Criers

When I sat on that seat, it was not a matter of irregular and unprecedented. It was an urgency, I wanted any seat empty next to a window. I wished I could pay for two and just be alone, I didn’t want to sit with anybody. As quickly as I sat on it I tried to flee, urged the driver to go. Urged the criers to stop.

Men do not cry

Men take everything in a stride

Fifty, Hamsini,: Fifty, Hamisini: Fifty, Hamsini

Two criers were calling out the wares of a hawker. They were bras and panties, polyester from China. My brother once told me that he had met one crier in his Keg joint in Umoja. After he bought him a keg of beer, in his usual social science forensic, the crier told him about his business.

His voice was his asset, he had said, siphoning the keg through a straw and hoping his tale was interesting enough. I live by the benevolence of Sir Jah and his gift to me of a voice. I wake up each morning and go by the riiiiveeerside for a session of the herb. He drags the riverside like Joseph Hill’s reggae classic. And then I walk to Muthurwa. He says looking down at his tattered shoes to make his point. And there traders pay us to shout all day, Fifty for those who have gone to school and Hamsini for the sufferers. People are so anxious in life they forget Sir Jah feeds the birds of the air and the beasts of the land and fish of the see. And then he gesture with his finger for my brothers half-life cigarette. He thinks my brother probably is the professor types, the ones who buy people alcohol to get them tell their stories or a journalist or something.

I smile to myself a part of my misery cried away. My chest heaves and I still feel a puffball in my throat. Hot dry choking puff ball. I wish the driver could make off. Ram his foot onto the foot onto the accelerator and fly home.

Doni Thirty, Doni Thirty, Doni Thirty, Doni Thirty, Doni Thirty, Doni Thirty, Thirty Doni Thirty

Touts join in the cacophony. They hit against the matatu like shadow boxers gesturing three with their middle fourth and little finger, each finger worth ten shillings.

An old minibus that had probably plied more routes than necessary pulled over. Its sides bashed in by constant bashing from criers, cracked and aged.

Doni Mbao, Twenty Doni, Doni Mbao, Twenty Doni, Doni Mbao, Twenty Doni, Doni Mbao,

Everyone on my matatu alighted and boarded the new old matatu and in seconds it was off leaving me alone and my criers with a job rolled back. I cursed them, cursed their criers and angrily looked out. All I wanted was to leave, to go away, to float away like their cry.

A man must not cry

He must bear everything in his heart.

I decided on anger, needed an emotion to kill my self-loathing. I needed to be angry to go and drink some cheap vodka, to swivel the mixture of industrial spirit in water and gulp down into my mouth in one swig. Maybe that way the pain would go away. They say alcohol does not solve problems. But they are some dumb people, alcohol allows you to be honest with yourself, to see things in a different perspective. Of course I needed alcohol. Or maybe I should go to a brothel. Angrily let my spite burn out of my groin. Spit a fiery lava into a random vulva. Maybe I should hit someone or something, start an argument and bash somebody’s face in. punch away into warm black flesh until my knuckles meet dull bone resisting impact.

The bus started off jerking into the long queue of vehicles in traffic. My anger spent me, tired me, my chest was heaving with emotion. I no longer wanted to be part of life. Just to watch it with the amusement afforded by God.

Allllaaaaahu, Akbar, Alaaaaaahu Akbar…

The muezzin was raising his cry to the heavens. Flying with recited melody through speakers hanging out of a tower at the Mosque. Floating like consolation to God above where he chose to listen to the muezzin with the sweetest voice all over the world. I closed my eyes and sucked in the salty taste in my mouth.

I could still see it in her eyes, she could see into me. The immense pain that raked my mind. The confusion as I tried to understand. There was no anger then, just an overwhelming feeling of heartbreak. Wrung heart, taut chest that labored breathing, and the feeling of everything falling apart at my feet. The disappointment.

If that is what love does to you then I do not want to ever feel it. I thought to myself, philosophizing. Marrying a bad woman makes a man a philosopher, Nietzsche. I laughed at the thought. If love means cutting myself down at the sheens, I never want it. But was there an otherwise. Lovelessness. A hollow pit of drudgery and loneliness. A painful black hole that I had lived all my life.

