It’s All Over Now: Kubali Matokeo? No. Time to START Living, if #WeAreOne.

A lot has changed since the late hours of Saturday morning. Life has needlessly gone to waste. Our inept governance and disaster response reactions have once again come to the fore. Even worse, our inhuman opportunism in moments of human pain further sullied a bloody backdrop.

15 years ago today, we were heading towards 50 days from our first involuntary encounter with Al Qaeda. 212 were dead, and countless lives scarred by a disaster I was too young to fully comprehend. 

The only thought on my mind, on August 7^th 1998, was my 11^th birthday the following day. Would they cook chapatti at my grandma’s – where I was heading, seated in the passenger seat of a matatu, as news of the bomb blast broke on the dashboard dead ahead of me – or ugali?

4 months ago, Storymoja Africa asked me to imagine the world with them. Gladly, I did. Imagination is the stuff of dreams, you see, and boy do I love to dream. What I care for more than dreams, however, is to see these dreams come true. I wait patiently to make them be. 

What happened on Saturday, while I had imagined it before, is no dream. It is a nightmare, the easiest kind of reality that comes from imagination. It was, however, no surprise to me. 

Last month, days before the August 7 memorial, I happened to be at Memorial Park. The park sits at what would be our Ground Zero – the site of the ‘98 terror attack. Let us now recap what we learnt then, and how we have applied it since. I’ll save you the trouble with one statement:

A lot has not changed since the late hours of Saturday morning.

As I learnt while talking to someone at our Ground Zero cenotaph, only the direct victims of what is now a fatefully insignificant tragic statistic in Kenya’s history actually remember it. The park may be called a ‘memorial,’ but beyond it simply being a commemorative plaque of one dreadful event in Nairobi hiss stories, the monument is now a simple revenue collection bin. 

That some choose to piggy-back on the park to fill their piggy-banks is hardly new. It is also, sadly, no news. Your government is still inept. Your morality is still for sale to the highest bidder. Your public utilities are still inutile. Your health system still sucks. 

You still don’t know who you are; still can’t tell what you need from what you want. 

You will still sit on your arse and wait for the next tragedy – small or monumental, natural or otherwise. You will wait only for you to react; to say, to never think or act independently.

“Stupid is as stupid does. Are you happy with your life today? Time is a blessing, that ticking clock has been sent to remind you that your life is valuable.

It is also futile; it has a beginning and it has an end.”

• Seven Sentences

And so tomorrow you will wake up. It may take longer than 24 hours, but tomorrow you will wake up. You will shed your patriotism. You will lose your nationalism. You will lose your leased ideals and leeched morality. Latch on to your good old need to feed off your brother’s flesh.

Indeed you will accept, you will move on, your choices will have no consequences.

Already you wonder what these tens of lives lost, these disquieting tens of hours under siege have done to your money. What they have done to Kenya’s economy, and if we can recover. 

Already you replace past silent tragedies with this latest loud one. 

Already you are marveling at the picturesque pictorials of gore, talking about the effectiveness of their insensitivity. Already you are rising up to defend your respective tribal leader’s squirms or otherwise squeamish action during the skirmish. 

Already you are baying for blood. 

Accusing your Eastleigh brother, that Somali Arab-looking brother you don’t know, for the acts of terror inspired not by race or place, but by creed. Already you are talking of reactions to these terrifying actions of terror. You have killed – if understandably so – every last gunman in that mall. Make no mistake, dear KDF , for I applaud your patiently conclusive reaction. 

It was, after all, in self-defense. You were, after all, doing a job that should only be yours as a last resort.

A job you did in defense of inhabitants – temporary or permanent – of Westgate, who on the day became hostages and victims. It is by no fault of your own that every possible trail – it would seem – as to whom and the wherefores of the attack, runs cold. 

We are left in an all too familiar position now, however: that of shooting in the dark.

People died in 80 odd hours from Saturday morning. They died at a rate, perhaps, of 1 life per hour; a rate, more so, of countless hungry, overall. Countless wept, overall, but few of these weepers were conscious, sadly. 

Nigh fell. Many prayed. They did the natural thing when confronted by the unknown. They went for the unseen.

That is no critique, this atheist might add, for the unseen comforted me too. I went for my music. And while unlike any god this music could be heard, I had but my own interpretations of this music to go by. 

In this way I was similar to some religious folk; but not to those who rely on what is interpreted to them of what they believe to be their own script.

That kind is no different from the ilk that shot to death unconfirmed denizens in the dozens of dozens.

