...that the system was going to fail anyway, so why not just jump ship. In this quest to allow children (real, or desired) to have a better life than their parents, we began to tear down the system.
Instead of supporting the public education system that had consistently and ably provided us with a decent education, we took our children to international schools, and then sent them abroad. Instead of giving back to the public health system- for the numerous times we had used it to get us back to good- we pumped our hard earned cash into the private health care system (not realizing that it was the same doctors who also consulted and worked within the public health system in our towns and cities).
Instead of maintaining the public garbage system, and the need to keep our streets and neighbourhoods clean, we allowed corruption to seep through the system so badly, that all we have now are relics of the dustbins that once drove around the cities and towns. What we have instead is a host of privatized companies now providing the services we still pay the government for.
But what hurts most is the things we do to ourselves that destroy us. Let me not even get into the rant concerning the cross-country railway line that should have been build 28 years ago, but that is still a pipe dream because some politician (WHO IS STILL HOLDING OFFICE!!!) stole the donor-funding that was earmarked for it. No, let's stick with the less dagger-in-the-back twisting pain that is our road transport. Growing up, my parents and older brothers were full of stories about the buses they took from home to school, and to work, and to church, and to shop. The image of these buses plying any route I know are only an unclear memory in my head. Yet again, this fiend privatization strikes again- causing someone to have a crazy idea that if they can create an elite of matatu-owning people, Kenya would be a better place. So they began- using every mechanism to undermine the government-run transport system, and now we have matatus. It's interesting that the debate about matatus only revolves around replacing 14-seaters, but completely ignores the fact that we had a regulated, affordable system that works, and that we STILL have the vehicles to make that system work again. No, it doesn't- because the very people who destroyed the system (and who are currently reaping the profits from the privatized network of road demons) are the people we elected to create better public policy for us. Did anyone think about the implications for shutting down a public transport system would play out? The number of man-hours lost in traffic (by my very conservative estimation its about 40,000 in the Westlands area only) each day, and what that means for development? The number of lives lost as matatu drivers strive to meet their quotas?
Would it have mattered if they did?
And how did we do this? Well, we didn't speak up when the services began to wane. We didn't raise a furor when the teachers complained about their salaries, or the doctors and nurses complained about the conditions they had to work in. We kept silent when our brothers and sisters in the city councils all over the town became greedy and corrupt, and completely mismanaged the monies we entrusted them with to maintain the cleanliness of our shared spaces. We allowed politicians to politicize the transport system, and systematically shut down every avenue for affordable public transport every Kenyan deserves. Those of us who could bought cars, and those of us who couldn't began to walk in silence.
What kind of citizens are we if we allow the public officials who have failed us to get away scott-free? An Ethiopian friend told me the other day that Kenya is seen as the capitalist utopia of Africa. If this is what we are striving for, and privatization at all costs (and usually at the expense of the 70% who cannot afford this uber expensive private life) is what we are working towards, then we have arrived.
Silence* kills societies that work. But let us not live under the illusion that this is "all we have to work with." That is a lie. It is not. We make these choices every day. In our history in this society-creation we had to do post independence, we made some pretty bad choices. But it's still our country. We can start making some good ones- good ones for us all, not just a few of us.
*Song by Muthoni, The Drummer Queen
Thursday 13 September 2012
Monday 19 March 2012
Betrayed
Betray: \bi-ˈtrā, bē-\: to fail or desert especially in time of need
The emotion that this paints is one of pain, and of hopelessness. One of dashed hopes; disappointments.
This is where I go, every time I think of home. Every time I think about who I am in relation to who I am supposed to be. The African against the african. The Kenyan against the Kenyan-from-Nairobi.
The older generation hate that latter phrase. They don't believe it to be true of anyone. Nairobi is not a place you come from. There are no shambas in Nairobi, no soil on which to cultivate, or land on which to graze cattle (kettle). Not only is that not permitted, it would also be callous and uncultured to practice any form of rural-ity in the city. For it is a city- a place of hard cash and concrete and unrelentingly heat on Monday afternoons in the stuffy Parliament building.
But that generation, now dying out, is wrong. Because, we are here- those of us who identify ourselves quite strictly by that phrase...Kenyan-from-Nairobi. The city is all we know. And to make matters even worse, we only identify with certain parts of the city, denoting how well our parents did for us (although nobody ever says this too loudly anymore...One Kenya, One People and all). So I identify with the west of nairobi and all the "rich-kid" sneers it evokes. Not that I'm a rich kid- far from it. Just that my parents got lucky, and landed up in what was once a leafy suburb (now turned concrete jungle) that catered to, and still does, the "upper middle class."
