By Wesonga Robert
wesongarobert@yahoo.com
He had to be a little silly. That is what he thought of himself. As long as he still thought about the trees and the dust and the dried grass, and the abrasive dry winds, and the absentee rainfall, he had to think of himself to be little nuts. In the face of his own personal problems, the heat and dust and dryness of Samburu were issues that deserved to be always left alone. Those were problems of the environment. Problems he had neither created nor commissioned anybody to create.
And for all he cared, the residents of Samburu should have been left to their own devices if at the time they still refused to see the relationship between the dry winds and the dry bones, protruding under the skins of their cattle.
He had his own problems back home. Beni had his own district hundreds of kilometres away from Samburu. And his district of birth too had its own peculiar problems. In fact he thought it was a little unfair of him to think in a manner by which he risked an interpretation by the natives that he treated the problems in Samburu as though they were the only problems in the country. For the case of Samburu, the results of the conflict between human beings and the environment had become too stark to be ignored. Even then, still, nobody listened to The Professor. Forcing distractions out, Beni let his mind concentrate on the speech. He had been obligated to make a speech on the World Environment Day. So he went on writing:
“For the rest of the country, a sense of complacency that hurls environmental fears through the window still dominates. These rare fears of a future in which generations to come will be incapable of sustaining their own development because of the sins of their fathers are needlessly cast from the halls of human concern, out to the darkness; to the hounds and wolves. And this attitude still reigns. Only few like The Professor now retain a tender spot that entertains these fears. They are, to say the least, fears concerning what everybody else seems to have failed to start worrying about.
When you travel to the North-Eastern part of the country, you will not meet this kind of disregard. You will find that the winds of the Northern Frontier have done their bit in this widespread degeneration of the essence of nature. As a consequence, you are to find a people resigned to the brutality of nature; a nature that seems to paying back for an equal measure of brutality it has received from man. And here you find a people whose faces show hardly more than their resignation to this unfortunate arrangement. Perhaps it is this brutality of nature that – in a somewhat magical way - manifests itself in the mercurial temperament of some members of the population. Who can blame a man for being harsh when everything around, ranging from the sun to the wind has little intention of letting up a lifetime beating it has inflicted on a people for ages?
Sometimes on one of your travels – voluntary or otherwise - you have left the Northern frontier and moved to the centre of the country. Here you sometimes find the succulent breeze invitingly wafting past your eyebrows; leaving you with a feeling as if you have been touched by a Greek enchantress. On a lucky day, when the air is not being chocked by the teargas smoke, you will walk into Uhuru Park taking in this breeze. And the breeze will caress your inner sensibilities so that anyone appreciative of the co-existence between nature and modernity will not stop to draw comparisons between Tokyo and Nairobi as two great cities. Sometimes you will stand, or even sit under the tree planted by The Professor and witness the artistry of the elevator as it moves upwards to the eighteenth floor of Anniversary Towers.
If you went to the university somewhere around the start of the millennium hitherto, you will know you have been in that lift as you rose with bated breath going to check the status of your university loan at HELB. If you were there much earlier, you will remember how many a time and oft you had to descend after being told that your loan would be approved the week after. Maybe you were once one of those who had appealed for an additional loan. And so as you savour the shade under that tree planted by The Professor, you remember how you descended in the elevator having been assured that your appeal had gone through.
And the breeze would help you invite a question to your mind. How many of those now descending in the lift from HELB ever thought about being like The Professor? Or had they become those who left The Professor become a prophet disregarded at home?”
He stopped. Beni was almost through with his speech.
And as he went on, almost summing up, he also remembered the many who said that The Professor was their heroine and role model even as they, in the same breath as their words, threw filth and food remnants out of moving vehicles. But he decided he was not going to include that in the speech. This is a speech he wanted to raise the least eyebrows. Beni had to go on writing the speech, moderating everything so that his passions about the issue of the environment remained only implied. In fact, he said he would go through the whole speech and edit it so unemotionally for it to remain detached from him. He discarded these thoughts that were going through his mind and bent down to finish the speech:
“From Uhuru Park, you moved to the inner core. There you would constantly be reminded that all was not well. You saw the gaping gushes that spewed the filthy contents of the gutter into the Nairobi River. The inner core, considered the citadel of order, knowledge, class, reason and all the things that can be mentioned in the same breath as the phrase: Modern Civilization …”
Beni stopped writing again. He was unimpressed by the direction this speech was taking. What needed to worry him was the lack of his own person. At this time, this thought hit hard. He thought about the bills he had to pay; the school fees he was obligated to provide, and the total sense of presence and direction required from him by family and relatives. These, he mused, were the real things he should solve before he moved to what concerned the universe. This came to Beni because he thought he was a man who believed in the charity that must begin at home.
“I don’t have to give this speech!” he said to himself loudly, folding the writing pads he was drafting on. He went out of the house, locking the door behind him. “A cold Pilsner at Jere’s might help me arrive at a decision,” he thought loudly.
No comments:
Post a Comment