I wrote this title quite some time ago but didn’t put words to it. It’s taken me a few minutes to try and put meaning to the words but just as i am sitting here I realize why.
There hasn’t been much activity from me in a while but that mostly is because I realized that I was letting my personal life appear too frequently in my writing. That kind of transparency is honestly not good for relationships and stability. They say never let them see you sweat, which would basically mean I cant plaster my day to day struggles on the internet for all to see. This topic however has very little to do with me and a lot more to do with the power that other people are yielding over us as a society. Not to just throw blame in one direction, we are very complicit in all this and thats what has been bothering me.
Since the last time I posted, my life has become way different. My wife and I now have two kids, live in our own home and we are now basically working ourselves like crazy to build some stability for our kids future. I work for the biggest oil marketing company in the region and possibly Africa and I have had a couple of good years. This has taken us a couple of steps further along on the stability part but there is still more work to be done.
Why do I see myself as a collaborator. My sole purpose in life is to sell as much fuel and make as much money as I can for my employer. I earn a salary and at the same time work towards an annual bonus that helps me work on my projects. The money my colleagues and I make is a fraction of the revenue and profit that we generate. The profit that ends up getting sent to our foreign shareholders who in turn use it to build up more companies and investments that end up growing their wealth while we don’t do as much for our own local companies. Now whoever has the capital is the one who gets to make the money and this I know but every day i go to work I wonder if I could do more meaningful work and still provide for my family the way i do now.
I once read that the British Empire wasn’t doing so well before they started taking over other peoples land and territory. Britain in itself is a cold damp place that i would honestly make you understand why they kept exploring for new lands. They at one time controlled 1/4 of the habitable land on the face of the earth. The sun never set on the British empire because of its size and with that kind of size meant that they milked the places they controlled dry. Even today as I sit here, hundreds upon thousands of acres of land is still held by the descendants of colonialists. Land that was once owned by my grandfather and other ancestors. This land is in the most prime areas and has generated unmentionable wealth for these people and made them nearly untouchable.
My maternal grandfather is from Limuru and I was once told that their ancestral land was in tigoni. They were kicked out of their land and had to settle elsewhere. My grandfather passed away a couple of years ago having lived a good life with over 45 children, grandchildren and great grandchildren to his name. But how different would his children’s lives have been if he didn’t have to build his fortune from nothing. Land in Tigoni goes for about 20 million an acre today ,so essentially the colonialists stole the base in which our people could have built their future. Fast forward half a century and i work for a company that was probably built from the money gotten from pillaging my own country and many other countries. The kicker is i will still work hard to continue building my profile and make more money until the day I can make it out of there. When i do, i hope I can build something my children will be proud off and maybe one day one of my grandchildren will be proud of my accomplishments.
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