Africa’s Melting Pot!

I would have started by writing that “there is no greater believer in the reach and power of social media than myself”, if it were true. But I am in there with millions of others who feel as strongly, desire as passionately, and who are participating even more fervently than myself. The beauty of Social Media and its inherent power has been in its ability to connect people and interests. It is with this in mind that I wish to publish the content below which was sent to me by Juliet Maruru. She herself has been at the forefront of using social media to encourage emerging writers to become.

She is now introducing Africa’s melting pot – Afripot. I am already boiling in there and I hope to see you there too as conversations over there about Africa with Africans pick up and heat up. Who knows, it may generate enough heat to force some of the changes we so badly need.

Read what she has to say and see what Afripot is all about.

Thank you and this is what Juliet has to say…

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Afripot – Africa’s Melting Pot!

It is interesting how fast communications paths have evolved. From mail that took a few months to arrive at its destination, to express mail that was expected to arrive in 3 to 7 days, and then email, instant messages, facebook, twitter… The modern professional needs to keep learning all the time just to keep up with the fast changes.

Africans living and working at home, or living/studying and working abroad, all of us are very much interested in seeing our country not just developing economically and financially, but also protected from greedy and corrupt individuals who would seek to deplete all the resources Africa has available.

The Swahili tribe has a saying, “Kidole kimoja hakiuwi chawa.” One finger cannot kill lice. To be in a position to understand the Africa we live in, her challenges, and the possible ways to make her better, we need to do more than observe. Africans need to get together in dialogue, information and enlightenment in order to ever be able to devise processes for better democracy, stronger economies and even stronger societies.

Afripot is the answer to the question. As Africa’s Melting Pot, this new web portal seeks to bring together the North, South, East and West of Africa, in a conglomeration of information, discussion and creative intercourse that aims at opening the doors to the further development of our beloved Africa.

As well as offering you news that affects Africa, we also offer forums and networking applications that can make it possible for you to connect with your friends as well as with new contacts from all over Africa.

To advertise your business or event, please go to www.afripot.com and fill in the contact form to the right of the website.
“I read myself out of poverty, long before I worked myself out of poverty.” Walter Anderson

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Thank You in advance on behalf of Juliet for following the link and becoming a member.

When Crimes were Simpler…

I was still very young. We woke up one morning to find our kitchen window wide open. It did not take a genius to figure out that we had been robbed. We went outside the house and sure enough, we found the evidence of the activity that took place the night before. From our window to the gate and beyond, we found a tract; not two like those made a bicycle, not wide like those made by a car; just one tract like that made by a wheelbarrow.

We followed it like breadcrumbs with the eagerness of cartoon characters believing that it would lead us to the perpetrators of this heinous crime. But no sooner had it reached the main road than it ended. The tarmac road was a street away and the few cars that roamed the roads then in addition to the human traffic had done a good job of wiping the tract away. We returned to our house, the entire neighbourhood kids behind us and we were eager to hear my mum’s assessment of the damage. This was after all her kitchen and my dad had probably never set foot in there . She said that her Sufurias including the one she had soaked because we had eaten Ugali the previous night, her frying pans, her spoons and basically every other utensil that was in the kitchen that night had been stolen including the ones holding the leftover food. The food went too.

The second time we were robbed was less dramatic but with the same wheelbarrow. My Dad with his blue second-hand Datsun was the victim. He woke up in the morning and on starting his car realized that the battery was missing. These bastards had come at night, popped the hood of the car open, took the battery and put it in the wheelbarrow and wheeled it away.  My dad was stark raving mad. Over the next few weeks or months, for security he had an electric wire connected to the body of the car just in case those thieving bastards came back. We had not heard of alarms in those days, not even on TV.

Our last experience with thieves was a wrong call. There we were, sleeping; me and my bro on one bed in the other room and my mum and the twins (then very young) in the other. My dad had not yet come home because he used the car for a few hours every night as a taxi to supplement his monthly income. Suddenly in the dead of the night, we heard the loudest pounding on the door as if in a frantic effort to break it down. My mum SCREAMED! The louder the pounding got, the more deafening her screams became. But unlike tradition, nobody showed nor showed any signing of coming to help. Eventually, these guys identified themselves as cops and cursed my mum over and over because of her screams. I was under the bed at the time. They announced they were looking for thieves (which my mum had mistaken them for – I WONDER WHY?) A lady with four young kids was not enough to convince them to leave her alone; she had to go borrow money from the neighbours to bribe them to leave. She had already given them all she had and they were not satisfied.

So effectively, the third time we were robbed, it was by the cops. Corruption did not start yesterday.

