A semi-ornate, marble cross lies broken atop a marble tombstone at the Langata Cemetery, in Nairobi, Kenya. The grave no longer seems to attract much attention, though the lawn besides it does. The marker is unintelligible. There is still the portrait affixed to the cross, of a forgotten elegant middle-aged man in suit and tie. There is the rust blood-red hue to the earth, and the grass next to the grave is short, and a verdant green.
On this Feast of All Souls, across a land that courts being consumed whole by an “inclusive” savage New Man, who is an efficiently heartless Hominid, there is an Artificially Intelligent and godless Über Ape paused at emerging. Like two very famous Kenya-born men Dr. Richard Leakey and Sir Richard Dawkins, it purports to have no soul, just a big brain evolving in a health-obsessed, genetically-modified, Africa-loving organism. It wants every newborn child to have a biometric Life Number because it fears that we are all “at risk of non-compliance with international enforcement agencies’ standards” and therefore may soon be “restricted from traveling or from accessing government services”.
All Souls Day was always a good moment to take a peak at “standards”, and at one’s “Life Number”, from a very Christian – memento mori – perspective. Only the most unintelligent – and Bolshevik – will associate “Life Number” with benevolent “government services”, with “technical experts and partners”, with a “smooth rollout”, and the many related fables – all resembling that Langata Cemetery tomb. How many tech-savvy Catholics will care to contemplate their verdant (or imploding) soul, and pray at a grave today?
There will, of course, always be those who pay more attention to the grass than to the cross and grave. For them, Maisha Namba is Swahili for Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s digital ID currently in development in Kenya 1. Those who speak languages with voiced stop consonants, with glottal, fricative or implosive features will tell you that tone is important to conveying correct meaning. But, what does maisha namba actually mean, and what relevance does it have to marked graves?
Though the meaning of the Maasai word langata matters enough, don’t souls matter more than greenery, than unintelligible words, than fables? Don’t you?
Written by Stanisław Barua
Photo by Stanisław Barua
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