Peter Abrahams, who died in Jamaica in January last year, was the South African writer who made famous the conflict between the Custom and the City. He told the story not just as a metaphor for the conflict between the White people and the rest of the races in Apartheid South Africa, but also as an exposé of what happens when two alien worlds meet in a sudden and tumultuous manner.
In the seminal work titled Mine Boy, Abrahams tells us how once, long ago, the City came to visit the Custom. The Custom, he says, received the City very well. He gave the City food. The City enjoyed eating the food, but said nothing. He was given beer and beautiful young women. He went on to drink and to sample and savour the pleasures. He serenaded and moulded. But as usual, he said nothing. The people, however, thought that the Custom and the City had become friends. Things were looking up, they thought. When they returned from looking after their animals and crops in the fields, the Custom was missing. Also missing was their food, their beer. Their beautiful young women were all gone. But the City was there, endlessly laughing at them and making lewd jokes.
Make no mistake; the City is about to laugh at you if it hasn’t already begun doing so. I have said in this space before that the sun is setting on the Custom. Do we need to manage the process? The traditional African village is going. In the next two generations, it will be a thing of the past – dead, buried and forgotten. A certain Joshua – not the one who was recently going to Canaan – asks me each time I raise this issue, “Why are you bothered about 50 years from now? You will not even be there.”
Maybe, but so what? Present civilisations live only so that they can plan for the comforts of future generations. Beyond this, life is meaningless. To live to eat and do the things that biology commands your body to do is useless, if that’s the only reason you live. It should be enough to live for only one day, for there is nothing else you will do that is different. You will sleep, wake up, eat, quarrel, laugh, pray, cry and all that – but to what good end?
Life is simply and squarely about tomorrow’s people. That is why Kenya’s Vision 2030 is a narrow horizon vision – if such a thing could be called a vision. Accordingly, I ask once again – where will this country called Kenya be in another 100 years? The town is invading the countryside. But it is not the town as such. It is the slum. Courtesy of devolved government, we are returning to the village in huge numbers. We have managed to redefine urbanisation. It is no longer about people moving from rural communities to urban settlements. It is rather about rural communities becoming urban centres. Don’t we need both local and national initiatives to define what shape this transformation should take? Is there a case for planning sewerage and garbage management in the emerging urban communities? How will a town like Kakamega, for example, manage its sewage even only 10 years from now? What physical arteries will a sewage pipeline in Kisii follow, with all the unplanned development of private property? Everyone who owns some piece of land can construct almost anything they want. There is no logical correlation of that property to other people’s properties and their implications for public utilities.
How will they manage garbage? Where will the water supply networks follow? How will they interact with sewage and power supply lines? Are we making provisions for future road expansions? The present village paths will want to become major roads to meet the needs of the future. Rural roads will even become dual carriageways in another 50 years. Is the present settlement in Isecha in Kisii taking this into account? In this day and age when we are demolishing buildings on riparian land in Nairobi, are we asking the same questions about structures that are now shooting up in the villages and village towns? What about security? The Ministry of Devolution and the Senate have their assignments cut out for them. Together, they need to lead us through national conversations that will lead to policies and legislations that manage the transformation of rural communities into urban settlements. Left to the ongoing free for all invasion of the Custom by the City, only the very worst characteristics of the slum are getting transferred to erstwhile rural communities.
If you look at the expansion and growth of market centres along the Kisumu-Kakamega Road and those along Kisumu-Busia Road for example, it is not difficult to see that in another three decades, they are going to fuse into one continuous metropolis. This metropolis is likely to be a massive slum. Instructively, the slum will span the counties of Kisumu, Vihiga, Kakamega and Siaya. It will even go all the way to Busia, Homa Bay, Nyamira, Kericho, Bomet, Kisii and Bungoma. Where is the urban planning function, at the National Government and the County Government levels? Do we need an urgent conversation about the Custom and the City?
-The writer is a strategic public communications adviser. www.barrackmuluka.co.ke
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