It was a cloudy, rainy morning. The clouds were heavy and expectant. I had run along the perimeter of a national park, my mind shrouded by the thought of meeting lions on the prowl. It didn’t help that I had been watching strange men on social media taking pictures and videos of lions while having morning tea while the lions passed by.
These and other thoughts kept me company in the silence, only interrupted by my breathing. In those moments, the need to speak to
another person seemed alien.
Yet when I transitioned from the lonely roads of Rongai,
through Karen and back to my estate, and my run became a walk, a young man
stopped me.
He seemed unsure,
almost embarrassed. Yet his demeanor was confident, and his eyes spoke of an
intelligence that sought attention.
“Excuse me, Sir, might you have a minute?”
He hurriedly used the precious seconds before my surprise
turned hostile or indifferent.
“I'm hungry and would appreciate it if you could buy me a
mandazi, if you don’t mind. I haven’t eaten for two days, and any help would be
a blessing.”
He paused. His eyes were pleading. My surprise didn’t have a
moment to turn hostile.
I hesitated.
He dove back in.
“I have been looking for kazi ya mjengo for the last
few days, and I haven’t been lucky. I need a meal to take care of today. Anything
you can spare, Sir, I would greatly appreciate it.”
He was frustrated. I could tell he was a person who would make
a difference in a company if employed. He was no lazy bum; he was clean and
alert.
“Have you been to college or university?” I heard myself
asking, deducing he had, and only wanting to confirm it.
“Yes, I attended Jomo Kenyatta University and earned a
degree in Procurement.” He said with no hint of pride.
I sighed quietly. For a while, many had been convinced that
getting into Procurement was a sure bet. It was access to an institution's resources, and it was how some government employees had gotten wealthy. This
young man was the product of hearsay, assumptions, and conclusions drawn by
many, whose sole desire was to follow the money and secure a stable income in a
highly competitive job market. I would bet beyond a shadow of doubt the young
man had no passion for procurement.
I would make another wilder guess that his parents, uncles and community had something to do with the course he picked. And back home, they hoped their son would soon secure a prestigious job in the city.
None of us is wiser.
How many of us have pursued degrees, courses, and certificates to make us more
marketable or open doors for us?
“Where do you come from?” I implored in the typical Kenyan
way to discover his pedigree and upbringing.
“Kakamega,” he responded, knowing my question was out of
habit more than calculated bias.
I had a blank stare that spoke volumes about my mind at that moment. The young man, a consummate facial reader, dove into a
narrative to distance himself from his rural home.
“My father has a farm in Kakamega, but everyone else is
using modern farming methods, and it didn’t work for me,” he said assuredly.
I had visited Kakamega several times and even remembered
walking in the tropical Kakamega forest. My best moments were running up and
down a road in the morning, enjoying the fresh air.
I heaved silently.
His words stuck with me as we walked towards a makeshift
roadside Kibanda
He had relegated his father to being archaic and ancient. From
his facial expressions, it was clear that he had no interest in farming.
“Where do you stay?” I inquired as we entered the eatery.
“At the shanties near Southlands,”
“Mama Jemu, kindly give this guy what he wants to eat,” I said.
“Where should I send the money to?” I asked as I fired up my MPESA app.
“Thank you so much, and may God bless you mightily,” he said
as I also thanked him for the blessings and walked home.
Yet the young man's face and words stayed with me longer.
It stayed with me as I watched a video explaining that there
had been eighteen assassination attempts on Burkina Faso’s military leader
Ibrahim Traoré. A man who is systematically decolonising his country by paying
off its local debt, halting the export of unrefined gold to Europe and increasing
production of millet, tomatoes, and rice, making his country food-independent. The
list continues.
I remembered the frustration and dejection in the young man’s
face. Eloquent and confident. Yet, he was striving to understand why the
system worked against him. This young man was told the best way to
succeed was to study. He left the farm and travelled to Nairobi with the
promise of a successful future. Still, four years later, he found out that the narrative he had been sold, one that many others had also heard of and
sought to achieve in the same field, was not entirely accurate.
