As you raise a child so shall it turn out!
… Mtoto umleavyo ndivyo akuavyo
My mum was fond of the saying; mtoto umleavyo ndviyo akuavyo (as you raise a child so shall it turn out). I recalled this as I read the first story in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book The Thing Around Your Neck. To paint the picture vividly mum would tell us the story of a young man who was condemned to hang for a serious crime he had commited. To bid his mum goodbye he bit off her ear as a backhanded compliment for failing to correct him when he brought home stolen pencils and rubbers. Over time he graduated to more serious crime.
On days when I was feeling bellicose, I would wonder why, in our society, it is mothers who are blamed when children make mistakes! “Please blame someone else for a change! And if the men are so good, why did they not make a better job of it?” I love the fact that the Kiswahili saying is gender neutral. The parent in umleavyo (how you raise him/her/it), could be the mother, the father, both or the society even! I suppose, also, at my age I am more amenable to taking the lesson; how important it is that parents try their best to pass on good values to their kids and less prone to the theatrics of the blamegame.
As I read Americanah with renewed interest I am reminded of the early ‘90s when many people known to me were migrating to the USA, Canada, UK and Australia. It looked like nobody wanted to remain in Kenya then. We called it brain drain at the time because all professionals trained with my parents’ and forebearers’ taxes and hard earned wages were leaving the country they had studied so hard to build and lead (as leaders of tomorrow – viongozi wa kesho) to greener pastures. We watched the so called leaders-of-tomorrow jump ship in perplexed horror.
In equally mortified horror we watch and listen to our present day leaders call this brain drain embracing and taking advantage of job opportunities abroad! Is that what it is now!? Instead of making your country liveble for its people, instead of creating environments that allow industry to flourish you encourage your people to flee as you plunder and destroy your lands! Those who never considered leaving the country secretly wished the economic downturn would never reach a place where they too felt the best way out was out. Is that patriotism? Somehow, I was convinced it was.
We looked forward to staying home and being part of the team that developed our motherland for posterity. We wanted to stay here so that when those who took care of us as infants needed us we would be there to lend them a caring hand. Alas after years of hope that the African renaissance was finally resurfacing, we seem to be backpedalling to the mental anguish of the 90s with our clueless leaders doing little to change the narrative of Africa’s begging bowls, wars and hunger.
As I read this part of Americanah – should it be called Britishnah or Anglonah – I feel a rage rising within me. The unpleasant experiences of those of us who ran away from our lands in search of choices and certainty are the cause of it. I wish the fire raging within me could leap and lick whatever is responsible for the destruction of our beautiful lands. I am not sure how much anger will have welled up in me by the time I will be done with this phase of my new found enthusiasm to complete my book authored by an African.
Do our leaders read some of these books and if they do, do they extrapolate in their minds how their progeny will fare 20 years hence! I wonder me! Didn’t imagine 20 plus years later I would be beholding what it meant when I told myself “we are like people who shoot ourselves but because the bullet takes 20 years to explode, we convince ourselves that there is no problem.” The bullet is exploding before our eyes but instead of looking for ways to correct our mistakes we continue along the same route of destruction, why is this?
Obinze’s mother’s observation that “We laugh too much, maybe we should laugh less and solve our problems more!” is worth examining. Maybe before we go to solving our problems we should first get angry and while livid with anger identify where we should be directing our anger! The danger we face is that in righteous anger we direct our outrage at the wrong place.
Normally we look at the other person, our leaders, those who went ahead of us and never us! Its ever the other person forgetting that “Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto: I am a human being; I consider nothing human alien to me.” Consult Maya Angelou for the details of that both the negative and positive aspects of being human. (See here for a short form of her message or for a full speech on the subject.)
Instead of pointing fingers of blame we should look deep within ourselves and start apportioning blame at ourselves first for what we could do and haven’t done in righting the wrongs that are before us. I love it that in the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People Stephen Covey asks us to be concerned about our sphere of control. That which we can control after we have cast our ballot and before we go back to the ballot box is never in the leader who is doing wrong even if it is good to point out their wrong. The work that needs doing is within.
The other equation we must solve is the equation of getting a critical mass of converts to this gospel. Part of solving that equation involves raising children that are convinced about doing what is right before or while pointing out what is wrong. Another portion of the equation is walking the talk however hard it might be. The time to start figuring out the equation is now, it is not late, it will never be too late.