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NAIROBI, KENYA - To all those who had their fingers crossed for me, you may uncross them. Thank you all for your prayers and wishes. I returned from South Africa around ten days ago and have been frantically catching up with work deadlines in-between going to the mosque for the ten days of Muharram.
Aamena
JiwajiBut I am getting ahead of myself. Last time I wrote I was chasing my identity card from the NSSF buildings.
Overcoming final hurdles
A few days after I wrote to g21, I went to their offices over lunch hour and the secretary for the Boss was preparing some wedding fliers for a friend of hers for that weekend and neither her computer nor her printer were working. I saw an opportunity and offered to prepare the fliers for her.
At 2:30 pm I left her office with her document on diskette, and left behind my ID receipt number. She promised to come by at 4:00pm with a print out that would enable me to begin processing my Certificate of Good Conduct at the CID Headquarters. She arrived early, at 3:30 p.m., and when I handed over around 50 copies of the wedding flier, she handed over, not a computer print out, but my ID car d -- brand, spanking new, with sharp green edges ... and the worst picture of myself that I have ever seen! (I wonder if everyone looks terrible with a green shine to their skin.)
I was thrilled to see it and so suppressed the urge to find out why I had been given the run around for weeks when it was the work of a few hours. I ran to the CID headquarters and began afresh the process for another official document. I was promised the certificate in two weeks, making it the first week of January 2005 and so I spent the two Christmas weeks quietly believing that this time I would not have to chase the process and that all would be well.
On Monday 3rd January, I went to pick up my certificate, only to find that from the bulk awaiting collection mine was not amongst them.
I was so frustrated and angry and desperate. that if someone had approached me at that stage and offered to sort it out for a fee, I would have only asked how much. I, who abhor the practice of corruption and the damage it has caused my country.
Aside on corruption
Two years ago I was sorting out my mother's immigration papers to stay in Kenya and when I visited the Immigration headquarters at Nyayo House (renowned now for the practice of torture in its basements, one of the less amiable traits of our previous regime,) I spoke to a well-mannered gentleman who offered to help sort the papers out. He asked for Kshs [Kenyan shillings -- Ed.] 3,500 as the renewal fee and I, completely green at this, handed it over.He pocketed Kshs 1,500 in front of me, glancing up briefly to whisper that this was his share. I was so surprised that I couldn't even make a comment.
He issued me a receipt for Kshs 2,000, the actual renewal fee, had the passport renewal stamped, brought it out and gave it to me.
I was disgusted.
As a civil servant I had been surrounded by posters cautioning not to give or receive a bribe ... and without even intending to, I had. I had in fact been deceived into bribing someone.
I visited the CID headquarters nearly every three hours hoping that mine had just been held up somehow at the production offices and that its arrival was imminent, along with the new batch of entries. But two days of desperate hoping later and the serial number on the certificates reaching 800,000 when mine had been in the 200,000 bracket, I decided that I would have to speak to someone.I filled out a complaint and a request and another two days later was told that the photocopy of the now infamous identity card attached to the application for the certificate did not have clear fingerprints. And so I painted my tips black again, smudged them onto more sheets -- the sight of black ink under my fingernails not even a concern, the practice I had had in having fingerprints taken making my double jointed fingers bend malleably to the pressure exerted on them by the officer.
This time my original ID card was attached to the application form to verify the originality of my fingerprints, and the process began afresh -- except [that] I refused to take any chances and pulled out the stops. To hell with being the submissive, Indian female seeking a document in a patriarchal, African government organization. So I spoke to one gentleman and when he did not give me much hope of being able to collect the certificate by that Friday, I spoke to a second.
Tuesday in the second week of January came and went. On Wednesday I went back to the CID headquarters, renowned now as the "muindi" Muslim woman in the Burkha who was chasing her document and had not paid a "wananchi" to chase it for her, and urged the second gentleman that I had spoken to to help me. He searched again and. on not finding a trace, told me to return the next morning when we would visit the Production headquarters in town together and track it down.
The next morning, we went to the Production headquarters but in order to track the certificate they needed my original ID. Of course the first officer I had spoken to had attached it to my application.
By this time I was having nervous jitters about my original ID card having been misplaced or stolen, visualizing myself starting the entire ID card preparation process from scratch.
We returned to the CID headquarters (is your head spinning by now because mine definitely was) and my second contact decided to ask the first about my certificate, at which point, the first officer got upset with me for making two people pursue the same issue and for not trusting his word. After scolding me, he told me to pass by at 4 that evening and pick up the certificate.
I did pass by at 4 but I felt terrible.
The first thing I did was apologise for questioning [the first officer's] authority and for upsetting him, and then I took my certificate and left for the South African embassy.
I am still not sure whether what I did was wrong in asking two people to pursue one certificate. After all the hassles I went through I just wasn't prepared to take any chances, especially at the last minute, and yet I still feel guilty about upsetting someone who was trying to help me.
