East Africans

As a child a border was a fence, a wall, a separator and sitting on the fence meant practically having to withstand the gashing spikes of thorns or glass on stone walls, throes of indecision.

I traveled to Busia hoping to walk along the perimeter wall, like Berlin or Greatwall of China and see what strange people lived across it whose president ate people and dumped lame men into Lake Victoria that when you fished you were more likely to get a watch or a ring in a fish, so fish were carnivorous?

But in Busia I met a gate, then nothing.

No border no fence, no strange people in fact they were too familiar, spoke even my own language better. So a border was actually nothing, air kaput!

Peculiarly too I met the first East Africans, the Baamani clan of the Bakhayo. They are the Maasai across Kenya and Tanzania, the Somali sprawled in space across Kenya and Somalia, they are the Teso  on either  side of Mt. Elgon, the Hutus and Tutsis and Rwanda and Burundi, the Merile and Karamoja. The people on borders, on nothing, on air kaput.

Here their land stretches and pans downs and ups, is split by rivers and ownership, but no line nothing air kaput.

Here they call Uganda Ingerekha ‘The Other side’ vaguely, there and not here. The clan is everywhere the other side and here and there.

They tell me what makes one a Kenyan or a Ugandan is an ID card. Its where for convenience you think you have a better shot at life. So a son can be a Ugandan a father a Kenyan a brother both. Well it doesn’t change where they live nor what they know about themselves. A young man failed in Kenyan form four exams, he went to Uganda for form five and six and became a Ugandan.

Here currency operates like a forex bureau, you do not have to mind which one you have as long as u understand the exchange rates and you know a little arithmetic. Either side operates either currencies. Anyway they are both shillings if you get rid of the prefix (Uganda and Kenya)

Here politics is also twofold, with the feeling of lack of democracy felt just within a year of the feeling of chaotic elections, Uganda votes just one year before Kenya.

It is here, where there is no border, just air, nothing kaput, that a people, East Africans, Maasai, Somalis, Itesos, Merile, Karamojong, Sabaot, Luhyas etcetera etcetera live in one country in two countries.

Serenading East Africa

Weary with war

Come lay by my feet

And find peace

Discriminated and depraved

Disintegrating in secession

Come ye and find justice here

Torn a part by tribe

Torn apart by religion

Come glued in our shared history

And find a future

Robbed by modern Cecil Rhodes treaties

By an open market with barricaded doors

Come ancient traders and trade in

Our market

This is East Africa

Land of shared destiny

Multiple identities

A pan African Federation is imminent