By Dr. Wandia Njoya
I support a complete lock down.
This is how I suggest it be implemented.
We map the residential areas of all the rich people who brought this disease with planes, who are doing road trips and throwing trash in estates and who are supporting the police. Those areas need to be put on lockdown, together with MPs and governors.
It’s the rich in State House area, Karura, Parklands, Kile, etc who need to be out on 24 hour lock down. Plus MPs, MPs, MCA’s, CS’s and all top GoK officials. Those people have walk in fridges, kitchen gardens and huge freezers. They won’t even notice the lock down. Mutahi Kagwe can give his press conferences via Skype or Zoom. And those platforms allow many users, we we don’t need to see the Cabinet social distancing. And their houses are big enough.
And then we will be surprised that the disease will not stop spreading so fast and so far, thanks to people.with cars, and not only that, Kenya will THRIVE like a nanzenz. The economy will thrive, it will be less unequal, and we will start to see all the bullshit bureaucrat jobs that are so totally unnecessary and yet absorb so much money for nothing.
Meanwhile here is what I did on April 1st:
So today my poetry class covered poems from Lusophone (Portuguese speaking) Africa. I began by explaining to my students the violence of Portuguese slavery and colonialism.The poems are intense: they are sensual but at the same time revolutionary. Men and women talk about the people they love but from whom they are separated by revolutionary war, jail and working in the South African mines. They talk about their dreams of freedom, which are very simple: flowers, dancing, harvest, children…
This was the stuff that prepared me for the man who eventually came into my life. They taught me to simplify love and put love at the heart of struggle. I learned that love must be tied to revolution, and that love is really about simplicity. I’m not sure my students get it now, but I’m trying to prepare them to protect their souls and relationships from the corrupt dreams of cars, houses, jobs and other material things which distort and pollute our feelings for each other. It is these corrupt dreams and distorted feelings that have brought us to the pandemic – we have no care for the earth or society. We care for power and money, and the universe has hit back.
It was such a deeply emotional content, and it was frustrating to teach it through the impersonal medium of the internet. I fail to see how Kenyans keep talking about digital classrooms as progress. That obsession with computers is no different from that with range rovers and other tins that we like to think compensate for our soulessness.
