The Simplicity of Change – Kenya28Feb

All they’re asking us to do is sing the national anthem.

And at once, this is for some, too little to do. The act is simply too transient, too undramatic, too forgettable.  And unfortunately, it’s people like me who are likely not doing much in the first place who are complaining.

I, like a staggering majority of people that were confronted by this amorphous show of solidarity, was immediately wary of it. Of course I asked WTF, and What next, and Which out-of-touch Kenyan thought this up, and How will it help and yada yada yada.

See if you can identify with me in this regard. I’m a rebel without a cause. In reverse. By any activist’s measure, I’m one of the lethargic middle class yahoos who’ll do nothing else but store up grain if this country burns. I’m one of them who’ll wait for someone else to do something, who’ll have to be shepherded into making a change. I don’t know the first thing about advocacy or activism. I would marvel at a conversation between Al Kags and Andrea Bohnstedt about John Githongo, and say nada. When the folk from Kuweni Serious organized a public meet-up, the only contribution I felt I could make was emceeing. I hate Prime Time news. I have to muster energy to read the newspapers; and I would rather watch a bootleg copy of Due Date. And yeah, there are millions of Kenyans like me. Smart members of the citizenry, aware of their power, but too afraid or aloof to do shit.

Still, I am not ignorant of the power a few foolish individuals to start something that changes something.

Two years ago, being jobless in the US in the ass-end of a recession, and doing all I could to stave away depression, I moved to Philadelphia to live with a couple of God-sent buddies. One random afternoon, I wandered by a little mall and walked into what I thought was a fast-food restaurant. It turned out to be an enlarged corridor converted into a makeshift command center. There were foldable tables and metal chairs arranged along the length of the room on both sides, each manned by either a teen or an old person. This left an aisle in the middle of the room along which the co-ordinators walked up and down, constantly receiving orders or barking them into their cell phones. There were campaign posters and charts and hand-written notices plastering the brick wall. There were computers and printers and post-its and badges and felt-tip markers and telephone extensions and reams and reams of paper everywhere. And the place didn’t stop buzzing.

This youthful, geriatric motley crew formed one of the many grassroots groups dotting Philadelphia and the state of Pennsylvania, putting on the spirited campaign that would eventually see Senator Barack Obama become President. Two days later, I joined this group of very ordinary people – most of them from dodgy, less affluent neighborhoods – in registering Philadelphians to vote, making calls to their homes to remind them to turn up at the polls, and posting little cards on their doors on election day thanking them for making history. This campaign was particularly dire in Pennsylvania, a crucial and unstable swing state. It was targeted at the large, lethargic populace that would otherwise have done little to see Obama into Presidency.

You know how that story turned out. When we met again on the morning after the election to clear up the office, we marveled at ourselves, at each other, at these nobodies who had something to do with history.

I want to feel that again, dammit. And once again, someone had to show me how. I will stand in public, in my black red white and green polo shirt, and in shaky baritone and stuttering Swahili, sing three stanzas of my national anthem. I’ll be stared at and ridiculed. I’ll finish and move on, and my little action will be quickly forgotten. I will have no answer to What Next. Yes, I’ll have to wait for someone to point that out to me again.

What I will know for sure, is that I will have responded to the spirit of change that stirs within the many other ordinary, ignorant individuals like myself. And I will be true to that defensible notion that true change begins with the simplest of actions – refusing to move seats on the bus, standing in the way of marauding army tanks, posting edicts on a cathedral door or simply, and less colourfully, singing a simple song.

- Mugz