I have been in the mood to set a bonfire to some of my vanities, the primary one being that Africa, or more bite-sized Kenya, my country, will ”sort itself out” soon. Sorting itself out means becoming a multicultural, culturally diverse South Korea with clean air and no sexual hang-ups.
It is a time-tested and honourable thing to be a middle-class African foaming and talking loudly about the continent — and saying what to do, and what is wrong and so on. I do it often. The tone is always urgent, the plan sought in the conference or over beers is always intense. Crisis.
What is much rarely heard is this: Ghana is 50 years old. Kenya is 43.
Who proved that countries can be ”fixed” in this amount of time? Who has the microwavable ingredients? The hypnotist’s wand that makes the millions of new members of these new nations instantly loyal citizens? Who provides an overnight capital base? Who provides the restraints of history to nations which arrived with none? For the many peoples of Kenya have many histories, but that heart-shaped map that houses us had very little to do with our common interests until 1963, when our common interests were assumed to have merged for eternity.
Flags were ordered, and lions roared in our coat of arms. (Who makes these things? The Registrar of Nations?)
We all know already that the InstaNation formulas — the various ”development plans” — were all just experimental operations with little real historical precedent. It was social engineering as crude and inorganic as TruFru orange squash.
Have you ever wondered why, like magic, after World War II, everybody in the world wanted, quite urgently, to belong to a nation? I was taught in school that this global and spontaneous combustion of aspirations was the natural order of things, an organic and tested form, invented by Fathers of Nations and independence heroes.
After you appeal to the Registrars, you get your little starter pack: a Constitution; tickets to participate in the Olympics; wigs, robes and parliamentary maces from a little shop in London. You send out for national banknotes featuring large mammals and even larger presidents. You apply to the International Registrar of Airlines for a national airline.
But not just anybody gets a nation: sometimes you have to fight for decades and smelt all your metals and consume all your assets to become a nation, as the Eritreans found out. This way, you get to start out broke and exhausted, which is about the time that the Registrars say yes.
As the wayward and brilliant writer Cesare Pavese remarked in 1940: ”The proof of your own lack of interest in politics is that, believing in liberalism (the possibility of ignoring political life), you would like to enforce it autocratically. You are conscious of political life only at times of totalitarian crises, and then you grow heated and run counter to your own liberalism in the hope of bringing about the liberal conditions in which you can live without bothering about politics.”
So. When Kenya does not work out the way I need it to be, I want Kenya sorted quickly, so I can disinvest from politics and drink my cappuccino; I want Kenya sorted so I can stop feeling guilty about being better off then most Kenyans; I want Kenya sorted because it embarrasses me; I want Kenya sorted so I can transplant my lifestyle there.
I want to close my eyes — and while my eyes are closed, to let into Kenya a superhero president with a stun-gun and underwear stuffed with $10-billion in bearer bonds, and anti-xenophobia massage oil for the Gikuyu political elite. I want him to use his universal laser-sight to zap any corrupt politicians; to detesticle any mercenaries; to use his future-laser-vision to invest our money in the fastest stock markets in history. He will merge all 60 languages (all equally represented) into one superlanguage that is tailored for computer operating systems and institutional accountability in all the nation’s tongues.
Then we build the nation, step by happy step, hand in happy hand. After our economy grows 40% a year with no inflation, I want KenyaMan to jail all civil servants who do not computerise the whole country in three weeks, and make us sing better than the Malians. Then he can die, and true democracy can flourish.
Happy Birthday Ghana.
This is just the beginning. Make every day work, believing this.