Knowledge is power or so the cliché goes. Tyrannical governments
the world over - from apartheid South Africa to the Moi regime in Kenya -
introduced emasculating systems of education.
In South Africa, Bantu
Education taught the black population to be efficient
slaves to their white masters. In Kenya, the 8.4.4 system of education
taught us to be God knows what.
School is, beyond religion, the best tool for indoctrination. When you
roll school and religion together, you have the masses fooled. Remember
Moi; how he always made headlines for going to church? Kenya was a Christian
nation, right? A Christianity enforced at morning parade, in school,
with daily readings from the Bible.
Then in class they taught us from the bible too: turn your other
cheek and give unto Caesar what is Caesar's. So we grew up knowing
that our duty was to pay taxes and look the other way as Caesar took
away our land, our rights, our roads and our forests.
We were learning and learning well, just as the stooges at the Ministry
of Education knew we would. After all, they had read Karl Marx's
rant about religion being the opium of the people. But they wouldn't
let us read him though, and they told the politicians about the
dangers of exposing our young and impressionable minds to subversive writers. The politicians hadn't read anything
beyond their names on illegal Title Deeds, so they took to the podiums
in sycophantic choruses begging the president to send that Karl Marx
fellow to jail.
In school, they told us that literature was the mirror of society and
then threw Shakespeare at us. Of course they wouldn't let us glimpse a
mirror of our rotten society; they taught Shakespeare because they knew
we wouldn't understand, nay, relate to it. No wonder, then, that upon
leaving school you would be hard pressed to find a Kenyan who knew what
'Oh Romeo, Oh Romeo, wherefore at thou Romeo' meant; or that the last
literary text the average grown-up Kenyan read was the Bible and or a
K.C.S.E set-book.
The school system was a government tool for turning us into sycophants.
Any literature that might mirror the ‘short and brutish' life of
the sycophant was outlawed. Unless, of course, it was set in a world
we couldn't understand. But sometimes they made mistakes (or
maybe it was their graveyard humour) and taught us from the likes of
Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector. We kept reading and hoping they
had made a mistake because a rotten system that helps you pour scorn
on it is one that has scaled the evil hills beyond megalomania.
Then I left school. I left school and stumbled into a world where my
academic papers were worth less than the paper they were printed on. I suddenly realised that I was a mere drop in that ocean
that was the effluent of a conveyor belt-system of education. A system
that continued to pour more youth into a non-existent job market at
the 8th level, maybe at the fourth one after that, and, for those
who were lucky, after holding on for a further four, the one after that. (And because poverty
continued to spread its wings ever-wider over our homes, more youth were
dumped into a recessive market at all manner of non-designated in-between
levels as they dropped out of school for lack of school fees, or so that
they could concentrate on the more urgent need of providing for their
HIV/AIDS-orphaned siblings.)
On leaving school it dawned on me that that phrase, education is the
key, that my teachers had always hammered into me was as farcical and
alienated from my time, space, and reality as the Shakespearean and Biblical
thous, wherefores and whatnots. What was real to me was that I was an
insignificant constituent of a significant demographic group: the dispossessed
youth. Every year, more and more of us trickled onto the streets
of Nairobi. Then trickle turned to torrent, until finally the
river broke its banks. And, well - just like in the plains of Budalangi -
that river had no dykes, the social fabric was ripped, the safety nets
had been taken away, along with the roads... the human rights...the
forests...!
The youth were advised to join the jua kali - the 'informal' sector. We were
told to put into practice all the practical things that the 8.4.4 system
had taught us. (I remember wondering whether we were meant to form choirs
to entertain the president on Moi Day.) So we threw our academic papers
under our mattresses, and with our toes peeping through third-hand patent
leather shoes, we hit the streets. We had now become The Tarmacking.
But River Road was full. Industrial Area: Hakuna Kazi. Kariobangi Light
Industries: Wapi?! Even the muhindi sweat shops and the EPZ Labour Camps,
complaining that operating costs were too prohibitive, began to shut
down. Which was strange, because they were notorious for using the Labour
Law as a sex toy and the Minimum Wage as a spittoon.