But already, dear hustler, you have returned to Kenya to help ‘calm the situation’ down… to "participate in security briefings." 

To consult. 

Because these attackers chose a time when you were not here to strike. Of course they did it in spite of you, not to spite you, dear hustler. Don’t come chasing waterfalls, while your colleagues sit chasing after doves in and outta parliament.

"We hope that some people will begin to contextualize what is going on and begin to appreciate the challenges that Kenya is going through, the region is going through, and the complications that are brought by what is going on here."

H.E. the VP of Kenya, W.S. Ruto, in "The Hustlers also Cry".

What does it matter? After all, opportunity – bloody or otherwise – is for the strongest to reap from. 

 

"In light of the circumstances and the views heard during the hearing, the Chamber excuses Mr Ruto from the proceedings.

For the moment the excusal is permitted for one week only, subject to any further requests that Defence counsel may make if need be to extend it,"  

Judge Chile Eboe-Osuji swallowed. Hook and line sunk.

This too shall pass. Not because we are a strong nation. Not because we are unscarred; because we are oblivious to our own bloodshed. At the least, this time around, we have a common enemy. Who that enemy will be, however, remains to be seen as the year closes down. 

I am worried. Not slighted, for that would imply – if only by similarity of sound – that it was slight. Worried, you see, sounds to me like war. It sounds like all out warfare unto the few in my town who think they know, while knowing not. To those who forget to feel, because – and get this – they have bills to pay. 

We all have bills to pay. We all need passion. Yet passion pays no bills. So ask yourself this:

“If you don’t like what you are doing right now, if your [life and work don’t] wow you…then why are you still doing [that]?”

• Seven Sentences

To paraphrase one of my favorite quotidian reads, quoted and attributed extensively through this post, is it simply because family responsibilities? Or is it because financial security? Perhaps it’s because some other lying, cheating, stealing reason?

“A good dream won’t make you poor, if you think it through, if you plan it well…”

• Seven Sentences

So if you’re doing what you don’t mean to be, then every time you are asked why you’re still at it, forget every other excuse, and give this reason:

I cannot think my dream through. I cannot plan it well enough to follow it through…

 

Only say you care about the world if you care enough to suffer through doing something to impact it. Regardless of what happens to you through it all.

The Riskiest Thing You Can Do Right Now Is To Simply Keep Doing The Same Old Thing.

Look What We’ve Done

What have we done to the world?

What about all the peace that you pledge your only son?

                                                - Michael Jackson, Earth Song.

Nairobi, Sunday 22nd September 2013

A man whose voice I wanted to meet died yesterday. A soul whose words I was dying to pick floats away to the unknown. This man I never met. I had not the pleasure of hearing him speak. Not once did I have the knowing want to hear him, not once having truly known him.

I remember sitting in the room, staring at my itinerary. Only 6pm, yesterday. Counting the men sat up front in the panel that met East with West, wondering.

Wandering whispers had been going round my electrified world, about gunmen in a mall. Hijackers, the loud repeat went. Custom had me less than kindly about the soft digital voices. It was a happy day, a day of joy.

A first, in many days.

I remember saying that privilege is our problem, our very lack of true being. I remember thinking of privilege as multifaceted – as a list of bubbles we need blow away. I even said, after thinking little of it, that the gunmen were fighting privilege.

It was a happy day, you see. A day of joy.

A first in 3 days for me, since the festive Storymoja Hay had begun. 

It was a sad day elsewhere, I later saw. A day of grey, mere hours into a loveless warfare of disbelieved belief. Awareness everywhere.  Voids of conscience filled up, bit by agony bit, with violent information. 

I was happy. Oblivious. Peacefully lacking awareness, disconnected from the world around, plugged into a literary Utopia. 

Then I saw the missive a friend bottled into my sea of inter-netted waters. 

What about it? They gave a kill order 10 days ago, I had thought. Hijackers are probably dead by now, I breathed in. There couldn’t possibly be more to this than simple burglary-gone-bad. 

Maybe, even, just a sick fundamentalist retaliation for that classist war of emotion and word gone by. A war that was electrified and shared. 

A war whose weapons lay down 4 months before yesterday. A war whose only weapon was a wordy affair laced with shades of class, and the art of Café. 

I was dead wrong.

One call and I realized how wrong I was.

