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  • In the 2022/2023 academic year, the Chancellor of Egerton University, Dr Narendra Raval, offered to sponsor an essay writing competition for all the undergraduate students of the University

  • Live and Die in My Motherland or Leave?

    By Olive Nekesa Okumu

    Some time back, my eleven-year-old sister, ever inquisitive and probing into matters one would think were above her age, asked me what my choice would be if I was given a second chance to be born and this time in any country in the world I fancied. I found myself too ready to answer. “Well”, I said, “I am not sure which country I would choose, but it would definitely not be Kenya.” My kid sister, who had obviously asked the same question of herself, said that she would choose to be born in Kenya time and time again because there was no other place on earth like her motherland.

    I was reminded of that conversation when I saw the topic of this essay writing competition – “International Migration”. In fact, it seemed that the question of living in my country or migrating to another one had never left my mind. The dilemma it presented was deeply rooted in my being and the way I resolved it had everything to do with who I was and what beliefs and ideals I held dear.

    There was a time when I too could not imagine leaving my motherland for any other country. Regardless of how magnificent another country might appear to be, the idea of relocating to it simply had no power over me. Even when my peers fantasised about living abroad, I remained the guardian of my conviction that I was in the right place, the place that was meant for me. I, therefore, could not help but wonder as to when my stance changed and for what reasons. Was it that I had stopped loving my country? Was it that becoming aware of the myriad of problems around me brought me face to face with the actual condition of my country and displaced my imagined version of it? Or was I hollowed out of all aspirations so that all I wanted was a better life, which I thought I could easily get elsewhere? Why would I, a twenty-year-old who has never set foot in another country, not want to live in Kenya for the rest of my life? After all, I used to belt out Sauti Sol’s “Live and Die in Afrika”, telling myself and the world that I would live and die in my motherland.

    I gave myself time to look deep within myself to try and find the answers to my questions. I realised that no, I did not hate my country. I in fact loved my country and I was proud to be a Kenyan. What exactly was the issue then? Was it I that did not understand the meaning of loving my country and being proud of my nationality? If I was indeed proud to be a Kenyan, then why did I want to leave so badly? Why was the post “The goal is to leave Kenya and show fake patriotism by wearing the Kenyan flag wristband” always on my social media pages’ timeline? Why was the “American dream” my life dream?

    It gradually dawned on me that I, as most of my peers, had imperceptibly bought the idea that the grass was greener on the other side. We had come to believe that life was better anywhere else except for where we currently were. This is the thinking of a multitude of people looking for ways to leave their country, especially people from countries considered to be “Third World” who wish to transit to the “First World”. We had convinced ourselves that by moving to more developed countries we would get a better shot at succeeding in life and accomplishing our life goals. And we had come to a point where nothing else, apart from the greenness of the grass, mattered.

    I do acknowledge that the belief of a better life away from home may not be entirely a delusion. Many claims have been made to the effect that moving to a different country could be exactly what one needs to advance one’s career and expand one’s knowledge. Career advancement and expansion of knowledge preoccupy the minds of most young people and if they are shown the route to success in that direction they would pursue that route without a second thought. I too would not let go of the opportunity to advance to the next level of my career, and if that meant moving to another country then I would move in a heartbeat.

    However, I can now see that this thought process is truncated. To begin with, how sure are we that as foreigners we stand a chance against the multitude of youth already struggling in their motherlands because they themselves cannot access the opportunities that we hope to get by moving to these countries? Are we really going to get the better conditions we enthusiastically hoped for or are we going to be despised because the reluctant hosts see us as desperate and a nuisance? Are we not likely to face hostility from the native citizens and won’t we have to suffer the humiliation of hearing “Go back to your country!” every single day? It is not a secret that uninvited immigrants are never received with open arms anywhere.

    In as much as I wish I could avoid talking about, it is impossible to ignore the discrimination that people of colour face every day in foreign lands just for looking different. In the recent past the Black Lives Matters Movement gained attention all over the world, with millions of people coming out to condemn and protest against the mistreatment and annihilation of black people across the United States. If this was the fate of black people who were citizens of their country, how about those of us who have come from outside? We also witnessed discrimination against Asians during the Covid-19 pandemic as people from China in particular were blamed for the emergence and spread of the virus.

    By now you could be thinking, “Oh she is such a naysayer. Why can’t she just embrace the positive without bringing up the negative?” I also wish I could, but that would mean choosing not to see. I am not trying to put fears and limitations on anybody’s ambitions and goals but surely it is worth seeing the full picture before deciding to make a move.

