If you are from Nyandarua and you are lazy, I would like to know which part you grew up in or what kind of parents raised you. There was endless work in Nyandarua. Wet season, dry season and every season in between, there was always work to be done.
When I tell my children the kind of work we did growing up, they think my parents should have been jailed for life with no possibility of parole. They feel what we experienced growing up was child abuse, child labor, child endangerment and child neglect, all aspects that are frowned upon by the United Nations and majority of the International Communities. From the description of the work we did, an outsider may wonder if our parents cared about our welfare or even loved us at all. But before anybody passes judgement on these Pioneer Parents, lets think about their circumstances first.
Our parents grew up under colonial rule. Independence came when they were already adults with families. Their parents and grandparents before them were born into colonial rule and most of them died under colonial rule, never knowing freedom their entire lives. Our parents suffered indignation that comes with oppression. They witnessed senseless deaths as their loved ones were brutally murdered by the colonists. They were denied basic human rights and their dignity was shredded every day as they served a thankless master, yet, they had zero options available to them. They missed the opportunity for an education because their colonial masters did not deem them worthy of such a ‘privilege’ IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY. Picture that for just a moment.
And now, in their late 20s, 30s and a few in their 40s, they finally tasted independence, and to crown it all, they were now landowners. It did not matter the farms they were occupying were mortgaged. All that mattered was that their names and thumbprint (kirore) were on the title deeds. They lived every day with the hope that someday in their future, they will reclaim those title deeds when the loans were paid off. All they needed to do now was work the land tirelessly, produce as much as they could, sell it and make enough money to repay the loans as they also raised their children.
With that weighing heavily on their minds, these Pioneer Parents had to make everything work. They had to. They did not have a blueprint on how this was done, because nobody before them had done it. Their parents and grandparents were confined to their Gikuyu roots. They lived on small over cultivated portions of land that had been subdivided for every new generation making them smaller and smaller each time.
That is what these Pioneer Parents had escaped from. They did not want to be confined to those pieces of land any more. They wanted something more and better for themselves and their children. That is why they took this leap of faith to venture into the unknown, do the unthinkable and pray to God that it all worked out for them. They now owed loans of unthinkable amounts. Amounts that had never been associated with their names all their lives. Now they owned those gigantic loans and there was no turning back. I am sure their Gikuyu families must have thought they were out of their minds to enter into such high risk deals.
The Pioneer Parents must have had guts of steel. This was a real gamble for them. New government, New Settlement Scheme, New Cooperative Society, New land, New neighbors and no income to fall back on if things did not work out. Personally, they would have had to initiate CPR and First Aid, trying to revive me as I sprawled out on the floor at the Lands Office after signing that contract.
What would you have done had you been in their shoes at that age, late 20s, 30s and 40s mostly? Before you break into a cold sweat, let me tell you what our Pioneer Parents did, and did not do.