Malli was in the parking lot, looking. Calling. I went out in a haze, slightly piqued at her for getting me out of the world of poetry Fatou had engrossed my self in. The lovely Fatou; a queen of projected soul from Sierra Leone. She sounded, I think, like sex on the imagination. Her words pricked, her bosom heaved, her eyes soaring to the skies of the roof. 

She would later say, of her country’s civil war, how much she felt. How – even whilst away through it all – she was its victim. A window to her mind’s heart would crack open, and she would tell me. She would speak to me of the friends and uncles who died, the mothers and sisters who got their legs undone, their sanctity defiled. Her soul forever soiled by a vivid living memory. A memory of what was. 

A memory of what would soon be, for me?

I could not forgive her, sitting in the car park with a mutual friend, for getting me away from Fatou. 

But the conversation turned, and I did. 

The man beside Malli, with the dreaded locks, spoke. 

“See what your religions do?”

He’s an atheist, Malli explained. I shrugged, indifferent.

“At least your hair would have survived the gunmen, Freddy. Are there any dreadlocked Muslims?” he said, his tired hurt eyes arresting my heart.

The gunmen, I soon learnt, were more fundamentalist than I had thought earlier. Creed killers; killers masked by creed, swathed by hatred, hidden by race, their faces hidden behind their killing shields. Socked, soaked with the blood of dozens of innocent lives they had taken indiscriminately, turned Nairobi into a killing field.

They were Mujahedeen.

A chilly wobble I have not felt in many moons shook my core as I walked back to the room, the haze I left it in replaced by an uncertain daze. 

A man from the West was baring his heart out in word when I got in, gradually levitating spirits, relegating conscience back to the drop. He sang a second poem out, did Kwame, and I felt my conscience ease back into the oblivion of bliss.

If you know your woman

…your sins are enough for her to leave and never return.

                                                                - Kwame Dawes.

Yet the unoccupied seat continued to linger in my mind’s trunk. Where was Kofi?

***

In an ideal world, where bullets know who’s guilty, I’d say guns were a necessary evil.  In the world I live in, bullets have no mind, but reckless freckled kills of their own. My euphoria dissolves at once. Kofi, it emerges, has become one of these freckles. 

¹And death, when he comes

to the door with his own

inimitable calling card

shall find a homestead

resurrected with laughter

and dance

and the festival of the meat

of the young lamb and the

red porridge

of the new corn.

He is now some body. Somebody I did not used to know. Somebody I know now. Somebody I can only now ever know by his documents:

²On this dirty patch

a tree once stood

shedding incense on the

infant corn:

its boughs stretched across

a heaven

brightened by the last fires of a tribe

They sent strangers and

builders

who cut that tree

planting in its place

A huge senseless cathedral

of doom.

***

If I’m going to die young, it may be from a piece of mechanic metal, tarmac-ridden by intoxicated thought. It may be from a piece of sharp metal, of a shrapnel-led existence making do with my material. 

It’ll be by a serf-inflicted bullet through my brains, not self-inflicted bullets in my mind. 

Free thought. Free to think and think freely, thinking alone. Not with the group-thinking faith that brainwashed a gun into taking away one of the great minds of our times. Kwame Dawes, hours before he found out that his uncle Kofi had been killed in the Westgate Mall terror attack, had said to those of us gathered at Ford Hall, that although our fathers’ “sense of self was so brutalized, they gave us something to hold on to.” 

It certainly was not fear. 

I hold on to the world, and the world doesn’t need to be changed. Change is always evitable unless you can become the world, feel the pain the world does. 

If I am to die young, I will have lived old. I will have been happy; having held on to my bold peace, in bold scattered pieces. 

As will my body rest. 

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success. But the man behind the label knows defeat far more intimately than he knows triumph. He can never be absolutely certain that he has achieved his intention.

             - James Baldwin; Eight Men, in Nobody Knows My Name.

Kofi Awoonor (left) and Kwame Dawes (right)

^1-2 Excerpts from Poems written by the late great Kofi Awoonor.

                              Lived 13^th March 1935 – 21^st September 2013.

Blurred Lines: The Mortality of Straight Thought

~ For @Storymoja's #WazaDunia

Act I, Sin-band 1.

On 14^th July, round about 2000hrs EAT, I happened to be at the scene of a crime. A bunch of crooks got tired of sitting in front of prison bars, cuddling prisoners' heads with the butts of their guns. Frustrated with guarding their own species of sex, never having to do more than butt the prisoners, let loose on the streets of Pwani Si Kenya’s Shanzu. Problem.

