Fisticuffs, Bitterness and Fame

I have just got this sudden craving to watch black and white talkies; anything with Lauren Bacall or Elizabeth Taylor, who in case you were not schooled became a celluloid goddess after her performance in ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’. I dare you to consider going through with a marriage proposal after watching that train wreck of a film!

The other evening, while weighing whether to endure the guilt of procrastination or completing two overdue dissertation chapters, I decided on the former and turned to the TV in the hope of catching some good old Jerry Springer. If you have ever wanted to feel blessed, brilliant, loved and morally upright, I highly recommend an hour of Jerry ‘take care of yourself and each other’ Springer. Unfortunately, there was nothing to appeal to such base tastes. However, I did came across a late-night screening of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. And was soon riveted by the emotional disintegration of Jake La Motta the boxer character played by Robert De Niro. The film is two hours of cringe and is based on the true story of La Motta who was a middleweight fighter in the late-1940s and early-1950s.

From winning the world championship with the kind of ferocity that only comes from deep issues, La Motta starts throwing fights, brutalises his wife, sexually exploits minors, takes to heavy drink and finally ends up as a washed-up grossly overweight stand-up comic at an obscure nightclub. All the while De Niro is matching his character’s weight gain and you can see him literally falling apart physically and psychologically. The film has all the elements it takes to make the ab&h list of celluloid fame, fisticuffs, bitterness and fame. And of course it is about boxing, a subject that has long fascinated me to the point that I am in danger of being one of those old men whose constant refrain will be, “I couda been a contender son, then your momma done gon an gotten herself pregnant…”

So a few days later, I am doing my little pre-summer jogging routine and I start daydreaming that I am wearing a hoodie, running with a grim determination to win an upcoming title fight. Before you can say “snap out of it”, I am at my laptop doing a Google search for boxing gyms in the neighbourhood. And behold, there happens to be one a mile or so away. So what other option did I have but to inquire about joining in the hope that at 34, the gym owner would run his bleary eye down my library ravaged body and spot the savage beast within.

And that is exactly what the elderly and laid-back – to the point of unconsciousness – owner of the Fitzroy Lodge did. His sceptical eyes took me in, concentrating to my surprise not on my bulging with skin, bone and blood vessels biceps but on my ever so slightly protruding belly. With what I hoped was a tone implying that I had banged heads with the toughest of them but did not wish to call attention to a dark past, I announced that I was there to “work out.” He extended his hand in greeting and I shook his dry palm with what I hoped was a squeeze that would let him gauge a hidden strength that I imagine must be someplace in me even if its stayed well hidden all these years. And no, don’t you dare suggest that my hands gained their hard grip hanging out with five-fingered Betty in boarding school. But this is a digression that is not to my advantage.

The gym was tucked away behind a line of FedEx delivery trucks, under an unused rail-track giving it the slightly seedy, industrial atmosphere anyone who has watched Rocky associates with such ventures. Inside, the ubiquitous and much described in every boxing story was an overpowering smell of sweat, chalk and leather. I was in: the first step to a fight in Las Vegas’ Caesar’s Palace ring!

The room was dominated by two boxing rings occupied by bouncing, jabbing, parrying, shuffling pairs. They looked clumsy to me, I could already tell that they were not going to match the athleticism that saw me into the Lenana School rugby team all of fifteen years ago. Heavy bags hung from the low ceiling like big, red fruits that had somehow managed to make a roomful of men angry enough to whack at them with varying degrees of violence. From all the boxing sagas I had read, and my lifelong fascination with the Kinshasa fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, I knew that ‘working the bag’, as the latter did so famously, is an art form of controlled aggression and playacting since you must visualise an appendage-less opponent who looks like a red, squat four-foot long sausage hanging from the ceiling.

Standing out from the crowd of young, mostly white males was a thin black woman who was bouncing clumsily from foot to foot with a kind of crazed energy as she tried to pummel the bag under the watchful eye of the whole room. You could tell right away that everyone was intensely conscious of her presence and I wondered whether I would come in for the same attention – perhaps even a challenge to spar with a brutal customer who would try and ‘blood’ me. These impressions were brief since our walk across the room to the office was all of thirty feet.

To be continued … my ego can take no more writing for now. I must save the triumph or the agony for later; my chapters are calling for some loving attention.

Diary of a Mad Kenyan Woman

I have just run across this blog whose first post blew me away. The Mad Kenyan Woman asks: Theoretical Economies: Does Africa Have a Consciousness? Her answer is provocative, mind enlarging and, I must warn you, will make you wish that you had eaten more fish as a kid.

Anonymous Reacts to Africa’s Brain Drain With Uncommon Honesty and Courage

I just received the comment below to my recent post on Africa’s brain drain debate. The writer who chose not to reveal his/her identity had such a visceral and honest reaction that I wish I millions of people could read it. Anonymous, please reveal yourself and tell us more!

Survival first is the most real of all human existence.

Money, but not patriotism pays the bills.
What is often laughable is it is the same beggars in government that have the temerity to label acts of sacrifice by Kenyans …brain drain.

Some go as far as saying they don’t understand how someone will leave a good job in Kenya to go and wipe arse in America.

Well the answer is plain and simple.
Wiping arse in America pays me 10-fold what the paltry pennies in Kenya did.
Wiping arse in America has given me an opportunity that those beggars in government stole.
A chance to be somebody.
Wiping arse in America pays the bills and restores dignity to my family.
Wiping arse in America keeps my younger sibling well provided for so she doesn’t have to go the streets to get it.

While banking in Kenya what did I ever have?
Paltry wages, strained family relations, hopelessness and the list is endless.

Yes I wipe arse in America.
Yes I also don’t think the bank suffered very much when my behind left my position in the words of my boss … you leave, we hire someone else.

Well understood.

Unlike the people in the Kenya government I hate handouts. I hate pity. I hate pretending. I hate stealing from others to build myself.

I love to work with my hands, break my back and at the end of the day see the toils of my labour pay off.

Me and many like myself are the true patriots of Kenya.
We didn’t leave her or sit back and feel sorry for her.
We knew that we make her.
We knew that when we are better than she is better.
Unlike those taking comfort in appearing in infomercials about Kibera begging for food while there is plenty in Kenya to feed us for years to come.
The donations that are given go straight to that fat white woman’s pocket and that nasty funky looking meero who can’t wait for another summit on the brain drain being a bigger threat than AIDS in Africa.

We choose to hide Kenya’s nakedness by the little differences we make in our own way.
Kenya knows that and appreciates it.
That for me is enough.

If You Think Africa is Suffering From a Brain Drain, Your Brain is Drained

I am getting sick and tired of this knee-jerk, sanctimonious and yes, stupid Africa-is-suffering-from-a-brain-drain argument. Every week, on one newspaper or the other, I read of a conference to decry the movement of Africans to the West as the latest neo-imperial plot to bring down long-suffering Africa. When they are not after your gold, oil or cobalt, they are after your mind goes the plaintive wail of the unreasoning aid and development industry do-gooders.

I wish they would just shut up, start a business and get some real work done that increases the wealth and security of their countries. Instead, they prefer to play the old ‘White Guilt’ game of joining with the West’s liberals – who make up the bulk of the aid industry – to call for regulations to stop the flow of hopeful people who are trying to do right by their families and themselves. The argument goes something like this: African professionals have been costly to train and are now moving abroad to pursue their professions thus benefiting the West, rather than their home countries which are now suffering the consequences of this migration. What twaddle.

In 2004, Kenyans abroad, just as an example, conservatively remitted at least $600 million to their friends and relatives through official channels such as Western Union. This is only the tip of the ice-berg as a lot more dollars are sent home through other channels. In 2003, the World Bank estimates that remittances by migrants to their (overwhelmingly poorer) countries exceeded $93 billion, twice the level of worldwide official development assistance. There are other estimates trying to account for informal remittance networks that put the figure at $120-$180 billion per annum.

Unlike development assistance transfers – a large proportion of which pays for luxurious NGO lifestyles and lines corrupt politicians’ pockets – migrant remittances go directly to family members. They are available to the recipients to use according to their own priorities and are used to finance basic consumption, education, health, purchasing or building homes, starting businesses and funding retirement.

My mother was a nurse in the UK for nine years before she returned to Kenya last year. She had initially trained as a nurse in the early 1970s, worked at a succession of government hospitals paradoxically managing to get poorer with every year as the cost of living got more expensive and her professional opportunities shrunk. After a decade of this grind, she went into business for herself and eventually ended up competing for small government tenders – a dirty, corrupt business. Every procedure was fraught with either red tape or dishonesty, and she again ended up almost financially insolvent when the government would not pay her for services she had provided.

Her decision to migrate to the UK was a difficult one: she was broke, in debt and two young children, not to mention my grandmother and a sickly sibling, were dependent on her. She moved to Kent in her mid-forties with kids in tow; having to re-qualify as a nurse by starting at the very bottom of the rung; and not knowing how to drive and unable to even afford a car, had to walk 6-7miles each way to her first £6 per hour nursing home job.

She was forced to often work 80-hour weeks, while meals tended toward baked beans and curry deliveries punctuated by intense worrying about Britain’s youth culture destroying her children. Few were the moments that were not stressful. Opening the post was a nightmarish affair; it was always a bill demanding more money and too rarely a cheque in her name. I can remember her calling me once almost in tears when she realised that she owed the BBC £100 for its compulsory license fee even though she could not remember the last time she had managed to put up her feet to watch ‘Celebrity Big Brother’. But through these travails, she scrimped and saved, and took some advanced nursing courses to qualify for better paying work. Eventually, having been offered a part-time postgraduate place at one of the better universities, she was finally able to come into her own.

The hours remained long but in the final three years before she happily returned to Kenya, they had become far more lucrative. She was now earning £20-30 per hour by working for nursing agencies. This enabled her to buy a property to rent, paid down her mortgage in Kenya and put my brother and sister through university. The former studying astrophysics with the dare-you-doubt-me intention of being the first Kenyan to go to space, while the latter reads international relations with giddy plans to change our country’s political landscape. But my mother’s achievements were not limited to Britain’s shores. She invested her money in Kenya by buying land, supported her mother and brother and provided financial assistance to dozens of friends and relatives during her nine years away. This, we are supposed to believe, represents a brain drain and a sort of imperialist plot. If it does, then I am all for brains draining with all speed and would love to hug imperialism.

The alternative discussed in the ever ongoing conferences bemoaning the brain drain is that my mother had remained in Kenya, getting poorer and perhaps eventually being one of those trades-people that the government treats like criminals when it is not taxing them punitively. Headlines and distinguished dignitaries in the all-knowing aid industry call for the governments that made my mother’s hopes untenable in Kenya and forced her to seek greener pastures abroad to be responsible for regulating and “encouraging” less brain drain. Every such pronouncement draws a bitter laugh from me.

The Kenyan state has routinely devalued and destroyed the aspirations of its citizens with its high taxes, over centralisation, arrogance and criminal conduct. It is akin to the colonial state that we supposedly got rid of 41 years ago though now staffed with black faces whose mouths spout a hypocritical nationalism that enriches them at the expense of those like my mother.

I am weary of the brain drain argument. It belongs to donor and NGO conferences, not to the real lives of those who must live by their wits and effort as opposed to a cheque from Western taxpayers. Those who bandy the argument are relentlessly statist and even now have their eye on remittances that they believe can be directed better by government and development organisations than by the people who earn them. It is an argument beloved by middle class paternalists in hock to donor money and who believe that without those who have left, everything at home will fall apart – it is nonsense of the worst kind.

They make the case not because they believe it, but because they are paid to. Most have been abroad and even worse, make the argument while in London or Washington or Paris. Not for my mother the benefit of migration, but for them who are in the United Nations or Oxfam, being abroad to pursue their vulturous careers based on beggardom is just fine. Ultimately, they choose to not appreciate that people own their own lives and the fruits of their labour belong to them to utilise as they wish provided it does not harm others.

The obvious response to the sentiments I have expressed is that African governments paid for the training of (health) professionals so people such as my mother owe something to the system. This argument, which infuriates me whenever it is made, ignores the fact that most professional who leave their countries do so after years of trying to make a go at home while paying their taxes the whole time. My mother had been a taxpayer for a quarter century before she left. And finally, shocking news to the brain-drained developmentalists: you have failed.

Four decades of your hot air, smugness, arrogance, paternalism and poverty of ideas have only built on equally vacuous colonial legacies to leave many people in Kenya and Africa reduced to a brutish existence that does not reflect their effort, flexibility and hope. Stop bemoaning the brain drain and start thinking of how to use your brain better.

(c) MMK

Blam! And You Thought You Knew Architecture (I.M. Pei)

One of my best friends, Roland, recently sent me a response to a cocky little email I had sent him awhile ago just after I had visited Paris for the first time. On seeing I.M. Pei’s famous glass pyramid in the Louvre, I pronounced it Mitterrand and Republican France’s middle finger to the monarchism of Louis XIV. Roland’s eye saw more, so much more that I have been driven to sharing his email below. I think it is the most illuminating, learned and madly enjoyable critique of an architect’s work that I have ever read.

ab&h,

I’m in the middle of writing another little ditty to you and then I see that you are (or were) in Paris. I didn’t know you were going and if I did I would have written this for you before you left. Actually this is over two years old. I should have given it to you before I saw you in March 2004.

