Meet Kenya’s army of lonely people

By Ted Malanda

Something sad struck me over Christmas. There are an awful lot of Kenyans, many of them in Nairobi, who are extremely lonely.

Holed up here in economic exile and consequently unable to travel upcountry because my jalopy conked up months ago and I couldn’t afford the fuel anyway, I spent the bulk of the holiday in bed.

When I was not counting the spiders who share my abode at my expense, I was online, reading up on historical stuff like the heroic exploits of German World War Two commander Field Marshal Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel and keeping tabs on who else was fooling around on Facebook.

I can reliably confirm that as late as 3am on the morning of Christmas Day, some people were online. Whichever way you look at it, you have to be extremely lonely to be fiddling with your computer at that hour. Later that evening, a little bored with watching spiders crawling on my wall — all wild animals, apart from snakes and gangsters, are welcome in my house — I nipped over to the local.

Darkness

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Sitting next to me was a chap staring forlornly into his beer glass. A beer later, weighed down by overwhelming loneliness, he folded up his mobile phone and vanished into the darkness.

I followed suit when it became clear that I could be mistaken for a gangster — or worse, a sex worker.

I mean, who sits alone at the farthest corner of the bar counter on Christmas Day?

Then it hit me that all these people you see hurrying along Nairobi streets are dying for human contact.

But fortunately, we are so engrossed with making a living and get so worn out from our daily labours that when we shut doors behind us in the evening, sleep envelops us quickly.

But give us a long holiday and short of spending it getting stone drunk, there is hardly anything else we can do with ourselves. Stuck up behind closed doors, the loneliness hits us like a tornado.

That is why you have an army of people who spend the night chatting with total strangers on Facebook. In one instance, a mother and her daughter were chatting, exchanging best wishes online, yet their bedrooms are metres apart!

In 48 short years, we have come full circle. Whereas we prided ourselves on our ‘Africanness’ and our close-knit community ties, now we have become like wazungu who only realise their neighbour died a month back when a strange smell wafts into the parking lot.

Village

The Christmas rush from urban areas to the village is, therefore, rarely about the desire to be with loved ones, but a disappearing act, albeit briefly, from the loneliness that hangs over our cities like smog, to the village where love hopefully still shines.

I worry that in no time, lonely people will start getting depressed and committing suicide like the Japanese.

So this year, kiss your neighbour and kick loneliness out of town.