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

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.