I have school mates here in the US, who are striving to be able to have their kids identify with that part of city. Proof of having "made it." Like getting into this school is not enough. Like having to pay all the money to be here is nothing. All that matters is that you live on thewhite right side of town in a developing country on the other side of the world.
But it is not with them that my quarrel lies. It is not even with my elderly parents, who were only trying to do the best for us by sanitizing us of any real culture (because culture means memories of climbing up the social ladder, and sometimes those are bad) and leaving us "better" than they could ever have been under colonialism.
It is with the generation born at independence and just after- that generation that could have reinterpreted this sticky concept of identity for us- filled that cultureless gap with vital information about who we are, and why we are that and not something else. That is the generation that betrayed us. Instead of taking the privileges their parents afforded them and using them to re-member (or 'member') an identity for a fractured country, they fell into 'businessing', and amassing, and "investing" and "building." Not that any of these things were wrong in themselves. Just that they are wrong if done in a vacuum. And that is where Kenya lay as they began their exploits.
In a cultureless vacuum. And so when tribalism reared its ugly head to fill that void, it found no resistance. On the contrary, it was welcomed. Because, you see, when the amassing and businessing and building and investing was on a slump, and minds were more open to thought, there was nothing- nothing of higher inspiration, nothing of greater good, no bigger-picture scenes, nothing. The most natural thought that could occur in that void was the thought of self.
And that self sought similar selves to be conjoined to. So the ethnic nation-building spirits that divided the land of their fathers possessed them, and they were ravaged by that demon called ethnicity. That demon that only destroys, tears down, tramples. But they had lost the window of opportunity to be exorcised that had presented itself in the 1980s, just after the attempted coup. They could have refused to take in what they were told...that X was blacker than them and therefore up to no god, that Y was a schemer, and thus out to finish them. They could have chosen to remember that it was Onyango who shared his books in class, and Kimani who was the best goalkeeper in last week's game, and Ngaira who's mother had given you the biscuits, and Chep who painted your nails for the wedding. And that X and Y didn't matter. People with individual talents and quirks and energies did (and do). We could have been one, had we rejected that notion of apartness that so clearly identifies us now.
But my older brothers and sisters failed us.
Lucky for us, desperation is surely a greater mother of invention than necessity- but if it makes us quibble, let's say she is the mother of innovation instead. Desperation has driven generation Michael Jackson/Whitney Houston to come up with "innovative solutions" in a bid to reclaim our identity. The problem is, there are about as many innovations as there are people.
Some of us deny our identity as Kenyans- we're too "other" to really do the "Kenyan thing," (whatever that connotes). So we only associate with white and brown skinned people. Everyone else is too dark for us, has too many secrets that we'd rather not know. And besides, this truly cleanses us from the rot that hides beneath, and makes us international citizens-able to live and be anywhere, living seamless lives in Vienna and Sydney and San Fransisco and Cape Town.
Others have created for us a "Kenyan-other class" that calls itself truly Kenyan, drops all actually Western names but tries hard to Westernise all cultural names (Wanjiroh, Shiquoh...I'm not terribly sure where in the Greek/Latin spectrum these lie, but surely they must lie somewhere..). This group identifies with all that is foreign- we colonize it and then try to clone it: from sounds, to art, to accents, to clothing, to architecture.
Then there are those of us who are just striving to make it to the other side of town (that white side I mentioned before). The problem is, even as we make the move, we're still "outsiders"- we didn't go to the "right" schools, we don't speak English the way the natives of this place do...but we're here finally, and nobody is going to move us. So we colonize too- by sheer numbers. Because numbers mean that we're not the only ones in the neighbourhood that don't speak like the natives... we're not the only ones playing music loudly in these ridiculously quiet neighbourhoods. Numbers mean "they" are different; they don't fit in. We're safe, and we've made it.
That's just three groups...I'll come back later and file all the others into these staid boxes that my mind has created.
The emotion that this paints is one of pain, and of hopelessness. One of dashed hopes; disappointments.
This is where I go, every time I think of home. Every time I think about who I am in relation to who I am supposed to be. The African against the african. The Kenyan against the Kenyan-from-Nairobi.
The older generation hate that latter phrase. They don't believe it to be true of anyone. Nairobi is not a place you come from. There are no shambas in Nairobi, no soil on which to cultivate, or land on which to graze cattle (kettle). Not only is that not permitted, it would also be callous and uncultured to practice any form of rural-ity in the city. For it is a city- a place of hard cash and concrete and unrelentingly heat on Monday afternoons in the stuffy Parliament building.