Their foray into the armpits of the Tourist Town’s foliage set the neighbourhood alight. Literally. Gunshots left, right and centre, mostly aimed at the sky. These crooks were exchanging smiles, snatching guns from each other as kids to toys. Much to the shit loosenings of the innocent bystanders.

Every Dick, Dick and Dick legally outside Shimo La Tewa's prison gates instantly became a candidate for the hostile reception party these crooks’ boots, whips, blows, bayonets and gun barrels had in store for them. Forget that many of these men were trying to get home to Mtwapa after a long hard day’s work in the sputtering of Tourist Hotels that are the mainstay of the Coast’s economy.

***

Act II, Sin 1.

You drop a cigarette in a litter zone. This zone, it so happens, is not a designated litter bin. It is, however, a litter bin nonetheless. Problem.

Solution? You pick up your butt and walk off, right?

***

Act III, Sin-band 1.

All the world's problems are, from every individual, picked up and dumped in one designated problem tank. They are then shared out equitably to every individual on the planet. It is then said that we would all, unequivocably, drop the new problems, pick up our shitty little problems and stalk off. Never looking back, the Lot's wives of us.

***

Are the above scenarios similar? Is Act II Sin 1 similar to Act III Sin-band 1? Is the problem tank analogy the same as the litter bin hyper thesis?

Perhaps. They all have problems. The second and third are probably most correlatable, but even then, not quite.

Unlike litter, our problem tank is full of material and immaterial issues. That cigarette's butt, plastic bottle, Java cup, busted Mobile phone, condom, condom wrapper, lollipoop-stick, or black gangsta hoodie in the bin. They can all be picked up. They can all be dropped. Easy peasy...quite the breezy.

Can you do the same for – or with – a social problem? Moreso, is the problem equal when exhibited by different individuals?

Does a high-class call girl, for instance, suffer through the same issues a street-walking strumpet does? Is prostitution a problem, or just the hive that nests problematic bees?

Act IV Sin 1

A guy stands at a podium. As he takes out a card from his pocket, out fall not one – not two – but a six-pack of sex-packs. Guy is a lecturer, preacher, politician, president or other exalted panel speaker doing his mouth runs in an auditorium full of eager young grasping sponges of minds. Like minds.

Society preaches protection and safe sex. Yet:

• Guy will most likely be embarrassed.
• Crowd will quite likely erupt in laughter, aka LOL, alias LTAO.

These like-minded eager to learn folks will still – quite likely – bear this double standard. Preach protection, then shake their damn heads at it in equal measure. Problem?

***

We live in a quite stratified society. Where every individual, despite being individual, unique, is expected – or expects – to fit in. One in which there are tonnes of eager boxes waiting patiently to be filled. To be entered. We have levels and lanes, wigs and high-roads full of self-interest and other-disinterest. Yet all these somehow merge for and/or against common enemies.

What common enemies?

Recently, our common enemy has either been very sexual or very religious. Or very religiously sexual, sexually religious.

Very sexual. Very homo. Very natural. Very same.

Because sex, like it or not, is natural. Take a look at your general pubic configuration and have yourself a gory light bulb moment. Hey socket, meet plug. Go ye forth and electrify.

Because homo, like it or don't, is same. Homosex, is same nature. As in natural. See history books. You were not taught by some outside force to be straight or curveballed.

Because individual, like it or not, we are. As a planet, we are a globe full of individual persons, with individual needs, and individual goals. Should one individual's needs be to score goals aplenty for the 'same' team, then that prerogative is their own to do with as they please.

As is their bum and pubic region.

What's stopping you from doing as you please, always caring too fucking much about your neighbours shit et al? Mavi usioyala, yakuwashiani?

What's should stop me from being?

Status quo?

It's nigh on impossible to simply sit there and talk about the issue of homosexuality as an exclusive issue. Yet, and this is where #teamHappy goes wrong, our problems are interconnected. Before your brain goes into overdrive, dear reader, trying to figure out if I think homosexuality is a problem that needs a solution, let me spell it out for you: being gay is a problem.

Homosexuality in itself, you will find, is not the problem. However, the modalities of being curved–not-straight, are. And not just for 'the gays'. It is in fact in the way society interacts, when it cares to, with them, and how they react to it. How they interact with society, if they bother, and how it reacts to them.

There seems to be a certain protocol and bureaucracy that correlates gay guy sex to feminism; where feminism refers to being feminine. And since women need to be controlled in our society lest they run wild and refuse to open their legs in silence, so need the gay guys.