You wrote me an e-mail long ago with your observations on French culture and particularly I.M. Pei’s (pronounced “Pay”) the Louvre. You saw this stark modernist thing sitting right there and it caught your attention. You thought it was Chirac’s gigantic F___ you to France’s past. Not quite. Please be seated for the following lecture on modern architecture of I.M. Pei presented by noted architectural historian Dr. Roland. Exams will be on Tuesday.

Good afternoon. (ab&h, if you continue to throw those spitballs, I will be forced to send you to the headmaster’s office!) Today’s lecture is about the modernism of I.M. Pei. First we will discuss Pei’s use of modernism in the pyramid in front of the Louvre. Contrary to what one would think of at first glance, his pyramid is not an affront to the 2nd Empire style architecture of that portion of the Louvre. What is going on here is what you may have heard in art called “comparison and contrast.”

Let us look at form and break it down. This area of the Louvre is an interior courtyard surrounding the pyramid. What is the characteristic of the style of the buildings? They are all 19th century additions in a very ornate style, very richly and heavily decorated. What is the characteristic of the pyramid? It is a modernist style of steel and glass whose lack of texture suggests smoothness. You see? Highly textured versus smooth. This is the type of thing that is done to highlight the differences and bring out the uniqueness of both qualities. One contrasts with the other, not for the purposes of embarrassing the other or to say F.U., but to bring each other into greater relief. Next, we can see that the older building, being built of stone, is opaque. In contrast, the pyramid is made of glass. This highlights a juxtaposing of solidity, weight, permanence against transparency and light. The old buildings stand proudly on the ground pronouncing their import. The pyramid introduces a new subterranean level, which we must consider. The old buildings invite us to go up into them, but create clogged traffic flows that mess up the vista of the plaza and make it less appealing. (I can remember being accosted by little ragamuffin Gypsies constantly running up to me trying to sell/steal something, which took away something from the experience. Please excuse any bourgeois condescension here.)

The pyramid invites us to acknowledge the previously unconsidered subterranean and directs traffic flows down into it. Here the pyramid provides an accent to the composition that forces us to look at the old buildings again and concentrate on what their architectural statement actually is. In turn, the old buildings force us to look at the pyramid and ask more questions about it. Never does the pyramid function by itself, or overshadow the older buildings. As I said before, it “accents” them. It doesn’t call attention to itself for its own purpose, but only in serving the purpose of the composition as a whole. Now that the contrast between the old and the new has forced us to look at the pyramid more closely, even as we have just looked at the Louvre itself more closely, we delve to a different level of analysis.

We notice that the pyramid is built in a modernist style. But wait a minute, the pyramid is a very ancient form, in fact, the most ancient form of architecture. So we have an old form in a new style—again, contrast. Now let’s add the Louvre to the mix. Isn’t the Louvre supposed to the old building? But wait, again! The pyramid is harkening back to a form that’s older than the building that’s supposed to be the “old” one! Once again we have contrast. That which is really an old form is actually the newer form in this composition. That which is the newer form is, in many respects, the older form in the composition. In this way the two forms dance back and forth, never really allowing us to rest—never allowing us to take them for granted and constantly creating the slight tension that provokes passion, thought and interest.

Now for the coup-de-grace—context. Ask yourself which civilization does the pyramid bring to mind. Egypt, of course. Who in the modern world brought Egypt to Europe? That’s right, the French. One might say that they brought Egypt into their ongoing conversation about civilization, mankind and his origins known as European thought. But Pei asks us to think about this one minute. Is France really bringing Egypt to Europe or has Egypt brought civilization to the world? Who’s old? Who’s new? So is the Louvre really introducing the pyramid to us, or is the pyramid introducing the Louvre to us? Who’s the Daddy here?

Now look at the above and see all the different ideas. Note how they juxtapose—jumping back and forth. The “old” building is really the newer form. The old form is in a newer style. One is solid, the other opaque. One is above ground, the other primarily below. The “old” buildings, facing the pyramid, are really the newest additions to the Louvre. Once again, we are not allowed to rest, get complacent and be comfortable.

Now let’s look at two other places where Pei has used the same tricks. And you should know both of them because they both are in Boston! You’ve seen them a million times. One of these you (should) know very well!

The first is the John Hancock building in the Back Bay section of Boston. (Feel free at this time to do a Yahoo image search for “John Hancock Building” and “Boston.” Find a pic of the building plus Trinity Church at various angles (more). The John Hancock building is also a design of I.M. Pei where he had to deal with the relationship of a modern structure to an old one. The square footage requirements for the design were great, making the building outsized for the neighborhood. How did Pei handle this? First look at the site plan. He made the floorplan into a rectangle instead of the usual square (or something like a square). He then took his rectangular floorplan and turned it sideways to the neighborhood that might be most offended by its size, Back Bay. In so doing, he turned the skinniest side to them making the building almost disappear. Think of a person turning sideways instead of being seen straight on from the front. This works so well that you don’t even feel the presence of the building when walking in the square. (Normally buildings of this size hover over you and make you feel as if they are about to fall on you.)

This, of course, leaves us with a flat, broad side on the other two sides doesn’t it? Its mass couldn’t be avoided right? Well, what he does, instead of trying to hide its mass, is to use the whole side like a huge mirror. What does the mirror reflect? Trinity Church. Trinity Church is the main attraction in the square. That church was designed by H.H. Richardson and is a very important work that exemplified the now famous “Richardson Romanesque” style. Pei knew that this is the very thing tradition-conscious Back Bay people would want to protect. He knew that their first fear was that this new monstrosity would overshadow their precious church. So he made the entire building defer to the older church. He mirrored the whole building. It was quite fortunate for him that this style was “in” at the time. This allowed the building to step itself back in importance (Size usually conveys importance. This is why so many artists paint large paintings. A small painting of the exact same subject would not fetch proportionately as much. But I digress…)

Anytime anyone looked at the building, all they would see is the church, despite the building being hundreds of feet taller and thousands of square feet larger than the church. Which direction does the huge mirror face? It faces downtown, where a large number of people who would be interested could see it. Do you see the same contrast used at the Louvre? Something large and important must not be large while something small is to be made all he larger because of how it is handled. There’s that juxtaposition again. By deliberately not calling attention to itself, it, by turns, calls attention to how well placed it actually is and how well it works within the environment, which just might call more attention to it!

Next consider texture. Once again, the new building is smooth and the old building is ornamented. One building is highly textured and the other is like several sheets of smooth glass.

The church is heavy in its Neo-Romanesque styling yet the larger building seems as light as air. Now look at a picture taken from the base of the Hancock. Notice that the mirror now, no longer reflects the church, but the sky. One really has to look carefully to see whether you are looking at the sky or the reflection of the sky in the uppermost mirrors. The fact that it is 800 feet tall and mirrored makes the top of the tower virtually disappear. This also makes the tower seem much lighter and less likely to feel that it is oppressively leaning over you.

See the same contrasts? Light/dark, big/small, stone/glass, heavy/light. Now criss-cross them. Make the heavy thing seem lighter than the smaller thing, which should seem lighter by comparison, etc. Use that to highlight the differences, not obscure them.

What’s the next example, which as I said, you should know well? Any guesses? IT’S The Christian Science Plaza in Boston! Pei also designed this and it was the first thing I thought of. I know that you didn’t pay to much attention to CS and all that stuff pertaining to it, but I thought that you would at least catch that. Yes, Pei did the church plaza and he used the same tricks here as you saw in Paris and at the Hancock building aforementioned. (Please open picture now) If you can see the old Mother Church is in the Neo-Romanesque style and the Extension is Neo-Classical, you have identified the two “old” elements of the design. Can you find the contrasting new element? It’s not just the new buildings—it’s the pool. Yes, the pool functions as the same type of element in the design as the Hancock tower does a few blocks over.

While interesting in and of itself, it creates a soft reverse image of the “hard” and formal buildings on the plaza. I’m sure you will find a number of pictures of the plaza at night with its pool shimmering and all the lights lit. Notice the columns in the formerly named “Colonnade” building. Notice the repetition used to create a rhythm, drawing the eye all the way down the plaza. Note that the newer buildings could overwhelm the older ones but they never do. They are brought down a couple of notches on the grandiosity scale so as to allow the churches to continue to capture the center of interest. Please look for the same ideas and their various uses in other areas in this design.

This concludes our lecture for today. Remember, you exam is Tuesday. I think you now can supply your own critique from here on as it is 2am and I’m getting tired.

Dr. Roland

Professor of Pencil Sharpening

The beautiful sights one is likely to see in the Louvre Gardens. 

Fit bastards. You will notice the woman in the yellow T-shirt who was also a Capoeirista, but in terrible shape. Yet there she was doing these crazy somersaults and twisting every which way. I was aghast, it has been years since I could be flexible enough to fold a fist! 

Capoeira on the streets just outside the huge and madly expensive Printemps. It was right about this moment when I decided that I indeed need to get my lazy self fit. 

Lazy blogger after an afternoon feeling badly dressed compared to sleek Parisians, decides to spend scarce funds to purchase pimp suit. 

Lazy blogger hanging about Paris playing at being a tourist while worrying about his dissertation the whole time… 

Kenyan soldiers, part of the 14th Army, with a seized Japanese flag, after their capture of Seikpyu, 18 February 1945. A lot of Kenyans who are abroad imagine that they are the pioneers in their family when their grandpa’s might ‘have been there and done that’.
 

Jonana Mungai of the Kings African Rifles, writing home. Burma,
January 1945.

 

On the road to Kalewa to face the Japanese army in January 1945 

Where Does African Heroism Reside?

I just received a text message from a friend in Nairobi who let me know that the authorities are bulldozing all the temporary structures built to house small businesses: kiosks, hawkers and mitumba dealers. All this is being done to supposedly get ‘rid of thugs’. I have been saying it for a while now, the Kenyan government is at war with its own people. Now small business people are thugs; wardens shot dead by British aristocrats get no justice, journalists slapped by the First Lady and Maasai people agitating for a return of their land in Laikipia. It all adds up to the criminalisation of being poor. But I have gone into all these matters in the past and frankly speaking, they are driving me to rage and great sadness. Let me use this post, not to be escapist, but to ponder on the nature of heroism, whether courage is a political virtue. And to ask where Kenyan or African heroism exists. In my last post, I mentioned my grandpa who went to Burma to fight with the King’s African Rifles during WW2. I have wondered what experiences he had there and have decided to post some pictures before I can get a story out. I enjoyed these pictures and hope that I am able to upload them.

My Granpa Went to Burma and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

Have you ever wondered why the British have so much concern for Africa and Africans that they would launch commissions of inquiry into the continent’s troubles? Well so have I, which is why an upcoming Oral History conference on ‘changing memories of World War Two’ offered me a glimpse into the heart of British charity. This is the advertisement for the conference:

A range of presentations from across Europe, Asia, Oceania, and Latin and North America will address the War’s consequences and legacy in the memories of participants and for successive generations. These presentations are organized into two major themes which reflect the ways in which the War continues in many countries to play a part in historical consciousness and everyday life. ‘Remembering, forgetting and silences’ explores individual memories in relation to dominant discourses, identity, myth and intergenerational transmission. The second of the two themes, ‘Using memories of war’, includes reminiscence as a therapeutic intervention and the ways in which the media has shaped recollections of the War.

That is right. Africa and Africans were somehow not a part of that war’s consequences and legacies. Yet the King’s African Rifles suffered many thousands of dead and maimed in the Burma, Abyssinia and Somalia campaigns. Then there were the taxes and other privations that Africans had to suffer as their colonial rulers fought a total war. This is not a rant to demand ‘inclusion’, a term that I detest with every cell in my body, it is to note that even as the British establishment crows about 2005 being the ‘Year of Africa’, they nevertheless maintain boundaries between the native and the master in their national myths. There is plenty of print and conferencing available when you die of hunger, HIV or just plain old atrocity, but not when you take a bullet for King Georgie. The thanks must flow in one direction only: Africans must kneel before the British in gratitude at Blair’s Commission and Bob Geldof’s pronouncements. But they, oh no, they will not acknowledge that at the hour of their greatest weakness, some darkies stepped in and did a job.

Pity is the worst thing in the world. When you are pitied and helped out of pity, your life is often taken off your hands. Pity degrades and kills everything it touches. And that is what we have become, a pitied people who come on hands and knees begging for more pity, nay actually, it is worse than that, we now demand pity as a human right!

I have fired off a deceptively ‘calm’ email to the organisers and hope that they will fall for the trap before I launch some brimstone their way.

