Season’s greetings from Emanyulia, this place of gold and hope. We are happy to remember you in this season of passion. We join other Christians throughout the centuries, to recall the biblical Garden of Gethsemane and the agony of Christ, on the night that he was betrayed, and of course the risen Christ.
Force of habit over the years always brings us this way in this season. We are the people you witness in heavy West Kenya-bound traffic in festive seasons. We labour to reach our native homes. Christmas and Easter are not the seasons they should be if we do not come to the Lake Victoria Basin for catharsis.
We come to fellowship with our kith and kin in the only truly homely place. It has been this way since they built Nairobi. It shall remain so.
Our place of nativity brings us the simple joys of life. The chance to run away from the Gethsemane of alien spaces where we sojourn most of the time. We consider ourselves multiple exiles in our own country. We leave our homes not because we love to, but because we have to. We go out to towns as economic exiles, to seek nurture.
These are the spaces with opportunities. We find shelters to live in. Yet, we must leave them every day, for the exile of school, place of work, and other daily searches for survival. In the evening, we return to this home from the city’s daily exile.
The push factors in our migrations are not dissimilar from the adversity that pushes poor Africans through the dangerous shark waters of the Mediterranean. So, Nairobi is our Europe, where we are pulled to. At least, it used to be.
That was why my grandfather, Samuel, lived there with grandma Rosa, from the early 1920s. My father, Jairus, was born there, in Pumwani Hospital, on 27 April 1933. He turns 92, a week from today.
Jairus and Mama Roselyn understand that Nairobi is no longer the Eldorado of East Africa. There is no more gold to run after, except for the wheeler-dealer class. The unsightly gutters and garbage; rotting dead dogs, rats and cats; broken pipes that blend fresh drinking waters with odoriferous sewage; broken down roads with craters; they all make Mama Roselyn wonder time and again, “What happened to Nairobi?”
Arthur Johnson crew
Yes, this is Nairobi, the home of infectious hustle and bustle. Everyone is in a rush to nowhere. Drivers and riders fly on the honk. They are all impatient, trying to drive or ride right through you.
Never mind that Chiromo Road is now the biggest ragtag of roads. Riverside Drive is dead. Sports Road is history. Never mind that the gentleman in charge, a certain Arthur Johnson, has no clue of what should be done.
For Arthur Johnson and crew, the focus is on designer suits and billboards that, in all probability, are not paid for. They seek to make hay while the sun shines; to be in the good books of the rock that is the ODM party and the hard place that is State House. But now the rock and the hard place are united in a broad-based conspiracy against the people of the city and beyond. Arthur Johnson can rest easy.
For the rest of us, Nairobi is Gethsemane, that Easter reminds us about. Now, Gethsemane was the Garden of Agony in which Christ underwent mental anguish, ahead of his arrest and crucifixion.
It is a place of fear, doubt and suffering. It is a place of betrayal. Your own friends give you away for 30 pieces of silver. They say, “Why does Barrack write these things? Why can’t he just look for money? Get rich, like everyone else? What are these useless philosophies he believes in?”
But Gethsemane is also a place of prayer. From the eyesores of Arthur Johnson’s burst sewers and stench; unsightly slums, deafening din, uncaring selfish drivers and riders; gangsters, and all the ne’er-do-well lumpen proles, we learn the power of hope and prayer.
In the grip of fear and suffering – both present and impending – we still submit to God’s will. We say with Jesus Christ of Nazareth, “May your will be done, Lord God.”
And so we shall retreat to the soothing idyllic Emanyulia over Easter and Christmas. Yet, we must return to the intense pressure in the crucible of Gethsemane. Here, we join others from other countryside places. We are united in hope that someday the Arthur Johnsons of Africa shall go. We shall turn around our cities and our countries. God bless.
Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser
