Friday afternoons are all shot to pieces. Sorry about that, but the year just gone past monkeyed around a bit too much, and I'm quite inclined to say good riddance. The last time I encountered a real primate was when a cheeky vervet tried to nick my picnic lunch. I wasn't quite sure what to do: flee at once, arms-a-flaying, or bop it on the head with the remainder of a baguette.
But you can't do that with a year, can you?
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Not that I remember it at all well, but in the month and year that I was born, the Chinese launched a simple telemetry test satellite into space. The satellite was called "Dong Fang Hong-1" (the East is Red), also the name of a personality cult anthem sung for Mao during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. One of the objectives of the mission was to test the transmission of radio signals from space. For ten days Mao's tune was broadcasted out from orbit and the world had to listen as China entered the space age with a melody.
Progress was keenly followed: the well loved pragmatist statesman and political-survivor Premier Zhou en Lai led the update meetings to an excited People's Republic from the Great Hall of the People in Beijing; the People's Central Broadcasting radio and newspapers published times of DFH-1's passage and directions of travel along its ellipse; and the space nations of the U.S.A., France, Japan and the former U.S.S.R. watched China's launch capability with a small flutter and thoughts of rocketing wars and astronomical defence budgets.
Meanwhile, China was being torn internally by the militancy of the Left - a legacy of Jiang Qing and her horrible Gang of Four - who promoted the Cultural Revolution; and the pragmatism of the Centre-Right who, in the politik of the time were derided as Capitalist Roaders: capitalists at heart and untrue to the values of communism iterated in Mao's little red book. Zhou en Lai and Deng Xiaoping, both moderates and former close associates of Mao as veterans of the epic Long March, had to play intricate political games in order to survive the era: in power, denouncement, detention, rehabilitation and then ultimately restoration to leadership. And yet, despite the complex politics, the filthy conspiracies in jostling for position and bargaining for power, somehow these men and others like them still held their ideologies and visions for the country (whether right or wrong) and worked hard towards them, probably in the knowledge that the results would not be seen in their own lifetimes.
Much as I am trying to doggedly sniff out ideology and vision from amongst the entire political filth of my own country, I can tell you all that I smell is that disgusting stuff alluded to by a certain Sir somebody or other, former British Envoy.
I too, like many Kenyan people, have recently found myself becoming increasingly cynical about the vision for this country's future that I was conned into thinking was so promising a few years ago. I don't know how to describe this feeling, but I can be allegorical. I imagine it is like observing and being caught up in the fervour, excitement and hope that once gripped the People's Republic as DFH-1 soared in the sky and directed the whole world's attention to the Utter and Inexorable East. A vision of something much better that lifted people's lives beyond the ordinary and just for an instant made them forget the half-filled bowls of maggot infested rice that was all that awaited them on their tables.
Which is all that will continue to await them as the greedy monkeys get usurped by the gluttonous roosters: neither of which have even the notion of ideology or vision to drive their base politics.
11 February, 2005
