Oops, my village has disappeared

An urban town in Kenya. Photo: The Standard Group

I am sure you are in no mood for a long speech on abstract things.

Today, let me tell you about a village where I have been having some nice rollicking fun under banana fronds.

I have been holed up high in the Aberdares in the last couple of days for the annual ritual known as ‘going home’. Let me confess; I have not been in the village in the last five years.

This is a story of a village just waking up in the morning of devolution.

Then, compare with the story of your village, if you are already connected to one this season. We can then compare notes in njaa-nuary. The village is no longer the same. In a span of five years, something radical has been happening.

Anyone saying devolution is not working is a criminal and should be incarcerated.

Before the ways of the big city and the urban bug overwhelmed me some time ago, I was an ardent follower of the village religion. I had always believed that the village was the last refuge from those ravaged by the bad ways of the city.

What with the clean air, bucolic humour and muratina? And everyone calling you mkubwa, mzee or chief, or such honorific titles even when you are as broke as a church mouse.

By happenstance, some two hours and I would be home and dry, literally. So, going home was almost a weekend thing, well until the city took the better of me.

Not that I developed a second head. I simply could no longer afford it.

Then they brought mobile money transfer, so that I didn’t need to go anywhere. And every other relative was a city dweller, anyway.

However, this year, some never-say-die relatives persuaded me that I should visit them, lest a traditional curse would befall me... soon! Now, I intend to stay under this sun for quite some time, God permitting. The relatives won.

In the 1980s, many youths and adults abandoned their villages, especially in areas that relied on traditional cash crops. Since independence the villages and their market centres had been built on the coffee economy. Then the coffee prices collapsed irreversibly in the 1980s.

There was an exodus to towns and into the Rift Valley, where villagers had used income from coffee to buy (emphasized) land from departing white settlers.

The emigrants left behind ghost villages. By the 1990s, abandoned buildings were covered with mounds.

Even the frogs at the Karii pond seemed to have departed. Now those damn frogs would just decide to open their silly mouths just before I opened a book to revise and then they would gurgle pond water throughout the night.

If you can’t join them, so eventually, we joined them in the song of a dying village.

It was a dog’s life for those left behind. Crime escalated. You didn’t venture beyond the gate after six. If you look carefully, you will note that in the Rift Valley, some small towns grew rapidly in the 1990s, in inverse proportion to the diminishing status of villages in the coffee growing areas, mostly in central Kenya.

I am thinking of Subukia, Elburgon, Jevi versus villages in Nyeri or Murang’a.

And then the Government fell down from the skies onto the village in the village in 2011. And things have never been the same.

The place is a sub-county headquarters. Seriously, Wamagana is a metaphor of what is happening in the morning of devolution in the countryside.

The hamlet of my childhood is coming back to life. There are the tell-tale signs of urbanisation.

Sample this: there is a cyber café, a mini supermarket, a makuti, which is a typical middle class watering hole.

The arrival of Government unleashed a huge search for houses to accommodate the retinue of bureaucrats. The mole catcher is still there.

But the villagers are converting their tiny plots into real estate. Coffee is long gone and cows refused with milk long ago.

So there are high-rise apartments and hamlets for rent. There is even an upcoming high-end (well, by village standards) guest house. Rent rivals that in the big cities. Land prices are galloping to the north.

All this has spawned many secondary small-scale businesses.

And behold, there is this girl in a kinyozi who kneaded my tired shoulders after a clean shave (yes that was, in many senses), a master masseuse if there was one.

The village is teeming with private schools. There are five of them. They are full, I’m told. Classrooms in the public school are empty.

By the way, on what basis do these know-it-alls say people in Central no longer give birth? On the basis of empty public schools? Lies on stilts. All children are in academies.

There are negative things happening, as expected with rapid urbanisation, but since it is my village, I won’t mention them. For now, I am trying to nurse a major hangover thanks to a master brewer, the ageless Breehe...

How is your village in the morning of devolution?

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

Take care.