Having said all that, I am embarrassed at how poor my education in history was in Kenya. I did not for example know that almost every Kamba male who was not handicapped was recruited into WW1 service; or that so many died and suffered (45,000 officially and 200,000 unofficially); or that many campaigns were won through the tenacity and courage of African soldiers. They may have been fighting in an absurd war given that they were the colonised fighting to keep others from being colonised, but courage should be acknowledged and applauded wherever it rears its head. The recruitment of the King’s African rifles who numbered over 120,000 in WW2 brought many people from incredibly diverse backgrounds together. They took to speaking English, Lingala, and Swahili as common languages, creating the templates for the nationalist politics that followed and led to the formation of the continent’s governments. The salaries they were paid sparked an economic boom after the war and tied a large proportion of the people to the cash economy. The war also radically changed the colonial notions of the African person. After the high fatality rate of WW1, recruiters had a tough time trying to attract Africans to join up. Few now know that the colour bar was dropped in 1939 to enable readier military recruitment.

Growing up, I was always taken with the bronze three-man statue on Kenyatta Avenue – can you picture it? The guy with a stick is a carrier, in the middle is a KAR rifleman flanked by an Arab rifleman. They appeared so strong and firm, which I suppose is the whole point of the thing. And the stories from the wars are gripping. Kenyan and Tanzanian beef for example fed the million men on the allied side stationed in the Middle East. Then here comes the King’s Africans Rifles, who when they were not putting down rebellious types on home soil, found time to ship to Burma and face down Japan’s crack troops – called the white tigers – in the ‘valley of death’. Then there are characters like Color-Sergeant Kumani of the 1st Battalion, King’s African Rifles who on October 7, 1914 won the Distinguished Conduct Medal in a battle at Gazi for his bravery ‘in leading his company in a charge after all his officers had been shot down, and drawing off the enemy’. Why did he do it? Why did he run into enemy fire when his white officers fell?

My late grandfather was a medical officer during World War 2 and I remember him being called daktari by everyone in Wida, Kiambu. I wonder what he experienced in Burma. What he felt travelling so far, treating gaping wounds and doses of the clap, losing friends to an early death for a cause that was not theirs. He was such a bunch of contradictions: charismatic, kind to me, brutal to those he did not like, clever, seductive, funny… He was a full person, but I regret that I was too young to talk to him about the things that I have since learned about his time ‘over there’. Beyond these personal asides, I am as always struck by the power of learning history. And have developed a conviction that to be ignorant about history is to be an intellectual cripple: driven only by the demands of the present and yet unable to understand from whence they come, and therefore ultimately meeting the future unarmed and more naked than need be.

Maybe I am wrong and my high school history education was superior. But I was too sleepy to care during those hellish afternoon double lessons with this teacher we called Rook. He would stand in front of the class like a peacock, chin up, hands on hips, and would authoritatively repeat the textbook on your desk to a letter. The moment I set eyes on him, a wave of sleep would overcome me. I always thought he should have come with one of those ‘do not operate machinery after ingestion’ warning signs. Yes, perhaps it was all Rooks’ fault.

Mass of Appetites: A Nairobi Bar Horror Story II

Below is a slightly different and longer version of Mass of Appetites. I hope you enjoy it, despite it being quite rough, and that you feel driven to add a paragraph, a photo, whatever, in the comments section. I will look through any such contributions and consider how to work them in. I like the idea of monster stories occurring in familiar spaces where people behave unexceptionally yet co-exist with horror.

Mass of appetites
It always buys rounds
Eating, guffawing
Patting the distension, wiping grease off bulging, sagging cheeks
gorging
Holding forth, fat soft paws gesturing
They reach for the girl
who imagines she will survive the eating
you are a ngood gaw
the appetites breath is hot and wet
eyes: beady, sunken, gleeful
happy
I may nget this one

The Mass of Appetites is always on the make, out on the town most nights of the week, like a shark that cannot stop swimming and hunting for a single moment lest it drown. His German automobile turns into the bar parking lot slowly, ponderously, with the drivers behind him hooting their exasperation. Appetites drives carefully and his car is always very clean. It has one of those pine tree air fresheners dangling from the back mirror alongside a small smiling green troll doll bought on a trip to Dubai last year. The inside of the car is immaculate and the outside polished to a dull sheen.

He looks for the parking space that will afford the most people a look at his car and is willing to wait interminably for one to free up. He crouches in his seat, taking in the sights, with his soft paw-like hands holding onto the velvet-bound steering wheel. When the watchman informs him there are open parking spaces further down, he chooses his response carefully from his two-item menu: threaten or cajole.

He takes in the other cars in the lot which are mostly Toyota Corollas bought from Dubai, the unmistakable mark of the striving classes. In the old days the ladder’s steps were: servant quarter in Golf Course, house in Buru Buru, a plot in Githurai, house in Plains View and the final move to Kileleshwa. Now it is about modes of transport: mathrees for a few years, the Shuttle, a used Nissan Sunny, new Corolla, used BMW then finally the Mercedes Kompressor. They will never rebel he thinks with an amusement laced with contempt, they will only keep switching their modes of trajectory to account for every national failure. Finally parked, he heaves his distended belly out of the car by first putting both small feet on the ground then with a grunt rising. He maintains surreptitious glances at the car, nervous that it will be stolen and also curious what everyone thinks of it.

Appetites ambles into the bar, beady eyes darting in all directions as he seeks friends and targets. His eyes take in the girls barely out of school, judging the firmness of thigh, the weight of buttock and most importantly the state of finance. He can guess within a few hundred shillings how much everyone has in their purse or wallet. Pocketing, he fingers a wad of notes with one finger and then subtly rubs it against his penis which is already semi-engorged with possibility.

As he walks toward fellow appetites with whom he’s done ‘Tender business’ in the past and who he calls his friends but secretly loathes, he notices a girl, dressed in a tight black dress that hugs a curvaceous body, who is eyeing him with what she imagines is a knowing eye. A frission of excitement runs down his sweaty back. She is the best kind – the ones who imagine that they KNOW, who want to eat into his wad, to use him. He chuckles inwardly knowing that he is unusable and cannot be lied to because he has achieved the exalted state of decadence which is the truest form of freedom. It does not matter that she has coupled hundreds of times or has a boy she loves and comes to this bar only for the money, he can smell the remaining strands of innocence woven into her firm youthful flesh. She will not know that when he heaves his hairy thighs off the bed with his fang dripping semen, he will have pulled them out of her and transformed her into the undead.

He calls for a triple shot of Johnny Walker Black and three kilos of roast meat – fuel for the hunt – while loudly ordering a round of drinks for the table. Miming conversation with his fellow Appetites, who do not mind since they too are busy, he sweeps his eyes across the room taking in the men this time. He wonders whether they present any competition for his mission. He casts around seeking those that appear to be in love wanting to watch them for little lapses that betray the futility of their attempt to find happiness. Spotting one such couple seated with the girl in black he notes the boy’s eyes occasionally glazing over as they covertly take in the sight of strangers’ thighs and arses. Soon the girl will be ready for Appetites when she finds out that her beloved, but slightly disappointing boyfriend is pawing her sister or sleeping with her best friend. He has seen betrayal a thousand times, but gets a delicious charge each time.

The girl in black gets up to go to the bathroom and Appetites, now in full Nosferatu mode, eyes her proud back which tapers to a point before her hips and buttocks explode outward and then settle onto thick hard thighs and thin calves. She walks slowly, uncomfortable in heels that are a bit too high for her, tottering and parting her way through the crowd with a subtle caress here and a hip nudge there. She will do, oh yes, there will be a feeding tonight. But first he must seek that dark, strong thing deep inside him that attracts his prey as surely a flame draws a fly to its destruction. He has never put a name to it, but knows that it emerges in the presence of Black Label, a wad of money, noise, low lights and innocence.

The meat arrives and he reluctantly invites the other Appetites to partake as well. They fall to it with unembarrassed relish. Tearing, guffawing mirthlessly, wiping grease off bulging, sagging cheeks and holding forth on “prots in Dadora”. Appetite matches them bite for bite, caressing his pot belly to summon the confidence monster who must emerge soon if the girl is not to fall to one of his companions. Here she comes.

She is heading for her table but her eyes are fixed on the table of Appetites, aware that they are rich and on a hunt. She thinks herself their equal in worldliness, confident that her beauty which she has used to toy with many men could see her through an encounter with any of them. Appetite watches her amused glance and snickers inwardly knowing that like everyone uprooted and thrown into the thousand universes that are Nairobi she belongs to many and yet to none – she longs for anchor and is seeking it without recognizing her desperate need. She has one of those new fangled rasta hairstyles which at first puzzled Appetite who had only ever seen them in pictures of Bob Marley and Dedan Kimathi. He has since come to associate them not with political struggle but with a process of self manufacturing that is a response to any one of a thousand traumas of an upper-middle class family tumbled to genteel poverty.

Such girls always tell teary tales of the mistakes Daddy and Mummy made as the to-be-rasta attended some fancy private school and then went abroad to find Me, he feels a surge of hatred. They make for the easiest prey. He knows how to lay a trap that allows them to feel the greatest degree of freedom even as the noose tightens – it is how they prefer to be ambushed. His first move must confirm her opinion of him and then there will be nowhere to go but up, all the while borne by her pleasant surprise.
‘I’ve been looking for you, Needs, do you know why?’
‘Yes, you seek flesh. You want to love me and you resent me for that.’
‘But there are also other things that lie beneath the flesh that are desirable,’ he breathes underneath his words. He is playing with the flame, trying to get as close to the edge as possible. The eating will be sweeter if he has voiced his true intentions and she, already caught in the web of the undead, freely offers herself.

A passing waiter with a tray of samosas and sausages walks by. Appetites motions to him and orders five of each. He watches Needs nibble at her sausage fastidiously, careful that she should not ruin her carefully applied makeup. Her face is round with wide eyes that are extraordinarily far apart so that she wears an expression of permanent surprise. Her smile is an attempt to communicate certainty where there is none; it twitches slightly at its widest point. The skin on her neck is darker than that on her face due to the use of Ambi skin lightening cream, her body not as youthful as it seemed at a distance. Appetites notes the careful disguise with distress, perhaps she has no strands, maybe she is empty of the sweet marrow. He falls to the remaining snacks, shoving them into his mouth and swallowing without chewing. Needs recoils inwardly, suddenly aware that she is in the presence of a great hunger.
‘What is it that you do for a living?’ she asks.
‘You are curious? I am an in-between; I exist in the cracks to smooth them over. I detect needs and fill them while keeping a few of them for myself. And you?’
‘I told you that I was the daughter of Fallen Success. That means that I spend my time caressing entitlement, in expectation of victory.’
As they have been talking, her hand has been inside her large leather purse stroking the spine of a book as if a genie will fly out of it and rescue her.
‘Which book is that you are reading?’ he asks. The dark thing always wants to know such details, there is no better way to divine the state of the inside.
‘The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho,’ she answers.
He shudders with excitement, she is his. It is the final proof that she is desperately trying to hold onto a moral universe – she is ready for the nail.

Appetites and Needs are in the German automobile heading to his lair. They are silent, listening to a CD of sighs and moans that Appetites is playing at a high volume. The lights of other cars do not seem to reach into the cab and he is driving very slowly. Needs looks around the interior and notices little carnations strewn carefully about, the kind used for funeral wreaths.

They drive on a dark road winding through a forest, past a great housing estate that now lies empty and silent, past vast horticultural farms, coffee and tea plantations, herds of emaciated cattle with no minders and beach hotels whose windows are giant Trojan condoms – they have not seen a single car or human being for the past hour. The music this time is a steady murmuring that is getting louder with every passing mile. She notices that the road is widening and is running downhill.
‘Where do you live?’
‘At the end of this artery.’
They drive past dark silent mansions whose large gates – on which symbols in a strange language are wrought in grey steel – have been half torn off their hinges.
‘Where are we, who lives in these houses?’ she asks with trepidation, she is realizing that there exist paths whose existence she had never even guessed at.
‘Mimicry used to live here behind gates of nihilism that as you can see were no match for absurdity when it came to take them to the end of the road.’
Needs is starting to listen to the voice beneath his words, feeling the presence of the dark thing. She glances sideway at Appetites and sees that he appears bigger than he did when they left the bar. He is sunken into the leather seat and his stomach has grown so large that it is pressed hard against the steering wheel which he clutches loosely with hands sprouting rough black hairs. His eyes are shut not looking at the road ahead and she can no longer feel the motion of the car.

‘I’ve changed my mind about visiting the end of the road, please take me back home.’ Her voice trembles. He does not reply for long minutes, but instead fiddles with the radio which starts emitting a low keening noise that steadily rises in intensity.

The road has by now become a steep decline and the trees bordering it rustle agitatedly. The moon, so prominent when they got in the car, is nowhere to be seen and yet there is an eerie light that seems to emanate from the earth itself.

