility. I do not know that I want to live in such a world.

 

My friend last year confessed to me that she was in her words “doing girls now.” We haven’t talked since. I don’t know why and I don’t know how to make it right… How to make her right.  It’s different I suppose when a cause has a face. A friendly face.

 

I believe in the inalienable right of people to pursue freely, right and happiness. It is just one of life’s paradoxes that the things that are right are a chore and those that are fun must be sinfully so. Need I go to Oscar Wild and his first encounters with ice-cream.

 

Here is a story and it is true. This year, October the sixteenth, one Daniel Chege and Charles Ngengi married under the 2005  Civil Partnership Act in London… I say everyone gets their 45 minutes on a couch, cry it out, talk it out and then get over it. Unless that is, you can afford to dwell on it. Besides, I’ve looked away before when I  should have stood up. I didn’t want to be a hero. I didn’t get it. It wasn’t about heroism, it was about humanity. I do now.

 

 

AT THE WATERFRONT

Not for a world would I trade my morning crossings through the Likoni Channel. Not for a world I swear.

 It’s something. It is said that you must either amuse people or shock them or feed them (Scott Fitzgerald) and each is done here in equal measure. From the Buibui clad bintis with veiled faces and immodest eyes, their perfumes sickeningly sweet like a sailor’s first sip of drink at a foreign pier to the good-time girls chasing the sun, light skin and the ubiquitous scent of money that lingers there; skimpily clad and leaving little to the imaginations of the enraged Sheikhs who stare angrily, and hungrily.

From the fawning coolies who fall over themselves smiling, carrying your luggage to the terminal, menacingly demanding more than was bargained for at the end to the touts who ruffle each other up for idle sport. It is how lazily life flows here at the waterfront. And what a fool I was once to even conceive that I could change the world…that I could change a world. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. C’est vrai.  There will always be a beggar there. Once it was a blind man who played the Nzumari, the same tune always…it’s stuck in my head. Now it’s a lame acrobat and a female leper with a manila paper telling her life story in impeccable English. The lame acrobat makes me laugh. These are familiar faces, and they all have names. They want a city in the sun where they can ‘dare to be lucky and live out loud’ and Mombasa is that one.

And there is a blind preacher, who plays the accordion rather decently, cites- quite impressively- numerous Bible verses. He places a tin at his feet for offering. The Muslims even, are charitable.

And the incongruous couples; foreign senior expats with painfully younger girls bathed in expensive perfume and too dark a shade of rouge. Robust young black men with octogenarian white ladies, their thinning hairs a metallic blonde. Old coastal men who wink and the younger ones who wink to each other. They all work for the president…everything has a price. You can feel the money changing hands around you. And the touts who tease young schoolgirls with wicked smiles and suggestive eyes and the girls giggle back…and cupid sighs. I harbour a merry dislike for them all and sometimes I love them childishly.

I love the sea. How it varies in hue from the promontory and where you can see little schools of fish no longer than your thumb to the ominous blue of the deep and a shimmering green in the distance at high noon. In the wee hours it smells like rotten eggs. And when it rains the sea goes mad, like a caged lion. You can feel the ferry tilting beneath your feet and the wind, its breath, blows against you and wrestles you like an invisible ghost…the zimwis.

And in this sea of humanity stand I, alone in a crowd, painfully diffident still at 21, but I’ve made such a consummate art of hiding this that my contorted face looks almost hostile to the tourist who smile encouragingly at us in the breath of those wanting to save us. Some smile back, wanting to be…

The government, in its eagerness to do more harm has built waiting areas so that while at first the crowds waiting for the crowds waiting for the ferry looked like disorganised sheep, now they look like cattle due for a dip. This amuses me. The tourists shake their head forlorn. And the gatekeeper in shades and a danger red shirt, buffed beyond the call of duty, treats us worse than cattle.

The away trips are alive with gossip…of yesterday’s conquest, of tomorrow’s promises. The return legs desolate, with people who look like cut-flowers out of water. There are women donning Kangas with scathing Swahili messages imprinted at the edges. Like a new means of conversing…a constant fad here. Kupanda mti kwataka shimo.

