One of my younger brothers, the younger twin watches something on TV and starts laughing, and the rest of us who do not get the joke turn to look at him. He went on to explain that the mother carrying the kid on TV had starred some interesting memory, something awkwardly interesting that he saw in a locally produced TV program. He tells us that there was this young kid, 3 or 4 years old who was running naked around the compound, with the mother chasing after him. The mother was hurling warning epithets as she chased her son, and this was when the father came on to the scene. After observing that race for a while, he told the wife to stop chasing after the son. When she objected, claiming that she needed to dress him, the father interjected with his own warped wisdom. He said, and I quote, “let the kid run around naked, I want the neighbours to see how well fed he his.”
You will agree that this was an interesting but absurd perspective, and the basis of my argument in my quest to better your understanding of Kenya, Africa, or any other country that is not your own. Two years back, wile I was still a second year student at Egerton University, I attended a presentation of several theses by our lecturers, who had titled the event “Interrogation of the West.” The theses presented comprised many issues that affect our continent, and most offered home grown solutions, but others were just attribution theories meant only to place blame. Overall, I left that room, FASS Theatre 2, an informed man with a different perspective, one that was recently brought to the fore by my young brother, as he reiterated the story of the young naked toddler and his proud father.
That mental abstraction that you have right now, of a young naked toddler whose father wants him naked as he does his thing around the estate may as well be the symbol that defines Africa. Anybody else, me included would have thought that this kid has come from a poor family and that they cannot even afford to dress him at all. If I had any small amount of money to spare, I would have approached the mother with it and beseeched her to dress the young toddler. I would also, with some authority (because a close friend of mine studied medicine and just graduated a week back) advise her that there are dangerous diseases like pneumonia which the young toddler could contract. There are two things here: I would first be assuming that the mother is not only poor, but also uninformed if not illiterate, and secondly, if I had approached the father instead of the mother, he would have punched my face in. He does not need handouts. He can feed his own kid, and wants everybody to see it.
Similarly, most people who are new in Africa assume that most of us are poor and that we all need help. That the old man who sits in the village until the sun sets must surely be earning less than a dollar a day, and so our country and continent is ranked as on average as earning less than a dollar a day. Ever since the missionaries set foot in Africa, they were on a mission to rescue Africa, from what, I do not know, and ended up fucking up a hitherto perfectly working society. They introduced religions; though our traditional societies had they own ways of being spiritual, and that was just the start. From what I got when my lecturers presented their thesis, we were civilised in more ways than the cliché history lessons taught in our formal education programs has made us believe. I was even more proud when I took a course in International Humanitarian Law, in which I learned that most of the now text book practises in the Geneva Convention and in Law of the Hague were common practises in the traditional African society. But I digress.
Based on our own backgrounds and experiences, we tend to observe the world from that very limited perspective, our own. We assume that how we grew up was the best way that all else ought to conform for all to be well. It however takes a lot for us to discard our perceptions and embrace new ones. This is the only way that one can truly appreciate the diversity of thought and practice that make cultural exchanges such enlightening experiences. There are riches in our countries that cannot be explained in monetary terms but have yet been reduced to under a dollar a day in donor blabber. I am in know way blind to the fact that poverty is a grave reality, and I know this to be true because I see it everyday as the poor people of Africa, my country Kenya included, die of hunger, disease and poverty. But all I am saying is that not every kid running around naked with an extended stomach has Kwashiorkor hence he must be from a poor family who cannot feed him a balanced diet. He might be the well fed kid whose proud father wants him to run around naked so that the neighbours can feel jealous.
To make my point clear, I travelled north to my Grandmother’s place during the harvesting season to help in the maize harvest. After the maize was harvested and sold, I literally had thousands of shillings in my pocket, but that meant nothing, because I had no place to use the money. Food was gotten from the farm, milk from the family cows, flour from milling the maize in the store, and whatever needed to be bought could either be exchanged with maize (Maize) or bought a throw away prices. While KES 5 would buy me one banana back in Nakuru, the town I reside in, I was given five bananas when I ordered a banana in one of the stalls.
The point however is this. We have things that work for us, and general attributes highly distort this fact, especially when it comes to analysing where Africa lies in the world. People in most of these places live well for less. A dollar a day is more than enough to a man/woman with a farm where he/she grows food, rears animals, and more so a man/woman who does not need incidental materials to feel accomplished. My grandmother is ingeniously frugal such that she manages over five households, and even the neighbour’s kids with petty cash, and yet in conventional wisdom, she is a statistic in the poor category of a dollar or two a day. It is for this very reason that there may be need to embrace the absurd in order to fully understand how things work in the different countries before making general conclusions. But how the milk from the family cow, the floor and vegetables from the fields, the oxen driven plough, the fruits from the trees, the water from the well, the spacious mud houses, the eggs from the chickens, not to mention the goats, sheep, cows and dogs, each with its own value, can be integrated in defining and calculating the dollar value of poverty is for those with bigger brains than mine to determine. All I know is that the above mentioned add up to more than a dollar a day when their real values are established.
Well Fed Child
Until then, find out whether the naked kid running around the estate lacks anything first, because there is usually more than meets the eye.
Happy Holidays…
