SEARCHING FOR ONE'S IDENTITY

How does a boy come to be? How does he conquer the past? How does he make the future?

Who is Son of Soil? The query is as vague as it can be. Who is not? Nil Nil. Then the discussion should end here, Shouldn’t it? If I was Mukua, I’d request you to pick an early popcorn and ensure that you are not sharing the bowl with a colleague who is watching a movie for there will be few stop times here. Only have a bottle of water, the walk in thoughts will be quite long. If you are an Indian liberalist you will call for order and request the Speaker to prevent the house from being misled. Such thoughts are archaic and fail to recognize the need to integrate the whole world. Some call themselves global citizens. It is not as conflicting as having a feminist around.  She will tend to think that the soil is still for the sons in modern times even after the long UN stated millennium development goals of gender sensitivity. My aim is not to conflict.

Take a tag before we proceed. consider yourself a proud daughter or son. Son of the Soil is another equally better tag. You may look at your palm and turn to gaze again as we proceed. 

If we took away our sexes, misconceptions and past injustices, what do we remain with? My lecturer says reason. Reason is influenced by experiences and perceptions. My perception towards the Son of Soil tag is an identity- something very key in a person. It is in identity that people discover self and develop confidence. With confidence there is hope. If I called myself the son of Igunza and failed to know whose son Igunza was, I will not be established. It will therefore make a long chain of forefathers that will get lost in the fifth generation; Mugenge got Liguchi, Liguchi got Isagi, Isagi got Lung’afa, Lung’afa got Igunza. This is too small compared to Barack Muluka’s 500-year span. It only takes the sense of belonging to start climbing high on Maslow’s pyramid.

Most of us have experienced rural life. These faces speak about me and my Sister. Source; Web

If you are born by a madwoman, will you go back and chose the womb to sire you? This was a Swahili poem I guess and I cannot remember the author. It must have been in a school textbook. If you are a black, do you wish to be a white? I wonder if whites ever wished to be any other (thing) else. You will agree that only a discontended soul wishes for things to have been the other way forgetting Aristotle’s quote, ‘Nature does nothing uselessly’. If you are blind, you are of benefit to he who can see. The mind can only see some things when its windows, the eyes, are closed. If you are lame, it is an opportunity to explore my hearty humane emotions in helping and pondering over the condition. If I die today, you will understand that life is a transition and depending on your beliefs mediate on a post-death occurrence. And so, now that I am a son, a man, let me live as one, using all the advantaged predisposed by nature on self to be of advantage to self and society.

The past is no longer with us. Every month the moon plays tricks with my eyes. Sometimes it hides in the cold clouds. In the hide-and-seek game, the clouds pass over and leave it naked in pretense to be moving with the clouds. Ezeulu could sense the sitting of the moon and know the calamities or glory to befall. During clear moon nights, one would fix eyes up and thank the moon for being faithful, moving towards the same direction. On reaching home, the moon would stop moving and stare. It came not to my mind that the same moon escorted witcrafts who would later cause uncomfortable sleep. Gone are the times. No matter how hard I fix my eyes up to its different shapes in different times do I read anything. It is forever something up to prove that the earth is round and reflect light on Earth. I tend to imagine if we lived in Jupiter and had at least ten moons in a single night. Glory Glory Son of Soil!

Whose child are you? This was the question every teacher and elderly person asked during my early life years. Then I would quickly utter the name of my father. It was unsayingly expected to name a mother. Children are not of their mothers, I used to think. Depending on the kind of doing, you were in at the time of questioning will your father gain praise. A child is expected to be in the modest character at all times in all places.  The praise was not only for the father. It was largely for self, mother and the larger homestead because saying one’s name was identifying self with the larger extended family.

If I was born a daughter, I have always thought, against odds that I would have been equally better as I am a son. It may vary in manner of need and contention as a person who was born dumb or in a different social strata family or race. What a person should do is to cease from discontention and forge forward in search of an understanding to a situation. Bet me, there is no vanity in an infinite substance- reason. This is to say, in your own aspect, you are as good as me.

To know what is good and pursue is the dilemma of any young soul. We enter into situations without experience but to gain it. The results are often unfavourable. We live in a kind of a world that highly influences a person in its external providences than offerings to discover internal personal knowledge. It is not easy to discover self because wisdom has no weighing balances and the ones we think are/were wise in their wisdom recanted it. They were but seekers. Waking up in the morning to start a day’s hustle and latter coming back at twilight with more demands and mental violence is the order of average person. Education is in waiting and the jobs are lacking. What used to be considered good is presently rationalized to accommodate diverse views. Staying neutral is a moral challenge and a step-back to personal credentials. How just could we simply do it?

If there was a specific way to live, for instance, I could have mastered a specific pattern that shows the start and foreshadows the end. There being none, life seems a game of dice. You may not believe if you hold the view that a man constructs his own destiny. Okonkwo tried but he failed. The gods are there for libation. Looking at the same coin from its edge there is a negligible distance (width) that gives the coin its mass. Without width, there would be no height or length. It is the distance between self and destiny. It is what keeps fate away from self. It is the distance between Son and Soil. The width is a manner of personal increase or decrease.

At one point in reason all of us are equal. We start by being present, can think and are able to do. If we are all born today and be the future sons of the land, our width is same. Depending on external influences as parental care, personal responsibility and accidents, the width may be loosely fixed but still present. If you are born by a poor father and I am born in a magnificent castle, there is no reason as to feel yourself inferior. When we grew up and started leaving the village, we had different agendas. As some left for school, others left in search of jobs. I am not ignorant to the lacking and poverty that keeps the two groups apart. Mine is to say that in your state, without comparing to another, you are as good as you can think.

