Let me be the first to admit it – I am a Luddite – and secretly ashamed of it.
Now, before you go basement thinking and imagine a ‘Luddite’ is a pervert who does all sorts of unspeakable things with lubricants, as I’m sure my Wanga neighbour upstairs Itindi is already thinking, let me explain that a Luddite is one who is intrinsically opposed to technological changes.
It comes from a group of nineteenth century English artisans who were opposed to industrial mechanisation and went about wrecking machinery and causing anti-machine riots in Britain. Eventually, in 1817, the leaders of the Luddites were arrested, a few executed and the rest deported to the penal colony of Australia to take their monkey business to the kangaroos there.
Which is why Uber drivers will find it difficult to strike against an algorithm.
I mean, how do you take collective industrial action against an App? It is not like doctors who can simply stay away from public hospitals and let patients perish there until their demands are met, is it? You switch off your ‘Uber Driver’ in protest, there’s a surge. Kamau sees this and switches his on (to hell with ‘solidarity forever,’ you are a hungry part time driver not an erudite university lecturer used to eating even his/her own words). Surge over, Uber ‘strike’ over.
As a Luddite, I even used to write out my early articles in longhand and take them to a typist, but that option was expensive and I quickly learned Microsoft Word (although I still cannot type anything over 3,000 out, which means all my books and novellas have been written longhand and typed out in town).
Being a Luddite means that for the longest time, I did not have a camera even when travelling to far off climes and would rely on the ‘kindness of strangers’ (as in folks I met abroad) to keep their word and send me pictures where we have been captured together.
In fact other than the actual travel pieces written for magazines, my correspondences would involve the ‘reminders’ (begging pleas) to people who had forgotten this African to remember to send pictures taken in whatever foreign space we had held some literary conference or festival at.
“Heya, Dragomoschenko, it’s comrade Mochama. Do remember to download and forward me those snapskis from the DisQuiet Festival in Lisboa ...’
Of course what takes the cake is the car parked in my lot now for more than two years as this Luddite tries to gather the courage to go to Rocky Glory and join the throng stuck in city road gridlock.
Not so the case with Mpesa, which I have been seeing this week is celebrating its tenth anniversary.
My late mother was a lifelong banker so I have always been comfortable around financial instruments and innovations, starting with the lingala dancing Barclays robot that heralded ATMs in Kenya (never mind that we were too broke to take advantage of this hole-in-the-wall in college, though I had a pal I’ll not name who, one morning from Florida 1000, mistook one for a urinal).
Mpesa is that monetary innovation which if you got carried away in the pub buying random ‘Suzie Shiko’ whom you met at the counter a Viceroy you cannot afford, you can lie to your homeboy Jack that you are stuck in Laikipia without fuel and he’ll ‘sambaza’ you the pesa. Long suffering landlords who used to try and ‘time’ Kingori at 2am (after the mid-week Champions’ League) as they are lied to ‘ati rent haija reflect kwa account?’ can just get their dues through Mpesa, as can schools for fees.
The word ‘mpesa’ has become a verb, so much so, and a global innovation that one Mark Zuckerberg popped around these parts of the world to check it out while pretending that he had just come to savour the fishy culinary delights of ‘Mama Oliech’s’ Pisces palace uptown.
tonyadamske@gmail.com