And so there we were on the streets totally unable, unlike others, to
describe ourselves in a word or a neat phrase such as: Lawyer, Banker,
Political Thief or Bank Robber. On the streets, we existed as mere statistics.
The closest we came to acquiring unique identifiers was in police Occurrence
Books: Idler, Suspect, Mungiki Adherent, or - with a police bullet in the
head and a toe-tag - Unidentified African Male. Sometimes, usually in election
years, we became The Youth while in NGO literature we made
token appearances as Unemployed Youth. (At some point NGOs began to
refer to us as Marginalised Youth but then the donor funds were tending
towards the Girl Child's agenda so the Girl Child became the new Marginalised
and we went back to being Unemployed Youth.)
In the midst of all this, no one cared to ask us who we were. Our place
in the Kenyan Nation, wasn't defined by us, it was thrown at us: a
vacuous place where hope didn't linger long. And all the while, the
things that had been promised us - jobs, leadership, a piece of the National
Pie - continued to linger in the hands of an ageing
minority. They called us Viongozi wa Kesho but tomorrow never came.
So we forgot the pursuit of Self Actualisation; Maslow's Hierarchy
of needs became nothing more than a chart with our names printed
at the bottom in indelible ink. We became too preoccupied with satisfying
the most primal human needs - the lack of needs-fulfillment mitigated
sex, alcohol and drug habits - to worry about our status in society or
to think about what we were to ourselves or to those that sat at the
top of the food chain.
The world beyond us rolled on with its aspirations of Life, Liberty
and the Pursuit of Happiness. We, the youth of Kenya, resigned ourselves
to fate. We spent our lives grovelling before our elders, or fighting
and killing each other just to stay alive.
And the truth of the matter is that if the national psyche were a democracy,
then we, the largest demographic
group, were the true epitome of Kenyanness. But then again this was Kenya
and our version of Democracy meant the tyranny of the minority - a minority
who occasionally yielded power to their sons, brothers and wives and
kindred of various removes every couple of years. And thus the experience
of the majority remained unremarked.
We would never be contributors to the social, economic or political
landscape of this country leave alone define its national character. So
we shrank into cocoons that remained undefined by us but paid homage to
by others in the crime pages: Public Alarmed by Rise in Violent Crime;
the token - annual - ‘exclusive' newspaper report: The Child Sex Slaves
of Malindi; or the faceless statistics of NGO Grant Proposals: Two
Million Youths Disenfranchised.
Whatever others branded us, we couldn't stop long enough to discourse
on identities; we had our pitiful existences to get through. So we spent
our lives chasing bread and butter and the occasional shot of alcohol
to escape the pain of living a life sans a sense of self. We kept on
with our futile striving, our furtive sex in disused phone booths, our
dinners of stale bread and sugarless strong tea; every day our hope
sinking deeper and deeper into the Stygian depths of the Nairobi River.
Life is short and brutish as Thomas Hobbes said but we had to keep
it fed and clothed while it lasted.
Trackback(0)
 |
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
Kenya's problems are not so easily or so lazily explained, and again as has been argued on another thread, the Kenyan middle class has no business sitting around waiting for jobs and for empowerment. The middle class with all its advantage really has no business pretending to be marginalised. The poor Kenyan people's problems are not the problems of the Kenyan middle class, not at all. The world has changed, that world where people just chillaxed and waited to get kazi kubwa with a nice wooden label on the door are gone, everywhere in the world graduates find themselves unable to get jobs, everywhere in the world there is an increasing gulf between rich and poor, everywhere in the world there is an increasing rapaciousness to society. We can all go the ODM way and moan to high heaven, we can go the Raila/Kimunya/ Kibaki way and transfer wealth from the poor to the wealthy, or we can get lively and start doing business, creating wealth and jobs. By the way, idle question, but how many of Kenya's youth have tried and failed to get access to the Youth Fund. Someone really should do a survey on this and rescue us from our moan culture.