He walked the streets of Nairobi, to a desperate crawl. And
without a strong network or a knowledgeable benefactor, he was left to observe
his surroundings and adapt to the lives of those around him.
Living in a ghetto in Langata, the jobs that put food on the
table were menial and temporary. He curtailed his lofty dreams and became a
menial worker.
Our minds are colonized. Mine as much as the next person. I
have no right to consider the young man less astute than his agemates working
in a tech company in the same city.
Or should I?
Recently, I have added the following statement to my daily
affirmations: “I decolonize my mind daily, seeking problems and providing
solutions to achieve wealth.”
It is a systemic issue. When you listen to startups pitching
for funding, you will notice their lack of conviction in what they are selling
and their reluctance to bootstrap and fully commit to their idea. Many cried
when Trump spoke of defunding USAID and, hence, Africa.
Yet, at every turn, a vast bank of problems is waiting
to be solved. However, we lack men and women who are willing to walk the lonely,
uncharted, risky, and undefined road away from what we have been indoctrinated
to believe, to create something new. We defer to the government, development
partners, or a system to resolve that issue.
We let trash pile up outside our homes, because someone will
collect it. We cause traffic jams on our roads, knowing our time is essential,
and others need to make way for us. We leave a road muddy and unpassable,
because it is the job of our county officials to sort it out, not the local community.
We are taught to deny taking responsibility and expect
salvation from a ‘messiah.’ The ‘messiah’ appears to have a
clearer understanding of the issue than you.
This seems to be the mindset at the top and among those in
power. They always expect a foreign power to take responsibility while they
plunder and abuse their citizenry.
The president of Burkina Faso is strange to our educated
minds. We want so much to associate with our colonizers, and bring them to our
party and yearn for them to baby us and cuddle us years after independence.
I saw that in this young man, a desire to find a ‘messiah’ who
would wish away his problems and offer him a job, so that he would suddenly be acceptable
and successful.
The reality is that it had taken him two years of stress and
dejection for him to realise that no one was coming to his aid. He had been
reduced to a beggar by a system that was failing worldwide.
The world's education systems are outdated, poorly
funded, and focus on rote learning rather than critical thinking.
Furthermore, when rote learners enter the workforce, they
struggle to find employment, maintain their jobs, or excel in their careers. Why?
Because how work is done has changed. We now need critical and creative
thinkers.
A creative thinker embraces ambiguity, is bold in risk taking,
a dreamer, imaginative, and intuitive. All things that the young man had not
been allowed to be, and if he was, they were taken away from him soon enough as
a child. He was required to be obedient, subservient and orderly.
Artificial Intelligence has mastered the orderly, structured,
rule-based world and continues to replace many in their traditional careers. The
only domain left to humans is the infinite universe of creativity. A place
froth with dangers, risks and the unknown.
Growing up, I thought I was brilliant until I got to high school, where geniuses roamed the corridors, did nothing more than the normal, and still stood miles ahead.
That was the first taste of dissonance, between what I had
done and reality. It was then that I embarked on a fifteen-year quest to
discover what success truly meant.
The more I asked, the more I rejected being forced to ‘repair’
my weaknesses.
It took that long because I had no teachers or
mentors who inspired me, and partly because the system idolises paychecks. Dreamers
are treated harshly in a world they have not created, and until they can will
their world into being, build it, and then invite the rest of the world into
it, they must also attend to their essential needs.
As I write this piece. I keep asking myself how much more
decolonizing I need to do, and I realise it's still a lot. It might take a
while. However, in the process, I am happy to help others embark on that
journey, because at its foundation, there is a clear need for self-awareness
and clarity of purpose.
No wonder these two things are never taught in school
because a slave must never have a higher purpose than the one given to them,
and they must only be aware of the one they serve, the one who controls and
owns them.
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