But that generation, now dying out, is wrong. Because, we are here- those of us who identify ourselves quite strictly by that phrase...Kenyan-from-Nairobi. The city is all we know. And to make matters even worse, we only identify with certain parts of the city, denoting how well our parents did for us (although nobody ever says this too loudly anymore...One Kenya, One People and all). So I identify with the west of nairobi and all the "rich-kid" sneers it evokes. Not that I'm a rich kid- far from it. Just that my parents got lucky, and landed up in what was once a leafy suburb (now turned concrete jungle) that catered to, and still does, the "upper middle class."
I have school mates here in the US, who are striving to be able to have their kids identify with that part of city. Proof of having "made it." Like getting into this school is not enough. Like having to pay all the money to be here is nothing. All that matters is that you live on the
But it is not with them that my quarrel lies. It is not even with my elderly parents, who were only trying to do the best for us by sanitizing us of any real culture (because culture means memories of climbing up the social ladder, and sometimes those are bad) and leaving us "better" than they could ever have been under colonialism.
It is with the generation born at independence and just after- that generation that could have reinterpreted this sticky concept of identity for us- filled that cultureless gap with vital information about who we are, and why we are that and not something else. That is the generation that betrayed us. Instead of taking the privileges their parents afforded them and using them to re-member (or 'member') an identity for a fractured country, they fell into 'businessing', and amassing, and "investing" and "building." Not that any of these things were wrong in themselves. Just that they are wrong if done in a vacuum. And that is where Kenya lay as they began their exploits.
In a cultureless vacuum. And so when tribalism reared its ugly head to fill that void, it found no resistance. On the contrary, it was welcomed. Because, you see, when the amassing and businessing and building and investing was on a slump, and minds were more open to thought, there was nothing- nothing of higher inspiration, nothing of greater good, no bigger-picture scenes, nothing. The most natural thought that could occur in that void was the thought of self.
And that self sought similar selves to be conjoined to. So the ethnic nation-building spirits that divided the land of their fathers possessed them, and they were ravaged by that demon called ethnicity. That demon that only destroys, tears down, tramples. But they had lost the window of opportunity to be exorcised that had presented itself in the 1980s, just after the attempted coup. They could have refused to take in what they were told...that X was blacker than them and therefore up to no god, that Y was a schemer, and thus out to finish them. They could have chosen to remember that it was Onyango who shared his books in class, and Kimani who was the best goalkeeper in last week's game, and Ngaira who's mother had given you the biscuits, and Chep who painted your nails for the wedding. And that X and Y didn't matter. People with individual talents and quirks and energies did (and do). We could have been one, had we rejected that notion of apartness that so clearly identifies us now.
But my older brothers and sisters failed us.
Lucky for us, desperation is surely a greater mother of invention than necessity- but if it makes us quibble, let's say she is the mother of innovation instead. Desperation has driven generation Michael Jackson/Whitney Houston to come up with "innovative solutions" in a bid to reclaim our identity. The problem is, there are about as many innovations as there are people.
Some of us deny our identity as Kenyans- we're too "other" to really do the "Kenyan thing," (whatever that connotes). So we only associate with white and brown skinned people. Everyone else is too dark for us, has too many secrets that we'd rather not know. And besides, this truly cleanses us from the rot that hides beneath, and makes us international citizens-able to live and be anywhere, living seamless lives in Vienna and Sydney and San Fransisco and Cape Town.
Others have created for us a "Kenyan-other class" that calls itself truly Kenyan, drops all actually Western names but tries hard to Westernise all cultural names (Wanjiroh, Shiquoh...I'm not terribly sure where in the Greek/Latin spectrum these lie, but surely they must lie somewhere..). This group identifies with all that is foreign- we colonize it and then try to clone it: from sounds, to art, to accents, to clothing, to architecture.
Then there are those of us who are just striving to make it to the other side of town (that white side I mentioned before). The problem is, even as we make the move, we're still "outsiders"- we didn't go to the "right" schools, we don't speak English the way the natives of this place do...but we're here finally, and nobody is going to move us. So we colonize too- by sheer numbers. Because numbers mean that we're not the only ones in the neighbourhood that don't speak like the natives... we're not the only ones playing music loudly in these ridiculously quiet neighbourhoods. Numbers mean "they" are different; they don't fit in. We're safe, and we've made it.
That's just three groups...I'll come back later and file all the others into these staid boxes that my mind has created.
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