 And the smells…of acrid waste from burst drains battling vehemently with the lemon scent of aftershave on beautifully chiselled faces, cleanly shaven and freshly kissed. Yesterday’s sweat mingling with today’s sautéing dishes from roadside eateries, infused with every spice imaginable. You breath it all in and it becomes native to you. And the city claims you.

It is the vanity of youth to think that one can save the world. A crucial vanity for from it one realizes that it is you who need saving. Because the world is perfect, it is our perception that is skewed. Its catastrophes and hurrahs, its griefs and solidarities…its moments all are perfect. No one should dream of changing it but rather finding one’s place in it.

There are moments in every day that Satan does not catch. They are intimate moments, hidden under the gauze of the ordinary. They are silent moments, unpretentious. As true as a girl’s first kiss, and as pure as a dream like the first touch of kindness from a stranger. And I thank God that I am lucky enough to be privy to them.

 

KAIZEN: LESSONS IN BECOMING MYSELF

 

Of partly red and partly golden plummage, thePhoenix that makes a journey from Arabia to Heliopolis, to the Temple of the Sun, is the only creature capable of reinventing and renewing its own being. it and us.

What are the most important things in life? To live one’s life with honour always, to teach your children to be generous, to believe,  to hug those who need hugging, to fear, to fight, to question…even the truth, mostly the truth, and then to stand for it. To hunger for things, to grasp at them with the heart. To live…boldly. (Easier listed than done!)

I can’t help but remember with nostalgia the snot-nosed years when life revolved around the playground. Life’s aim was play…and life was joy.

At nine, I was hopelessly ignorant of the world’s ways. I knew that at roughly 7.00 am people dressed and went to work. That at 4.00pm, these people were the streams of humanity on the sidewalks, clutching to their Dailies and grocery bags, spent as the day. Children had to go to school.

I had also come to the realisation that coins, not tears, were the way to my shopkeeper’s heart. Was loosely aware that everyone was chasing it. Money. But there was no grand deduction from this knowledge…no intellectual catharsis. No aim to it. Life was the way it was.

At 11, it was inflicted on us that we work hard. That life itself was hard. We nodded sombrely in complete puzzlement. We couldn’t wait to grow up. I especially, had a plan to change the world…nothing as dramatic or labour intensive as Mother Theresa, but it was air-tight.

By 14, I couldn’t claim to be a complete self-creation. I had read cheap literature, wasted years’ worth of man-hours in front of the tube, had pep-talks from my mother…I wanted to be a writer, casually world renowned and yet an enigma to this same world, banging away at  my typewriter…completely self-absorbed. I wanted to sail the high seas on a seven-foot raft. I wanted to be a rebel and a thief…something of a Robin Hood who’d read a less radicalized version of Karl Marx. I read the Bible and wanted to be a prophet, I read Shakespeare and wanted to love a man. I watched First Wives Club and reconsidered it all. I contemplated sisterhood, the military, Oriental religions, Sects, Weed…and somehow it was important that this fall within the 7.00am to 4.00 pm timeline. I would be a lawyer. It encompassed everything. The endemic dialectic of good and evil, the social intercourse with the world and that inviolable feeling of being in it all. Being a part of the mechanics of justice. (Yes, I adored Tom Hanks in Philadelphia). Besides, I wanted to see the law in colour.

For most of my sixteen years boys interested me in the same way that death interests empirical scientists: an idle question, intellectually impotent. There would be no Eureka! At the end of one’s musings. I had however gained insight into my mother’s quips about growing up. I could some Stepford grand plan to have me exchanged for prized bulls to some unimaginatively named man. No love but there would be bliss. No cows, I resolved.

By 18, I had questioned a few things: my DNA, my Christianity, the human fibre, the viability of Chang’aa in the global market…always thought there was promise there. Chang’aa is as local and as illicit as brew gets in these parts and I always found human nature had a curious penchant for both.

And now I’m old enough to know that there are no answers; that the plan is yes. Yes to climbing Mount Kenya, searching for God at the peaks. Yes to a weekend in Lodwar. Yes to a dip in the Ganges chanting the sacred Vedas. Yes to Rio and its rums…yes to the spontaneity of living. Frivolity, frugality and all. Be all that you can be!