Appetites is in a trance, knowing that the dark thing is now in full control, the hour of feeding is well nigh. It caresses his sex, stilling him, burrowing deep into the folds of his stomach and emptying it in preparation. The trees outside the car are now in frenzy, bending over the road almost as if they wish to peer into the car. The radio is now emitting a wailing noise.

Needs is whimpering.

They approach a large black gate decorated with naked steel statues that spell out ‘Etats house’. It opens with a great creaking sound that can be heard over the radio’s deafening wail. Appetites has expanded even more and is now pressed hard against Needs side.

‘We are here: the end of the road.’

Appetites puts both his feet on the black gravel and with a heavy grunt of effort heaves his bulk out of the automobile motioning to Needs to follow him. They are outside a large mansion with every light blazing. Fused within its granite walls is wet blonde hair that emanates a strong smell that seeps into Need’s every pore. She staggers into Appetites’ arms knowing that in them lies certain destruction, but it is the only place that appears familiar and therefore comforting.

They descend a winding staircase, the steps illuminated by a milky, glowing substance. On the walls are a thousand portraits of old men in Makerere graduation gowns. Their faces wear expressions of heavy resignation battling pride; their fingers clutch their diplomas tightly like a drowning man clutches at a straw. Fallen Success. Needs is in the house that she has been trying so desperately to run from, she was always headed here. She feels an enormous weariness.

Appetites savors these moments before the feeding when he sees the target face-to-face with itself. He is fully engorged, but cannot remember when he has ever felt hungrier. If only the other Appetites could see him now, descending lower than they have ever dared.

A low keening sound fills the hallway through which they are walking. It breaks into song, a disjointed rap tune issuing from a child’s throat.

Ahhhhhhhhh, squat, squaating, birthing.
Prowl, sprawling
I am a savage
Spear chucker
Right inside you
Chucker chuckling
Position clear
No instrument required by law to be stamped
Can be accepted
Unless it is stamped with the required
Sufficient stamps under the stamp oathing
Roader roading
Insides chuckling
Spear hurting
Savagery ceasing

Needs lies on the bed watching the ceiling on which fat snakes in pinstripes, red shirts and green ties wriggle as if in a pit of pain. They are hissing at her … hissing her name over and over. ‘Needs, Needs, Needs daughter of Fallen Success,’ they say. They are celebrating her homecoming to the end of it all; to that place the ordinary world pretends does not exist.

Appetites is asleep on his feet. The dark think unfurls, its one unblinking eye fixed on Needs. From this eye comes a drop of a bloody liquid whose scent is like rich, wet loam soil.

Needs watches the fang approach flanked by two thin hairy thighs above which swings swollenness containing filaments of writhing, suffering innocence. She parts her legs already feeling her filaments struggling to get out, to free her of their tenuous hold. Appetites does as instructed and perches above her directing the fang between her legs, its breath against Needs thick thighs is hot and moist. It writhes towards her. She screams.

The Matrix Redux: The African Version Scene IV

The preceding Matrix Redux posts are in the April archive: Scene I, II, and III.

I really dug the movie. Especially the party scene in Zion which was a real kick and reminded me of the overly conscious cool of Brooklyn, New York.

I lived in Brooklyn for a few years and loved the Fort Green neighbourhood before it was taken over by mousy types from the backwaters of Iowa. In the good old days, it was filled with the kind of deliciously pretentious and yet cool kind of black person that I have come to refer to as an RRRR: Range Rover (driving) Rasta Revolutionary. This is a very particular type of young black person who has often done quite well professionally and yet is profoundly uncomfortable with his/her privileges and as a result tries to project a kind of progressive, left, revolutionary, mystical – you get the meaning – identity.

By day he works in an investment bank and by night soulfully spouts Sufi poetry. He can often be heard in coffee shops and funky lounges holding forth in angry tones on the subject of the ‘Man’ and the ‘System’. As the rare beers from Fiji – bottled in fair trade wooden bottles – flow, he is often to be heard making a never-to-be-achieved plan to become the next Malcolm X.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate such contradictions and loved my neighbourhood all the more for them. RRRRs, for those who do not know, are also known as The Senegalese. They are not actually people from Senegal though they are likely to speak of Goree Island with a painful catch in their voice; will have gone to FESPACO in Burkina (if you don’t know what that is, you are not Senegalese) and have a CD collection full of Youssou N’dour even though they do not understand a lick of what he is singing. Dreadlocks are preferable, yoga sessions compulsory, deep I-am-trying-to-find-me vibes seep out of every pore, while a trip to Salvador da Bahia in Brazil is always on the cards.

The Matrix post below is bit short, but I just run out of steam as I was going along. To return later, I hope.

Scene IV

Tree-Hugger Smith: The great Mzee. We meet at last.

Mzee: And you are?

Tree-Hugger Smith: Smith, Tree-Hugger Smith.

Mzee: You all look the same to me.

Tree-Hugger Smith: Why are you so angry? Have you ever paused to consider aid’s beauty, its genius? It converts poverty and death into wealth and purpose. I remember when you were a young Boi; you could have been The One.
Hear me, Mzee, I’m going to be honest with you. We seek title over African wretchedness. Your problems are now ours; they became so the moment we started solving them for you, which is of course what this is all about. Ownership, Mzee, ownership. All power emanates from contestation, from crisis: your problems, our power. Look out that window. You had your time. The future is our world, Mzee. The future is our time.

Mzee: You’re empty.

Tree-Hugger Smith: I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This Africa, this reality, whatever you want to call it, I can’t stand it any longer. It’s the futility, the misery. I feel saturated by it and scared of it and yet it calls to me. Everytime I stop at a traffic light, I cannot help but wonder if one of them will ‘jack’ me. Whenever I pick one up at Gypsy’s, I cannot stand the clash of my desire to grind them into my bedsprings and the fear that their diseases will grind me six feet under. I can taste your misery and every time I do, I fear that you shall somehow take it away from me. I hate you and I owe you nothing, NOTHING!

Mzee: Quick Boi, re-read Fanon and Conrad – with courage this time. Smith is Mr. Kurtz re-made for our age. He is ‘… an emissary of pity, and science, and progress, and devil knows what else.”

Tree-Hugger Smith: Boi, are you listening to his ravings? I warned them, I told them over and over again, but they would not listen: never send a black man to do a white man’s job.

Mzee, left arm held rigidly at his side and the right pointing ahead so that it appears like a sword, charges toward Tree-Hugger Smith. His left arm makes a ponderous upward stab toward the already-dodging torso of Smith who focuses his attention to it. Smith is a blur of speed, head toward the offending arm, his face a rictus of fury. For a split second, his attention drifts from Mzee’s right arm which now starts a fast chopping motion to Smith’s vulnerable neck. The impact makes a heavy, meaty sound and Mzee’s arms cross, momentarily making the sign of the cross. It is the classic movement that accompanies the killing stroke that the matador applies to the bull in the corrida. Mzee’s momentum keeps him travelling forward and he slips behind and away from Smith. First blood has been drawn; Tree Hugger Smith now feels the measure of Mzee’s resources of anger and skill. But inside the red mist of his pain and rage he has detected a frailty in Mzee, a weakness disguised under layers of a righteous anger that cannot be sustained for lengthy periods.

Without Boi, Mzee will lose and so it is that both foes almost simultaneously turn toward him.

More coming up …

(c) MMK

The African and his Dangerous Loins

The piece below was published in the East African in the Fall of 2004. It is about a London conference that featured all the hypocrisies that I have been ranting about for the past week. It will be followed by a return to the The Matrix Redux: The African Version – stuff that is a bit lighter once this rant on donors and the aid-consuming elites leaves me, to return soon no doubt.

You’ve been hoodwinked. You’ve been had. You’ve been took. You’ve been led astray, run amuck. You’ve been bamboozled. — Malcolm X

African loins are dangerous to their owners and to society at large, especially when they pair up. At a late 2004 UN conference on reproductive health held in London – with the ominous sounding title of Countdown 2015 – African sex came under the spotlight for its almost unmitigated dangers. Speakers held forth on its unfortunate tendency to transmit lethal infections and failing that, to result in numerous babies who, contrary to popular belief, are actually destructive beings that impoverish their parents and undermine national economic aspirations. Countdown 2015 ended with the unanimous recommendation that Africans should make capacity building efforts empowering them to sheath their weapons of mass destruction in latex. Outrage was expressed that while facing the twin dangers of disease and babies, Africans are faced with the disadvantages dealt them by a destructive colonial legacy and the continuing neo-colonial attentions of the West. It was thus confusing in the extreme when this august body of scholars, reproductive health professionals and officials from African governments and NGOs concluded that Africans had a right to free condoms and healthcare paid for by those same Western nations.

The overarching goal of the conference was how to provide free sexual healthcare to the world’s poor by 2015. Its various motions lived up to the worst stereotypes of NGO-speak: impenetrable, pedantic and cursed with a hopeless idealism. Participants argued that unless all women and men have access to free contraception of their choice, it would be impossible for hunger, war and pestilence to be eliminated in Africa. The pressure civil society, which many attendees claimed to belong to, exerted on local governments and donors would result in funding being made available for contraceptives that would then be delivered by NGOs. The small talk back at the delegates’ $300 per night hotels was all about empowerment and the possibility of getting invited to the next conference at some exotic locale. Uplifting stories of poor folks’ ability to cope with privation were shared by our learned friends who spoke in hushed tones accompanied by furious little nods acknowledging the dignity of ‘the people’. I wondered whether the irony-free demand that rich nations were obligated to pay for the care of poor Africans was made in cruel jest or was evidence of an astonishing naivety. It also made me curious about the wider role that donors and NGOs and the so-called civil society play in Kenya.

Most of those attending the conference were united in the opinion that the industrialized West has an obligation to provide contraception and health for the African poor. In numerous speeches, the recipients of this aid were tagged as partners or even clients – in the case of NGO service provision – but there was little doubt that they exist downstream from the expertise and the money. They were relegated to a helpless, but dignified victim-hood beyond their ability to relieve save when their capacity receives attention from the NGO-donor crowd. So it was that speaker after speaker asserted the right to free condoms to be as fundamental as that of free speech.

Of course the glaring difference between the two is that while you can fight your government for the license to vote or speak your mind, you cannot marshal much of an argument if faraway governments do not safeguard your loins. Can Africans really enjoy rights based on Western charity? Is it possible that donor states are generous enough to provide free health and contraception to billions outside their boundaries? Common sense would provide answers that are resoundingly negative. But such conferences are not exercises in common sense, they are attempts to de-politicize African poverty so that it can be managed by a section of the upper class sustained on donor patronage and with no popular mandate.

It calls itself civil society. Even when it employs political language, for instance in railing against what it asserts is neo-colonialism or the devastating legacy of colonialism, the higher aim is to engender guilt in the liberal West and ensure the continued flow of donor money. Sections of this civil society – many who were present at Countdown 2015 – periodically make headlines for holding lively demonstrations against multinationals, regarding them to be at the forefront of a homogenizing globalization of capital and Anglo-American culture. The language employed is that of a class war whose European frontlines have since been abandoned by its originators – the revolutionary left. The paradoxical result is that NGOs funded by pro-globalization agencies such as USAID and DFID end up lauding poor Africans for being the ‘resistors’ of an ‘evil’ capitalism. Some are clever enough to spot the irony in this arrangement and usually extol themselves for being transgressive: ‘we take their money and then work against them…’ being a typical argument. One of the major reasons for these tortured exercise, which I will return to later, is the need to argue the need for social welfare programs. By identifying the source of the deepest structural problems to be Western, and thus making the case for where responsibility lies, they ensure that monies to apply band-aids will be available. Concurrently, they (rightly) assail African governments for lacking the capacity to implement these programs thus opening the path to their taking the lead in administering aid.

Countdown 2015 was billed as a follow up to a similar effort in Cairo a decade ago. Before then, population control was the rage in development circles. Policymakers regarded the birth rate in Africa – rapid compared to that of industrialized nations – as a leading cause of poverty. Kenya, if you will cast your mind back to the 1980s, had the distinction of being the world’s leading baby factory. Aid experts and the organizations they supported locally made strident efforts to communicate the dangers of the birth rate outstripping economic growth, which they concluded would inevitably lead to national destitution. In the two decades prior to the Cairo meeting, a top priority of international development organizations was to drastically slow population growth.

But the connection, whether real or imagined, between such a Malthusian outlook and the policies of countries that pursue forced sterilizations and compulsory abortions to control population growth proved to be a public relations disaster. It required a shift in tack. After Cairo, and prominently so in London a few weeks ago, the old population control ideas have now been repositioned as a human rights issue. This is partly for PR value, but is also an acknowledgement of new possibilities for expanding their domain introduced by the willingness of the donors to now countenance democratization with the fall of the Berlin Wall. When the Cold War was underway – with Moi as a valued client of the West and thus above criticism on his human rights record – NGOs had been forced to steer clear of ‘political’ issues.