New Horizons
Days later I left for South Africa, excited as a child at the thought of returning to a country where I had had the happiest moments I could remember, a place where my fondest memories lay and at an opportunity to meet all the friends whose faces and presences I had carried in my heart for three long years.South Africa for me will always be associated with my university years and the person I was then and so returning to it after three years of difficulty, challenge and phenomenal personal growth was awkward.
Now, more than ever, I recognize the importance of schema and its effect on a person's interpretation of a given situation. It was as if I was returning to a different country but, in truth, it was the same country; it was I who was different.
The two weeks I was there passed like a ship in the night, leaving behind just the memory of lights on the horizon, not even a ripple of water. And now I am back in Nairobi, in the country of my birth but aware more than ever of what Kenya's potential is and how the callous, arrogant and selfish attitude of some of its citizens is letting it down.
Every time I see South Africa I cannot help but compare it to what Kenya could be, to what any African country could be ... and despite the problems that [South Africa] still faces and that its people like to discuss so vehemently, South Africa has reached a plateau that other African countries dream of for generations and never see.
I remember sitting in the back seat of my friend's car while she drove around Port Elizabeth, seeing the green pitches on which a group of people were playing night football, the entire pitch lit up by strobe lights; the crowds of young people thronging nightclubs in groups - full of life and living it to the full; the students in Grahamstown walking down High Street in slops and shorts enjoying that first taste of freedom and independence they had found at University; the Rhodes library filled even when campus is closed with students eager for learning and knowledge. None of these things have I ever seen in Kenya.
Security [in Kenya] does not allow night matches. And that is assuming that there isn't an electricity outage. The last time a night club was thronged it resulted in a handful of people being killed and around fifty others injured following a stampede at the gates, due to poor security and planning.
Kenyan universities are more memorable for their riots and stoning incidents than their production of academics.
Even the huge signs at South Africa's crossroads and traffic light corners warning of a "Hijack Hotspot" are a symbol of how South Africa's people are fighting the wave of crime that has engulfed their streets and that their government is spearheading the campaign.
In Kenya, you just hear about people being hijack ed and killed, matatus waylaid on their way to the suburbs with commuters after a long day's work, driven into the "bundus", [the passengers] robbed, sometimes stripped and stranded, left to walk miles to a major road or police station, with no clothes and no money.
Newspapers with screaming headlines and pictures of the victims of crime, slaughtered in their own homes; crimes that have not been looked into close to eighteen months after the fact.
"Beware of Human Dogs" painted on red dustbins that line Nairobi's Uhuru Highway shouting statistics of how a woman is raped every three minutes in Kenya ... and yet women and children continue to be raped and sodomised, the strident voices of female advocates appealing to the government to recognize the need to protect the female population ignored.
Instead prominent Kenyan politicians publicly joke about how donor pressure on the Kenyan government to fight corruption and graft can be compared to the rape of a "willing woman".
Even though I live in the capital city of Kenya, the supposed benchmark for the country's infrastructure, I was awestruck by the highways, the shopping centers and the airport in Jo'Burg. But most of all I envied the lifestyle that my friends lived: young, independent, with a career and a social life that reflected the best qualities of each of these elements. If one were to make a surface comparison between them and me, there would be little difference. City lifestyles both of them, YUPpie to an extent. But if one were to look deeper, the vast chasm between us would be clear.
Although South Africa is the country that has emerged form a racist era, it is the Kenyan people who are more conscious of the race of their friends -- not because of colour but because of the unspoken link between class and colour, and the stigma that is still associated with a mixing of both.
The Catch-22 that the youth face in Kenya is worse: either they are confined to their homes by transferred fears of what lurks in the night or trapped by the eyes and ears of people that see everything and that judge without being judged themselves. Nothing is more debilitating than being afraid to be yourself because you are worried of how a society, that you don't care for or respect, will judge you. Trapped and terrified. That is truly living in fear.
I had forgotten what it was like to live, forgotten the sound of my own laughter having been cloistered in a life where I was slowly being suffocated and starved.
And I found all of that in two weeks. I re-discovered the joys of friendship and trust. For two weeks, I acted like what I was, like who I was, someone in their mid-twenties with the joys of a career and the independence that this brings and the hope that the future holds something so extraordinary that it will take your breath away in wonder and amazement.
In Kenya, even my dreams had been stunted; I was forced to continually second-guess myself and my actions ... and my soul told the ravages of it.
Johannesburg has a large cloud of smog hovering above it but I left South Africa determined not to let Nairobi's fumes and pollution cloak me, resolved to laugh and smile as wide as I wanted, and to wear flowers in my hair.
Two weeks later, I feel like I have been back for months and there is little proof that I had ever been away -- I have settled into the routine of my life as smoothly as if I had never been away -- little evidence but for the smile on my face at odd hours in the day and a hope for tomorrow.
© 2005, GENERATOR 21.
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