I wish I could go back though, and tell my nine year-old self to gaze into people, eyes more, not as windows to the soul but…just to gaze. Tell my 14 year-old self to not take this self so seriously…to remember to laugh at myself and to tell  that 16 year-old girl that there are a few good men, great men, ‘they walk the back roads and do what is right everyday and nobody knows but those lucky enough to be loved by them.’

There are parts of me I fear. The parts that are cynical, the parts that refuse to love…that don’t want to care. The parts that don‘t instinctively clutch to kindness…the parts that don’t want to live. It is these parts that I must fight off. They overpower me sometimes.

I remember when I was young and decided, not to be rich, but to own a huge white house, a dazzling white car and an inexhaustible supply of clothes. I want to go back to that clarity, paradoxically though since I now see through the hollowness of money. I want to wonder again. Want to be awed by the world, conquered by it even. I want to be the happy-go-lucky chap whistling in the rain.

 

At 21, I realize that cows are not the enemy, that a seven-foot raft could actually have been a viable idea…too late. No dice on the Chang’aa. But there is something to be said for pipe dreams.

 

FEMINISM IN BLACK: and an ode to Neda

This grand painting attributed to Caravaggio perhaps captures adequately the mood of the first feminist movement. "Feminism: It isn't only for lesbians anymore"

My constitutional law lecturer, Mrs Pamela sporting modest heels, a witty tongue and that ubiquitous black skirt designed to flatter well toned legs magnificently,stands at the stage and tells me women rule the world. How can I not believe her when half the class is swimming in drool? Men being the visual creatures that they are, and gender disparities being what they are.

Being not unintelligent, I’ve always been loosely aware of the universal mantra of Amazondom. ‘If you’re intelligent and have a vagina, you rule the world.’ Secretly, everyone knows this to be true. From the king who wishes to place a kingdom at his Cophetua’s feet to the beggar who wants to win the chief’s daughter. There was Corazon Aquino, the plain housewife in a yellow dress who dissembled the Marcos dictatorship in a whirl of yellow ribbons with roses at her feet and Cristina Kirchner who wooed voters, literally, hair bouncing in the wind. Red lips, all woman. Each cascading lock swinging some crucial undecided voter.

Years after white women, in a fit of domestic fatigue and sexually frustrated and repressed rage (or was it the other way round?) decided to burn their bras, the fires have spread to Africa. Feminism has gone black, and in two words…it’s a jumbled mess- in all its various age brackets. The 18-24 girls with that deliciously girly,bra optional, no make-up needed mien, they can afford to be unidealistic. They want to be pampered in these their ‘best years’. You can treat them like tarts as long as you pick up the tab. For the 25-36 bracket, a radical shift in priorities has taken place. They still want to someone to pick up the tab but they must not be condescended to. At all. Middle age is a labyrinth. Dealing with mistresses and wrinkles in equal measure. Of course culture, education and lifestyle shift the dynamics greatly.

In Kenya, the feminist movement is in dire need of a pin-up girl. It must not be Martha Karua. Arguably one of the best legal minds here. Brass-balled divorcée…I love her to pieces. But she emasculates the men and alienates the women. But then again, it can’t be anyone else. The women want to be repelled. A recent initiative by gender-based groups which called for a voluntary ‘dry spell’ of sorts for the sake of institutional reforms was a nationwide flop. Fiercely intelligent women in protest argued that by deploying their genitalia as bargaining instruments, they were advancing the notions of women being, well…sex bunnies. The rest, who had no argument, just wanted to get laid.

The question needs to be asked, though. What are feminism’s footprints in post-independence Kenya. The subsistence sector of our economy is a woman industry. Yes, women are running the country and go-figure…they are the last to know.

Because Africa was colonized, women here didn’t really get a gradual understanding of their own femininity. It was already defined for them. The modern goals and demands of the African woman are heavily borrowed and imported from the West. And what confusing signals this importation brings. African Traditions dictate that we be seen, not heard. Scratch that, they said. Don’t wear bras…!? We didn’t to begin with. It became okay all of a sudden to sleep around. You weren’t loose, you were liberated. We could drink men to bed. Love them, and leave them. Fast-forward to this century and you have to wear spandex and padding just to get a line thrown at you…how I do so desire those kiss-ass days of yore!

