Fiction
Poetry
A Tale of Exile
Literary Monuments
Thotlines
Audience Response
We Who Believe
To my fellow Kenyans
A bridge looms across tomorrow. We have been trying to cross this bridge for a long time. With every attempt, we have met at the foot of the bridge, shuffling and shoving, praying and panting, screaming and silencing others. We have shed blood, taken oaths, buried loved ones, and walked about with hearts festering with open wounds. Then we have withdrawn, clicking our tongues, sighing with despair, and starting off again for the same bridge.
It's been over 20 years of fighting to reform the guiding laws of our land. Actually, the struggle has been going off and on since independence, some 47 years ago. We suffer from great bouts of induced gephyrophobia. Once a fear qualifies as a phobia, complete with a Greek etymological identification, it's serious. In fact, it's life-threatening. One could cause fatal accidents on a bridge while driving in a state of extreme panic. For long, we have suffered a collective phobia of bridge-crossing, and we just can't seem to gather enough guts to set our feet on the Promised Land over yonder.
I'm a believer. I believe in bridge-crossing. I believe the other side is neither green nor red; it's the colour of a collective decision to overcome the fear of the unknown, the fear of leaving the comfort zones of familiarity; familiarities that radiate with the toxicity of squalor, insecurity, despair and apathy. Do not assume that the familiarity of a good job, a car, a fat account, and a barricaded home gives you security and therefore do not need to cross the bridge. As long as your neighbour is dispossessed, you are standing on quick-sand. So perhaps all the macabre skirmishes that were exploding around the country over the years while we still shamelessly passed as an island of peace also passed you by as you worked hard to build your fortune. But if the flames of 2007 also passed you by, you are cold and heartless. I'm here to help you get a heart. Let's turn to scripture as believers do.
Remember that constitution-bearer, Moses? The guy who lost in the referendum to enshrine new law and the people voted for the rule of a golden calf instead? It glittered, didn't it? Lesson, all scum glitters, that's why we fall for it. But in the people's defense, Moses stayed too long up Mt. Horeb negotiating this-and-that with the big guy. A people left too long without a leader will vote in the neighbour's goat that was rumoured to have talked. The betrayal of the people did not stop Moses from getting his ten-articled constitution instituted as the guiding law of the land. He believed. So he starts the process again, finally succeeds, and the people enshrine that document in the Ark of the Covenant, the holiest vessel in their midst.
Joshua takes over leadership after Moses dies. He is commanded to lead the nation across the river Jordan so they can get to the Promised Land. He's terrified. So terrified is he that God gets fed up telling him nicely not to be afraid and eventually just lays it down as a command.
Have I not commanded you? Be strong and of good courage. Be not afraid, neither be dismayed. For the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go. Joshua 1:9
Joshua's crippling fear was not that he was being commanded to cross a river that had no bridge. He knew God could stretch out a bridge in the blink of an eye just as easily as he could cause water to gush out of a rock, appear as a cloud of fire, part the waters of the sea, or rain down donuts. Joshua was terrified because he had to move an even more terrified nation from a place they knew to a place unknown.
The people did not believe in the Promised Land and its possibility of prosperity; they feared its giant occupants, in their minds, ferocious ogres in a hostile land. They were ready for a rebellion. They'd rather tough it out in the desert they knew. These, the very same people that had been so frozen with fear that they had wanted to stay on in Egypt as slaves rather than cross the Red Sea into freedom. A fear so utterly irrational it is difficult to understand, hard to excuse, most annoying to those that don't experience it, yet completely real in its debilitating abilities. I tell you, I know this.
In another time, I am young. My siblings and I are ferried across the old Nyali Bridge in Mombasa every day to and from school. It is a rickety rinky-dink contraption that feels like planks of recycled wood held together with cloth-hangers and thumbtacks, then propped up with bamboo sticks borrowed from a demolished cheap beach hotel. I remember the soothing lullaby effect of its creaking and swaying. I don't recall fear, because there was none.
I'm grown up. It's early morning on a fall day. I'm crossing the Delaware Bridge and the sun is coming up through a light mist on the east side. The bridge rises to a peak, and dips again. I feel myself soar above and look down on the vastness of the pale blue river below, suspended like an eagle, all-powerful, all-seeing, in absolute control. It is one of the most exhilarating feelings in the world. I cross this bridge many times. I don't recall fear, because there was none.
