The padlock is small but carries more than its weight. It is used to secure buildings, boxes in high school, cash boxes and bicycles, among others.

It has a long and checkered history. It’s also personal to me, maybe because we never had padlocks in our home when growing up. 

I reported to Form One with a padlocked box. It was a school in Nairobi whose name is not disclosed for security reasons. That shattered my respect for the city. Was it not supposed to be more civilised than my remote village? Why does the city have thieves? The other downgrading for the city was beggars. Never saw one before coming to the city.

Impersonal people also took me by surprise. What of slums that are worse than houses in rural areas?

Yet, we still have food set aside for “watu wa Nairobi” during rural funerals.  What happened to the signboard, “Welcome to Nairobi, the Green City in the Sun.” Enough on Nairobi’s “fakeness.”

The padlock had a dual role, a sign of insecurity but also prestige.  We never bothered with padlocks because our village was secure. I do not need any textbook to explain the causes of crime.

Myth and mystique

I noted inequality was low as we grew up, while hunger and desperation were rare. Even school dropouts got jobs working on farms and made money.

Only that they married early and started families. The economic consequences of that are there for all to see. The padlock was a sign of prestige; only those a bit well up locked their houses.

We lock in something valuable! Why lock a grass-thatched house?  What is there to steal?  

The myth and mystique of the padlock have, however, faded slowly, courtesy of technology. First came the lock, which just needed the key.

That was replaced by locks with secret codes and, lately, cards, mostly in offices and institutions. Not many homes use cards for access. But despite the advances in security and integration of software, the padlock will remain a sign of innovation and prestige. The most comical use of the padlock was locking the rotary phone (Genz find out) to stop misuse.

The padlock is such a common tool that we do not spare much thought for it.  It was patented in the UK in 1805 and in the United States in 1807.

  It’s good to keep old things, not just in the museum. Why not a family museum? Got an old padlock? Clock? First mobile phone? Old gramophone?

Old coins? I even have my high school “love letters.”   Such souvenirs remind us of where we came from and how far we can go.