The timeless stereotypes are still alive. A career-oriented woman with no children is secretly hiding testicles under her skirt. If you cry you’re a hysterical female, if you don’t you’re a man. Low IQ and culinary skill is still the secret to a lasting union. You mustn’t watch politics or business and if you do, you must feign complete miscomprehension. And men aren’t helping matters any…but again, they never have. They want to be the breadwinners. They want to hunt. They want someone, ideally a woman, in the kitchen. And they secretly want to pick up the tab. Anything else is a disruption of set rites and designated roles. Yet our roles are changing every day. How are we to cope?

All around the country women are waking up to the coffee-fresh realization that there’s more to life than breeding and cook shows. Martha Stewart and Oprah? We’re not that pathetic. Barefoot and pregnant has become passe. Women want to not pop babies; in heels. Six inch. What I find infinitely depressing is that once you’re liberated, you’re labelled a slut. but more’s the woe: liberated women are sluts. the current state of things is: sex sells. Yes still. Ergo the magazines with sex tips that make you blush. Men sleep around, women can sleep around better. But is this what it’s all about? The hard truth is that women don’t know what they want. Do they want to be the Ventriloquist or his dummy? Do they want the corner office or a modern kitchen with a friendly oven? Do they want to be demur or feisty? Brainy or compatible, abrasive or soft-spoken. Unfortunately for women, there is no middle ground.

Yet what is my contribution to the Good Fight? Beyond silently chanting Allon-y mes braves! to those clamouring for affirmative action. With adolescence and mood swings, I always thought I should concentrate on living to fight another day. Yet still in the remote parts, White beards are holding beer fests to discuss daughters-swaps. The inappropriate kind. And in the city there’s a Slap-on-the-wrist policy for male clients and a nothing-but-cell one for prostitutes bundled away in Black Maries. I thought it was enough to buy my own drinks and give a spirited mock protest when he offered to…refusing one for the team.

Is feminism dynamic or am I just a pretentious feminist?

 

Raila and other stories

Raila is a fraud and I want my money back. No, no…keep the change because this man is one interesting piece of work.

What cannot bend must break, and what you break you own. This appears to me to be the single-minded intent with which Raila signed the National Accord of April 2008. The date says it all, the 13^th of all days. There is therefore no need to further pollute the ozone with carbon-emissions from Geneva-bound planes on hatchet-burying missions when the accord is being actively negotiated in front of our very eyes. I thought it callous, the call for snap elections when the smoke had barely risen from Kiambaa. We owe something to the dead. An assurance perhaps that none will die as ghastly as they did.

Raila is a born strategist with superb organizational skills. The Rainbow Alliance that was instrumental in Kibaki’s first successful presidential bid had his fingerprints all over it. (I refuse to comment on his second bid). The ’07 pentagon merger had that Agwambo shine as well. He was right on the money with Balala and Mudavadi because these were men of little consequence. Men who could be compelled and whose dreams for the presidency were nothing but ‘idle flights of fancy’.  But with Ruto, he refused to see a man like him. A self-made man who carved himself out of nothing- literally because Ruto had neither a name nor an inheritance. He made his own way by the sheer force of his personality and the strength of his intellect. Raila either disregarded or  refused to see that Ruto’s  eyes too were on the prize. Of these two Raila seems to me what euphemism ascribes ‘the lesser evil’. His reformist credentials are more ‘up-market’ than Ruto’s.

His detentions and series of incarcerations in the eighties following coup collaboration suspicions and later KRM(Kenya Reform Movement) involvement. He is an indispensable figure in multiparty reform saga. But he upsets this unblemished record with a brief stint in the Moi government; Energy minister 2001-2003. And  serves as KANU Secretary General after subsequent party elections. I can rationalize this in a world where the end justifies the means and I do respect ambition. But when you lie with the dogs…KANU is almost a rite of passage where every politician must ‘make his bones’. For him is the Molasses stench.

There is something restless about him. Something restless about the Magdeburg-trained Engineer who lectures for five years, quits to join KBS and quits that too. After his return from Norway in ’92 he joined FORD, challenged Wamalwa for chairmanship after his father’s death, lost and left. Joined NDP, then KANU,LDP,NARC and finally ODM after the 57-43 referendum of November, 2005. A serial party hopper? He reminds me of Ahab who sails the high seas in search of the ferocious whale, Moby dick, which manages to unfailingly elude his nets.  And when the chance is tantalizingly within reach…there are no good endings. If Melville’s literary masterpiece is anything to go by, I think one shouldn’t get addicted to the chase.

