By PETER WANYONYI
Africa always seems to have the worst of everything. From the breed of humans on the continent — Africans are likely the most brutal, most unthinking of people where savagery is concerned — to the fauna we have. But villagers will tell you that the gods do not play favourites, so in their infinite wisdom, they granted every continent pretty much the same as other continents — minerals, people, animals, the like.
GAZELLE
The African, however, slept on the job. Providence gave the Europeans and the Asians a horse of some sort. The Indians even had elephants thrown in by the gods, just for good measure. Africa got the lot, we were given the strongest and largest land mammal — the elephant — plus a whole host of goodies to go with it. That is, cow-like animals to eat and milk, from wildebeest to buffalo, several goat-like species to roast on our open savannahs — wags contend that gazelle bones are so soft that after a session on the grill you’d never notice them while chewing. And, of course, a few varieties of horses, all of them striped, which we called Zebra.
As villagers will tell you, the European and the Asian tamed the horses that their gods had given them, and turned them into vehicles of conquest. The Indians even managed to tame the elephant. With horses to ride, horizons in Europe and Asia opened up. Distances that would have taken the best African marathoners months to cover were nothing to the mounted hordes of Europe and Asia.
COLONISATION
With the horse tamed, the wheel was soon invented, and ideas could spread like wildfire across the vast steppes of Asia and over the craggy peaks of Europe. So melded were horse and rider that when the Greeks first saw horses being ridden by invading Asian armies, they assumed the horse and its rider to be the same animal, and so was born the legend of the centaur.
But the African never domesticated his horse, the Zebra. And so when Europe stumbled upon us 200 years ago, we were barely out of the Stone Age. A few decades of colonisation followed, but mzungu ultimately left to go back to Europe, leaving us to return to our rather backward tribal ways.
In these, you trust no one other than a tribesman. And if you are a leader, this means the prized positions in the economy inevitably go to your tribesmen.
These lucky souls, not being tied to any performance criteria, then proceed to help the leaders loot the organisations under them. This is the natural path followed by anyone who owes his or her job to being born in the right tribe or family. And while this happens, a wave of tribal envy washes over the other tribes in the land, all of whom vow to remove the ruling tribe from power so that it becomes, in turn, their turn to eat.
While this happens, services — electricity, water, health, name it — go undelivered — all because of that pesky beast, the Zebra.
