New, old systems and why there’s a bit of heaven in both

Growing up, I noticed a peculiar thing among old men in the village. Most had well-educated children who worked, lived and had families in cities and major towns. Yet these old men rarely travelled to the city, unless for medical check-up. Why did these old men have to wait until the Easter or Christmas holidays to see their children and grandchildren? Why is it that only their wives made the occasional trip to the city, which was planned with so much fanfare that word would spread far across the ridges. I found out that most of these mainly traditionalist men associated city life with colonialism, a dark patch in history that they’d have preferred to forget. Culturally, it struck them as an abomination to cram children, grown women and men old enough to be village elders into one small house. These men also believed the cackling of a hen just before laying an egg, and the bleating of goats in the meadows, unlike the case in stone-dead cities, was the very poetry of African life. It was a utopic world from which a tribesman could only be plucked by death.

In the blissful African cosmos, the boys never mixed with the women, and the girls had to be kept off the instinctively untrustworthy menfolk. So for some, the bush was so central to life that they wondered how grown men and their children could have a toilet right inside the house. How now? If you chose to relieve yourself in the house, these arrogant African lions predicted, you’d sooner than later shoulder the burden of dumping the effluent into the bush, where you should have deposited it in the first place. Today, the city in the sun is but a filthy eyesore. And those bushy-bearded elders must be guffawing in their graves. We called them illiterate bushmen. Ah, why didn’t our education warn us that the world would in 2016 be planting back the African bush to reduce global warming? Why, they must be chuckling with knowing bemusement, do we deplete our meagre earnings just to escape the concrete jungle for three days in the bush? And we were warned; the county government sewer systems now cannot ferry our effluent to the bush! Let’s not say anything about modern foodstuffs!

But the old men were also wrong. Life in the bush was not all bliss. Even our historians concur that, though there were herbs and witchdoctors and medicine men, malaria, chicken pox and other strange diseases decimated us in droves. There was no peace, as we had to raid other tribes whenever our crops failed or our livestock were depleted by Rinderpest. Besides, we practised some abhorrent things that we too agree were ungodly. Like forced marriage and the female cut. Besides education and medicine, we must also admit we understand the world better and imported technology has enabled us to solve many issues that took us to an early grave in yesteryears. Today most African countries are independent, if you could excuse the ubiquity of the begging bowl, which helps us plug the holes in our national budgets.

We may not have fully reformed our judicial systems, but at least no one buries you alive as they did with Waiyaki wa Hinga in Kibwezi on September 6, 1892. True, the police still tell us funny stories about merry-go-rounds and Saccos to explain the movement of Sh50 from a roadblock to their bosses. Yes, they have also always been implicated in murders. But at least we no longer plunge into snake-infested bushes at the sight of a black maria.

But we continue to betray our hard-won independence by stealing from the poor, hence our yawning wealth gaps. Our leadership, in power or outside, rarely veers too far from the tribal flag post. This creates a home-grown extension to 400-odd years of African slavery. A suffering born and bred in our midst. My point is that our past was not so blissful or deplorable, and everything new is not necessarily better. The future must borrow from both.