Drink to ’50 years a slave’
I am rather disturbed by gossip in foreign newspapers that our Lupita Nyong’o is dating K’naan, a very handsome Somali boy who is a rapper.
Our economy is suffering. Even the amount of ugali cooked at State House has reduced by 20 per cent. We, therefore, need all the help we can get – including dowry.
Unfortunately, K’naan, ‘hot’, as he is, doesn’t look like the sort of fellow who owns a goat.
What we need is a proper, grizzled Somali warrior with 40 camels and 367 head of cattle to his name. If such a gent were to turn up seeking Lupita’s hand in marriage as a sixth wife, we would nod sagely and ask her to immediately go bahali yake and wait for KRA to tax the groom’s camel droppings.
But even as the glow of tiny Lupita bagging the big Oscar ebbs, and government officials marvel at how much they spent on newspaper ads (one glowing ad lied that the government is committed to promoting the arts. Ha!) and others jump onto the bandwagon to use her exploits to brand Kenya, a rude reality check:
At Nyakach, not far from where the Mexican-born Lupita was really born, the Luo and Kalenjin are hacking each other with crude weapons (they are too poor to afford contraband guns) for God knows what. Six citizens, whose dreams never were valid, are dead.
Tribes have been killing each other over the most mundane things – like county boundaries and grass for goats – for decades. For most citizens, life is 50 years a slave of politicians. And counting.
Worse, just like Lupita was depicted harvesting cotton on a slave-owner’s plantation in America’s South, Kenya too has its own slaves, only they slave in their own oil rich chest-thumping land.
These are the folks who toil for life on tea estates, sisal and flower farms and perform other menial jobs both for Kenyan and foreign firms. They are uninsured, have a mockery of a pension, lack medical or any form of insurance and get paid crap.
Theirs is a wretched existence, a hand-to-mouth sort of survival where the body is conditioned to wrinkle and age without proteins, vitamins, rest and any form of leisure apart from copulation.
When they fall sick, they die. When they die, their mug shots never get published in newspapers. Their employers, in a heart-rending feat of magnanimity, offer their kids the same wretched jobs their departed parents held — watchmen, tea girls, tea pickers, sugarcane cutters and flower farm workers. It is so touching that the assembly of mourners tears and claps.
But like their parents, and sometimes grandparents, they will never educate their children. So the cycle of poverty continues across generations. And with life expectancy a miserly 50, they star in 50 years a slave – only without the flash of cameras, red carpet, bouquet of flowers, designer clothing, or an Oscar.
Fat trade unionists, lying politicians and the clowns who purport to quarrelsomely manage workers’ pensions know this. But who cares?
By Ted Malanda