Kenyans too steeped in rat race to see graft manholes ahead

NAIROBI: One of the most remarkable things about literary art is that, at its breathtaking finest, it transports you from the here-and-now to beautiful countrysides of ideas and transcendental sublimity. In the deft hands of gifted writers, ordinary and mundane things are captured in so vivid and witty expressions that we start looking at writers as extraordinary beings.

It is this ability to observe and clothe nuances and imagined people and events with moving words that makes us think of writers as prophets. Indeed, in some traditional African societies, poets were ranked just a rung below the gods. But those who have studied literary appreciation and criticism will tell you that writers are just differently gifted mere mortals. What sets them apart is that they are able to detach themselves from the everyday rat race called life and observe the shenanigans, the foibles and infirmities we exhibit in the universal theatre called life.

Then they wear a psychoanalytical cap and try to creatively tell us why we do the things we do; why we betray each other, cannot avoid conflicts even within families and why we are always cursed to run after the shifting goalposts of ‘success.’

Why we must hide stolen millions of shillings in our houses even when the would-be beneficiaries of such cash are dying of preventable diseases, depression and other symptoms of the malignant disease called poverty.
Simply put, writers have the double gift of observing the world with objective clarity and honesty; and using words and creativity to let us see an amplified video of who we really are.

Thus, when Ngugi wa Thiong’o warned us, in Matigari and through the Kamirithu theatre that the subservient peasants and other God’s bits of wood would demand what the upper crust of society stole from them, he was not inciting the public. Yes, he was not the enemy. He was, like the biblical prophets of old, just lighting the path ahead of us so that we could see where we were heading.

Unfortunately, we were too busy with the rat race of robbing each other on a ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ basis that we did not care whether the path we had taken had manholes ahead. When you listen to our hypocrisy on corruption and how keen we are to reform, you get the impression that we were like a society standing in a bucket and still claiming to be trying to lift it.

I read Imbuga’s Betrayal in the City, and Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross as a young man. At that time, steamy scenes in novels made more sense to us than serious philosophical nuggets. But one could not help looking at these writers sympathetically. We got the impression that writers are like the intelligence agency of society. When they realise what our current behaviour portends for the future, they don’t call rallies or belch political drivel at funerals. They sit down and weave an artistic narrative that warns us on what ugly monster is poised to pounce on us from some bush somewhere ahead.
Take Devil on the Cross, where Wariinga, who represents Wanjiku, follows (Mafisi Sacco?) rulers of Ilmorog to a cave where they take turns to brag how ingenious they are at stealing from the public.

Many scenes in Kenya would later remind us the caves of Ilmorog. First there were commissions of inquiry. Here, we (like Wariinga in the cave) heard people brag how they supplied ‘air’ to the country and claimed compensation for ‘gold exports. We heard how they – some of them conmen in prison abroad – ate choice groundnuts thousands of feet in the skies in private jets and all tabs were cleverly shoved to the peasant of Ilmorog (sorry, Kenya).

Today, Wanjiku crowds the public gallery in Parliament – again like Wariinga in the cave – to hear people brag how they made millions of shillings after making contact with only one person, or how people with little or no expertise opened briefcase companies that siphoned billions of shillings from public coffers. No, we have no prophets, we are just too greedy to see the pitfalls ahead.