Our people are dying. They are dying not from diseases nor accidents nor raids. They are not being swept away by the evil forces of nature. They are dying from ignorance. You might think, ‘But, this isn’t right, ignorance never kills!’ I understand your retort. You are right, ignorance never kills even as our people die prematurely from the baggage of uncomfortable life. Ignorance indeed never kills even as children are doomed to be shepherds yet they have best of brains. I understand why you say ignorance never kills while thousands of herds of cattle are swept away by drought and lokit after years and years of looking for them greener pastures. Yes, you are damn right ignorance never kills. That like rat it bites and breathes on the spot but doesn’t kill.
And so we exclaim, ‘But tunadumisha mila’. Which is a good thing, I might say. And in the spirit of tunadumisha mila we send hundreds of girls to early graves. We pluck them from schools, mutilate their womanhood and marry them off to the oldest men in the village. We bargain for a trade-off with their lives and we clinch ‘good deals’ sealed with the stab of a double-edged sword into their hearts. We shackle our young boys in the bushes to herd cattle and chase after birds and rats. We look at our herds of cattle and secretly wonder whether there is any other rich man all over the village. We count the rich cattle-owners and bubble with excitement over the fact that they are not richer than us. And so, brother, when I ask you if ignorance kills you look at me as if I am walking on my head. You say, we are rich.
Again, you may ask, ‘How do you measure ignorance? By the theories we read and western trends we absorb?’ Brother, I understand your frustration. So what is ignorance then? I will not give you a clear-cut definition. I will give you some scenarios.
On a Sunny Market Day, a cattle-seller counts his money under a tree. The fifty shilling notes are pressed using the left toes. The hundred shilling notes are clamped in between the toes. The five hundred shilling notes are held by the left hand while the one thousand shilling notes are held by the right. It is a windy day and the exercise must go on. Not even the flutter of the notes and the slow pace of the exercise dampen the zeal of the under-a-tree-cashier.
Behind the hills somewhere far away from the dispensary a family is in a grip of despair. It is past midnight. A child is sick. As a matter of fact, the child has been sick for the last three days. It is not yet Sunday, a Market Day, the day the child should be taken to the dispensary. The terror-stricken parents rush the child to the dispensary some twenty kilometers away. Unfortunately, the child passes away some hundred metres away from the dispensary. The parents cry in low tones and the man says in-between- sobs, ‘Worry not, the woman of my children, we will have another one’.
The period for the registration of voters has come and the clerks are dispatched to the villages. A clerk is in the heart of a village conducting the exercise. He explains his motive and elucidates the process to be undergone. An ageing woman shuffles near the clerk and speaks rationally, ‘My boy, you people amaze me. Last year you came and wrote our names. This year again. But where is relief?’ The clerk prepares to answer but she advises her listeners, ‘This boy is a fraud. He is one of those cons to get people’s ID’s and disappear. Don’t let him!’
Somewhere in another village a woman is in the grip of labour pains. Under the moonlight, the undergone-FGM woman mutters all the names that come to her mind. It has been couple of hours of agony. A midwife makes a lot of incisions on her birth canal. The orgy goes on and on and on ad infinitum. The woman succumbs to death at dawn. The frustrated midwives mutter, ‘We gave our best shot. Too sad she had to die. We thought she was a strong woman.’
And almost with irritating predictability, drought will strike, people will cry about hunger and many will survive, literally. No one controls the hand of fate, I agree. I don’t laugh at those who are in pangs of starvation either. But I feel the problem would have been alleviated with education. Feeding on wild-fruits while there are hundreds of cattle beats my logic. The burdens of being a pastoralist!
You might be thinking, ‘You don’t understand our people. They are that and will remain that.’ But I refuse to believe that they are that. If you come to think of it we suffer from ‘they-are-that’ syndrome. Its patients always feel comfortable about the status quo. They are the outsiders. They look at the problem as some sort of a one-page actuarial science question to be answered. They say, ‘They are used to that life—the shoe-wearer knows where it pinches’. But again I refuse to admit that our people are ‘used to that life’. The problem is more complex than we think. You will agree with me that the height of a mountain is made possible by the flat landscape, the cleverness of a child is made possible by another dumb one and delight is achieved by presentation of two alternatives for which a person picks one. But our people have not been awarded the luxury of two alternatives. Theirs is a one-way alley for which they walk on unaware of a highway of life where they can choose their lanes. Theirs is one story about struggle and hanging on the rope. Theirs is a sad life with one theme and one chapter. And when the footnotes of history will be written, a clever historian will write in a diary, ‘People die. They die not from diseases nor accidents nor raids. They die not by being swept away by the evil forces of nature. They die from ignorance’.
Time has never been ripe as now for us to examine ourselves. To admit that ignorance is killing our people and seek clemency within classroom walls. To ask ourselves hard questions about our extent of kudumisha mila. To find reasons as to why we should pay the costly price of ignorance with tears and blood. Our people need to be freed from the chains of ignorance for there is no worst and debasing atrocity against liberty than the limitation of the freedom of the mind.
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