We Are Going

I am currently battling to read Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go. Battling, as it seems to me a long poem disguised as a novel, with its pointed words with pointed meanings, demanding reflection upon each, so that the reading is akin to a morning journey to work in Nairobi traffic – arduous and full of stops and starts, never fluid. One of the motifs I have picked up so far is that of “go” – a simple word that seems to support the entire book. It has been used to imply a departure (but of course), rapture, abandonment, and death; a denotation of departure from a current undesirable state, presumably to a better state of affairs, and sometimes a function of hopelessness, sometimes of escape, and sometimes of desperation. Informed by current circumstances, the act of “going” is one of choice and decision, and thus can be good or bad, voluntary or forced, deliberate or kneejerk; whatever the case, it can offer relief, or can be haunting.

The latest explosions in Nairobi are a pointer to a worsening state of affairs in our beloved country. They happened in spite of a series of measures marked by their desperation and ill conception. Much in the way a dog would chase flea-inflicted itches all over its body, sometimes on far ends as the root of its tail, circling itself furiously, chasing its tail in a futile manner, and finally, frustrated, setting off on a blind trot driven more by the itches than any sense of direction, going, not anywhere in particular but going, escaping but not really escaping, we have become reactionary, driven by stings and kneejerk reactions.

We seem to solve problems but not the root problems; in fact, solving but not really solving. We “solved” the problem of tourist abductions by going for the “root cause”, apparently Kismayu, but forgot to solve the problem of our precarious internal security. Our solution was to go into Somalia, the way university students, inspired by “reincarnations” of Karl Marx, and failing to resolve issues inside the confines of the Campus, decide to go to the streets, responding to war cries of “we go! We go!” Yet the ones we were going after have stripped us naked and very tragically so. Having gone after the enemies, who vanished before our very eyes, we now go after their ghosts and shadows, in our own backyard, resorting to finding bad rice from among millions of good rice and not really finding them.

We discovered ethno-religious profiling, deciding that since the enemies looked like Somalis, we must pick out the bad Somalis from the good Somalis. But then we can’t really tell who is good Somali and who is bad Somali just by looking at them. So we decided to round them up, thousands upon thousands of them, and lock them up in a [concentration] camp. We decided that to be Somali in Nairobi must be a crime, and for Somalis to clear themselves, they must face some sort of humiliation and angst. We imposed a curse upon them, and drew around each and every one of them a halo of danger, a birthright of judgment stamped on their faces, to forever dog them genetically and hence involuntarily. We made sure that this process sends a message – we do not want you, you must go.

We denied reports of children separated from their mothers, of pregnant women giving birth in pools of water and excrement, of our inability to verify national IDs issued by us, and of bribes and corruption. Even when doing something wrong, we can’t do it right.

As we chase ghosts of our enemies, other ghosts, eerie, stalking, and haunting, as sinister as the ghosts we are chasing, are chasing us. It gets better – these ghosts have something to do with the ghosts of our enemies. The ghosts of Anglo-Leasing, perhaps, as we danced with them to private and privileged songs of greed and theft, created a mirage: we postponed resolving the problem we are trying to solve now through the [concentration] camp. These ghosts, having caught up with us, as we tried to escape them but not really escaping them, have forced us to consider them, and to decide that we might, after all, pay them to get them off our backs. That the theft that had been halted can be finalized. That the money must go.

We decide that some people at the State Law Office haven’t done their job right, and decide to come down on them quite hard – we tell them to “up their game”. Perhaps we don’t want to be too harsh on them – they have done quite well in that other big case.

We seem much aggrieved by betrayals of travel advisories, of tourists going, but not as much by the goings of our own people, the permanent goings of death – an insistence perhaps, that tourists must die with us as we grapple and tail-chase and go? That foreign governments must abdicate their national interest of protecting their nationals, wherever they may be? Shouldn’t we know better? (Talking of the advisories, I chanced upon a tweet by a military spokesperson wondering aloud whether they are a result of the Chinese railway deal)

Yet we don’t. We are unable to admit that perhaps our intelligence is poor; or if it’s good, both in-bred and shared, we are unable to use it effectively, perhaps hampered by lack of capacity. We seem to downplay the fact that our police service, maybe the entire security sector, is inadequate to the task. We seem to ignore that a [concentration] camp may in fact radicalize the un-radicalized, and play into the hands of the enemies. Having developed a morbid fascination with tinted windows, we are unable to act on reports of police corruption surfacing all over social media. We fail to admit to ourselves that, perhaps, we need help beyond multibillion-shilling Chinese deals.

Instead, we are preoccupied with chasing shadows and ghosts, with ethno-religious profiling. We have set our minds on this path; no one is going to stop us. We are going. 

Picture credit: containsmoderateperil.com