The irony is that when manly men are shackled, the have the luxury of revolting. Not so much for their women, and their womenly men.

Did the MauMau revolt because they were denied land that was rightfully theirs, or because they then had to walk around this land with a noose around their necks, from whence hang a metallic pedantic pendulum of identification?

The Kipande, a colonial ID system that was basically the equivalent of Slave TrackIt, still exists. Not only in our linguistic parlance, where we still reserve the term for our wallets and IDs; but also in our minds.

We still call them kipande, and like women's tribal names, they remain as their cultural society intended them to. Women, in my native tongue, are -lashed 'silence'. Directly translated, 'mutumia' refers to 'person whose lips are sealed'.

Men, conversely, are called 'choice', or 'brave', depending on which scenario of preference they are zooming in on. 'Muthuri' is the 'person who chooses,' while 'mundu-urume' is the 'person who is brave.' Choice is a man, bravery is a man. Silence is a woman. And what is a man's choice?

Man's choice is as to which woman's lips he will seal. Which women he will bravely silence, awed as they will be by his courage and ability to choose so well. It's no wonder the blowjob is such a fast-rising – and arousing – sensation. The only sound she can make then would be a gaggle or slurp...but I digress.

What society, thus, cannot fathom, is why any man would choose to be silenced. The gay guy, being so 'womanly', is expected to be just as silent. Because he so chose to be. A woman. Yet in true double standard, he is also expected not to choose to 'be a woman'; not to 'be a 'Desperate Housewife'; not to 'be a queen'.

He is expected to choose. To be brave. To be man.

Ergo, it's either 'take your pride parade where it belongs. In a closet far far away' ... or 'why don't you be...somebody? Why are you being...a woman?'

And just to make it a tad worse, sometimes it's either...or...or die.

So why bother coming out? Why not simply be who you are, and not have to come out into the shit streets in defense of who you, I, we...are? Pride at having come out should be the bravest, most stupid choice a guy can make.

[First Published on July 19th 2013]

The Return of MOI: Kenya's Post Erection Insolence

Everybody loses it, I have oft found, continue to find. Perhaps this is why, in writing this piece, I sat and took a long hard think as to how I'd say what I need say, and appear not to bitch. Appearances, however, are a tart cliché filled with deceptive pastry.

This is not a bitch post. My mother had it tested.

I have also oft found that I disappoint people a lot. More on appearances -- remember them? -- than it is on the deliberate intention to deceive. The appearance that I fit into a box: the 'one of us' box; the 'not for us' box; the 'uptight' box; 'the easy-go-lucky' box...and much more recently, the '(not) Kumbaya my Lord' boxes. 

Recently, however, a new series of boxes has seemed to emerge. The 'serious', 'loaded' or 'seriously loaded' box, depending on where the boxer stands. 

You see, I decided to start a company. I have done business before, but this time I chose to go it the long hard narrow way that is incorporation in Kenya. 

Being as I find action to be incorporated in thought and speech, I talked about the company; it was soon to be that the company took on a life of its own. A story, one oft finds, that I will tell another day; since that is not why we're assembled in this dark cyber room, pretending to speak to you. 

We're gathered here today, dear brethren and sirens, to cast our minds back to the days when Kenya was born. 50 years ago, right?

Wrong. Dead wrong. 

In fact, Wrong Turn kinda-dead wrong.

Kenya was born of the fecal matter that sprung out of the Race for Africa. Just in case the wording fools you, we're talking about race in a 'Hey ye! hey ye! scramble, let us partition Africa's scrambled eggs' kinda way. 

The Race for Africa. Not the colored race, nor the colorful races. 

Those races are not the kind we speak of. The race we do, today, is the same one that invaded - and continues to invade - the dusty 1, cave-dwelling 2, Provincial Roman populace 3 now known as Africa. The same one that occupied, annexed -- and continues to occupy, annex -- this land, named for all intents and purposes after some king-doomed place, in or around present-day Tunisia4. 

The race -- your History books will tell you, if you bother yourself with them -- that colonized and civilized my ancestors. It continues to colonize and civilize their children's great grand children.

The Race for Africa. The only race that has been for Africa. The violent race; a bloody winner-takes-all race; one that named, shamed and took Africa, continues to name, shame and take Africa.

The capital race; a Capitalist's race wrought in steel, iron and capital murder; not a colored race, nor a colorful race.

Even the people who live in the continent called Africa certainly are not for it. They spring from it, in more ways than one. They are sometimes born in it, into it; sometimes they choose to live in it, fly into it. 

