There are many senior citizens who have lived and worked in the towns
where they grew up and went to school and have neither roots nor
emotional links to village life. PHOTO | FILE
In Summary
Qn What is the ideal age to quit city life and
retire to the village? I walk on various urban streets and see the
suffering of elderly people who struggle to cope with the fast-paced
life and I don’t want to be part of this group.
Your question reminds me of a conversation I overheard recently between a group of young people.
The thrust of the argument was that a young man who
was born and brought up in Buru Buru, Nairobi, cannot correctly speak
of “our culture” in reference to an ethnic group from Western Kenya.
As the argument became heated, the young man
continued to lay claim to “our culture” but became angry when asked to
explain the cultural attributes that define him as a member of that
ethnic group.
His friends wanted to know how much of his “mother
tongue” he spoke. Pushed even further he confessed that both his parents
grew up in Jericho and attended local schools in Eastlands.
At home, they spoke Kiswahili. The young man spoke
only Kiswahili and English and knew only a few words of the language of
“his culture”.
It then transpired that the only people who spoke
their mother tongue properly were his grandparents who had worked for
the East African Railways in the 40s and 50s and who had later retired
(perhaps as you would like to do) to a rural life.
They died within two years of returning to the
village in abject poverty. Their retirement gift had been two items they
least needed; a wall clock and a wheelbarrow. As for the clock, there
was no pressure to keep time in retirement, while the wheelbarrow served
them no purpose because they had never lived on a farm.
So, coming back to the young man and the claim to a
culture of their grandparents begs a few questions. Can a young man
whose parents grew up in Nairobi truthfully claim to be a legitimate
member of a group whose language neither he nor his parents speak?
As the conversation progressed, a few more questions were posed to the young man.
It then turned out that other than attending the
funerals of his grandparents he had never spent time in what he called
“the village” and his parents owned only one house, the one in Buru
Buru.
He had problems remembering the names of his
uncles and cousins who live in the village. Pushed further by his
friends, he was unable to provide details of how he would get to the
village.
Her had not been there for many years. That debate
would have ended there had a young woman who had been sitting with them
not raised what turned out to be the defining question.
She wanted to know whether indeed they all
qualified to be considered as the new cultural group of Nairobians. She
proceeded to argue that they all spoke the same language (sheng), went
to the same schools and universities, lived in the same areas, loved the
same music, spent similar lengths of time on Facebook and ate the same
(junk) food.
Their conversations were very similar; football,
girls (and boys), fashion and occasionally parents and politics which
they all found boring and old fashioned
Of parents they all agreed on the need to have them
become more “professional” and modern, emphasising how backward some
parents were in their view about modern things like music and the
importance of social media and hanging out together.
They found it hard to understand why their best friend from
class one becomes a Luo, Kamba, Kikuyu and or Kalenjin every five years,
when elections are on the horizon.
Emotional links
Roommates at university have no tribe until
election time when politicians go out of their way to explain
differences that did not exist when the boys played rugby together in
high school.
As children, they lived in the same estates and sat
next to each other in buses without knowing (or caring) what tribe a
person’s grandmother came from.
It is my hope that this story is making you think about your future and possible retirement in the village.
There are many men and women in their 60s and 70s who do not know life outside of Nairobi, Mombasa, and other major towns.
They have lived and worked in the towns where they
grew up and went to school and have neither roots nor emotional links to
village life.
For them, going back to the village would be a
prescription for early death. Their children, grandchildren, friends,
neighbours, clubs, churches are all in the big towns. If these are the
elderly people you see walking in city streets and suffering it is too
late to change them. They do not know any other life.
As to you, not knowing when or why you came to
Nairobi it is difficult to tell you when to go back to the village.
However, more and more people prefer to live near their children and
grandchildren.
No comments :
Post a Comment