In the 1980s, the fight against KANU’s dictatorship democracy was mostly led by clandestine movements like Mwakenya together with a small scattering of individuals and aboveground groups such as the Law Society of Kenya. By the early 1990s, as Western patronage for the regime retreated, the political space available to the opposition broadened. It now stretched beyond covert efforts and developed into a broadbased pro-democracy movement that enjoyed the support of a majority. So much so that the American ambassador, Smith Hempstone, now became a proud member of an opposition that only a few years earlier he would have demanded to be dispersed violently if need be. With this momentous shift, donor money was soon funding the now-familiar civil society programs in democratization, voter education etc.

Considered in hindsight, it would seem that the focus on babies was only incidental just as the present one has little to do with creating a vibrant democracy. The problems addressed by the local development enterprise must accord to donor priorities just as its programs must take the shape of the available funding. Ideally, it keeps its language abreast of political developments to the extent that its aforementioned limitations allow. The more it succeeds in taking the rhetorical lead in solving or framing local problems, the greater the legitimacy won; this is valuable currency in the world of conferences and proposal writing. Possessing radical bona fides helps, especially when earned by stances that are no longer perceived as a threat to donor interests.

If they cannot get their hands on a hero, it suffices to reach for legitimacy with a garbled radicalism characterized by vague leftist terms and positions. Success in this exercise confers a two-fold advantage. First, it sells better to those remnants of the Western left who regularly staff donor agencies. Secondly, it accords the particular NGO or individual a good position from which to challenge the government’s adequacy thus ensuring that donor funds are increasingly directed away from it and to NGOs that are by leaps and bounds taking over the governance of the country.

Kenya’s self-identified civil society, like other sections of the country’s elite, has arrived at its lofty position by being a go-between. Its A-game is to scrap for the right to represent the public to foreign interests and vice versa. The public has problems – big ones, while the foreigners have a guilty conscience to assuage or geo-political goals to achieve by dishing out cash. That is why it is not surprising when civil society’s members join the Cabinet and effortlessly abandon the positions they fought for in the past. To either camp, ordinary Kenyans are the bait that provides a house in Lavington, cocktails in Westlands and air-tickets abroad for these bigwigs.

According to one of the reports handed out by the conference organizers, participants decided on a worldwide program to guide national-level policy making for the next 20 years in all countries that signed up. Given that many African governments have abdicated a substantial part of their mandates to NGOs and donors, after years of being browbeaten and allowed a sense of entitlement to foreign aid, they will surely sign up. Once they do, and with their policies ‘guided’ by external actors, will there be any need for democracy as citizens are relegated to passive charity recipients and not the ultimate guides of national policy?

But it is not only the paternalism evident at the conference that was so objectionable, it was also the poverty of the idea that reducing our birth rate is a necessary step to building a prosperous society. Once in a while, I inadvertently have a conversation with a Western layperson that imagines Africa is overpopulated, and that this is one of the causes of its extreme poverty. Their solution often goes something like this: if you have fewer babies, there will be better schools, a less burdened health system, more food to go around…etc. Save the Children adverts of starving children begging for a Westerner to ‘adopt’ them for $12 per month would then cease according to this view. I was surprised that the learned and supposedly informed health professionals at the conference shared this outlook.

The reason they ignore the growing body of statistical and anecdotal evidence that contradicts Malthusian policies toward the poor is that they must keep up a relentless drumbeat of negativity to keep their programs going. It does not matter that over a dozen studies, including one by Nobel prize-winning economist Simon Kuznets, oppose the overpopulation consensus so evident at the conference. Rarely do findings demonstrating that faster population growth is not associated with slower economic expansion make their way into conference speeches. Africa actually needs more people and a higher population density. For example, Hong Kong, though it has forty times the density of China, has still managed to build a vibrant enough economy to provide a comfortable existence for most of its citizens despite most of them having been dirt poor fifty years ago. This is repeated in all of the Asian Tiger economies. Even the NGO outcry about the growth of slums, brought on by rapid urbanization, rather than being a universal evil has been a crucial factor in the growth of capital and wealth in every industrialized country during the last century.

Limiting the number of babies, or having more capacity building conferences, will not make for more wealth or less misery. The solution lies in stopping government from its perpetual beggardom and from having its policies guided by donors and the civil society NGOs they fund. That the government is the biggest employer, spender and consumer of national resources, while it prostrates itself to the donors, means that its bankruptcy of ideas and lack of sovereign will is communicated to an inordinately large percentage of the social and economic life of the country. At present, this state of affairs faces little opposition. The very rich who it would be thought have an intrinsic interest in limiting the role of government in socio-economic affairs do no such thing despite such oversight usually resulting in higher business taxation and regulation. It is because that 50-year old guy with a Pajero is too often the one who, as part of the political elite, has made money on fraudulent deals in the ministries. Reducing the reach of government would reduce his ‘opportunities’. Thus his sense of relief now that donors are back to providing government with budget support after they had turned to the NGO sector as the preferred deliverer of services during the late 1990s. Alas, this state of affairs had even forced him to ponder dropping the businessman moniker and writing up a proposal to launch a charity. For their part NGOs welcome donor funding, but try and make the argument that government is too corrupt to take a lead in delivering aid.

The fight against corruption has only incidentally to do with its effects to these two groups, rhetoric notwithstanding. It is just another way that civil society haves wage war against the political elite have-mores. Both groups will deliver Kenyans to the bidders, and will continue doing so by fighting turf battles that the public assumes represent their interests – if these are served, it will only be incidentally.

What is not accounted for so far in this essay is the game on the donor side. Are the monies promised for condoms or commissions launched to investigate yet another African crisis motivated solely by liberal guilt or traditional geo-political goals such as that of expanding the donor country’s sphere of influence? Toward what are Kenyans being guided? The briefest answer is thus: to a world where democracy is good only for making limited service choices and the public has scant chance of fundamentally re-orienting its political sphere. Keenly awaited political goals such as most of those included under the human rights banner will, by virtue of the depoliticised approach to them and their spearheading by foreign funded bodies, replace an organic political dispensation with a global one. FGM will be eliminated, women freed from patriarchy and older people from ageism by agents drinking from the same fount, many who do not understand the grand vision that will be realised should their particular campaign reach fruition.

The result will be a legal and moral code that is everywhere similar, one characterised by its contempt and enmity to the political life of the multitude of publics around the world. The only difference between Missouri and Nyanza will in be their menus and traditional dances. Culture will be robbed of its animating power, robbed ultimately of the dynamism arising from difference and expressed as political opposition. An ostensibly neutral body of law which will be nothing but an enthronement of the powers that be will hold politics at bay for it is only in that domain that the public can express its will. But is it so bad to have this project succeed is the obvious challenge to the negative tone of this article. Would not a universal human rights regime and a technocratic management of social welfare be preferable to the deluge of crises that is our lot? Perhaps so, but this vision will never be realised.

We are caught in the march of history without being its beneficiaries. The donor monies from up north will always be too scant to fundamentally solve our poverty-induced problems. Funding will actually shrink with time, as it has been doing since the end of the Cold War. Yet our ability to generate entrepreneurial capital remains stunted by the statist instincts of civil society and the political elites whose hold on the levers of government – or their NGO alternates – are the key to their sustenance. What is being created is a new management system. The old one managed the war against communism. This one must cap the violence that may emanate from disparate and opposed political voices, which could threaten the security of the West – whether via increased illegal immigration or the creation of environments that generate anti-western terrorism. The system should appear to have all the working parts of a democratic polity: government, opposition and civil society. The rhetoric issuing from it will be stridently pro-people, while its proponents will wax lyrical about the universal goals and responsibilities of Humanity; anything to keep you engaged with the donor world and away from thinking or acting parochially, tribally, by sex.

Kenya, and countries like it, will remain in a state of suspension between implosion and sputtering progress, between crippling poverty and an over-taxed, over-managed petty capitalism. Being suspended in this miserly, degenerate state will be an invaluable benchmark for those other parts of the world whose production of capital is increasing rapidly. We shall comfort the despairing in those places for we are incalculably worse off. Our role is to be the other, except not a threatening other thanks to the management system. We will be pitied, provided with charity and used as the backdrop for societies whose nihilism has grown apace with its riches, and that is now in need of moral crusades that will not upset its applecart. We are consigned to be the blackspot that must be stopped from spoiling everyone else’s party and that allows for the modest appeasement of Western conscience.

Some Reactions to ‘Confessions of a Middle Class Kenyan’

I just read these comments on the Confessions of a Middle Class Kenyan post and thought that they were so passionate, they needed to be better displayed.

Anonymous: I stopped being guilty and apologetic for being a middle class Kenyan along time ago. Human beings are about interests and interests first. The difference between an action that is immoral and one that is evil is if the interest is broad and long term or if it is narrow and short term.The guy in my village defines his interests in term of his ethnicity and therefore he acts as such. Being middle class and cosmopolitan I define my interests in terms of class as opposed to ethnicity. So then, which interest serves Kenya better? I don’t particularly like poor people however, it is in my interests that there are fewer of them so that they leave me be to enjoy my life. I personally am tired of the b.s that middle class conversations about morality for moralities sake. The morality has to be discussed in terms of interests and the players and roles they play. This I believe is a lot more interesting and a better framework for addressing that, which ails us.

Deno: As a middle class Kenyan myself, I have to concur with our smug obsession with socially extricated from what is the real life of the AVERAGE Kenyan. We talk about it lots; it bothers me that the talk never goes beyond superficial concern. These ‘class tensions’ are exacerbated by languages evolving and growing within each class, languages whose sole intention seems to be exclusion. I think the first stop (as with any therapy session) is we sit down and speak the same language till we unearth the conflict. I may be slightly obsessed with blogging, but I really think that dialogues like these are the beginning of such a ‘therapy session’ for Kenyans. The goal now is to get a more diverse group of Kenyans blogging, since as Arunga correctly noted, most of your readers, if not all, are members of the Kenyan middle class.

Akinyi J. Arunga:
Deno, I recently began to listen to the music of Kalamashaka, and other underground Kenyan musicians and they are having the dialogue. It is just hair raising to hear the lyrics of their songs, they are literally fermenting a revolution and the rest of us are oblivious. If you are not familiar with K-Shaka… that is where the true politics of the mwananchi is done. All these things are expressed there, the treatment of Hawkers, the legislation of massive wealth acquisition by politicians, and the deep cry of the youth in the poor neighbourhoods, saying they are living the consequences of these things, and yet when they even sing about their plea, the MCs in the middle class radio stations will not even play their music, unless they sing about girls’ booty… That stuff can make you cry. It is detailed, it is potent, it is true and it is Kenya, the Kenya that we have refused to engage with. We buy tomatoes from the woman on the street, but never yell out in outrage when the NCC askaris, crush those tomatoes and throw her in their truck. It is as if she has no children to feed, to cloth, to educate and shelter. It is as if we conveniently have amnesia of the convenience she offers us on our way from work, being able to pick nice fresh juicy tomatoes for a fraction of what the cost at uchumi, where we have no time to go in the rush hour as we are trying to run and catch the Mathree home. But then we can hold conference after conference about poverty reduction and Millennium Development Goals… lofty things that give us power, since we assign ourselves the task to achieve them, forgetting that each of those Kenyans just like you and I, is precisely trying to achieve their his or her own realistic development goal, but get robbed blind, beaten abused (Do you know how many times the Markets have been burnt down?)… so that that power they have to do it for themselves is transferred to the people with better English, so that instead of innovating, being creative and excellent, people are now leaving school to get jobs at NGOs so that they can help Develop their fellow Kenyans! BTW, for offering convenience at better prices than other traders, people in the U.S become millionaires (See Wal-Mart); that is their reward… But in Kenya Alas!

The Pitfalls of National Consciousness

This should be required reading for every single African because it says it all. It was first published in 1959 and is prophetic to say the least. Read on and see the course of your country foretold … Replace bourgeoisie with babi and see how it reads

The Wretched of the Earth
by Frantz Fanon

Chapter 3

The Pitfalls of National Consciousness (excerpts)

HISTORY teaches us clearly that the battle against colonialism does not run straight away along the lines of nationalism. For a very long time the native devotes his energies to ending certain definite abuses: forced labour, corporal punishment, inequality of salaries, limitation of political rights, etc. This fight for democracy against the oppression of mankind will slowly leave the confusion of neo-liberal universalism to emerge, sometimes laboriously, as a claim to nationhood. It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps.

National consciousness, instead of being the all-embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of the whole people, instead of being the immediate and most obvious result of the mobilization of the people, will be in any case only an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been. The faults that we find in it are quite sufficient explanation of the facility with which, when dealing with young and independent nations, the nation is passed over for the race, and the tribe is preferred to the state. These are the cracks in the edifice which show the process of retrogression that is so harmful and prejudicial to national effort and national unity. We shall see that such retrograde steps with all the weaknesses and serious dangers that they entail are the historical result of the incapacity of the national middle class to rationalize popular action, that is to say their incapacity to see into the reasons for that action.

This traditional weakness, which is almost congenital to the national consciousness of under-developed countries, is not solely the result of the mutilation of the colonized people by the colonial regime. It is also the result of the intellectual laziness of the national middle class, of its spiritual penury, and of the profoundly cosmopolitan mould that its mind is set in.

