Mirror Mirror

Mirrors are scary things because we see ourselves and the fear within us is so immense its scary. So we take a peek at those shiny surfaces afraid that those next to us will not see you notice that freckle on our collar or frown at that aging wrinkle. And like the woman standing next to me as the elevator levitates corrects her posture and steals glances at the mirror and then refers to me and I pretend not to have noticed.

Mirrors needn’t not be glass, they can be our reflective perceptions and insinuations. They can be our society or our history. Our stories. Mirror mirror on the wall who is the fairest of them all. So mirrors can be deductive, they can know what we do not know or admit. And they are truthful, or is that just another idealism of fairy tales?

But hark lets take GADDO for instance, the most perceptive caricaturist of our time. He did a mirror cartoon where Raila is standing in front of a mirror and the PM label on his door read as MP in the mirror. Now I call that a genius of the mirror in GADDO’s mind. Then there is that mirror one where Kibaki is staring into a mirror and seeing Moi and a tag line, ‘The end of an error (era) and the beginning of another.’ It must be very dangerous to walk into GADDO’s house if he has such mirrors that see through the emperor’s clothes.

So if mirrors have a peculiarity of seeing things like they are, then this mirrors are scary things. Like the one in this shop in town which had the portrait of three presidents reflected in it. When Uhuru took over the reign of power people from Nyanza were relieved when he shrugged off the need to pin up his portrait on all  shops in the spirit of ‘Big Brother is watching you’ that Moi had associated his portrait with. Now in Kisumu one can barely find the portrait of a president in a shop, maybe mirroring their feeling of being president-less. On the contrary as the AG argued the portrait was a symbol of patriotism, and pinning it up was an allegiance to the president and country, which I agreed especially in light that it was not being imposed. Until I entered the shop on Tom Mboya street and saw the portraits on the wall. Like the glaring absence of portraits on Kisumu shops, the glaring presence of only three presidents caught my fancy.

There was an old portrait of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, that seemed like an apparition of an old calendar dusk yellow and aged probably resurrected from old belongings, there was the awkwardly smiling Kibaki and blood shot eyed Uhuru. Either Moi had awfully wronged this man or he was so tribalist that he had erased 24 years of history.

There was also photocopy of the Mau Mau in a detention camp in Nakuru from what I made out of the sketched tag line. I asked the owner about it. He reiterated that it was good the British were finally going to pay, that was not what I had sought to find out, I had overlooked current events. But he took it upon himself to point out at Kenyatta, now that’s a man who knows about the Mau Mau.

I was not sure whether to break the sad news that he was not Mau Mau, and that he had denied it and that allegation was only used by Her Majesty’s government to imprison him. He was leader of the political wing though. So I said ‘JM was Mau Mau, I’ve been reading his book, I guess we do not know a lot about them,’ tactfully. ‘No, Kenyatta is the one who knows about those white people and what they did to him, a true warrior,’ he countered assertively.

He had chosen his mirrors that saw three presidents in Kenya and his version of our history, just like the shops in Kisumu that had no presidents, I should visit Eldoret.

But can mirrors be made to see what we want? Or do they tell the truth and its just that we chose to interpret it in our own way. And as we continue seeing it this way do we stand a chance of getting lost in the blurriness? And can we allow our children to view these distortions they will no longer know the truth?

Or are mirrors myopia, a misconstrued version of a wider world, and will that makes us miss the bigger picture. Like a Sh50 million bronze statue of retired President Mwai Kibaki hoisting aloft a copy of the Constitution during its promulgation on August 27, 2010 eclipsing the years and struggle that brought us to this moment when we are faced with looming food crisis as indicated by an Oxfam report. Then we are doomed like narcissus that we will be entrapped by beauty (short lived tyranny) of the moment to our undoing.

And when we grow old, looking at pictures and statues of our images frozen in time, will they tell of where we will be, and what we will have done now to get us there?