Tchaikovsky’s outrageous cannons

Bring forth a stir as groundbreaking

as Tchaikovsky’s outrageous cannons

this straight line needs a curve - or sharp turn

few birds in flight keep it that way for long

for fear is a stranger and daring is life

bring forth a stirring, I say

it's no use being lifeless while living

the eye casts upon the familiar no more

and the spirit yearns for a twist.

Picture credit: Freestockphotos.biz

One Year of Blogging: Thank You

A year ago I started this blog. From that tentative first post and through the highs and lows of the year, it has become an ambivalent girlfriend whose ambivalence is only matched by mine. I have deserted and came back to it many times. One would think that it is always there, as I did at first, to be forgotten and remembered at capricious whims. It however has a trump card of its own – words. It is somehow in sinful collusion with the blank word document, mocking white, blemished only with that blinking, laughing, and pointing-a-finger-in-vindicated-mirth cursor. Inviting and mocking at the same time, quietly screaming, “look, I’m all yours, give me your best shot,” it dares and comforts, rewards and punishes, validates and fulfills, all in harmonious measure.

It is a journey that didn’t start a year ago, but from primary school days when the English teacher’s stringent “five minutes!” was a call to draw up speedy conclusions to those ubiquitous “compositions” written in surrendered and frenzied fervor. Remember them? Those in which you wrote of “adventures in forests”, two-headed ogres, and dips in local rivers that raised the teacher’s eyebrows as you and your friends had skived just a week earlier. Once in my final year I was tempted to write about a girl sitting in the front row (boys, we always sat at the back) who had taken to smiling at me as if saying she had waited for me for eight years, and once this charade of KCPE is over it’s you and me. I think I figured that wouldn’t have been appropriate.

I’m curious to read my compositions now, they always seemed full of outrageous and overblown similes, metaphors, and big (we called them “bombastic”) words intended to impress. They were repeated over and over again, I wonder why teachers never got bored with them. Yet we practiced them religiously, lest we forgot before the main KCPE show. We defensively covered our scripts from prying eyes. It was funny how the classroom bully would insist on sitting next to a composition champ during the tests.

Those challenged in this department made grand and alluring promises of “ice”, samosas and sukari nguru during lunch break in solicitation for help; others made offers you couldn’t refuse especially if they were good at something you weren’t (geometry and Business Education were particularly annoying for me). You could tell the challenged ones who, whenever you looked up from furious scribbling, you would find them staring at the ceiling or at those writing, as if in stupefying wonder where they got the words from. Eyes would meet at a terribly awkward moment, when one would wonder what exactly is the other writing so earnestly, while the other would resist a sudden temptation to burst out laughing. And it was gratifying when your composition was read aloud to the rest of the class, but annoying at the same time as you felt like you now had to come up with new tricks.

It was from this juvenile competitiveness that this journey started, and it’s a journey that is far from complete, like a self-perpetuating epic story. I can feel the echoes even now. Sometimes I catch myself staring at the ceiling as if I’m about to invent word mining from there, and I burst out laughing. Life comes full circle. Yet we are unable to escape the beauty words can paint, the emotions they can bring, and the stories they can weave. We read to appreciate and wonder at beauties painted; to go on a roller coaster of emotions created; and to be enchanted by stories weaved. And we write to try and do the same.

In this blogging episode I have made new virtual friends whom I have only met through the written word. Friendships whose lives crop out of a shared fascination with the written word are as good as any. I have solidified many more. I am still learning what works, and what doesn’t. But most of all, I am comforted by your readership and your comments, and by your virtual companionship in this journey under these starry skies.

So here’s to many more years of reading and writing, and to you the reader. Thank you for coming back again and again in the past year.

Picture credit: shesgotsystems.com

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

Diplomatic flashbacks

Nostalgia is bugging me. You know, that warm and fuzzy feeling that swindles a smile out of you as you reminisce on what has been, or what you’ve been through. Most of it nice, but some not so; some are funny, weird, even laughable, while others plain annoying. Nevertheless, they come back to you when you least expect them, the way a sudden and unexplained craving for nicotine hits an ex-smoker. You smell something, or see something or someone that looks like someone, and bang, a memory hits you.

Nostalgia is a bummer. It might make you feel nice, but then you catch yourself and wonder why. It questions your decisions, as it brings with it doubts you must confront. Maybe I shouldn’t have done this or that, you think, as this feels all good now, as I remember.

But nostalgia is good too. It feels good simply because it is in the past. You cannot go back there except in the safety of your memory. It feels good as, in your warm and fuzzy mind, you feel liberated from that episode, from that bane of familiarity that seemed to weigh you down. And you feel great because, unlike a fanatic, you have redoubled your efforts but haven’t forgotten the aim.

Lest you become impatient and blurt out a get-on-with-it, I am speaking about my Tour of Duty as a Foreign Service officer, or, if I want to sound a little fancy, a diplomat. Having finished it a couple of months ago, I can now relax and look back, sometimes with a warm smile, sometimes with laughter, sometimes with an annoyed grunt.