Closer to the present. I'm crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. So far, bridge-crossing has never been a problem, and I do not anticipate any. It's a technological marvel of steel and concrete flung across more than four miles, rising so high you feel like a speck flying over the bay waters. Then, barely a minute into crossing this bridge, my primitive amygdala sounds off a sharp danger siren. My nerves are on hyper-alert, cold sweat begins to trickle wherever I have glands. My digestive system grinds to a halt, my stomach fills up with gas, and my bowels want to let loose. My mouth is dry and I swallow hard. I try to stop my hard-pumping heart from jumping out of my mouth. My breath is coming fast, my pupils dilate and make my eyes feel as if they're about to pop out of their sockets. I grip the steering wheel, almost tearing into my flesh, and move so slowly I create a traffic jam on the bridge worse than Nigeria's legendary go-slows. With heightened alert signals streaming into my visual thalamus, for the first time in my bridge-crossing years, I see who has come into my world. Hello Fear. It's a terrible experience. Induced panic attacks must be the worst form of torture in the world.
From this day on, gephyrophobia devastatingly cripples me with every bridge-crossing. If I'm ever at the wheel and I get to the foot of a bridge high enough to give me the feeling of loss of control, I vacate the driver's seat and I'm safely ferried across my fears. I learnt that where I live, the state's transportation authority runs a special program where gephyrophobic drivers can call ahead and get someone to drive them across the bridge, a service used averagely 4000 times annually. I'm not alone.
I know phobias are not about the object of our fear. I believe extreme fear is the alert signal that warns us we have a terrible poisonous intruder sitting at the centre of our hearts, and that enemy is despair. Desolation. Hopelessness. Anguish. That enemy comes in quietly after we experience an extreme situation like the loss of a loved one that leaves us without answers. But its presence is later manifested in irrational phobias like crossing a bridge, because after all, being suspended up on a bridge simulates lack of control in matters metaphysical.
We overcome crippling fears by admitting to our sense of wretched despair and desolation, and humbly seeking help in navigate through our weak moments. Many are we that walk about with hidden phobias, having seen the burning of our homes by neighbours we trusted; the torching of our children as they scream, mama, mama, mama. . . and we fall down on our knees with utter devastation; the slaying of our sons and daughters that we raised with untold sacrifice and let them out into the world to seek their blessing in a country scorched dry with joblessness. Then we go about life with eyes staring blankly, dark wells of shattering emptiness. We bear our trauma without a place to get help while tomorrow demands from us its share of hope.
Instead, we wake up to hawk-eyed political Svengalis and scripture-spitting prudes manipulating our weaknesses, loving the media limelight, calculating their victory to maintain the status quo that cushions them. They heap on us some more phobia-intensifying lies. "Good heavens, they will take your land and leave you destitute! God forbid, they will snatch your children from your womb and squash the life out of them! Why, the manipulative colonial masters will enslave you again! Surely, the Muslims will pluck your eye for an eye, chop off your arm for an arm and declare a jihad! Watch, your son will marry your neighbour's son, and God will smite you and burn you all to ashes in his righteous anger! If you disagree with us you are disrespectful and out to destroy this country!" Ad nauseum. Perfidy packaged and peddled so aggressively by leaders manipulating the psychological and spiritual vulnerabilities of their followers. I speak to those who have engaged in dishonest debate. They have completely upstaged those who believe, those who have expressed honest dissent and sought to be enlightened, those who have been working tirelessly in providing education and information, those who have sacrificed over the years to see their neighbours prosper.
Faith, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen, is our collective strength, a force that exists in every human being, the element that causes us to achieve the seemingly impossible. When we stumble in our faith and fear has darkened our path, those who believe, no matter their creed or ethnicity, hold our hands and tell us, I'll help you across the bridge. When our faith has been dented with the hammer of religious bigotry over the years and caused us to see another as everything but a child of God, those who believe are there to confront our prejudices and help us cross the bridge to a better co-existence. When our faith in the sanctity of human life has been eroded by oppressive injustices that reduce us to the nature of a beast, causing us to slay one another without thought, those who believe hear our cry for healing and help us cross the bridge to reconciliation.
We have come a long way, and we stand ready to grow only through the dynamism of our institutions, not through the creation of dogmatic structures of law and governance that demand never to be changed or questioned, on pain of death. The triumph is not in crossing the looming constitutional bridge; it will be in working together when we get to the other side to make sure the land yields its promise to us.
I believe in our connected purpose as children of God, in all the glorious beauty of our diversity, destined to a place where justice holds up the foundations of our institutions, where inclusivity is the light that shines out terror, where innovation is the force that drives us to prosperity.
Mkawasi Mcharo Hall