And now as an arm of the Grand Confusion he has lost that thing that was instrumental in shaping his career, namely the right to criticize the government. It is this that the She-man from Gichugi gained through her resignation- a moral high ground. For Martha was neither a reformer nor a lone agent for change in a system that was unspeakably corrupt; the picture she was trying to sell a while back. She was Kibaki’s personal pittbull and the snub in favour of Uhuru in ’08 was too much to bear…’ nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.’ Enough said. It is this system that Raila is now a part of and by dint of the guilt by association rule; the ‘it ain’t me’ argument can only take him so far. The whole ‘PNU is taking the reform agenda hostage’ angle is getting old. It won’t  wash till 2012.

And after, in my view, winning the bitterly debated leader of government business round I advise Muthaura to have a manageable fear for his post.

All in all I do think Raila is in the twilight years of his existence, politically, and while his ambitions might not have been fully quenched he should concentrate on cementing his legacy. Something that maize is not helping too greatly with. There will be a handover to the next crop.  He should use the power he has consolidated so far to initiate reforms, not wrestle more power through the accord. When will it ever be enough to effect change?

 

“My poverty is incomplete, it lacks me”

 

Poor and content is rich, and rich enough. ~William Shakespeare

Like everyone else I have qualms with my upbringing. I resent not being born in a mansion in one of those leafy Nairobi suburbs with Swiss neighbours Günter and Zelda, a missionary couple or foreign expats perhaps tired of Western reserve and looking to find themselves in untamed Africa. We would have had a houseboy called Juma and a dog affectionately named Simba. Ahh…how I would have adored Juma, and Simba too.

I resent the view from this side; it’s not glossed with that enchanting patina of opulence, ornamented with trinkets that only money can buy. Resent that I cannot afford that indifference to money that those with too much of it can. Those with something more than a passing familiarity with it. Resent also the numerous encounters with that word ‘No’, the incredulous truth that there are those to whom it has never been uttered. Yet, as I look on it now not with the petulance of a six-year-old but with the cool calm of a maturing awareness…it’s gentle resentment. Nothing seething.

But where does that come from? When we’re young we’re all Kings. All idiotically happy. We play with mud with the same enthusiasm that the children of Runda play with their illogically expensive toys. Where does that go? That fascination with the elegance of crude simplicity. And where are those first lessons in the love of money held? Money is the sixth sense without which you cannot enjoy the other five and so on.

It’s at school, is it not, those centers of diversity where we hear other children talk and we learn what is normal to us isn’t so. It is here that we are exposed to a world outside our reach that shuns us and teaches us to be ashamed of who we are. To despise it.

You learn fast that you are invisible…to the chauffeurs behind tinted windows, to the pretty people in air-conditioned cafes. A statistic to the media. Everybody thinks you should be helped, no one wants to. Wanjiku means something to everyone: to the rich, a reassuring reminder of their superfluities, to the government a pitching point for donor aid, to the West a platform for imperialism through this same aid. She has existed under different labels in the annals of history: the pleb of ancient Rome, the proletariat of revolutionist France. But I ramble…

I am grateful for my poverty, and my shame. You’re not human until that dehumanizing feeling of self-deprecating worthlessness washes over you. I’m grateful because it has allowed me to touch the world, raw and unshielded; there’s none of that cushion that money provides. I’m not trying to romanticize poverty…there are the rich for that. Besides there’s nothing romantic about want. And yet there is this…a truth. It’s in the dusty streets where people laugh most heartily, in the overcrowded Kongowea market where the hum of a thousand voices makes happy discordant music. It is an overwhelming sensation to feel the pulse of a people. To hear them mourn and laugh, to see them suffer and triumph and see the realization of a father’s forsaken dreams come alive in his son and to feel the feeble grasps of humanity among these children of a lesser god. It is the poetry of living. Hope. And it is recited everyday from daybreak to dusk. Here…like a rose growing among thistles and thorns. I can live on this I think. On a little, but not on less.

