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Travelling to Europe or the Americas has for the longest time been seen in East Africa as a breakthrough and a leap into the so-called ‘greener pastures’.
Actually, during the colonial era and shortly after independence, many people travelled from Africa to Europe or the United States of America for further studies, which helped them land plum positions previously reserved for the so-called European and American settlers.
And while those who travelled abroad in those days had to contend with all forms of bias, a scholarship to the United States, for instance, shielded one from the kind of racial jaundice that was the daily waking reality for those who had found themselves in the so-called land of the free as descendants of slaves who had been captured, chained and shipped to work on cotton and sugarcane plantations during the infamous Transatlantic Slave Trade.
Decades after independence, however, travelling abroad has largely been a result of tanking economic and employment opportunities back home. People travel to do jobs that they would be overqualified for back home because in the US and Europe, even odd menial jobs pay much better than working in more prestigious careers back home.
So we have come to a point where, despite numerous cases of people being mistreated and dying in mysterious circumstances in countries such as Saudi Arabia, people still travel in droves to the Gulf countries to look for better opportunities.
Why, the government makes a pretty penny from the dollars wired back home to support old and ailing parents, to build houses, buy land and execute other forms of personal development.
It matters little that many send back millions to a purportedly trusted relative to manage a construction project, only to come back home with a house-warming party in mind, only to find that their supposed project was a figment of their imagination, a kind of charade that has come to be referred to in Nairobi as kipindi (a distortion of the Swahili word for a broadcast media programme) or kipindi-re in sheng.
A new novel by George Anyango, released this month by Moran Publishers, captures such vipindi.
Titled Trapped in the Jungle under the Ruby Readers imprint, it follows Jean Barry Polos, a Kenyan who, soon after marriage and fatherhood, travels to the US for further studies. There, he faces racism and rejection, even from his own kin, before settling in.
Multiple jobs
The novel lays bare life in the United States, challenging the glossy image projected by “summer bunnies” who return each December, luxuriate in top hotels, then head to the village for festive reunions.
While the summer bunnies may be the object of communal envy back home, what with real estate projects mushrooming everywhere courtesy of their ostensibly bulging wallets and pockets, Anyango’s book pulls back the mask on the sacrifice it takes to make the ‘bucks’ in the US.
Many juggle multiple jobs, returning home at dawn before heading out again on little sleep. Trapped in the Jungle casts a harsh light on those who squander remittances through vipindi, while also probing the fragile, often treacherous nature of love and relationships in the diaspora.
And while one would expect that it is people from other parts of the world who would look down upon Africans abroad, Trapped in the Jungle throws up interesting dynamics that put it in the league of A Squatter’s Tale, a tour de force that artistically turns tables on deeply held notions about life in the diaspora, especially for those back home.
Readers will find Trapped in the Jungle a key addition to a growing corpus of literary works that began with Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, first published in 1960. The novel by Achebe opens with an epigraph from W. B. Yeats’s 1919 poem The Second Coming, source of the title Things Fall Apart.
Written after World War I, the poem captures a world sliding into chaos, “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Its warning of disorder mirrors the moral collapse in No Longer at Ease, where Obi Okonkwo, sent abroad by his Igbo community to study law and return to serve them, is later accused of taking a bribe.
Losing it all
In Trapped in the Jungle, too, expectations take a turn for the worse. Instead of things getting better for the family of Jean Barry Polos back home, he discovers the treachery of holding down a long-distance marriage.
In the US, he finds that some people work hard all their lives but end up losing it all and have to wind up in an old people’s home, penniless, loveless and sagging under the weight of regrets.
Trapped in the Jungle is perhaps Kenya’s most recent addition to this strand of literary works, which is perhaps best championed by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
In Americanah (2013), the author also explores the treacherous nature of relationships among people of African descent. I consider this one of the best books one could use to teach the art of creating memorable characters.
One striking minor character is nicknamed “Ceiling” because, during an intimate moment with Ifemelu, she finds herself staring at the ceiling, an awkward, telling detail that captures emotional detachment rather than connection. Relationships among the African diaspora are also well explored in another of Adichie’s best-known short stories, ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’, first published in 2008 as part of the collection of the same title, which was first released in the US.
The power of Trapped in the Jungle lies in how it boldly upends assumptions about life in the diaspora.
It exposes the hidden struggles and scars many endure while maintaining a rosy image back home, living in a land that may never fully embrace them, often treating them as mere cogs in its wheel of development. So much that some spend decades without stepping into a lecture hall, which was the reason they travelled to the land of the free in the first place.
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By Henry Munene