    My second consideration is that, even if the grass was greener on the other side, it is not our grass. The truth is that we were not born to live on the sweat of others, that we cannot live with our dignity intact if we only benefit from what others have created. Is it not common sense that the grass is greener on the other side because someone is watering it? Does it not then follow that if you want it to be greener on your side you should water your side too? That got me thinking as to why we cannot strive to water our side instead of always being attracted by the lush green that is in someone else’s yard. It surely cannot be that hard to improve the living and working conditions of our people, can it? Those aspects of our reality that make us feel we live a wretched life and that make us pity ourselves have existed all over the world at one time or another. The difference is that, unlike us, all these other countries that we see as having “greener grass” have simply come up with better ways to address the problems they once struggled with. We too, then, can follow their example. All of us! Our government, too, must strive to find better ways of dealing with issues affecting the life of its people so as to make them want to stay. Otherwise, who is going to work towards growing our economy if everybody is gone?

    I, therefore, have come to doubt that it is necessary or desirable for us to move from our motherland. I now know that I do not want to leave my country. Why would I if I do not hate it? I love my country and I am proud to be a Kenyan. I have come to terms with the fact that loving my country does not mean thinking or saying Kenya is the best country in the world. It also means admitting that as a country we should do better and we ought to do better because we have the potential to do better. I also know that it is not that those who want to leave are less patriotic than those who want to stay and they should therefore not be patronised because at the end of the day we are all Kenyans. But when, ultimately, it comes down to making a choice I sincerely hope that we all choose to live and die in Kenya and not leave.

  • My Two Cents’ Worth on Migrating to Explore the World

    By Alexander Makau Mukiti

    I bet you two cents that the first white man to discover Africa was armed with nothing but faith, in a poorly made canoe. He must have literally bumped into Africa, and if the monsoon winds had stirred him just a little bit to the right he would have ended up in Australia or Antarctica. I will go out on a limb here and assume that he was a man – yes, I dare you to accuse me of misogyny.

    Sometimes I bury my head in my sheets and imagine him seated miserably in his backyard filled with regret, anger and disappointment that his life had not panned out how he had pictured it. C’est la vie – such is life; sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I know that’s how I would have brushed it off, but, no, his head is spinning and his heart is thirsty for an adventure, something to jump-start his adrenaline. So curiosity, boredom, and a mid-life crisis lead him to set a journey. With no direction in particular but great desire to stimulate himself, he sails south. Somehow he survives the terrors of the sea, and, by grace and mercy, his voyage lands him on this beautiful continent. And this arrival turns the wheel of time for some historic events to happen in and to Africa.

    The white man is met with open arms, and with astonished, yet smiley faces and warm hearts. He’s mesmerized by these amazingly textured human beings with thick hair and dressed in animal skins. He is dazzled by the languages, and he is amazed to see the kind of religion we had going on here, but he still considers our way of life “primitive”. He gets deeper into the continent – well, actually, the “big country,” according to him, and he stumbles upon these breathtaking landscapes, all green and unpolluted,  and he suddenly gets ideas.  He looks around him and sees a backward, retrogressive country, a country sitting on a lot of potential. He is filled with greed to turn this sanctuary into his own, and his feelings of being a failure suddenly disappear. He is overcome by a sense of superiority, as well as by so much ambition that he can literally taste it on the tongue. All the things he has so far not felt in a long time come rushing back to him like a moth to a flame.

    The white man travels back to his country and exalts himself before his family, friends and his government. He beats his chest, reassuring himself that he all by himself has discovered something more valuable than any man who has so far walked upon the planet. The geniuses of his time, he tells himself, have had nothing to offer to beat what he has achieved, and he dangles this carrot that is Africa before their eyes and says:  “It is huge, greener than most places, fertile, full of resources:  gold, lead, diamonds – you name it – and the icing on the cake, the cherry on top, is that it is all free and comes with free labour.” They are all hooked. So, in the years that follow that coincidental trip, Africa will be visited by explorers seeking a sight for sore eyes. In will come missionaries, who will kick off the ground running, and like a pressed child who has found a hidden bush to ease himself they will make it pour. Traders also will find their way to this ocean of resources. Everyone with a little bit of curiosity will be headed this way – including even people with inferiority complex disorder – because this will be the place whereby they feel like royalty despite their backgrounds.