Always fly in. 

You don't hear Amistad-like stories of people drowning in their boat-fulls; on their way from Spain, crossing the 15 odd Strait of Gibraltar kilometers into Morocco, and to the blissful freedom of oblivion's claws.

The Strait of Gibraltar as seen from space by NASA, 14 April 1994.
(North is to the left: The Iberian Peninsula is on the left; North Africa on the right)

What you do hear, is those born in it, when given the Green chance, springing the blank off of her sperm-fulls of potential blanks. If they're lucky enough to be worth their host country economy's while.

Yes sir, Frank Njenga sir! Ladies first...

The people of Africa, as she is now, spring from Africa. Spring; not from what it was when it wasn't Africa, but from what it is since it has been Africa. For over half a century towards the 19th Century's close of business, before the boss said there would be no pay for overtime, the dusty slum-dwellers of the black land were prepped. 

Lubed, more like, by a hegemony -- an informal governance, if you will -- of military superiority and economic dominance. That, and the influencing promise of slave-ship detours to Religiosity.

Long before the land- and mind- grabbing began -- long before the lines drew, the mines blew -- there lived a Berber named Leo Africanus. The Moorish 16th Century diplomat and author is said to have written of the land west of the Nile Valley, in a Descrittione dell'Africa.  A Description of Africa in which he proposed that his home was aphrike, from the Greek Αφρική. With the suffix φρική, meaning "cold and horror", and a prefix that to this day means 'without', he described his home as being 'without cold or fear/ horror.' He is also said to have traveled to Timbuktu and back - literally, before it became a European byword for inaccessibility.

He never once crossed the Sahara, nor saw Nigeria, Kenya or South Africa. He did see a lot of the Songhai Empire, travel through Cairo to Constantinople and Bologna. Go figure. 

The Rhodes Colossus: Caricature of Cecil John Rhodes, after he announced plans for a telegraph line and railroad from Cape Town to Cairo. December, 1892.

The irony that you - supposedly - are going to figure, is that the man after whom Africa was more likely christened 5:

• did not see most of what he described, but rather relied on what he was informed of. 

• did not see Kenya, Nigeria or South Africa, countries supposedly synonymous with Africa today. See Africa Rising narrative.

• quite possibly did not intend to describe any more than his own knowledge. That is, he described what lands he conquered -- also later known as 'discovered' -- in his travels. Mostly North Africa; this he compared, one might imagine, to what else he had seen. Namely some bits and pieces of Italia, Anatolia (Asia Minor) and what lay in between.

This is what became of Leo's knowledge, in 1600.

 'A Geographical Historie of Africa' was proclaimed.

To Africanus, however, aphrike was what he knew; and he certainly knew a lot. Quite like many of our own leaders, wannabe leaders and pretend leaders today do. He had read, you see. He had been told, you will find. He had also traveled and seen some, and concluded that what he had seen -- related to what he had read, and been told to think -- was true. 

He had not, one finds, experienced every nook and cranny of what landmass became Africa; much - again - like many of our African Union peeps. Peeps who be presidents: many simply peeping abroad and sipping high teas as their small portions of the cake Africa rot in their mouths.

I am no apologist of Europe - or Britain, for that matter - in as far as her Colonial History is concerned.  I am no apologist of Africa -- or Kenya, for that matter -- in as far as her recovery, or pretense thereof from said history, is concerned. 

But; inasmuch as facts be considered, then the following remain true:

• Kenya is not Kenya for Kenya's interests.

• Neither is Africa for her own interests.

• Being Kenyan, Ugandan, Burkinabe or South African (what does this even mean? Where does South begin?) counts for naught in as far as bread puts up tables.

Who, pray tell then, is African? Who is Kenyan?

I am who I am. I think -- dream even -- but not like Umair Haque does, or thinks I should or shouldn't. I do, but not like my brother and friend Boniface Mwangi  may or may not think I should. I say, but not as my good foreign friends -- TED -- and gooder local enemies -- GOK -- think I should. 

My thinking -- my dreaming, even -- and my doings and sayings, are my own. They should not come to be sought to presume that I have this, that or that there. This being money and women, as they go together... oh so tenderly well. That being expensive phones... and that there?

That there being leadership. 

Because I will, by default, likely disappoint these boxes. At the very least, my appearance will.

      .::0 To be continued 0::.

Ps: This is still not a bitch post. It was the return of moi, French for me. Or the return of My Own Interests. Or the return of President Moi. 