In a way it is easier to be poor. Your path is mapped out for you with mind-freeing ease. A path out of the slum. The means of course can’t always be justified. It fills you with a paralyzing fear of being nothing. And fear is a compass. It is after all the son of tears and want who learns to make the future grow, but entirely the happy child who prances about looking for the private glades where he played. When you come from nothing, you have nothing to lose.

There’s a man who peddles water in our neighbourhood during the shortages. He’s about 5’6 with rough workman’s hands, a sonorous voice and a genuine laugh. A Mijikenda man who goes by the name Wakenya, by far the greatest man I have ever known. He gives his lowly, labourious job such a grace and dignity and when he laughs it isn’t a hollow laugh, it’s infectious. He seems untouched, artless to the seductive charms of money or immune to them. There’s no greed in him at all. The good life is the simple life. Ahh..my soul loves him. And as I think grudgingly of those leafy suburbs, of Günter and Zelda and of whether I would ever have met Wakenya on those well-lit pavements, those manicured lawns…it’s gentle resentment. Nothing seething.

The sun kisses my back, a burning hot kiss.  A child smiles, artless and innocent. A madman grins, gently and then idiotically. The wind blows…how can I not be alive? He stands in the rain, he smiles. He shivers and he laughs. Is he more sane than I who smile at nothing? Where is Apollo’s Oracle to give me a purpose. Here where even the winds blow in circles, following no path.

It helps to have no expectations in life. Simple pleasures. I am poor in silver but I claim everything else; the Sun, the smell of wet earth, the sea. They are mine.

 

 

Cupid’s reflections

 

In Roman mythology, Cupid (Latin cupido) is the god of erotic love and beauty. He is also known by another one of his Latin names, Amor (cognate with Kama).

I need a definition of love…yes we’re back to that. Again. I feel like a definition is half the work. If you know it you can avoid it…or find it better. (Pick one people, and run with it!)

I look for it’s meaning in those around me and frankly, I’m disappointed. Is love something you pick up at Maggie’s half-drunk on a Friday night or does it reside in more morally sanitary conditions? Is it something you bump into along Moi Avenue or does it require, like perfection, the gentle touch of time? Is it, per Camus, ‘madness and confusion’ or is that just a gimmick to cover up the fact that we’re all certifiably insane?

Is love a colour? Red? Do we paint it on and wear it, and own it? Can love be summed up in words or in a gaze or in a touch, or a kiss? Does love obey Newton’s laws or is it on a downward trajectory, bound for the inevitable crash?

Where does love lie? In the heart or in the head? And how long is this journey from the cerebrum to the cardiac cavity? Is love the truth or is it the greatest story ever sold?

Who gets the girl? Is it the quiet intelligence or Mr. Popularity? And who gets the guy? Saintly Mary or not-so-sweet Sue? The mating rites at Campus make T.V an unnecessary and expensive hassle. Fertile ground for as impressionable a mind as mine.

Some opt for the consumerist approach…they buy it. Lunch, clothes, weaves…the whole enchilada. No romance without finance. I can understand this, I suppose, in an offer-limited-while-stocks-last kind of world. To each his own, right? Besides, you have to give some to get some.

There are those who try to hide from it. In library basements and behind computer screens. Those who fear inadequacy and hurt. But what’s worse? A broken heart that can mend or one fully intact and empty? It’s terribly easy for me to condescend from the spectator bench…or my usual high horse.

And those who think they have it; illusion, smoke and haze. Heedless that love is mortal, susceptible to death.

Others prefer to wait for it. Others like myself. Does it come by ship or rail I wonder? Like some import of some strange and enchanted foreign land? Or an arrow through the heart?

Where is the indisputable proof of its existence in a world where weapons of mass destruction exist; proof that there’s no love lost. Where is its assurance in an Akinyi-chinedu world? Or is it that thing evidenced by a ring, consummated by cake.

Is love its own reward or does it demand something in kind? Is it something tangible or are we damned to blind groping in a candless room? Is love the good ache…is there even such a thing?

‘It’s about finding someone who you can tolerate better than the others and giving until it hurts,’ my friend tells me. He’s male so by dint of this very fact his emotional intelligence was neutered on arrival. I had hoped for something a little less clinical. Why if Troilus had displayed such vague sentiment to Cressida, romanticism would be beggarly for it!

