Last
week, a moving story was aired by one of the main broadcasters. It featured two
Kenyans of Asian descent sleeping rough in the streets of Nairobi having fallen
on hard times. While it is indeed rare to see homeless people of Asian descent
in Nairobi, the story lacked in depth and only acted to feed into the common
held misconception that views certain races in society living in uninterrupted opulence.
The reporter was very successful in capitalizing on our stereotypes- he
expressed his shock that this could be happening, we went along with it. There was
a clip showing a group of African homeless children or what he referred to us
the rest of us , again we went along with it. A day after the story was aired, there
was a follow up, we were notified that the two individuals had been ‘rescued’.
We were relieved, our stereotypes remained firmly unchallenged. Certain races
simply don’t fall in hard times.
The
stereotypical nature of the story is not all bad though. It challenges us to
scratch beneath the surface, to carefully review what we think know both at a
local and global level. Who carries the poverty tag? Does poverty respect
boundaries? Hardly, thanks to capitalist systems and greed, oligarchs and the destitute
live side by side-everywhere. Just
like homelessness, addiction and all other social ills, capitalism is universal and have been for a long time. The common fallacy that depicts certain
ethnic groups or individuals from certain countries as somehow immune to these
ills is just that -a fallacy.
Every
race, every country, struggles with its own underprivileged populations, no
matter its social standing in the global wealth index. The difference lies on
how the vulnerable are handled in their respective societies. In more advanced
economies, governments have enough resources to take the slack for the
underprivileged, providing them with food, homes, medical care and the like. To
a visitor, this may give the deceptive impression that the whole population is
privileged. (Unless of course you come across the homeless in the streets or
live there long enough to truly understand these societies-only then does it
start to dawn on you that all that glitters is not gold). The same applies to
some communities. In my almost eight years of residence in one European capital,
I never once heard of a homeless Kenyan (though I came across many homeless
people). I however met many Kenyans who struggled to survive and had to be put up
by fellow Kenyans. The same can be said about Kenyans of Asian descent, they
too encounter hard times, they only appear to handle their socials ills collectively.
Poverty
knows no race, no society- it really is stubborn like that. Overall, the
reporter deserves some credit. While his intent was a little misplaced, he did
manage to draw attention to the fact that once again we are losing the war on
homelessness. The legacy left behind by Karisa Maitha in the early years of the
NARC government has largely been eroded.
