I wished they were there with me. But I could not risk telling them anything over the phone. When my abusive and manipulative marriage ended, I had thought that I would never go through worse times. I wish to correct that and say, if you think it cannot get any worse, it actually can. It did. Right there, in my full view, it got worse. There followed a series of blood tests and imaging tests and more blood tests.
I did not even flinch when the nurse said she would need more blood samples. I would have to wait about a week for the results of the biopsy that would determine what stage the cancer was in and how management would look like.
In contrast with common practice in Kenya, the management of patients in the UK is largely patient-centred. Patients take part in the management of the disease from the initial point of diagnosis. There are no surprises. Doctors do not dictate what treatment will be given. They offer options, complete with alternative routes, and discuss the risks and benefits of action or inaction. You would be a fool to ignore science.
Mother dear raised no fool in me. A week later, it was determined that the cancer was Stage 1. Sigh of relief… because Stage 1 is curable. Results also came back positive for female hormone receptors. This matters because cancer cells behave like padlocks and we must know what type of padlocks they are. For each identifiable receptor, science has the keys or medications needed. Sneaky little witches. On 25 June , I underwent surgery under general anaesthetic to remove the lump at the Western General Hospital.
The United Kingdom has since invested heavily in breast cancer units, making breast cancer care effective and efficient. Waiting times are reduced because breast cancer patients do not have wait in line with patients seeking other services. Thankfully, the cancer had not spread beyond my milk ducts. But I needed radiotherapy to kill any remaining cancer cells and to reduce the chances of recurrence. All this happened in less than three months.
I had to put on my big-girl pants and face my treatment. I did not have the time to mourn my lovely breast. I seem to be doing this a lot lately. Gazing at my breasts.
As if I want them to say something to me. A habit that intrudes on my attempts to focus elsewhere. They are clearly asymmetrical; the left one dwarfs the right one.
My bra size has also changed. I am glad that they did not have to remove my breast. I still look forward to starting a family and breastfeeding my babies. I do not know how pregnancy will affect my breasts but I have come to accept that worry and fear are the nub of anxiety. I just am grateful to be alive and still have both breasts. Symmetrical or not, they are my breasts and I love them today more than ever.
The idea that artists from privileged backgrounds might be the only ones left mentally fit to create art and give an artistic interpretation of the times is terrifying. As I recover, like every other hopeful Kenyan, from the mild shockwaves set off by the release of the Pandora Papers and the confirmation that the Kenyatta family is indeed an organization with a long heritage of looting.
I remember to also spare the devil some time to indulge me:. Late last year I teamed up with an artist I still consider my mentor and friend to create work that would see us occupied for the greater part of this year, linking intergenerational struggles in the political space.
It was an awkward split as I never really knew how to directly address this philosophical difference; what I had to say about his actions was in conflict with my knowledge of who he was and what I had thought would be his contribution to the project. I am an artist in my mid-twenties while he has been in the field for longer than I have lived so one can only imagine the crisis of confidence I was in.
I chose instead to give my mental health as the reason I would not be able to continue participating in project. Silence, and second guessing myself, has become my way of coping with this new reality that I find rather obscure. I did not have a clear picture of what was happening and whether my knowledge would have had any impact. Perhaps there really was a different way of doing things that I did not know of. Perhaps structures and plans were just formalities that yielded to personal needs where resources were concerned.
There were many disparities between what we had actually done and the financial accounting, facts that our reports concealed, and this has left me without peace. What I was taking part in did not sit well with me since it is my generation that is facing systemic violence from the state using this very same tool of obscurity. There are many instances where acquaintances have offered me advice that sounded more like a warning from an elder to a young man. Such warnings are usually given by former artists who become concerned whenever I happen to share with them that I find it difficult to compromise my integrity for financial gain.
Some have even gone as far as calling me an idealist for insisting that if the work an artist creates intentionally promotes a certain idea of what the world should be like, then the artist would be a liar to be living their lives contrary to those ideas.
But I am reminded that artists too are human beings, with the same flaws, the same needs, facing the same temptations. I have learned to take such advice as polite warnings against losing economic relevance in a country that is diving deep into an economic recession. But what does this reality mean for an artist seeking to live a different way and confronted by the need to make a living?
Reflecting on the conversations I have had with friends on the value of integrity has offered me great insights into where this split occurs.