But that was it. Over the years, people who had been caught stealing were killed. Many had passed through our estate as they ran towards the slum area adjacent to the park. We usually followed the mob and found the alleged thieves either being stoned, being burnt, or already dead. We never knew what they stole, where they stole, or whom they stole from. And dead men don’t talk. Rumours however abound with people telling their versions of the story. But it was never nothing more than a purse, clothes from the line, a bicycle etc. There were these two who had stolen mattresses and on being caught, were tied in between the mattresses and lit up. They died a very painful death.

But that was then. A robbery mission for thieves involved going to steal without raising any alarm. Stealth mode was their modus operandi and simple things the objects of their desires.

But increasingly over the years, crime changed. Crime was no longer about stealth but about force. The balls that the police had back then to slam our door in the dead of the night had now transferred to criminals. They came to steal with big stones to knock door downs, machetes to threaten to harm or harm the occupants and came in large numbers so as to carry as much as possible. Whereas we had grown in an estate with wooden doors, wire mesh grills, where fences were imaginary or wooden or natural (thorny trees); new building that came up were built had with wooden doors but reinforced with an outer metal door, metal window grills, and high-rise brick fences topped up with broken glasses. Force was being met with force.

Still it was not enough. Where people were resourceful, criminals were creative. They no longer used brute force to make their way into a house but rather came equipped. They came with padlock cutters which were also used to also cut the window grills, some came with oxygen tanks to burn through the grills and metal doors, and there was a case where these bastards carried a grenade just to force open a door. Money now became the difference between safety from robberies and being victims. Those with money hired the best security agencies whose numbers had now surged. They also had electric wires surrounding their fences and well fed big-ass dogs guarding their homes. And just in case, they had a gun in the house and bodyguards with them the rest of the time.

But criminals got guns too. Safety was no longer a priority in our homes alone but everywhere else too. What was being stolen was now not just in the homes. The game had changed. There was money in the bank, money being ferried to the bank, value of the car, jewels, phones, laptops etc and this is what the target became. Carjacking increased, muggings became rampant, ngeta became a noun, and crime had evolved yet again. The victims had to become creative. We bought cheap phones, used plastic money, carried laptops in paper bags (kando ya nyanya na kitungu) and made every other effort to make ourselves least likely to be potential targets. But now crime became personal. When these thieving bastards find you with a cheap phone, they have the audacity to insult you and break the phone and encourage you to buy phones worth stealing. They find you with a debit or credit card and force you at gun point to withdraw everything and max-out your credit card.

From personal, crime became brutal and inhumane. People no longer just lost they property, they lost more. They no longer just steal from you now. The hijackings were never complete without a dead driver or a raped woman and increasingly men too. Now they also cut private parts off. The Mungiki tortured and then cut the heads of their victims off. And with human life seemingly worth less today than ever before, killers for hire has become a thriving business in Kenya. Kidnappings for ransom in now the fad among the criminal fraternity and given all these, I am scared what will happen next.  I talked to mum the other day and she told me of a case in a Nairobi estate where kids sent to the shops are drugged, molested and left for dead. I missed the story on TV but honestly, when we can turn against our own children like this; haven’t we reached the end of the line?

What happened to the days when crimes were simple? When you would wait until I was asleep to steal my shirt from the line. What is happening to our society?

A wife cannot trust his husband with their daughter; a mother cannot trust her brother or even father with her daughters; you cannot trust your neighbour with your kids; a man cannot trust his wife with the pin number; a parent does not trust the teachers with his/her children; the owner does not trust the watchman with the property; a father is not sure whether these kids are his; and everyone in society is potentially a threat to the next person in any number of ways. Just in the last month, a maid stabbed her employer to death, a young mother threw her just born infant from the balcony, a head teacher was ejected from school by parents for raping their daughters, a kidnapped Sudanese child was brutally murdered because the ransom was not paid, and KES 33 million shillings was stolen through a collusion of cops and robbers.

Can we take all these in our stride and if we can, I wonder what will shock us enough to stop, think, and wish for the days when crimes were simpler.

Romance and Lack Thereof.

I not a romantic.

I wrote earlier that I am embarrassed by emotions and that is the gospel truth. Just the other day, I talked to my ex and she told me that she failed to connect with me on an emotional level. That was her take on why we broke up. I am still not sure and never bothered to ponder over it because what’s done is done.

But I am not sure what it is people mean when they say connect on an emotional level. I can be emotional,I guess, but I hide it when I am because I am embarrassed by it. I just watched August Rush and I was moved. That kid playing the guitar like that was classic. But what made me teary eyed was the young black girl whose voice towards the end of the movie soared as she accompanied the the classical musicians in August’s Rhapsody.That is an emotional connection,isn’t it.

But I guess what my ex meant was that I get that emotional with her. But I do not choose when to get emotional and when not to,it just happens. And when it does, I sneak somewhere and let that moment of weakness pass. I may wipe the teary eyes to erase the evidence too. And I am not just embarrassed by the mushy stuff alone; I also get embarrassed when I lose my cool. I don’t get angry for flimsy reasons and when I do get angry, I don’t easily lose it.