To see what actual bitch posts look like, contact me here, here and here. They may or may not really be bitchy.
____________________

1-4. From Africa's Etymology, see hypotheses on: dust, cave, Africa Province - capital city being Carthage - and Ifriqya - being modern-day Tunisia.

5. My own presumption, based on little actual knowledge.

* The next installment of today's piece features: Kenya's colony, and how it led us to where and who we are to date, our post election insolence, and 'my own interests' culture... 

DISCLAIMER: It may or may not be titled as follows. 

"From Kenya to Africa: One Big School Full OF FAKE Bitches."

Mad Men: A Flight of Stairs in the Dark

#Np Theory Of A Deadman – Hate My Life  

A boy updates his Facebook status. His Facebook status updates his Twitter, and his Twitter sends word to his Linkedin. All it takes is one hit, and one message — through these intricate interconnections — becomes public; becomes, for solicited prostitutions of view.  

A girl far-far away in South Africa to his Kenya, who is the boy’s boss – and incidentally tapped into his networks – sees his update. A girl calls a boy and asks him why he has not responded to her email from 6 hours ago.  

We live in a world where technology is making public figures of anyone with a key -board or -pad. The World, Thomas L. Friedman remarks, is Flat. 

What this flattening does not take into account is just how much technology complicates life. If a fire breaks out in a traditional village deep in the heart of Kenya’s not-so-Silicon-Savannah valley, chances are that one hue and cry gets the neighbours out. I witnessed a couple of instances deep in Laikipia county, where one scream was all it took to marshal a fire brigading troop of young men, women, elders, living dead and ancestors to the scene of a fire; to putt it out collectively. 

There are no electric lines in the village, you see, to add insult to the incendiary injury. There are no gas cylinders, you will find, to hinder prospects of getting too close to a flame. There are no worries, moreover, that a call to put out fire at 6 O’clock – be it am or pm – will stop you from getting home, or to work. There is no traffic jam or one-for-the-road to consider. No all-nighters either, no trans-nighting...unless of course it's the kind that goes "ooh, aah..."

In the communes, the people live together, work together, fight together. Sure they will disagree. But – so I found during my 6 month stay in Sipili Ng’arua – they have a lot more that unites them than divides them.  

How? If ‘your fire’ spreads out onto ‘our grass fields’, then ‘my cows and goats’ will starve before the next rains come; two months from now, I could lose my source of milk, source of income. If ‘your trouble’ spills over past ‘our grass’ and levels ‘our children’s school’, then ‘my money’ – spent in piecemeal building up the school’s infrastructure – will be lost. If, heavens forbid, ‘your flames’ fan through all that and burn down ‘my forest, my crop, my hut’, then I have no firewood, no home, no clothes, no food…

I’ll be damned if I let your fire burn me!  

Just because I update my Facebook and Twitter doesn’t mean I’m ignoring your Inbox or Direct Message. Social Media is about being social. Being social is about expressing yourself. Express … your SELF. Talk, that is. 

Do you stop talking every single time you receive an email or text message? Do you stop eating or walking? Does your digestive tract halt, or your 'Last Enzyme Standing' lift up a placard hailing ‘ye majesty the Royal Baby Mail’? Do you park your car to the curb and pay a parking fee just to respond to that glorious seed of corporate communication?  

Inboxes and Direct Messages are simply over-glorified text messages and emails. They are personal, should remain in that realm.  

Who says life revolves around that email, so much so that you sit around waning and waxing, twiddling your thumbs, awaiting a response? When did communication become the equivalent of actual tasks?  

Unless I am absolutely in love with you, absolutely available or do not need to think about my response, then where you come off expecting immediate responses absolutely beats me. Let me rephrase: I work offline. I don't work online. I cum online...and vent. Occasionally say something sensible, but mostly, I work offline. So deal with it...your little Inbox or DM will be got to if and when it is got to. 

Yet urban life does seem to revolve around emails: that email a client is waiting for; that email your boss sent that pissed the silently flowing shit out of you; that email your Badoo layover sent you with a NSFW attachment; that degrading email copied to everyone and their dog’s flea’s sister’s mother, sent to you by that little mind, with its little car, and a fancy little dress laced with fancy little ‘imported airs’ of self-importantly caffeinated weaves in a dainty little furnished apartment. We have become such narcissists in our own little worlds that nobody seems to think through what their actions do to others’ state of mind.  