I’m not looking for those cheesy Hollywood one-liners about seeing forever in his eyes. Just a truth that can be endured. Yet is it a contradiction in terms to wish love were something taller than 5’8, had something more than a grudging acquaintance with Shakespeare? Can love be chivalrous and funny or is that too much to ask of this hustler-thug generation? Will love be the father of my children?

Is love what comes after loneliness or is it the other way round…and is it complete lunacy to ask for assurance in this world of clay where everything breaks and nothing lasts…even hearts, even love. Or is it an ideal, something we can only aspire to…

never possess?

 I need a definition of love so that I can know it isn’t this insubstantiality of media-hyped emotion. That it isn’t a third wheel to a meeting of drink and mutual willingness. To know that there’s more…there has to be. And to know that it didn’t pass me by.

 

SONU; the circus is in town

It’s one day to D-day; the SONU elections of May 22nd. And while the weeks leading to it have been characteristically marked by mudslinging, voter ‘swaying’ has gone up a notch. This SONU time of year has seen campus politicos preach one redeeming Gospel message: they came so we could have soda, and soda more abundantly.

Yes, the official symbol for a Kenyan bribe is no longer the time-tested ‘Chai’- plummeting overseas prices and inefficiency at KTDA saw to it that disgruntled farmers plucked out tea bushes with others going up in smoke- literally. So it’s basically Brrrrrrr and Bamboocha time.

These weeks were marked by aspirants raiding your room with their ass-kissing entourage on an epiphanic mission to ‘get to know you’. Of course none of these well-meaning social calls would have occurred earlier in the semester because no one would have given a rat’s ass- constructively or otherwise- who you were. Isn’t life a crock? All the same you had to laugh half-heartedly at jokes with no punch lines, nod agreeably about friend requests on facebook, smile inwardly at these hawk-eyed entourage who for a higher cut would gladly play for the other team; mercenaries or hire with an unwavering loyalty to the shilling. Mercenaries who smell money like sharks smell blood.

The electioneering period, marked by flagrant voter bribery (which one may argue is in line with the nationalistic, if not humanitarian efforts of pumping money into a slumping economy), the lack of ideals, and the corruption of the whole system makes our national parliamentarians seem like sound candidates for sainthood.

But this isn’t even tragic yet. It isn’t the rabid hypocrisy that incenses me. It isn’t the Keg conspiracy- you know, the feeding of young minds with such unsavoury brew so as to dim any glimmer of logic nor the lies told with unflinching gazes. It’s this new phenomenon. This self-pontification of virtues. This churning out of Obama one liners: it’s not about me, it’s about you…Really!? I mean, just when you think you’ve seen it all we have these little demagogues (some of the candidates are curiously short-statured) chanting hope slogans. It’s depressing to see how far from the inspiration mark they fall.

They publicize their clashes with the ‘powers that be’, wear these incidents like badges of honour. Irrefutable proof of their martyrdom. SONU operates on a budget of about 39million. It has no budgetary oversight body which makes misappropriation the only ‘politically correct’ thing to do. The SONU constitution might just be, save for the real owners of Mobitelea, the most jealously guarded secret in Kenya.

A few bleeding hearts swear to rectify this sorry state of affairs once elected…but I’m hardly holding my breathe. Campus politics operates in a very narrow field. Firstly, the pernicious class wars between parallel students and regular students- wealth versus merit some say. It’s age –old tension bursting at the seams and worsened by shortage of amenities, primarily bed-space. Tribe, believe it or not! Every tribal grouping , save for the Ogiek and Dorobo, have associations from which one of ‘their own’ enjoys frenzied and unsolicited support.

‘ Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers’: Tennyson. You can’t take the village out of the man, eh?

And lastly, money. It accords you a certain comparative advantage. Who controls the on-campus businesses is always a political affair. Do you know someone who knows someone? So it is that campus bureaus rightly belonging to the needy students are owned and managed by student leaders- illegally might I add. SONU is high stakes. It’s a stepping stone. A promise that if you amass as much student funds as you can chiefly from the bursary pool that should be rightly awarded to the deserving, you will be handed the keys to the kingdom- the Kenyan coffers.