    News of this rare gem called Africa will travel fast, even at a time when there will be no social media and when different parts of the world will be invested with unknown diseases, for there will be no impediment to Europe’s interest in them. And, as fate would have it, Europe’s greed will be too much for it to contain, that it will rush to Africa. Different superpowers will camp in various places on the Africa, and I assure you they will not consult us first. The era of colonization will be upon our people, and it will be an altogether difficult time for us. I don’t know what sins our ancestors have committed then, or what they will have committed in their preceding lives, but the wages will be due.

    If you read your history well you will most definitely come across the invasion of Africa and how different communities reacted to that hostile takeover. The white man literally migrated to Africa, took over our lands, and wanted to be treated like a god? But as sure as hell it wasn’t going to be that easy, for some communities resisted his rule.

    The Nandi of Kenya, the Hehe of Tanganyika and the Ashanti of Ghana, among many other tribes, were not ready to play ball, and the price was too much to pay. Tribes like the Maasai of Kenya, the Baganda of Uganda, the Lemba of Zimbabwe, and many others collaborated with the colonizer, but their maximum cooperation with him did not go without bloodshed either. The Europeans relegated us to a sub-class of human existence to such an extent that it still stirs up bitter emotions among the older generations of our people whenever they go down memory lane and recall the cruel acts done unto them, their parents, and their siblings.

    That single trip out of curiosity and adventure somehow left us, the black people, killed, homeless and governed by the white man.  In our corner of the woods, we had the British, while across the river we had the French, and beyond the hills we had the Germans, and so on. Greed is an insatiable desire, and more often than not it blinded the white man so much so that that he tripped and fell on his brothers’ backyards. Yet on those days when they didn’t see eye to eye, when brother wanted brother’s piece of the pie, somehow it was our blood, we the Africans, that soaked the earth, because they enlisted our young men to fight their battles. This was settled by the treaty to partition Africa when the indigenous territories were enclosed in boundaries with restrictions of movement from one country to another, so that, even today, it is still a hustle to get a visa from one African country to another. When trouble stirred at home the white man also shipped us off to fight those battles for him as well. We fought alongside him in World War I and World War II, when diplomacy was off the table and each country wanted to show off their toys. The bill was ironically invoiced to us in a war that was clearly not ours.

    In favour of logic and reason, it was beyond reasonable that the man had to go. A few educated men and women came together, strategized, incited, and took a swing at the Europeans. This revolution was historical, although not without its ups and downs and a lot of bloodshed – because the white man did not leave without a fight. We finally got our lands back, our culture and our people in different prisons. Ghana got her independence in 1957, Tanzania in 1961, Uganda 1962, Nigeria 1960, and Kenya in 1963 – and so did many other African countries.

    To say my imagination of how these events transpired is wild would be an understatement. Each country, each community has their own story to tell of the harm done to it those many years ago, and these stories need to be heard because the pain inherited from those events these many generations has not yet dissipated. Most certainly one thing remains true: the relationship between Africa and the outside world is complicated. Those hundreds of years ago, when the white man wanted to break his monotony and stumbled onto the continent, he was welcomed with open arms until he proved himself otherwise, as I have just narrated.

    What is ironical, or, rather, paradoxical, is that, for us, the experience is the opposite whenever we decide to explore and see the world beyond our borders. First, it’s a hustle to get a visa, even though some of those whose countries we may want to visit may not require one in order for them to visit us. And secondly, more often than not when we finally fly into those counties we are met with hostility at the airports, death stares on the streets, closed arms at the malls, and cold hearts at the restaurants. Today black people in the United States of America are still considered lesser human beings than European Americans, and whenever they walk on the streets it is as if they have targets pinned on their backs. Even with our artefacts still on display in their museums – and I dare I say an apology long overdue – many in those countries still do not accept us as fellow humans and certainly do not consider us worthy of their hospitality. I would not go so far as to condemn all Europeans and Americans on those grounds.  As everyone knows only too well, every society has its good and bad apples.  However, one cannot help but wonder why this problem persists in certain parts of the world despite the passage of so much time.

    The first person that wanted to explore, see the world and all that, sent Africa down the colonization and slavery route, and with the kind of debt we have accumulated we might just as well end up in cages again, but that is beside the point. The question is: why doesn’t everybody settle in their own places and put a hold to this travelling and seeing the world that is, for the most part, misguided curiosity? Yes, it might cost us money, but our pride, dignity, and safety will not be compromised if we made that conclusion and remained stuck with it. We have everything we need here, and, as the saying goes, a flower must bloom wherever it was planted and trust it was not planted there by mistake.

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