An Inconvenient Truth ~ John

This is an article...written by a Kenyan....whose insightful writings are always a pleasure and occasionally painful to receive...but to the point.

A genuine reality check...all so necessary...and sometimes....to coin a phrase...

'An Inconvenient Truth'. - John

Why the duka wallah is smarter than you
This from the Standard on 07 Sept 09 - By Ted Malanda

In the unlikely event that the British decided to rebuild the Kenya-Uganda railway, rest assured that the man-eaters of Tsavo, if they still exist, would not be carting away Indian coolies into the boondocks for snacks and dinner.

There would be no Indian coolies in the first place. Instead, the whole railway line would be bustling with youthful - and not so youthful - indigenous Kenyans under the Kazi kwa Vijana
initiative.

Yet just over 100 years ago, the locals wouldn’t be caught dead doing such ‘menial’ work, to the extent that the railway line’s entire labour force had to be shipped in from India .

But if it was massive muscle drain for India, then, rounding up the descendants of those coolies today and throwing them out Idi Amin style would result in brain drain so severe that the national economy would be clobbered to its knees.

How did they manage this transformation from sweaty labourers to captains of industry when locals are still doing what they were doing then hunting squirrels, pretending to raise maize on barren land and engaging in tribal warfare every five years?

Strength to strength, Equally, the Brits who were lording it over everyone have virtually scattered.

Grogan is gone; Egerton’s castle is in ruins while Lord Delamere now hawks mandazi and milk on the roadside in Naivasha.

But the Kenyan Indian just seems to grow from strength to strength.

I could hazard two reasons for this: One, the Indian doesn’t give a hoot about land. All he needs is a roof over his head and a place to sell his wares.

Wazungu, on the other hand, will lease thousands of hectares of desert land and then pretend to make money out of it from tourists.

How the hell do you do that when crooks are turning all the trees upstream into charcoal?

Africans, on the other hand, will steal and kill each other for land. But after that, they do absolutely nothing with it apart from walking around admiring farm boundaries and selecting burial spots.

The second reason is that the average Indian is more tenacious than a donkey.

Note: A millionaire duka wallah will own the same pair of shoes for years unlike a local man who changes wives with his first bank loan.

It’s not easy minting money from a duka, either, as the many locals who sink their retirement benefits into roadside shops can testify.

But I admire Indians most for their marriage customs. They are just brilliant, these Indian men.
How did they connive to have women pay them dowry and still manage to sit on them?

Aging mothers, In fact, as soon as they have eaten the dowry that the bride brought, they install her in the family home so that she can take care of their aging mothers as well.
Would you believe it! And to seal the deal, they cover those women from head to toe making it
virtually impossible for wife snatchers to salivate. Have you ever seen an Indian woman’s underwear?

Now contrast that with African women who seem hell bent on baring it all to the nearest passer by.

My ancestors thought they were smart yet all they cared about were useless gizzard rights.

Why couldn’t they think up a scam like this? Here we pay dowry through the nose yet if one’s mother visits for two weeks, the wife issues an ultimatum: "Either that old hag goes or I’m out."

Life is, indeed, a circus!
~Ted Malanda