"This looks like an interesting book you are reading. Can I have a look at it?" says the young Kenyan lady next to me on the mataturide home. She's pointing at my downer of a book about HIV. I pass it over, and resume looking out the window at the guys pushing a brokendown car up the street. She flips through two pages before she starts peppering me with questions.
And there, in alternating snapshots, I've got my two firmest images of Kenyan society: the overt, instinctual wonkishness on my left, the helping hand to a stranger on my right. Follow along, please. This'll be over in a jiff.
Leftward benign overgeneralization: Kenyans love books, they love parliamentary procedure, they love erudite discussion. They have, after all, far and away the highest literacy rate in east Africa. The nigh-wonkishness of the average Kenyan on the street is as striking as the university education of indian cab drivers in NYC. The newspapers are amazingly impenetrable--to my eyes anyway--because of the Kenyan writer's and reader's eye for detail, and then more detail, and then more detail.
Rightward benign overgeneralization: if you drive or walk on a road for twenty minutes, you'll see people pushing a car somewhere, or picking a wheel out of a giganto-pothole, or trying to jerryrig a car part back onto the car. At least half the time, the people helping out with the automobile in question don't know the driver. They just happen to be standing nearby, and so they of course offer to throw out their backs pushing someone else's Peugeot up a 2-mile hill. It's just polite.
Anyway, be especially happy for these polysyllabic carpushing folk this week, because they just got a new constitution.
Ya wonders if Americans knew as much as Kenyans about their constitution when it was written. Ya wonders whether anyone deserves a second chance more than Kenyans.