I have for this reason been asked why I am not angrier? I do get angry, but moderately because extremes of anger are emotionally draining and leave one the worse off.

But today has been to say the least interesting. A Sudanese friend of mine who wanted to buy a net book that I had a while back came into the cyber and started whispering to my friend victor. We call him Garang and he had an agenda today. I later realized that he had agreed with Viktor that the latter was to write for him a love letter. I guess Garang’s writing was not up to par or something of the sort. So he dictated as Viktor wrote “my love this,” “I love you like that,” “I will see you when” and so on the letter read.

After Victor was done, Garang asked him to spruce it up a bit to which Viktor headed for the fonts section and pimped up the text with some fancy font I can’t spell. He printed out the copy and Garang read through it and was pleased. This was surely going to win him this girl. I smiled thinking that I would not be caught dead pouring out such confessions, on paper. I could say them if cornered, but never on paper. That is just too corny for me.

As I came to find out, it was not just me who was behaving like this, people who had interacted with me looked at me funny whenever they saw me approaching emotion-ville. They were effectively telling me that I did not belong which is true.There ere things that people knew without me telling them that I would not do. There were places I would never venture to. They was only a particular class of ladies I would date. And I would go about all these in a calm non-assertive way that told people I did these because I wanted to.

I remember a few years back when I was still in campus when this lady came by my hostel. She found me busy washing my clothes; I have never seen her smile the way she did that day. “Oh my God! Marvin! you wash your own clothes?” I found it bizarre and ridiculous that she would react the way she did. But apparently she got the impression that I would be too busy, or whatever to wash my own clothes. She expected either my girlfriend or the washing ladies to be the ones hunkered down doing the washing for me.

But what they did not know is that I come from a family of five kids, all boys. The only fair-lady in our house is our mom for whom we have the utmost respect. From a young age, we started cooking, cleaning after ourselves, and in every way became self sufficient. There was never any job that was too good for us or “for women.” In fact, my mum only cooked when she felt like it; the rest of us kids cooked most of the time, washed up after ourselves, and handled every other thing that needed handling.

On the emotional stuff, this was a house of boys. We did every thing that boys did. My mum has seen all kind of injuries that we picked over the years. I fell down a hill, my big bro sat on a piece of bottle that did quite some damage and also broke his hand while attempting a somersault in school, my small brothers tore something,broke something, grazed something, were cut, stung, hit and sustained all other manner of injuries in the process of being boys. And this was our house. If they came to crying about a scraped knee, I would tell them that I fell down the hill so that to me was nothing. My bro would tell them he broke his hand and had be told by others that his hand was broken; he did not even notice so all these were petty stuff. TAKE IT LIKE A MAN was the message conveyed. And we did. There was no crying or acting all mushy because we would ridicule each other.

I remember the whole family bursting out in laughter when one of the twins made a statement about us not understanding his “needs”. He joined us when he caught on to the absurdity of the statement.

Except for one of the twins who thinks that he is Casanova, the rest of us do not go around confessing our love with roses in our hands. We do not go around looking for love quotes to regurgitate to the fairer sex.

But romanticism is not tied to love and relationships alone; it is extended to the general world where people usually have this romanticized of the world or their leaders. Because I will not say words I do not mean to my fiancee means that I will never swear my allegiance to anything I do not believe in or agree with in principle. Over the years, I have been trying to master saying what I mean and meaning what I say. It is cliche, I know. But it is also priceless in practice.

So at the end of the day, I told my ex when we were having this conversation that I will not cry on cue, I will not get down on one knee unless the knee feels like bending, I will not use cliche love sound-bytes just for the sake of it, and I will always make it known where it is that you lie with me. The same goes for business transactions, contractual obligations, or any other form of relationship that I engage in with other parties. A reply to a thread a while back asked me to always say what I mean in as many or as little words as possible so that I won’t have to claim that I was misrepresented.

So to those pouring out your hearts, I hope that how you were raised by your parents made it easy to wear your heart on your sleeves and that you are no just out to get some. For those of you are not embarrassed by emotions,  continue doing your thing because people need the kind of love that is uninhibited and which cannot flow freely over here.

I had a point when I started writing this a while back. I am no longer sure what that point is but I hope I have made it. Because I am tired and this has been a long day. I am in no position to think and you may have to disregard the this post from the point you felt I was losing my drift.

I am traveling tomorrow to Nairobi and it will mark the beginning of a new month with a lot in store. I will get back to you on my progress because I intend to write a series of posts on entrepreneurship ventures in Kenya and my experience as a budding entrepreneur.

Wish me luck and all the best to you to in your endeavours this month.