I arrived in Pretoria that late September summer’s day in 2009, as fresh faced and shy as you wouldn’t conceive a diplomat to be, and that very night I was introduced to the life. I mean a life that I wasn’t used to (damn it, with my free time closed up reading or writing incoherent ramblings, or playing that antisocial game called chess in some downtown club, I can’t say I had a life in Nairobi). A farewell party. Loud music. Rapturous laughter. Loud conversations and overly excited and inebriated individuals. Too much energy for an introverted soul. “Ala!? What have I got myself into?” I panicked. We were taken through an induction course before the posting, but it doesn’t quite prepare you.

As time went by, I grew into it. I actually began enjoying those ubiquitous receptions, meeting all kinds of fascinating people from different backgrounds. The Japanese and the Chinese are the most hardworking diplomats of them all. Very friendly and genuine, but lamentably hamstrung by language, they really go out of their way to smile genuine smiles. Diplomacy, in my limited experience, is a world full of plastic smiles. Where a western diplomat will smile opaquely, a Japanese will smile his widest smile to the point of screwing his face, and actually bow his head in utmost respect.

“Kenya! Ha ha ha haa!” it was always a rapid, four “ha ha ha haa’s”, projected skywards at an angle before being stopped abruptly at the fourth, elongated “haa”. “Kenya! Lofely country, fery lofely,” they would say in a high-pitched, insistent voice. A few sentences later and the conversation, genuine as it may be, would screech to a halt, at which point we would both realize we’re holding drinks in our hands, which we would proceed to raise to our lips as we look sideways over our shoulders.

Conversations with western diplomats fared much better, but that invariable glint in their eyes shining over a glass raised to the lips always forced guardedness in me. Those will quote you in their reports to their capitals, something that I also did sometimes; it’s part of the job. Well, I can’t blame them; they were under greater pressure to deliver compared to me, which is a shame as I discovered that in our Service one could very easily be a freeloader. Sometimes they would cut to the chase, especially when the Ocampo-powered ICC gained currency with the Kenyan cases, and plead, “Come on Juma, help me out here.” And I must admit, because an evil vindictive residue remained in me from my days as a campus Marxist, it felt good. This vindictive streak, quite unlike me, was reinforced when once an American diplomat handed me her business card with a matter of fact declaration, “Here’s my business card, in case you need us.” She didn’t wait for mine.

One could paint the hierarchy of world order just from a single diplomatic reception. African receptions were attended by a sprinkling of western diplomats; many, many African diplomats attended western receptions. A senior official from the South African foreign office would be dispatched as the Guest of Honour in an African reception; while a full Minister, sometimes two or more (they would be tripping over each other) would be dispatched to officiate a National Day reception of a western country (China and Japan would fall in this category, hehe). Whether it is was a result of subtle, superior diplomatic skills that ensured their Ambassadors’ personal touch at the highest levels, or other considerations, I don’t know, but it did seem oddly amusing, in the land of African Renaissance of Thabo Mbeki, no less.

Then there were our African brothers. Boy, oh boy. Funny characters. Great thing with them was, I could find them in Sunnyside, Pretoria’s inner city, over weekends enjoying the exuberant nightlife. There would be nothing diplomatic about us then. We would just be fellow African brothers hanging out. Which was just great.

But they were funny. I remember one, Deputy Head of Mission no less, older middle aged, almost retiring (his promotion to full Ambassador depended on political factors, and he seemed to have given up), keeping himself busy in pursuit of a gifted (ahem) young lady at the French Bastille Day reception, which by the way was sort of the biggest, most colorful reception you could get invited to (but I don’t say).

It was in the Council of African Ambassadors that you found the highest concentration of former Ministers and senior government officials. Every other African Ambassador I knew seemed to have held a very senior position in his/her country prior to being posted to Pretoria. And that came with a lot of pride. I was fortunate, or unfortunate depending on how you look at it, to have become Rapporteur of the Council, which is just a grand name for taking minutes of its meetings. It was an impossible task, recording the back and forth, conclusion of a discussion only for it to be raised much later on resulting in a reversal of a decision already taken, resulting in fresh objections and more backs and forth, eish. A typical meeting lasted a minimum of three hours, two hours on a lucky day. It was an insufferable job.

African Ambassadors also had the longest tenures, and thus ended up being Dean of the entire diplomatic corps in Pretoria. It was almost as if their governments had forgotten they were still there. The Dean for a long time was a former Libyan Ambassador who was a good friend of mine, as he liked my minutes from the Council of African Ambassadors (where he was Dean too, and therefore Chairman). The overthrow of Brother Leader Muammar Gaddafi led to one thing and another, and despite his best efforts (read: jumping ship), he found himself out of a job. But he was smooth, a fine diplomat, and a very popular charmer. The current Dean is from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Again, I found some guiltily sadistic albeit useless relish that an American or British diplomat could never hope to be Dean.