The national middle class which takes over power at the end of the colonial regime is an under-developed middle class. It has practically no economic power, and in any case it is in no way commensurate with the bourgeoisie of the mother country which it hopes to replace. In its wilful narcissism, the national middle class is easily convinced that it can advantageously replace the middle class of the mother country. But that same independence which literally drives it into a comer will give rise within its ranks to catastrophic reactions, and will oblige it to send out frenzied appeals for help to the former mother country. The university and merchant classes which make up the most enlightened section of the new state are in fact characterized by the smallness of their number and their being concentrated in the capital, and the type of activities in which they are engaged: business, agriculture and the liberal professions. Neither financiers nor industrial magnates are to be found within this national middle class. The national bourgeoisie of under-developed countries is not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor building, nor labour; it is completely canalized into activities of the intermediary type. Its innermost vocation seems to be to keep in the running and to be part of the racket. The psychology of the national bourgeoisie is that of the businessman, not that of a captain of industry; and it is only too true that the greed of the settlers and the system of embargoes set up by colonialism has hardly left them any other choice.

Under the colonial system, a middle class which accumulates capital is an impossible phenomenon.

…

The objective of nationalist parties as from a certain given period is, we have seen, strictly national. They mobilize the people with slogans of independence, and for the rest leave it to future events. When such parties are questioned on the economic programme of the state that they are clamouring for, or on the nature of the regime which they propose to install, they are incapable of replying, because, precisely, they are completely ignorant of the economy of their own country.

This economy has always developed outside the limits of their knowledge. They have nothing more than an approximate, bookish acquaintance with the actual and potential resources of their country’s soil and mineral deposits; and therefore they can only speak of these resources on a general and abstract plane.

The national economy of the period of independence is not set on a new footing. It is still concerned with the ground-nut harvest, with the cocoa crop and the olive yield. In the same way there is no change in the marketing of basic products, and not a single industry is set up in the country. We go on sending out raw materials; we go on being Europe’s small farmers who specialize in unfinished products.

Yet the national middle class constantly demands the nationalization of the economy and of the trading sectors. This is because, from their point of view, nationalization does not mean placing the whole economy at the service of the nation and deciding to satisfy the needs of the nation. For them, nationalization does not mean governing the state with regard to the new social relations whose growth it has been decided to encourage. To them, nationalization quite simply means the transfer into native hands of those unfair advantages which are a legacy of the colonial period.

Since the middle class has neither sufficient material nor intellectual resources (by intellectual resources we mean engineers and technicians) it limits its claims to the taking over of business offices and commercial houses formerly occupied by the settlers. The national bourgeoisie steps into the shoes of the former European settlement: doctors, barristers, traders, commercial travellers, general agents and transport agents. It considers that the dignity of the country and its own welfare require that it should occupy all these posts. From now on it will insist that all the big foreign companies should pass through its hands, whether these companies wish to keep on their connexions with the country, or to open it up. The national middle class discovers its historic mission: that of intermediary.

Seen through its eyes, its mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation … The national bourgeoisie will be quite content with the role of the Western bourgeoisie’s business agent, and it will play its part without any complexes in a most dignified manner. But this same lucrative role, this cheap-jack’s function, this meanness of outlook and this absence of all ambition symbolize the incapability of the national middle class to fulfil its historic role of bourgeoisie. Here, the dynamic, pioneer aspect, the characteristics of the inventor and of the discoverer of new worlds which are found in all national bourgeoisies are lamentably absent …

It follows the Western bourgeoisie along its path of negation and decadence without ever having emulated it in its first stages of exploration and invention, stages which are an acquisition of that Western bourgeoisie whatever the circumstances. In its beginnings, the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries identifies itself with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of the West. We need not think that it is jumping ahead; it is in fact beginning at the end. It is already senile before it has come to know the petulance, the fearlessness or the will to succeed of youth.

The national bourgeoisie will be greatly helped on its way towards decadence by the Western bourgeoisies, who come to it as tourists avid for the exotic, for big-game hunting and for casinos. The national bourgeoisie organizes centres of rest and relaxation and pleasure resorts to meet the wishes of the Western bourgeoisie. Such activity is given the name of tourism, and for the occasion will be built up as a national industry …

Because it is bereft of ideas, because it lives to itself and cuts itself off from the people, undermined by its hereditary incapacity to think in terms of all the problems of the nation as seen from the point of view of the whole of that nation, the national middle class will have nothing better to do than to take on the role of manager for Western enterprise, and it will in practice set up its country as the brothel of Europe.

…

The behaviour of the national landed proprietors is practically identical with that of the middle classes of the towns. The big farmers have, as soon as independence was proclaimed, demanded the nationalization of agricultural production. Through manifold scheming practices they manage to make a clean sweep of the farms formerly owned by settlers, thus reinforcing their hold on the district. But they do not try to introduce new agricultural methods, nor to farm more intensively, nor to integrate their farming systems into a genuinely national economy.

In fact, the landed proprietors will insist that the state should give them a hundred times more facilities and privileges than were enjoyed by the foreign settlers in former times …

The landed bourgeoisie refuses to take the slightest risk, and remains opposed to any venture and to any hazard. It has no intention of building upon sand; it demands solid investments and quick returns. The enormous profits which it pockets, enormous if we take into account the national revenue, are never reinvested. The money-in-the-stocking mentality is dominant in the psychology of these landed proprietors. Sometimes, especially in the years immediately following independence, the bourgeoisie does not hesitate to invest in foreign banks the profits that it makes out of its native soil.

On the other hand large sums are spent on display: on cars, country houses, and on all those things which have been justly described by economists as characterizing an under-developed bourgeoisie.

…

It is from this view-point that we must interpret the fact that in young, independent countries, here and there federalism triumphs. We know that colonial domination has marked certain regions out for privilege. The colony’s economy is not integrated into that of the nation as a whole …

Immediately after independence, the nationals who live in the more prosperous regions realize their good luck, and show a primary and profound reaction in refusing to feed the other nationals. The districts which are rich in ‘ground-nuts, in cocoa and in diamonds come to the forefront, and dominate the empty panorama which the rest of the nation presents. The nationals of these rich regions look upon the others with hatred, and find in them envy and covetousness, and homicidal impulses. Old rivalries which were there before colonialism, old inter-racial hatred come to the surface …

African unity, that vague formula, yet one to which the men and women of Africa were passionately attached, and whose operative value served to bring immense pressure to bear on colonialism, African unity takes off the mask, and crumbles into regionalism inside the hollow shell of nationality itself. The national bourgeoisie, since it is strung up to defend its immediate interests, and sees no farther than the end of its nose, reveals itself incapable of simply bringing national unity into being, or of building up the nation on a stable and productive basis. The national front which has forced colonialism to withdraw cracks up, and wastes the victory it has gained.

…

As we see it, the bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie is not apparent in the economic field only. They have come to power in the name of a narrow nationalism and representing a race; they will prove themselves incapable of triumphantly putting into practice a programme with even a minimum humanist content, in spite of fine-sounding declarations which are devoid of meaning since the speakers bandy about in irresponsible fashion phrases that come straight out of European treatises on morals and political philosophy. When the bourgeoisie is strong, when it can arrange everything and everybody to serve its power, it does not hesitate to affirm positively certain democratic ideas which claim to be universally applicable. There must be very exceptional circumstances if such a bourgeoisie, solidly based economically, is forced into denying its own humanist ideology. The Western bourgeoisie, though fundamentally racist, most often manages to mask this racism by a multiplicity of nuances which allow it to preserve intact its proclamation of mankind’s outstanding dignity.

…

As regards internal affairs and in the sphere of institutions, the national bourgeoisie will give equal proof of its incapacity. In a certain number of under-developed countries the parliamentary game is faked from the beginning. Powerless economically, unable to bring about the existence of coherent social relations, and standing on the principle of its domination as a class, the bourgeoisie chooses the solution that seems to it the easiest, that of the single party. It does not yet have the quiet conscience and the cairn that economic power and the control of the state machine alone can give. It does not create a state that reassures the ordinary citizen, but rather one that rouses his anxiety

The state, which by its strength and discretion ought to inspire confidence and disarm and lull everybody to sleep, on the contrary seeks to impose itself in spectacular fashion. It makes a display, it jostles people and bullies them, thus intimating to the citizen that he is in continual danger. The single party is the modem form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, unmasked, unpainted, unscrupulous and cynical.

It is true that such a dictatorship does not go very far. It cannot halt the processes of its own contradictions. Since the bourgeoisie has not the economic means to ensure its domination and to throw a few crumbs to the rest of the country; since, moreover, it is preoccupied with filling its pockets as rapidly as possible but also as prosaically as possible, the country sinks all the more deeply into stagnation. And in order to hide this stagnation and to mask this regression, to reassure itself and to give itself something to boast about, the bourgeoisie can find nothing better to do than to erect grandiose buildings in the capital and to lay out money on what are called prestige expenses.

The national bourgeoisie turns its back more and more on the interior and on the real facts of its undeveloped country, and tends to look towards the former mother country and the foreign capitalists who count on its obliging compliance. As it does not share its profits with the people and in no way allows them to enjoy any of the dues that are paid to it by the big foreign companies, it will discover the need for a popular leader to whom will fall the dual role of stabilizing the regime and of perpetuating the domination of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois dictatorship of under-developed countries draws its strength from the existence of a leader. We know that in the well-developed countries the bourgeois dictatorship is the result of the economic power of the bourgeoisie. In the under-developed countries on the contrary the leader stands for moral power, in whose shelter the thin and poverty-stricken bourgeoisie of the young nation decides to get rich.

The people who for years on end have seen this leader and heard him speak, who from a distance in a kind of dream have followed his contests with the colonial power, spontaneously put their trust in this patriot. Before independence, the leader generally embodies the aspirations of the people for independence, political liberty and national dignity. But as soon as independence is declared, far from embodying in concrete form the needs of the people in what touches bread, land and the restoration of the country to the sacred hands of the people, the leader will reveal his inner purpose: to become the general president of that company of profiteers impatient for their returns which constitutes the national bourgeoisie.

…

There exists inside the new (postcolonial) regime, however, an inequality in the acquisition of wealth and in monopolization. Some have a double source of income and demonstrate that they are specialized in opportunism. Privileges multiply and corruption triumphs, while morality declines. Today the vultures are too numerous and too voracious in proportion to the lean spoils of the national wealth. The party, a true instrument of power in the hands of the bourgeoisie, reinforces the machine, and ensures that the people are hemmed in and immobilized. The party helps the government to hold the people down. It becomes more and more clearly anti-democratic, an implement of coercion …

In these poor, under-developed countries, where the rule is that the greatest wealth is surrounded by the greatest poverty, the army and the police constitute the pillars of the regime; an army and a police force (another rule which must not be forgotten) which are advised by foreign experts. The strength of the police force and the power of the army are proportionate to the stagnation in which the rest of the nation is sunk …

…

The observations that we have been able to make about the national bourgeoisie bring us to a conclusion which should cause no surprise. In under-developed countries, the bourgeoisie should not be allowed to find the conditions necessary for its existence and its growth.

…

A bourgeoisie similar to that which developed in Europe is able to elaborate an ideology and at the same time strengthen its own power. Such a bourgeoisie, dynamic, educated and secular, has fully succeeded in its undertaking of the accumulation of capital and has given to the nation a minimum of prosperity. In under-developed countries, we have seen that no true bourgeoisie exists; there is only a sort of little greedy caste, avid and voracious, with the mind of a huckster, only too glad to accept the dividends that the former colonial power hands out to it. This get-rich-quick middle class shows itself incapable of great ideas or of inventiveness. It remembers what it has read in European textbooks and imperceptibly it becomes not even the replica of Europe, but its caricature.

…

Frantz Fanon

Confessions of a Middle Class Kenyan

I have spent the last few hours listening to audio tapes of James Baldwin and Malcolm X, reading of the anti-slavery exploits of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry and reading the last letters that his fellow raiders wrote just before they were led to the gallows. I have done this as a result of a question that has been on my mind for at least a year, a question that has refused to let go: what are we and what is wrong? This I ask about my home Kenya: why is there a profound sense of dislocation between the majority of people and their government? Why are we beggars? Why is there so much violence in a country that prides itself for being peaceful? Why, I ask trying to avoid despair, are we not equal to our problems?

I have wondered what constitutes knowledge, what role I have to play in the Kenya that is or possibly could be. And I have concluded with some reluctance that I was raised to be a ruler, a governor and civilizer of the savage. That I, and the middle classes that birthed me, struck a great bargain on that day when Kenya won its independence all those years ago: to continue that moral mission that Britain set itself, to govern and civilize the native. We have become a pustule, an encroaching and violent class that with charity on our lips criminalises, exploits and yes, oppresses those who are not like us.