When I was little I cried. But a man is not supposed to cry. I felt compelled to cry because I realized I had lost the recognition of my mother. She was weaning me then from her over protection. I was angry, heightening my perception of sibling rivalry and I wanted my affection. So I thought that if I cried, maybe I would evoke emotions back. But mama told me, Men do not cry. It was then that I realized why men do not cry, because the vilest human emotion so grave that it harangues the very nature of man is pity. So I decided never to be pitiable and never to pity.

She knew, I knew it was over. I did not want it to but I knew that was the only way it would go. Unsaid but it was over. I felt crumpled. Overwhelmed. Even death felt more predictable the uncertainties of living without her was too much to bear. How would I even manage to live? How could I wake up each morning and not think fondly of her and hope that she would call me and I would hear her husky sleepy voice over the phone, her chuckle at the other end of the call. The way her words fell out of her mouth with heavy syllables cropped at the edges. How could I imagine never seeing her?

How was I to handle the thought that she was now with another man. Tickling him and laughing playfully, looking at him naughtily and teasing him. That she was kissing him and telling him she loved him.

I clenched my fist and stared into the night Nairobi air that was rushing in through the half opened window, I closed it and felt a blinding urge to jump out. I stared out at open night clubs and was undecided if I should alight and rush into one. When I reached Eastlands. I rushed out bumping into the tout and hoping he would protest so that I could initiate a scuffle. He did not. I ploughed into the first bar I saw and ordered a drink. I no longer cared if I spent all my money. I drunk and drunk and wrote this story hoping it would cry for me.

Nyumba Kumi

Was ‘Nyumba Kumi’ system a reactionary response of our security forces or was it a deliberate and viable yet unpopular policy that the government intended to use. On October 16 2012, coast province PC Samuel Kilele ordered security agents to cluster homes into groups of 10 or 12 and monitor them closely in a system he called ‘Nyumba Kumi’

Events around this period inform this stand of the government as Mombasa Republican Council posed the highest security threat to the country, mobilizing to make real their threat of secession. The MRC were mobilizing and for the government to get a hand on them and closely track their activities it needed to spy on them. So it was apparently logical to divide them into small clusters that could easily be assigned to officers for monitoring.

One year down the line the status quo has drastically changed. While it was mainly the MRC who were giving the Kibaki government a big headache, the new administration has come under overwhelming pressure left right and center. Skirmishes in Moyale, Samburu, Mombasa, Busia Tana River all exploded within weeks of each other. Mandera is in the constant grip of terror from Al Shabab infiltration and military apparatus response.

As a policy Nyumba Kumi was easily applicable in small containable areas due to logistics. Currently the Police force boasts of fewer than 50,000 police officers, a factor that makes the application of the policy as earlier envisioned impossible. With about 8.7 million households each officer will be assigned 180 household which coupled with geographical demography will not be tenable.

Last year the government envisioned an ambitious alternative, the mounting of Close Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras in 41 locations in Nairobi at a cost of KSh437 million (US$5 million), part of a KSh8.5 billion (US$98 million) loan from the government of China. A tender was issued to China’s ZTE Company but has since been caught in the web of red tape and counter accusations (legal or otherwise) between the government and the company. While this was a viable option to Nyumba Kumi in terms of incorporating technology in fighting crime and mass surveillance with minimal labour it has not come to fruition.

While the government was still undecided in security policies, the general state of insecurity went to the dogs. Armed gangs sprung into the fore and general security malaise spread in the countryside as reports after reports of civil strife flew into newsrooms. The government on most of these instances seemed to lack intelligence on the skirmishes preferring to heap a blanket claim of political instigation even to cases of outright conflict over natural resources.

Then came Westgate, a terrorist attack that apparently brought forth the complete breakdown of our security institutions from its highest echelons to the enforcing police and immigration officers. This opened up the security apparatus to scrutiny and exposed its rot in corruption incompetence and nepotism.

