Parable of Kenya as a pit latrine that cannot refuse USA dysentery

I apologise upfront for the coarse imagery in the title of this piece. I didn’t invent it. In fact, it’s drawn from a book bearing a very beautiful title: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah.

While the book came out in 1968, and Armah was writing about Ghana, he may have well have been writing about Kenya of 2026, a society whose decay and decadence mirrors the sea of shit—apologies again for the visceral, metaphoric language—but that’s how Nairobi looks like whenever it rains.

The rains have been beating us everywhere, though, and Armah’s allegorical novel captures the decay and disillusionment that defined his country Ghana, the first independent African state, in that first decade of uhuru. And since writers belong to the prophetic tradition, the novel precisely mirrors the state of our nation.

Documenting the travails of “the man,” an honest railway worker who’s determined to stay on the straight and the narrow, against the constant push from everyone, including his wife, Oyo, to do some ukarabati and bring a little something home, like his corrupt but wealthy peers, he refuses to capitulate. He stays put, even as the society around him decays into pee and poo.

In a certain sense, even those that steal from us don’t do much with the loot. It’s all converted into pee and poo, whether they ate salmon at Italian restaurants, drowned in matured French wine, the extravagance afforded through funds meant for a public school in Lokitaung. Or Kamagambo or Katoloni.

In Armah’s novel, this moral decay is powerfully conveyed in the pit latrine that cannot refuse anything, including dysentery, whose biological notoriety is only comparable to the ebola that we face today.

Which brings us to the big issue of the day. The United States of America, the empire built on slave labour, is building a medical facility to quarantine its citizens who have contracted or are at risk of contracting the ebola virus, which is ravaging DRC and Uganda.

No, they won’t fly their diseased folks home, because they risk infecting the great people of America; they are bringing them here, in our midst, because we’re like a pit latrine that cannot refuse American dysentery of ebola.

For those among us who have travelled to the western hemisphere for work or study, or both, the level of screening required before you can access a visa makes one think they are a specimen of all “tropical” diseases known to mankind.

After all, we still live on tree tops with primates. So getting a bunch of sick Americans in our midst doesn’t pose any risk since this is the hotbed of “tropical” diseases.

I get that logic, as I also appreciate the logic of “global cooperation” that this ebola lab brings. It’s a direct foreign investment, which is badly needed in these tough times, especially as elections loom large and other investors pull back to wait and see who takes the helm next year.

They call it political risk, and it’s measured by the hour, as they do the weather. This means keeping an ear to the ground not too dissimilar to Rigathi Gachagua aka Riggy G’s antics, to gauge public sentiment.

Of course Prezzo Bill Ruto need not worry about public sentiment; he’s the Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. That’s why he could deploy our policemen to Haiti, even as the chorus of disapproval hit a crescendo. Ditto the pact giving Americans access to our health data.

I heard some very intelligent chaps hail the ebola lab as a mark of American confidence in our nation’s future. Why, they could have built it anywhere else, by fire, by force, but they chose Kenya. Yes, that’s how we measure our worth—by being recipients of diseased Americans.

I won’t call it inferiority complex, that’s to problematise a simple phenomenon of self-hate. I think it’s upumbavu, pure and simple. The question I keep asking myself is how we got here in the first place, and how we intend on getting out.