I have very fond memories of my early days in a small village known as Gathíngíra. The village has been so important that even after permanently moving from there at a tender age of 9 years and having lived in countless addresses, my deepest heart desires as well as my moral compass has been tethered to this small village in a manner that none else can ever hope to compete.
When I think about the reading of my social audiometer that indicates the miles I have traveled and all the various people I have met, I think it would be sufficient enough to make a credible sample upon which I can base my assertion that Gathíngíra was a legendary village with vibes that are worthy of preservation or resurrection. It was so integral to the development of analytical thinking that has helped me survive to this day. It is the last place I lived a semblance of a sustainable living that was least corrupted by vampire culture that drives the empire of the day. By that, I mean that the major crisis we face in an age often labeled as Anthropocene or Capitalocene, has been largely brought about by means of changing the values of majority of the world’s population to adopt unsustainable concepts that temporarily benefit the architects of the empire but ultimately leads to our demise.
One of the main reasons I left the village for the city was precisely as a result of falling to the fallacy that all that glittered in the city was gold. There was all manner of well oiled propaganda that I was inundated with that I couldn’t have possibly seen the lies. So I left for the city and it has taken me a better part of 40 years of wandering in the urban wilderness. I have been working to return to the most sane place I have ever lived. While I have had the opportunity to travel to places I never even knew existed, I have grown more fascinated with my home village. It almost seems that all my travels and learning serves only one major purpose: understanding my first nine years of my life.
Forty years ago on this day was the day I vividly remember entertaining the idea of attending university. I was in the first year of secondary and hadn’t really thought about university education as nobody in my family had graduated. But then my sister in law at that time was in her second year or so. One evening, my cousin Kapep came to visit us for the long holiday. That evening Njeri, my sister-in-law, was making preparations for dinner, and a deep debate ensued between them. I was glued to the radio, the only electronic gadget we owned at the time. It was around dusk and I had just wrapped my evening chores of milking Kamore, our lovely and ever faithful cow. I was now free and was keen to follow the ongoing Safari Rally car race aptly planned to coincide with the rain season. I was a big fan of Victor Preston Junior and his Datsun 120Y.
I was a naughty boy and never really made toy cars like many other boys but I negotiated with one of my childhood friends to get one such toy made out of a wire and I was keen to name it Datsun even without caring that it had been designed as a totally different model. As I outgrew the age of having wire toys of a car, cars continued to fascinate me. I can probably attribute this fascination witht he fact that there were very few cars in the village during my young days. We would hear cows driving on the road towards the direction of our home from miles away and run from the fields where we were either working or grazing animals and run to the road just to see a vehicle pass by. We would ensure to read the number plates and memorize them. It is ironic that I knew the number plates of some of those vehicles from those days to this day, yet I often have to check my number plates whenever I have to pay for the digital parking meters that require me to enter the plate number of my car. Maybe the love of cars and advancements are deeply rooted in my DNA. I would later be very surprised after I met someone with my uncommon name on social media. We became friends and there is a chance, however small, that we could be distant relatives. The distant relative who shares my name shared an interesting story of his uncle who was a popular driver around that time named Njathi. In short, my interests couldn’t have been further away from matters of college and food.
While I was listening to the radio commentary on the Safari Rally, I could simultaneously vaguely follow the conversation between the only two adults in the house even though it was a bit philosophical. It was during that time that Kapep used a word I could have sworn and bet with my life couldn’t have been an English word. The word was paraphernalia. I turned the radio down and asked Kapep to repeat the word. I expected Njeri to ask what the meaning of the word was. I was wrong. She did not seem to care about coming to my rescue. She seemed to have understood the word quite well and continued with the debate without any indication that I had interrupted the conversation. I immediately started designing a formula in my head to remember the word. I used the word paraffin, the only foreign source of energy we used in our house and gonorrhea to make sure that I would not forget the mesmerizing word. I repeated the word as many times as I could silently to make sure that I could later find a dictionary and confirm that there actually was such a word. I have no idea why but the word sounded so strange that I could not get my mind off of it.
I later managed to get a dictionary and looked up the word. To my surprise there it was and what did it mean? It meant miscellaneous things necessary for an activity. I had lost that bet. Kapep was right and so was Njeri. But what I gained was a desire to be so learned that I would be able to engage in such conversations and make wrong betts thinking that words that were being thrown around were a mistake or from a different language. It also fascinated me that a person could keep what appeared to me as a very complex word in their head and actually use it so casually. I was hooked. I embarked on a totally different race. Safari Rally and Victor Preston Junior no longer held any sway over me. My new focus from then was the death of ignorance and the birth of knowledge. Just like the Safari Rally, it has been a long journey with twists and turns, but one of great adventure. I travel many miles and talk to many people, not about paraphernalia but about something that was so mundane at the time but yet more fascinating. I speak mostly about the kind of people I grew up around during my time in the village and the great lessons I carry to this day.
Now that I managed to finally attend the highly coveted institution of learning during my early days and to achieve not one but several degrees, I thought that it would be nice to repay the debt of being being inspired by a word which I thought could probably never have existed by celebrating the people I owe everything I have done in life to. These people are like no other people I have lived among in many ways. But I will pick the one thing that was so different about these people. The group of people in my village were masters of astroprojection. They understood the simple idea of living like stars and the importance of shining and keeping its orbit. It is the only logical explanation I can come up with for having designed such a sustainable culture that projected them into the future. I celebrate the birth of a vibrant consciousness among my ancestors and the vigilant members of my village. But I also wail for those who fell for the lies of the empire that continue to push a holiday of celebrating a resurrection of a white person and concepts that continue to wreck our once functional community.
More and more people are claiming a new form of resurrection while in actuality practicing death worship by living a life that is contrary to the values they claim. That is what I celebrate and I commit to making a reality both in my village but also everywhere I go. My message is simple, build your heaven right here on earth. I saw a semblance of it and I know it can be done by human beings. What we can break we can fix, at least if you don’t wait for too long. We are all on a Safari Rally of life, some are speeding towards death worship and others towards life worship. Our food is like the paraphernalia for our craft, except that it is the cardinal tool that one needs to reach the two possible goals of either life or death. Just food resurrects life and junk and unjust food resurrect death. While I was watching My modern fascination is no longer with Datsun 120Y. I now know that such fascination is just for a while. Such ephemeral paraphernalia are dangerous to bet on in your life. Easter there is a time to resurrect my sustainable indigenous sensibilities with a bit of nostalgia and homage to those who lit my personal Safari Rally away from death and towards life in the stars but grounded in my ancestral village.