Of matatus, daily commute and lessons from a walking nation

Students along Jogoo Road walk to school on Day Two of the public transport crisis. [Stafford Ondego, Stafford]

Kenyans are still smarting from a week that started with postponed meetings, stalled business and the stale smell of death as the authorities clashed with what Senegalese writer Sembene Ousmane calls God’s Bits of Wood – the hoi polloi – over the rising price of fuel. And though things eased somewhat towards the end of the week, there were all sorts of conspiracy theories as to why the organisers called off the strike before its objectives were met.

This led to a perplexing situation where the same people who argued their lives had ground to a halt started complaining about a strike ended before its initial objectives were met. Trust Kenyans to weave lots of conspiracy theories into any space where there is lack of clarity.

So much for conspiracy theories. On the literary front, in Kenya, and Africa, and indeed across the globe, travel, journey and the road are seen as metaphors for the endless search for the meaning of life.

In Wole Soyinka’s play, The Road, we find a professor looking for ‘The Word’ from the road. The road, it turns out, has deep roots in Soyinka’s Yoruba myths.

For starters, the road is governed by Ogun, the Yoruba god of iron, metallurgy and the road itself, who occasionally demands sacrifices in the form of blood from accidents. This linkage of accidents to spiritual forces is well and alive in Kenya too, where if you talk to communities around so-called ‘black spots’, accidents are not a result of poor road designs, careless driving and human error. To the average African mind, frequent accidents are a result of dynamics in the realm of the occult.

In cities like Nairobi, the road and daily commute are a ritual of sorts, linking ordinary lives to capitalism and the dream of a better tomorrow. Thus, the disruption of the daily commute to and from work interferes with the rhythm of everyday hustle.

It impedes a ritual that is synonymous with the meaning of life for those who dwell in the city. A walking nation, the highlight of the headlines of such times, becomes a defiant search for resilience in the wake of a broken ritual. We see it in Matigari, a book that caused such a stir in Kenya when it was launched that the authorities reportedly went round Nairobi looking for a dangerous man called Matigari, unaware that he was just a character in a book.

How disruption of the daily lives of ordinary folk affects socio-political life is also seen in many other works, including Meja Mwangi’s Going Down River Road. Indeed, in many works, the ‘journey’ is part of what can be called the ‘quest narrative’.

In Western literature, the quest narrative mirrors historical characters such as explorers – Christopher Columbus, Alexander the Great, Marco Polo and Ferdinand Magellan.

A particularly good example is Buffalo Nickel by C. W. Smith, published in 1989, which follows a Kiowa man called David Copperfield, whose Indian name is “Went On A Journey”, after oil is discovered on his Oklahoma farm and he becomes wealthy overnight.

The novel explores his struggle to navigate between Native American identity and the modern capitalist world. That aboriginal Americans had names such as ‘Went On A Journey’ perhaps affirms movement from one place to the other as part of the core of the universal meaning of life.

Record experiences

In Africa, however, especially in the postcolonial setting, travel and journey, both in literature and in the daily life it mirrors, the hero or heroine is inexorably moving from the rural areas, trying to escape poverty in rural Africa in search of a better life in the city. We see it through Paulina in Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye’s Coming to Birth, a naïve girl who comes to Nairobi at the height of seismic socio-political upheavals that birthed the nation called Kenya.

Recently, this quest to travel to better places in search of better life has levelled up to travelling abroad. So, among young people, if a girl wants to say no to a boy’s advances without hurting his feelings, it suffices to say I have someone in  mayolo, which is another way of saying, “Young man, please stick to your lane, I am a rung higher than you on the social ladder.”

The appeal of “travelling” to “greener pastures” is so real in our world that it is little wonder that the government has a deliberate policy of helping young people connect with jobs in other places across the world. This, of course, seeks to cure the runaway unemployment among young people and shore up remittances back home.

What I would urge publishing editors is to encourage those who travel to various corners of the world to record their experiences. Better still, it would help to create whole series of literary works that explore the experiences of Kenyans and other Africans in other parts of the world. For, it goes without saying, what catches the imagination of a generation is raw material for great literature. Mercifully, this body of work is already beginning to trickle in.

Back to the matatu strike and the prices of fuel. Another interesting thing to infer from disruption of daily life is that most of the assumptions about city life are, when you think about it, a house of cards. The assumption, for instance, that those who use private vehicles enjoy more convenience than matatu users gets shattered in moments when the chips are down, as seen in Anthills of the Savannah, where Christopher Oriko, a senior government officer, has to contend with the chaos wrought on the roads by public transport and urban disorder.

Indeed, matatus and daily commute are so central to our daily lives, irrespective of our class assumptions, that the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority could well be the Ogun of Kenya’s economy.

When I was an editor in the English Department at Oxford University Press (East Africa), one of the greatest achievements of that time was that we had the word matatu added to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. For, matatus are us.