LAST WORD
On The Year That Was
In the early seventies , nineteen seventy two to be precise , Ochieng was an exchange student in England and was being hosted by an English family who lived in Sussex . Those were the sunset years of the British Empire and altruistic goodwill was still in the air .
Sussex was not exactly a good choice for locate an African student who was supposed to be exposed to the British culture since there were virtually no black folk in the area and he attended a school with only one other black student , a girl from Ghana .
Ochieng ’ s presence only elicited curious and nervous looks from the usually reticent Britons as he walked to school and the ignorant questions at school from those who wanted to know , including teachers if Ochieng and Ama , the Ghanaian girl were next door neighbors at home .
So for Ochieng it was a surprise when during one of those long weekend afternoon walks he took to kill boredom he came across a house sign , Kenya 21 , fronting a particularly stately English residence with exquisitely manicured lawns and a cobbled driveway .
Ochieng wondered if the owners had any connection to Kenya and although he had already learnt that in Britain it is considered rude and impolite to visit a home unannounced his curiosity was so piqued that he took a chance and walked up the driveway .
As it happened , before he reached the main door he noticed an elderly couple sitting at a gazebo in a very neat garden having afternoon tea . He approached the couple and was surprised that they did not seem at all alarmed by an intruder but quizzical .
Ochieng apologized for the intrusion and informed them that he was from Kenya , at which they both smiled and asked him to join them for tea . That was the inauspicious beginning of a long friendship with the Gilmores who had spent eleven years in Kenya .
As it turned out , Gilmore had worked in the Colonial office for forty five years and Kenya was his last assignment before retiring . He had actually intended to retire in Kenya as the country was being prepared as a British dominion in the same light as Canada , Australia and New Zealand .
Gilmore had arrived in Kenya in 1955 with the specific task of converting Kenya into a self-governing British territory but the 1948 granting of independence to India had switched the political mood in colonial countries into a clamor for democratic majority rule .
There was unease in colonial territories because it became apparent that white extremists did not want a democratic dispensation in the territories but a White hegemony of the colonists as a master race . The revolutions of America , France and Russia made this arrangement impossible .
Africans had started to get nervous when South Africa and South West Africa institutionalized racial segregation under apartheid in 1948 in an attempt to avoid the Indian experience and this type of thinking also culminated in the Rhodesian UDI declaration in 1965 by Ian Smith .
Just as Gilmore had served in the colonial office during a wind of global political change with a push back against minority rule , Ochieng is equally convinced that 2022 is a seminal year in that the events of this year will have far reaching political ramifications . The wind of change is upon the world .
The pandemic shock of 2020 had such a seismic upheaval in the world that the world has become immune to shocks , so the defining events of 2022 seem to be taking place on a backdrop of the overwhelming pandemic era .
This year China has reported its first Covid related deaths after a grueling Zero-Covid policy that has wreaked havoc in China the government is determined to contain the spread of the virus at all costs which have included lock-downs of entire cities of millions of people .
Why is China paranoid about Covid , a pandemic that was originally identified in Wuhan and the Chinese authorities convinced the world that it had the virus under control and had boasted about their superior handling of the virus . Why is the
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