Further, John Perkins – an Economic Hitman – released Confessions thereof in 2004. This self-confessed former pecuniary mercenary, helps kill off democratically elected presidencies – with a bullet, a polity or a policy. He then turns around and tells you about it. In a book; a book that is for sale. 

In other words, I was once a thief, rapist and murderer, and have severally crushed little babies under the soles of my feet, but now I’m saved; praise Jesus!  

Perkins' book, while affirming Graham Hancock’s The Lords of Poverty – a book as relevant in the late 80s as it is now – also plays on the same layers that both books attempt to expose. I get that passion does not pay the bills, but if at all he was really interested in doing his pretty little Sacrament of Penance, Self -Mortification and a bit of -Flagellation, how about not selling the books, Lil' Johnny?

Reading either book – or both, I would recommend – opens your eyes to the frailties of our system, and why it is that we are consistently asked to fanya kazi kwa bidii, utalipwa nothing’-i. Why we are now being told that the country Africa is such a hopeful one, riddled with opportunity as it rises. Why every other speech by the ‘criminal president invited to the UK’ begins and ends with youth and women, and is laced with chants of go ye for the and multiply Enterprise.  

The lines between which, dear sheeple, you do not read, are these:      

• That guy in Diaspora was told the same story when he left Kenya on a Green card to The Land of Opportunity, of Stars, of Stripes. They assessed his strengths, profiled him, saw how he fit in and would benefit their system, and told him to pack his bags; he had won. He could come back 5 or 10 years later, he decided, before the checks and balances designed to keep him there, benefiting their system, tightened their noose around him.     

• That guy who has a cozy job, with a picket fence in Suburbia, nice big-breasted female to warm his loins, and a sports car as large as his cajones, is paying out loans to his employer, and mortgages and insurances and assurances to his Shylock, that keep him mark-timing in his own mediocrity, so sio eti hakupendi, but appearances must be kept up boo-boo.     

• This president you call Tyranny, Prince of the Arable Buyers of Souls, is not a rebel to the World-System-against-Kenya cause. Dear NSIS, you can sit here.     

• And finally, who do you think these businesses Tyranny is telling you to launch – with not one clue how to run it, and where to but the ground – are supposed to benefit? In a system as officially inept and prohibitive, unofficially corrupt as ours? Boo-boo, your ass is in someone’s pocket. So think before you do shit that will feed itself back to you in spadefuls the size of Mongolia.  

All this faux feminism belching around, giving women a sense of propriety and men a sense of importance for allowing women to be, simply works into a larger system of oppressive mindsets that boil down to little else but money. You want her; she looks good, doesn’t she? She’s independent, isn’t she? She can buy her own shit, and she buys it in ships of shit-loads. So you buy it in jet-fueled plane-fulls of it for her. Win-win, you think to yourself, aye?  

You tell her that you are pro-choice. She can have an abortion any time she feels like. She can pop as many pills as she wants, can’t she Ms. Pro-prevention? Meanwhile, the Pharmaceutical giants and baby-skinning doctors are laughing all the way to the bank.  

The same goes for the faux Green Revolution, faux Social Business, faux Micro-financing, fashion faux pas, KENYAN MEDIA, some foreign media, a lot of SOCIAL MEDIA, Holly’s wood… Basically, Imagine your World, then try see what is not infiltrated by greed and bids of insanity. Especially, try see what box you’ve fit yourself in, and what other boxes are just dying to add your massive shep'herd-ity into them.  

 

Question: between you, dear sheepish thinker, and the intellectually challenged/ mentally disabled/ mind-numbingly crippled/ mentally fucked up/ crazy stupid/ foolish asylum dwellers, who is more mental?  

Who is the mad man? 

We’re 7 Seconds away…  

and there’s a million voices,  

to tell you what you should be thinking  

so you better sober up for just a second…  

And when a child is born,  

Into this world  

It has no concept,  

Of the tone, 

the skin  it’s living in…  

#Np Neneh Cherry  & Youssou N’Dour 

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—  Fred Wambugu, preferably known as Freddy, is a writer/ entrepreneur with a liking for agro ways. Both the loud-mouthed, angry “for no reason” and the arable kinds.  

When not farming or talking, Freddy imagines his world with Storymoja Africa, is an Industry and Market Researcher with Eronia Inc Ltd. and is the founder of inThync Kenya.   For more details on the writer, he has suggested that we tell you to scream at him on @french_freddy or Yule Mbois Mndialala.  

Disclaimer: He will holler right back. Loudly. Or lovably.  In other News, does a bio need to have an ‘I’?