As of ancient, we should circumcise our thoughts and pave way for constructive reason     Source; Web

I find myself going out of what I intended to communicate as to who, son of soil at my age is. This has been the liking point I’ve had to authors. As authors write a story giving character A and B qualities and denying C goodness, so have they acted as God in real life. They create, kill, bless and reward depending on their story. Unfortunately this is the true reflection of a people. My favourite authors know how to steal lines in an act and ponder over an idea in their own experiences. The best part of a novel is not the story line but the wise bits an author uses that in my view is wisdom.

 If a man became a god, he will fair on as God. He will assume an unfriendly position of favouring, discrimination, negligence and procrastination. Sometimes the world may seem disorderly to doubt if gods exist and what their purposes are. If the life of a person is such precious, then how does another person take it out so easily? If some people crave for what they do not have, making them sin and be punished in their lives, why can’t there be enough providence for all? Why should we control population? In essence, if God existed there would be clarity on everything among everyone as Gordon Mon wrote in his poem, God or No God?

All creation is owned by man. The land, sky, oceans, animals and others are majorly state properties. It is therefore challenging to seek ownership of another man’s thin. Land may have been created for free but it is no longer free. During month ends there are earthly physical gods in need of rent, tax, insurance, education, health and many others. Knowledge is a custodian of man. If a book is written, it is sold. If a lecturer appears, she is on payroll. And if the preacher misses and breaks to form, another church, he was not being paid quite fine.

The break from a young rural mind into a growing global world is happenings that people of my age should marvel at. Most of us are people of two millenniums. Change comes and when it does, it slows not. I was born when computers were a dream and mobile phones too simple and inaccessible. The only true home was the rural land and no matter the errands in town, the home expected you. Discipline was communal and nuclear families as large as extended families. Change is here and things are really tough.

My father’s time only challenge was to earn a job which would provide basic needs that could not be got from the rural setting. The land was expected to provide food as he provided shelter and clothing. When education ceased to be a harambee movement, he could not understand. It was tough as it still is to my siblings who often think I have the capability to seek them out. It is in this generation (if you are thirty years and below we are in the same generation) that first borns will last take care of their younger siblings for it has been a steep hill to some.

Though the rural has not been scrubbed off to be suburbs of the county government centers, the places will soon be. Most of Kenyan population, about 72% resides in the rural area as per World Bank 2011. It is however prophesied that the urbanizing population will be three times in 2030 with a majority of population being 40 years and below (80%). This means that at 40 I will have seen the end of rural life, something that Lung’afa, my grandfather never envisioned. Then there will be no land but staircases. Sons will be of Sky crappers and not of soil. If the earth continues to be held in space by an intelligent super power, concerned with other things and not humans who are concerned more, to another 1 billion years, I pray to rise up from the dead and have a glimpse of future world before dying again. It will be a million times more horrifying and dangerous than Dennis Wey’s writing in Twice Upon A time.

The dilemma continues. Should I go back to live in the village after campus? Definitely not. Should I marry soon? No. How many children do I want? It is too minimal that if a man would be counted in terms of a fraction, I’d do. Who will raise the orphans if not me? Is it a must to reproduce? What do I want in life? There is no clarity of response. If USA, a modern day land is too far ahead in technology and yet in the same year of existence with Kenya, how will things be when Kenya reaches a 25% GDP? For this to happen a few critical things will have to align.

A poor man is the earth’s most shameful offer. He is poor in reason, invention and material. As if ying and yang will aid man forever, there should always be such people to reproduce quickly and in numbers like rats as if natural death had a share in them, survive through agony, hating everything and designing deviative ways, reproducing again too soon too quickly without a positive contribution to Mother Earth, making Earth hell to the reasonable woman and letter amassing weapons of self destruction to kill his seeds. Fools die. Wise rest. The son of Soil will live forever.

In listening to a preacher, a social Sunday time that may not last a hundred years or it is rather in such a slow doing that only the prophesied 1400 and something saints will step on the podium to be sanctified, I grasped an important point. Despite the heavenly fair tales, preachers have awesome advises. The acronym for POOR is ; Passing Over Opportunities Repeatedly. Though a shallow kind of thing, I agree by saying that our problems are of our own causing. Why should a poor man give birth? To many? When opportunities become scarce, the agony is not directed towards solutions but indirect man-man cannibalism. It hurts to see a beggar who could otherwise be doing something useful sitting just in a way slum sons sit. This is embarrassing.

To be or not to be? This is Shakespeare’s tragic dilemma. I take ‘to be’ though I always stand to the half empty bottle side of the ridge. It is by chance that one in a million sperm gets to fuse with an ovum. The end result is a human being. In such an unpredictable happening, sex is determined and birth is due. The earth has its pre stated passage conditions and humans whose hearts have not been refined by the ages of civilization, art and music wait to influence. If so the heart of a man is full of evil, let him dwell on science and technology. This will keep him straight, sometimes too late for his time.

Where does the contention lie? In man’s deficiency. There is no good in airing news and talking of violence when we could otherwise by swimming in the rivers of innovation, plenty and reason. The wastage of time in discussion of football and politics are the current gods of the modern son. History has proved that gods are egoistic and make man inferior. They have castigated means and continue to influence man’s decisions. If a god asks you to kill your brother, tell it to kill you first. That is the greatest err. In reason, emotions are kept at bay.

There is much for the son and daughters of soil to handle. The problem is Foolishness. The solution is Truth, Austerity and Industry. Son of soil should be a human, break from the animalia Kingdom for some animals fair on so well and take charge of his life and society. There may no be heaven for all but a reasonable life you can afford.