 That’s why there’s an ODM and PNU faction. That’s why Ruto and or Biwott, so rumour has it, are funding one Nickson Korir who is vying for the post of SONU secretary general. That’s why aspirants are churning out cash faster than ATMs on crack. And why Coca-Cola is enjoying a bumper harvest of sorts. Saturday the 16th was the designated day for nomination paper submission. Motorists on parklands road can attest to this.

Things headed South but not on a large scale. What’s with University students and this seemingly endless fascination with the roads? Come Friday every serious contender will have prepared adequately- bribed the clerks, bribed the voters and mudslinged as though his very life depended on it.

There are already some aspirants who have been tied to the Mungiki sect by the rumour mill- which for the record is having a field day. The not so serious contenders stick to their ideals and live on a prayer; the outcome is almost always invariably disastrous. They have one year to impress me. Ten to one they won’t. Who ever heard of a politician being worth his salt?

‘Soda keeps you relevant,’ one told me.

 Can I get a Brrrrrrrr?

 

 

THE EVIL THAT MEN DO

The painting, Hope, by George Frederic Watts is a representation of the Greek mythological entity of Hope. Legend has it that Prometheus sealed Hope inside Pandora's box. When the evils were released from the box, Hope stayed. Although Hope is more of an idea than an actual figure it is sometimes personified as in Watts's Hope.

During the post election violence that gripped the country after the results of the 2007 presidential elections were announced, a question gripped me. It hasn’t let go ever since. Is evil something in us? Is it something we’re born with…something we have to conquer to gain redemption? Like killing off a piece of ourselves. Or is it something foreign? Something we have to acquire a taste for?

I was in bed that night and outside I could hear the heavy sound of footfall; marching around the estate. (I came from one of those areas where ‘sporadic unrest’ occurred.) I wasn’t afraid then because I’d spent the past few week s in a state of permanent terror. Fear had become a religion…and we sacrificed to it pieces of ourselves everyday. I was angry. Angry that these hoodlums without a cause could make me feel unsafe in my own home. Still, out of respect for self-preservation, I maintained a sound fear for my life.

So I lay in bed and through the deliberate footfalls, I could remember in abstraction, hazily, a discussion on the sources of evil in society from a previous C.R.E lesson in high school. (It’s surprising what can come to you when death is mark timing in shorts outside your door. Ps- see Mrs. Mureithi, I was actually paying attention!) Anyway, African tradition attributed evil to the external, to those things beyond our control; Christianity to man’s nature that is highly susceptible to evil. I much favoured the African approach because I do believe in our humanity. Shaky and sickly at times but it is there. My mother has tried to kill this ‘Ann Frank’ optimism but it’s an obdurate streak in me. It refuses to die. She thinks it criminal for someone my age to harbor this brand of naiveté.

But it was the night after Kiambaa, and my views on world goodness had changed considerably.

‘He who cannot live in society is either a god or a beast’: Aristotle.

Are we beasts? It scares me this line of thinking because I mirror myself in others. I look for myself, for my humanity in them. I look for in people the same thing I look for in food. I’m not a picky eater. Yes, yes. Sue me. I subscribe to these Hippie philosophies of humanity being a web. Step on a butterfly here; cause a tornado in China and all that. Chaos theory and then some… Like every other walking cliché, I’m secretly an optimist masquerading as a cynic. I also moonlight as a romantic…

But Kiambaa killed something in me, in all of us I guess. For me it was the right to believe in the inherent goodness of others. It was blind faith that didn’t need anything to anchor on, I’ve lost the right to practice that futile religion of hope, which much like my Christianity, I do not understand but practice anyway. The world isn’t black and white anymore. I see the shades of gray. Because people have such an amazing capacity to love, we must also appreciate that they can feel unadulterated hate. Because they can build, they can destroy.

In the wake of the discharge of the suspects of the Kiambaa killings due to insufficient evidence, I want to launch into some Dickensian rant about better hanging an innocent man than no man at all. But I resist the urge because I see how easy it is for one to paralyze one’s soul with hatred…and evil. I resist because evil, like apathy, is something we must resist. So let’s console ourselves with pointless truths that those who died were too good for the world and be awakened to the knowledge that evil is both around and in us. But these days I doubt that there’s much goodness left. Is there?