I have often written of it in the past especially in a March post called Babylon System is the Vampire, here and here. But until now, I have not come to grips with the moral vacuity of the class that dominates the state or terms itself civil society. We are mercenaries for hire, ready to do whatever bidding any foreign donor desires. We hate the poor, with their smells, strange accents and backward ways. Of course we never admit this since we prefer to hate them as we speak of their dignity and their ‘authenticity’, and even drop our Christian names to be more Afrikkkan. Yet we hate them for being lost – at least according to us – and even more because despite their inferiority in our eyes, they are the only meal ticket we have.

They annoy and embarrass us with their circumcisions, their patriarchy, their unreconstructed tribalisms, and their bible-thumping ways. We fear them as criminals – we quake at their approach at the traffic lights. Yet we feel a need to be joined with them because we know that we lack something that we suspect that they have. We middle classes have become obsessive seekers of authenticity, listening to Fela Kuti, being BLACK, taking on WHITE RACISM and praising tradition. Yet we are alienated here in our air conditioned cars and gated suburbs where we live on the money we earn being the purveyors of mercy (NGOs) or the enforcers of progress (Government and Development).

We are Soyinka’s tigers, ever proclaiming our tigritude. But hating doing this all the while for we know that what we are is a posture, an attitude aimed at the European who is at the centre of all we do. If he has a welfare state, so must we. If he is into environmental rights, so must we be. We mime like parrots except our mimicry is garbled and has no clarity; our works can never equal those of the European because we are infected with the lethal mediocrity bequeathed to us by our ancestor: the settler. We have the laziness and decadence of the slave owner. The language fails me because we have perverted it. When we say unite, we mean unite in obeying our dictates. When we say we are for freedom, we mean we are for our freedom to be in charge. When we argue that capitalism is right, we say it because we are charged to say so by our foreign sponsors. We cannot be capitalist because we do not respect the property or the person of the average Kenyan. When we say we are against capitalism, similarly, it is because we are miming attitudes suggested to us by a West/East/South/whatever that promises us some prestige and money. When we talk of our development partners, we are talking of our beggary. When we talk of security, we do not care about the insecurity that has been the lot of most Kenyans due to our actions, our stealing and let us never forget our killing. When we say up we mean down.

By our nature, at its most fundamental, we are liars. We lie to ourselves more than to anyone else. We mime nationhood when what we have is rip-off-hood. Our nature is to be corrupt because we are corrupted. We owe no allegiance to anything other than our self perpetuation. We do not believe in sweat or in the property that results from it. We do not seek excellence or innovation or competition, goals that are intuitive and instinctive to most honest people seeking to live well. We believe that we are owed the world, but have never put in a single decade of real effort to earning it.

The only safety for Kenya is for us to be boxed in, to be ushered off the stage or at the very least constrained. That is why I believe that our greatest aids in our vulturehood – the state and the development industry – must be curtailed, cut down to the smallest proportions. Everything our state has touched it has destroyed or stolen. But we shall not do this voluntarily; we shall fight to the end knowing that to curtail the state is to destroy our access to other peoples’ efforts and winnings. And that is why we have become targets of a growing violence and hatred that if you have not noticed, I announce to you now.

Politics has moved out of the political arena. It is now in the car jacker’s slap and the random killing. Observe the crime wave and understand that you are seeing the beginning of a culture that we have begotten: the democratisation of the crimes we have been committing against people for four decades and that are the fount of our privilege and power. We shall be its targets because this crime wave covets what we have, as we have coveted the land of the Taita or the Maasai; it shall rip what it wants from our tight grip just as our GSU and police and Provincial Commissioners and District Officers have ripped what they desired from the hands of millions.

When Baldwin warned of a ‘fire next time’ all those decades ago, he was warning not just the White people who refused Black folks the vote and lynched them, he was warning all those who would dare compromise others’ humanity. He was warning the middle classes that sprang up all over Africa and continue to this day to act like the mkoloni and who thwart the best efforts of people to just live.

After this rant, let me please beg you to ignore it if you will but read Chapter 3 of Franz Fanon’s ‘Wretched of the Earth’. It is the most incisive study of the middle classes in the former colonies. I will post it on this blog.

The Weekend I spent in the Queen’s Compound at Windsor

By the time sixty University of London postgraduates finished squeezing into buses rented to ferry them on a two-day retreat, I sensed significant events were in the offing. The prospect of guesting at a former game lodge on the grounds of Windsor Castle had frankly excited me, but I was trying to keep it bottled up by adopting a weary I-have-seen-this-type-of-thing attitude.

In the hour that it took to drive from London to Berkshire, I had abandoned all efforts at being cool and was experiencing an expectant glow. Cumberland Lodge, set in the tranquil landscape of Great Park (formerly known as the ‘King’s woodland at Windsor’), is a massive brown brick mansion surrounded by gardens in which nature’s untidy ways have been quietly subdued. After checking in, we were immediately ushered into a lecture on the history of the lodge.

Later, upon a brief investigation, I discovered that the Duke of Cumberland was better known as Butcher Bill in Scotland on account of his enthusiastic embrace of murder. Somewhat understandably given the English penchant for keeping up polite facades, the 30-minute talk on the lodge’s history had failed to mention this little fact. The woman who had made the presentation got rather thin-lipped when hours later, in a burst of drunken inspiration, I joined an otherwise dignified Swede postgraduate in accosting her and loudly demanding that they change the name of the place to Butcher Bill’s lodge. The whole business got slightly more annoying for this dear lady when we decided to chase the deer peacefully lurking about, thus breaking the air of royal tranquillity if only briefly. They could be killed, but only by the royals and so their being scared by a commoner, especially an African one, appeared to her, I suppose, highly inappropriate. Remembering these incidents now, I can supply no strong argument in my defence except to suggest that they were a childishly expressed desire to dig below the surface.

But let me return to Cumberland and how he came by that sobriquet – we were after all his guests in some fashion. It bears getting into some (irrelevant) detail for though in certain quarters Cumberland was known as Butcher Bill, he was also referred to as Stinking Bill and Sweet Bill. He even had a flower named after him. Whence the discrepancy in names, why would he boast of a mansion in the King’s Woodland, and how to explain the presence of Africans (joined with the Scots in feeling the colonial boot) in this residence so many years after his (in)famous acts? You must admit that these are mysteries, perhaps useless ones to understand, but they are interesting nevertheless.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, Cumberland, after suffering a defeat at the hands of the French as the commander of an Anglo-Dutch-Hanoverian alliance known as the Pragmatic army, was recalled to England to put the threatening Scots in their place. Charles Edward Stuart, called the Young Pretender by those ill-disposed toward him, grandson of the deposed king James II, had invaded England. After several engagements, with the Highlanders at his command using guerrilla tactics, matters came to a head in the Battle of Culloden where Cumberland’s army inflicted a crashing defeat and killed at least a thousand brave Scots. The Young Pretender eventually settled in France after having unsuccessfully tried to raise another effort against the English and used feminine disguises to escape the Royal Army. But that is a story for another occasion. Suffice it to say that Cumberland had carried the day.

After the battle, when our noble duke was asked for orders, he reputedly wrote, ‘No quarter’, on the back of a playing card. You can easily imagine the airiness of the gesture as Billy took in a game of cribbage with a brandy and a cigar in hand. What followed was the cold-blooded murder of all the Scottish survivors, many who had left the field wounded and hidden in peasant huts. He remained in Scotland for three months, captured three thousand prisoners and executed just over a hundred of them. His actions were met with great acclaim in England where he was given a generous pension and a flower named after him to mark his success. This blossom is known as the Sweet William in England, but in Scotland is called the Stinking Billy.

Knowing these details, consider the raison d’être of Cumberland Lodge given these two hundred and fifty years later: ‘to encourage an interchange of thought between students, especially those from the University of London and from the Commonwealth…to encourage the investigation and discussion of the nature of Man and Society’. As I return to the unimportant events that transpired on my weekend stay, consider what role time and intention play in transforming the violent and domineering into the charitable and democratic.

In the interest of honesty, I must report that on our first night at the lodge, students, who perhaps should have known better, stole a bottle of wine from the kitchens seeing that the bar would be closed by 11pm and that there was a strict injunction against providing your own liquor. Word is that they were acting out of a drunken desire for adventure. One of them, a sweet tempered and once removed conspirator in the wine lift, was dispatched to procure a corkscrew from a youngish bartender who seemed to have the eye for her. Unfortunately, the fellow turned out to be less horny and more principled on matters of theft, which I admit threw me. He steadfastly refused to yield the corkscrew and insisted on knowing why she needed it. Feeling that the game was up, this young lady came running to her compatriots in a panic at the dire consequences of robbery on the Queen’s own grounds.

Now this created a dilemma for the guilty parties who will remain unnamed for the moment. While this young woman had been a cheerful member of the planning group, she had not, in a manner of speaking, put her fingers in the cookie jar. If anything, she had been assigned the less morally compromised task of procuring the corkscrew. Being English, and thus possibly clued into the dire punishments that attend petty thefts in the land of Queens and dungeons, she was bubbling over with fear and trepidation. But, as she assured us, chin awobble and in quivering tones, she would take this on the chin without giving up the guiltier parties.

This of course was received not so much with relief, but with the faint beginnings of panic as we sensed that her nerves did not seem strong enough to withstand steady interrogation. And from the look of things, what I suspect was the faint memory of Butcher Bill in his former home, it was clear that the interrogation would prove to be brutal in the extreme.

I tried assuring her that it was an insignificant prank that would amount to nothing, not believing myself as I considered her tear-swollen features. I attempted summoning what I imagined was a rousing speech, deriding the bartender and suggesting that he would not, and indeed could not, take the matter any further on account of its pettiness and the lack of fingerprint proof. After all, I concluded, they did not even know a bottle had been stolen yet.

Having strengthened her backbone enough to reduce the tears into sniffles, I decided to investigate how much information the other side had. Approaching the bartender and his elderly, ladylike assistant – who had earlier refused to serve me drinks because of my inability to accompany the request with a ‘please’. After some friendly banter, it emerged that they suspected our young woman and a companion of stealing a bottle of wine and hiding it under the staircase. Punishment was going to levelled at the whole group by closing the bar a full hour early. Now this was serious stuff given the carefully laid plan to binge drink during that crucial hour. They were determined, like the former owner of the house, to giving no quarter. It came to me in a flash that the downstairs – the servants – in such a home would never ever forgive the transgressions of the upstairs if they had the power to exact punishment. These two had been thrown a bone, a reason to gnaw on it and they were not going to let go.

A well considered discussion now got underway as I dug deep, trying to find a sober set of ideas. With surprising ease, out came a rant on man’s innate corruption and the temptations that, alas, are too often the pitfalls of badly raised youth. Joined in an outraged chorus by the not-so-horny bartender and the please lady, it soon became clear THAT THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH THE YOUNG PEOPLE OF TODAY. ‘But surely, if we are in a crisis here in England on account of declining moral standards, what are we the decent people who have worked hard and lived honestly to do about it all?’ I demanded to know in the midst of this moral love-fest.

I had actually started to feel stabs of great anger against youth crime and a steady sympathy for these two good souls found in their peaceful lair by insidious wine thieves. But I still had a job to do. ‘Are we to depend on collective punishment; on the idea that the sins of the few can be visited on the many; is the message of the New Testament to be disregarded?’ I asked brightly. This was now too much for Mr. Principle and Lady Please; the African was right and deserved a free pint. And then several more. To my credit, I tried refusing these offers suggesting that somewhere in my foggy, largely conscience-free mind, there remained a hint of guilt. But what the hell, I was not going to refuse another pint of London Pride with so much riding on it.

(c) MMK

Stop Moaning: The English Response to Years of Defeat

To keep up with the British theme now that their elections have come and gone with nary a ripple anywhere outside Westminster, I am going to re-run an article that I wrote in 2003 after a particularly frustrating day in London. Truth be told, I am trying to find a clear way to describe the English and have in mind a story about the little accountant with his triplicate forms who lives at the centre of the Englishman’s soul. I have been promising myself to get it down, but alas.

Stop Moaning: The English Response to Years of Defeat

How did the English ever manage to conquer such a large swath of the world? London can barely run itself much less entire continents, I should know because I live here.

Train tracks are held in place by blocks of wood, rusty nails and a brick. The train system, like virtually every other public service is in a state of acute crisis. Thankfully the operator apologises with reasonable sounding phrases that would have you imagine delays are a rarity.

The time on the tube is mostly spent wondering how you will afford David Beckham’s life, which is splashed on every headline and that you are a loser for not emulating. By the time you extricate yourself from your fellow, habitually unsmiling passengers, you slouch outside to cold, grey skies, and incessant rain.

Thank God you have lunch to look forward to. Will it be the fried candy, fried chicken, soggy vegetables or the fried tomatoes? Whatever you choose to eat, be prepared to pay dearly for it – if not financially, then surely with blocked arteries. And remember you only have an hour to wolf it down before you return to your badly paid job.