The Arabs seemed to go on about their duties with luxurious detachment, from an oil-inspired sense of comfort. I envied them. The South Americans scurried about with dutiful but assertive diligence; they also possessed impressive diplomatic professionalism. I admired them. The Asians, except the Chinese and the Japanese, you would be forgiven to think they weren’t there. And our hosts, the South Africans? Well, they were great, especially our colleagues with whom we interacted on a daily basis. However, when it came to hosting big conferences and events to which world leaders would swoop, they acquired a certain diligence peppered with an effective arrogance that made things move.

Talking of big conferences, those are the Foreign Service officers’ biggest nightmares. When your President comes to town, you will huff, puff, sweat, threaten, pull your hair, and cajole in equal measure, just to get everything in order. I never knew I had the resourcefulness in me to pull off some of the things I did. You never know until you have to do it. You have no choice, the President is coming, and it has to be done, one way or another. The mundane is no longer mundane. I was told recently one African Ambassador nearly came to tears, as he couldn’t find suitable (the word is key) accommodation for his President who was coming to attend the Memorial Service of the late Nelson Mandela. Teamwork was key. And when everything went smooth, it was a great feeling of service to the Government and the People, pledge-style hehe.

At this point I will share a little sad secret. At a recent visit of H.E. the President, I had to wait for accreditation tags at the Union Buildings in Pretoria for the Presidential delegation (mundane is no longer mundane) throughout the night, for a morning event. The South African protocol officer allocated to Kenya had been harassed all day long, poor girl she almost cried over the phone at one point. So we waited together till the wee hours, after which she realized her transport colleagues had disappeared, presumably to sleep. She had to get to Johannesburg (about 30 minutes away by road), where the President was staying, so it would be easier to get to him so that everything should go smoothly in the morning. I had to drop her off though the cold and rainy night.

By the time I was making my way back to Pretoria, it was half past four in the morning, still drizzling. I drove slowly, feeling superhuman for working all day and night. I was thinking about my warm covers, how nice it would be to tuck in and get warm…. when I nodded. You know, when you dozed off in class back in the days and you only realized you were dozing when you felt your head heavy, and you nodded as you raised it up again, as if in agreement with the rambling teacher. Only that I didn’t have my pen stuck on a page on my book, ready to doodle; nay, I was behind the wheel, and a few inches to the left of a snail-paced long haul truck, staring at squares of steel. All I can say is, thank God, and God bless reflex action.

So there you have it. Public and/or Foreign Service, just like everything else under the planet, isn’t kind sometimes. The less palatable airport duties (sigh) come to mind especially. I don’t know about other stations, but Pretoria has a certain peeving peculiarity. Ministers and other senior government officials like to use that Kenya Airways flight that departs Nairobi at 20h35, but that only means they arrive in Johannesburg at around 23h50. They like to stay in Sandton, which is 20 minutes from the airport. So when you have been tasked with receiving and facilitating them at the airport, you travel 20 minutes from Pretoria to the airport, 20 minutes from the airport to Sandton, then 20 minutes from Sandton back to your house in Pretoria (we liked to call the whole trip a triangle); by then it is 02h00. You need to be at your desk by 08h30, or if the Minister or whoever it is says so, be at his/her hotel by 08h00. Make a point to be nice to him/her. Repeat sequence almost once every week, for four years.

That’s why a call from the boss on a weekend was a dreaded thing. Don’t get me wrong – we had the best Balozis to work with, career diplomats who know their job, and very friendly and easy to get along with. It was bliss. But a call from him on Saturday morning can hardly be a courtesy call just to check up on you and family, hell no. It was most likely a call to airport duty. And you will kiss your weekend plans goodbye. Many times I was tempted to lie that I was in some obscure village in KwaZulu-Natal, but service is service.

Some of the dignitaries made it worthwhile. Most memorable was facilitating the late Hon. John Michuki, God bless his soul. He cared to ask how I was doing, if I’m ok, how was my family, and so on. Genuine concern. And he remembered my name (trust me, that’s touching). But once he ascertained all is well with me, the grilling started. What is the GDP of South Africa? What are its main exports? Where exactly are our troops now in Somalia, have they reached Kismayu? Eish, he worked me up into a sweat. He would shoot questions while tapping his walking stick on the carpet, his face a mask of relish. Somehow our discussion ended with the ICC, and I can tell you, I never met anyone who valued sovereignty as much as Hon. Michuki did.

Nostalgia indeed is a bummer. You remember good things, and you wish you could go back and experience them again, but you can’t. And then it’s a good thing, you remember bad things and you say, thank God I’m done with all that, I can only remember them with an annoyed grunt in the safety of my memory. I don’t know if nostalgia is a bummer or a good thing when it makes me write too much.

Shout out to my colleagues, it was great, it was amazing. We pulled off some of the most impossible things together, and built lifetime friendships. A word too to my Diaspora friends, we too built lifetime friendships. I cherish that, more than anything else.

Picture Credit: mwpdigitalmedia.com/