Just to clarify, the 'Country' here in the third world that is Kenya, in which I was born, is in every way contrary to the green, luscious, thriving meadows and vineyards of Italy or sweet smelling alps of some Western State.
When you hear from your mother, we're going to 'ushago', a national colloquial term for homeland, you automatically think of annoying flies you just wish you could strangle, you think of sweltering stultifying heat, labored perspiration, wanting, if any, infrastructure, and, needless to mention - the dust. The dust on which malnourished chickens scrape for worms they'll never find. The omnipresent dust, particles in your morning tea and even to your evening's impoverished blanket.
Rightly so, I have, in the back of my head, the well warranted dreadful thought of a thick mix of salt-tasting sweat and dust- sand in my forehead, entangled in my kinky African hair - an inescapable conclusion to a day in 'the country'.
Even now as I am engrossed in Strandes' 'The Portuguese Period in East Africa', I just think of how this expanse of valleys and escarpments has, as per destiny, been shortchanged by the West. To think that they didn't even bother to keep enough sufficient records of our pre-colonial history, courtesy of our uninteresting, primitive and socially isolated past. And I quote, we were apparently "too far removed from the stream of world affairs".
TO BE CONTINUED.
When you hear from your mother, we're going to 'ushago', a national colloquial term for homeland, you automatically think of annoying flies you just wish you could strangle, you think of sweltering stultifying heat, labored perspiration, wanting, if any, infrastructure, and, needless to mention - the dust. The dust on which malnourished chickens scrape for worms they'll never find. The omnipresent dust, particles in your morning tea and even to your evening's impoverished blanket.
Rightly so, I have, in the back of my head, the well warranted dreadful thought of a thick mix of salt-tasting sweat and dust- sand in my forehead, entangled in my kinky African hair - an inescapable conclusion to a day in 'the country'.
Even now as I am engrossed in Strandes' 'The Portuguese Period in East Africa', I just think of how this expanse of valleys and escarpments has, as per destiny, been shortchanged by the West. To think that they didn't even bother to keep enough sufficient records of our pre-colonial history, courtesy of our uninteresting, primitive and socially isolated past. And I quote, we were apparently "too far removed from the stream of world affairs".
TO BE CONTINUED.
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