However the incident also provided a landing ground to the policy of Nyumba Kumi which the government must have been toying with for some time. The opportunity off selling the policy at this point would enable the government avoid cost implications and overwhelming number off households to monitor with limited police labour. It would also be less costly like the technological option that had stuck in the pipeline. It would also effectively bring back the state to the fold of intelligence it seemingly had lost.

Will it work?

Will it bridge the lack of ideological buy in as the terrorists-induced fear wanes? The model in China, Cuba, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Rwanda were informed by communist ideologies (save for Rwanda whose system is based on traditional colonial systems) to control populations. Our own largely unregulated policy might border on repression and loss of privacy. While in the communist countries it was given an ideological perception of fighting those who harboured dissenting views to the system lack of the same for our case might make the policy unpopular especially as the Westgate memory wanes.

Will it further swell our wage bill as incentive to the leaders becomes inevitable? The clusters of 10 houses are set to choose a person of ‘integrity’ and elect them as a leader who is supposed to inform the chief each morning on the state of affairs within his commune. Now based on this ‘cheap’ policy proposal, what incentive will they offer the leader? Plus in a capital economy will it be rational in towns given that everybody has different work schedules, and be damned if you show up late at work and your excuse is that you were filling a daily report with the chief. Note: in Eastlands where there are so many people it would take a whole day for the chief to actually file reports.

Will it run into a constitutional crisis; the gender, youth and people with disabilities rule or the very fact that the constitution protects individuals from being compelled to join or form an association in Article 36 (2).

If the government is shifting rails on how to administer the Nyumba Kumi policy based on the current status quo, then it should consider re-assessing the policy to make it less of a directive and more as activism. The enlightenment of Kenyans in the environment of liberal democratic thought might pose the greatest threat to an authoritarian policy that seeks to compel its citizens even for security reasons. While it is every government’s ‘unofficial’ role to spy on its citizens Kenya might aspire American like technological surveillance rather than ‘Face East’ on this one.

Where is African SCI-FI

African science fiction and the curse of cultural displacement

Eurocentric foreshadowing was based on the understanding of man in his form of physical evolution. The essential projections were a sure end. Their philosophical attitudes toward the future were more like Nieztsche’s Zarathrusta, toward and end physically or philosophically. Their sci-fi were more of secular versions of the religious Revelations.

America who were experiencing renewed vigour and unparalleled growth at this end times in Europe adapted a different course. They invented the UFO, a kind of life after death or the religious transfer of populations to heaven. Theirs was the possibility of life beyond our physical and historical end or evolution of humanity into an indestructible being beyond the elements so they could survive the end of man. So beyond an imminent end there could only be another world (aliens) or other humans (demigods, supermen, Spiderman etc).

The African case suffers from the curse of cultural transfer. Barbara Kimenye’s Moases and the man from Mars reads more like Roswell or Katama Mkangi’s Walenisi could sell as Utopia. I have not read many African Sci fi which could be a blunder on my part but allows me to qualify that African Sci fi is dead.

Could this lack of arrational literature that is supposed to inspire and provoke ideas, reflecting society back onto itself indicate lack of an identifiable personal growth of the African person? Is it that we are only capable of imagining evolution according to modernization theory and cannot strive to create new realities for ourselves?

And could this realization open up the explorations of the African oracle to re-discover premonitions and the infinite possibilities that sci-fi opens

Why Science Fiction is Important

Sci-fi are tales that span time, reality, the human condition, and much more. They are a kind of creative and arrational or free futuristic thinking. From this powerful genre we are able to draw a limitless understanding of how we see ourselves in the future. And this conscience can unlock human potential and effort as we head towards the last man or beyond.

Holywood sci-fi has in recent years produced classical forward thinking of future economic social and political state. Its ability to predict shift in the social order based on the precedent might of global economic systems that might see very powerful corporations conquering state power. For example Repo Men, In Time and recently Elysium show just how significant forward thinking is and its relevance in foreseeing possible challenges.

Can Africa open to unbridled forecast of its future? Can literature open the doors beyond predicable data sets or fact sheets and world bank projections of Africa Rising and present to us an image of Africa Risen.