You might be lucky enough to survive without depression therapy into the evening. Then you can anticipate a few hours at your local pub, surrounded by the same unsmiling train passengers you thought you had left behind forever. If this is not good enough for you, try one of the three TV documentaries on the First World War playing on any given night.

Actually don’t bother, they all say pretty much the same thing: “We are a plucky lot blessed with a good moral compass and able to sacrifice for jolly old England,” all correct sentiments, I suppose, with the exception of the ‘jolly’. When it comes to you poor devils who were colonised, there is a grudging admission that it was wrong to oppress you. But hurry, it’s time to move back to happily reminiscing about the greatness of old England.

There are few people whose self-perception is so painfully contorted to ignore reality as the British. The famous stiff upper lip for instance, disguises a complete inability to connect with others and a shyness that borders on phobia – it’s a case of the shy guy who pretends to hate women.

It also helps when you are being screwed by painfully high taxes, late trains, bad food, high rents, traffic jams and trying to digest the cultural significance of the latest story on the thong Kylie was spotted wearing at Lord Elton’s party.

The importance of sacrifice keeps cropping up, but much of it amounts to putting up with privations brought on by mediocre government and enduring yet another Royal scandal (“I wish I was your tampon Camilla,” Prince Charles once muttered thickly on the phone) The obsession with a glorious past gives testimony to this being an age of British decline and it’s not a pretty thing.

Living with such a storied history has made many here insecure. A widespread dislike of foreigners might once have resulted from imagining that they were all a sorry bunch, but now it springs from the fear that associating with them will expose one’s inadequacy.

You see, for the British, identity is competitive: “I am better than you because I once ruled you. But since I don’t any more, I am better because, ah, well, my great grandfather was mowed down as he walked slowly towards a German machine gun nest at the Somme after his officers thought him too stupid to run in correct formation.”

In case this is sounding like the rant of some disaffected ex-colonial subject, it is. The fact that I am from Kenya, a country that was ruled for more than half a century by people so dentally challenged, rankles.

The British are many things and most of them, if not really wrong or evil, are boring and slightly pathetic. One example suffices to tell you everything you need to know about the country: Tim Henman.

Here is the great hope of British tennis who in his own words states that “winning is everything,” a sentiment that is widely accepted across Britain.

However, like the rest of this country’s athletes, businesses, dentists, train operators and health service administrators, he has not had much actual practice winning. There are those 11 titles won in a decade of professional tennis in places like Tashkent, Brighton and Reunion.

Now, this would be fine if he were just some minor talent, but remember this is a man who has made fans weep when he was bundled out of yet another Wimbledon (reaching the semi-finals on four occasions amounts to cruelly teasing the British public’s fevered expectations.)

As he sportingly accepts defeat after defeat he is frequently referred to as a gentleman, a status many Britons aspire to as they surreptitiously take in the naked breasts of the page three girl.

For the British, defeat has come to define the past 50 years of their national life to such a large extent that putting up a fight as you get gutted is now the only recourse. Henman’s game reflects his country’s approach to everything.

It is careful, yet mediocre, and shows few flashes of creativity. I must admit though that his pronouncements of future victory do bear bleak testimony to his possession of a vivid imagination disconnected from reality.

Above all, his demeanour on the court is dignified. There is little panic in evidence as he gets blasted away and treated with obvious disrespect by his opponents. You might deal with him like a calf in a slaughterhouse, but don’t expect him to beg for mercy. Here I have to stop and acknowledge that there is something perversely admirable about this attitude.

If the British have anything to show the poor Asians or poorer Africans they once ruled it is this: stop moaning so much about your problems, show some pluck, for God’s sake, and never let them see you sweat.

Kenyan Election Monitor Claims UK Vote Rigging

As the hapless Brits head to the polls today, I have decided to represent Kenya as an election observer just in case the Labour Party or its Conservative and Liberal Democrat rivals should decide to rig the results. Tony Blair has been looking particularly dodgy and given to the sweats when interviewed on TV, looks like a man who has something up his sleeve. Michael Howard, the leader of the Tories, other than looking like a smile has been curved into his face by a plastic surgeon, has been going about with the slogan “are you thinking what we’re thinking?” What exactly is her referring to? Then he has repeatedly stated that Blair should expect a surprise tonight. Sounds to me like the fellow has cooked up a few results, aye?

During my rounds of the polling stations, as I have kept close watch for evidence of fraud, all I have managed to notice is a completely disinterested public. Most, I bet, had a tougher time choosing a lunch-time sandwich than a candidate. And those are just the ones who did vote. No conversation I have heard throughout the day and during the last few weeks has indicated that today’s exercise holds out any possibility of ushering in significant changes. It feels as if people have given up, they are too busy avoiding speed cameras, cursing at late trains, wondering whether the NHS will kill them or a binge drinker will puke on them. So in best election observer fashion, I did a little research on the history of the vote in these Empire-loving Isles.

An Itty Bitty History – see, it’s even in small type

Before the First Reform Act of 1832 parliamentary representatives in the towns were chosen only by local freemen or the council. In the counties the vote was restricted to 40 shilling freeholders and MPs needed to own land. A mere 2% of the population had the vote before 1832 and a mere 3% following the reform.

The Reform Act meant that the position of property owners and some tenants as voters was secured. In the counties, 40 shilling freeholders, £10 per year copyholders and £50 per year leaseholders had the vote while in the towns, householders with a £10 income benefited. It was a measure that favoured the middle class as groups other than the landed entered parliament. The working classes were not to gain from it and continued agitations that led to the Chartist movement. It is interesting to note that in the 1850s, only one out of six adult males had the vote in Britain.

The Second Reform Act of 1867 ensured votes for town workers, some tenants and lodgers. The vote was extended to all male householders in towns and to country householders whose rental was at least £12 per year. Lodgers paying £10 per year for unfurnished rooms also qualified. It meant that many urban male workers could now vote.

The Franchise Act of 1884 extended the vote to agricultural labourers. This meant that for the first time, the vote was not apportioned according to property ownership. But women remained disenfranchised.

It was not until Lloyd George’s prime ministerial period and the 1918 Representation of the People Act gave the vote to all men over 21 years and to all women over 30 years. The Suffragettes, activists for the women’s vote, had seen their work ‘helped’ by WWI since it was difficult to claim women were inferior after they had been forced to take on many jobs previously only undertaken by men.

In 1928, under the Franchise Act, nearly all men and women in the country over 21 years got the vote. At last the sentiment underlying the vote was that every adult was an equal member of the polity and had a right to similar democratic rights and responsibilities.

Phew! That reminded me of the horrific history lessons I used to have during hot afternoons in high school, wondering when the teacher would get to the intrigues I knew history to be filled with. Unfortunately, every teacher except Mr. Oyuga would just drone on endlessly meaning that I ended up sleeping most afternoons for six years!

Well, I must be off to the polls now. I am sure there have been shady goings on about town while I’ve been blogging away. I shall report on some of the more interesting results. Stay posted…

419 Scam: Naomi Bangura’s Certificate of Deposit

Naomi Bangura’s certificate of deposit to prove how much money she has in Ivory Coast and needs my help to move offshore. For the rest of the story, read the posts on the 419 Scam Letter.  

Dear naomi,
I am sorry have been out of contacy. sory about you feeling so sad. as i told you one of my workerts got hurt ansd that is what we have beenn focusing on. really want to help you but am wondering about the money. just when you wrote me and even kindly sent me your picture (you are a very younf and atractive girl) someone wrote me a letter who is also in the same probliems like you. is this common problem? he was writing from liberia and had a lot of monery in the bank. almost fifty million which he offered to share if i helped him. i am tempted to also do busines wityh him, what do you thinlk? it would be good money for me and it would also help youbng people in trouble. tell me your thoughts.
thank you and cheers.
MMK

Dear Mr MMKs.

I thank you so much for your letter at last. And I am
sorry for what heppened to your worker.

Please, I will want you to be serious about my case
and help me.

Here is the website of the bank,where my father
depoisted the money (www.boahq.com) you can contact
them for the transfer of this fund,so that I will
leave here now that the political problems has not
gotten worse.

For the person that contacted you.I do not know him in
person,But there are many people here who lost their
parents in the cause of the war.If your spirit direct
you to help him as well, I will not stop you.

I am looking forward to hear from you.

Thanks,
Miss Naomi Bangura.

MMK
How are you sir?i see it neccesary to write you
once again,i hope you are coping with the problem your
company had in dead of your worker,i hope the
situation is coming down.
I know the Lord is in control and i have been
praying day and night to see that the lord see us
through for this transaction,i still beleive that the
lord brought you to be a help and it shall not be
invain,you know am a young girl and don’t know much
about business and i know with you everything shall go
smoothly when i come to your country to work with
you.Have you contacted the bank? i went to the bank to
confirm if you have contacted them and i was told that
you have not contacted them,pls sir don’t waist time
remember you promised me,and they are still waiting
for your lawyers to call them.
Sir, there is one thing i noticed from the bank
director, he seems not to be much happy because i want
to send this money abroad and he told me that he has a
friend in toronto canada who deals in diamond and he
will contact him for me but i said no that i trust you
and i cannot do business with anybody except
you,tuesday last week i went to consult a lawyer
concerning what the bank director told me,when two of
us got to the bank my lawyer asked the bank director
that as long as your name is in the bank file that he
has no legal right to contact anybody who is not my
choice or desire,so my lawyer is with us here to
ensure every thing go well and he is worried and he
said you should do quick so that after the tranfer of
this money i can come to meet you.
Please,sir call the bank director so that they
can tell you what to do for the transfer of this
money.
Thanks and GOD bless you and your family.
yours Naomi

dear naomi, as always I am happy to hear from you. but worrid. i talked to my lawyer and he seemd a bit hesitant because he said my busines is very in debt. but then i told him that you seemed very nice and showed him the certificate of deposit. i hope that he makes a conection with the bank because he promised. how are you? tell me quickly when my lawyer contacts bank.
bye
matin

Dear MMK,

I thank you for your letter and I appreciade your
continued efforts.

Please, you have to force your lawyer to contact the
bank as soon as possible,so that this money will be
transferred to your account.

You are in a better position,to inform me when your
lawyer contacted the bank,because where I am staying
is very far from the bank,and some times I do not
have enough money for transport.

Please, psuh your lawyer to hasten up, I am very
worried.

Thanks and God bless you.

Naomi.

Cucu’s Farm

Just thought I would put up one of my favourite images. This is one of the the oldest structure on my grandmother’s farm: the boy’s hut. It is where I would stay whenever I went to visit her during the holidays. The walls on the inside are covered with old newspapers and pictures from ‘laddie’ magazines collected in the 1970s. Isn’t it beautiful? 

A Quick Note From An African in Paris

I have just returned to London from a long weekend in Paris. Ah, Paris – all the clichés are true: the waiters are abrupt, the women sophisticated and the city is pathetically beautiful. There was such a relaxed atmosphere, which was especially noticeable among Africans when compared to their London or even New York counterparts. But then there were many who looked like they had bleached their skins, leaving them with blotchy – albeit it relaxed – faces and super dark elbows. It was a strange juxtaposition: the sense of home many of them exuded and the depths of self-doubt implied by a bleached visage. As for the hair styles… I can now say that Paris should be a UN-level International Emergency on the same level as Iraq and Darfur. If you really want to make a Bill Gates Sized fortune, start a hair salon in Paris. I usually cannot identify a weave if it was whipped into my face, but on the streets of Paris it was a choice between noticing the Arc de Triomphe or the reddish, tangled bushes many sisters were walking beneath. The weaves called attention to themselves, looking like a cross between the Medusa’s snakes and a small wet poodle lying atop a head. I worried that a cigarette butt would be flicked too high, sparking an immediate conflagration, an agonizing death and a flood of lawsuits against the Chinese manufacturers of hair pieces.

Folks in Paris are friendly though, engaged with what is going on around them. They do not hunch their shoulders and look into the middle distance like their Anglo counterparts. And though the place takes bureaucratic procedure to heights that Stalin’s Russia would have quaked at, it is all so smooth and well thought out. At least that was my touristy impression. As for being a tourist, this time in Paris, I was unabashed about it. There is something of consuming another culture that I find quite surreal as an African whose country is usually on the receiving end. It was like being in a shop with peoples’ lives on sale. Everything felt available, subject to the whims expressed through my credit card. Of course I knew that the truth is different: Paris is a city interested first in itself and not the outsider. But still that sense of ownership persisted as a tiny, intense feeling of power. I liked it. And so in a bid to capture the European tourist’s perpetual desire to capture an ‘authentic’ African on film, I tried to do the same by seeking out stereotypical beret wearing, red wine drinking, Marxist spouting French men and their clad-in-black female counterparts. I found very few and actually felt surrounded at all times by people who were from everywhere except Paris. More later. I have two stories of women that I saw: one at the Gare du Nord train station, waiting, I thought, for an inconsiderate lover and the other walking toward the Louvre museum holding a bunch of tulips with the cocksure step of a happy lover. Coming up later …