I spoke to Kate and Janet, two university students from Nairobi who seemed to be in agreement that when it comes to making money their integrity can be set aside. Both still live at home and all their basic needs are met by their parents.
Janice concluded by making it clear that she would not like to be an angry fifty-year old who is unable to speak the truth because she compromised a few times in the past. I never really got an image of what material maturity looked like from my conversations with these friends. Janice only went as far as describing the age at which someone, an adult person, begins to feel the pressure to mature materially as varying with the background that individual comes from.
This is a very crucial point to consider when looking, for example, at crime in the streets and the ghetto where young men and teenage boys, driven by the inability of their parents to provide for them, use the only resource they have access to — their physicality — to meet such basic needs as food and shelter. This often involves the use of physical violence or intimidation to gain access to resources. This is the way of the beasts, the way of life in the bush, not the way of humans and civilized societies.
It is a reality that these young men would perish if they found no means to fulfil their basic needs, but does their imperative to survive ever get to be reconciled with the fact that they are causing harm to another? What does integrity mean when the young and poor arrive at this impasse almost every single day of their lives? And based on what other young people have to say, it is an impasse that seems to cut across the class divide.
The only difference being that class obscures this impasse, making it seem non-existent for the rich. The more one gains access to resources, the less they have to interact with the implications of their actions. Perhaps this is why people steal as much as they can, not just to survive or to become the richest, but rather to avoid interaction with the guilt of having hurt others to get where they presently are.
There has to exist an unbridgeable physical distance between the dispossessed and the wealth of the oppressor, and for this distance to be effective one has to also create a mental from with reality. Here, the revision of language becomes an important tool, as to have to constantly consider what is meant by a word such as theft might lead one to look into their own actions and see the deed. We detach the signified from the word theft, substituting it with the signified of the word survival because our reality has come to prove our understanding of language wrong.
The majority is doing it. The capitalist system employs the obscurity created by this distance to reward the biggest thieves with immunity from personal and public guilt, while punishing the pettiest of thieves, who are bound to the public that is their only resource, with death often executed in public.
Those that choose not to steal even when faced with the imperative to survive, often end up being swept away by irrelevance, the system swallows them whole. He remembers telling a more privileged poet that he felt like art was a curse for him to which the poet responded that, for her, it was like a stream of healing. He found it interesting that contemporaries could have such different experiences of the same space.
This conflict had become overwhelming for him, so he moved to the hospitality industry where he earns a good living. I received these remarks with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I was happy for him, that he was no longer threatened by the imperative to survive. On the other hand I was disappointed that a creator had been turned into a consumer by virtue of his financial status. I met Charles Anthony Matathia earlier this year, a writer and poet whose work in film has received great acclaim from the Kenya art fraternity and beyond.
Nairobi Half Life , the film he co-wrote with Billy Kahora et al. My three encounters with this great artist, whose career and life have been disrupted by his mental health with no resources available for him to call upon, were heart-breaking. His contemporaries continue to make meaningful contributions to African art and literature while Charles Matathia occasionally pops up on social media and radio interviews as someone who was once a writer.
The idea that artists from privileged backgrounds and those with reliable contacts or resources might be the only ones left mentally fit to create art and give an artistic interpretation of the times is terrifying. As poets turn to selling clothes vending, social media influencing and photography to survive, as writers cap their pens in order to stay economic relevant by doing sales, my concern is no longer who will speak truth to power, but what type of truth is allowed to be presented before power.
I come back home a worried man, even more perturbed than I was before, about the march of colonialism under the guise of conservation. Dear Natives, do you know any conservationist who was in Marseille, France, in the last couple of weeks?
Personally, I was there as part of a group organizing resistance against the relentless advance of colonialism throughout the global south under the guise of conservation.
Like most conservation conferences today, this meeting was full of backslapping and self-congratulatory nonsense exchanged between celebrities, politicians and business people. Oyunga Pala is a pioneering satirist and columnist. He remains one of the most impactful, Kenyan columnists of his generation. Oyunga is adept at curating individuals and collective ideas and imaginations and works with various genres of expression.
His intellectual work is multi-disciplinary and foregrounds Pan-African histories and ideals when analyzing political, social, and cultural events at local, national, regional, and international levels.
I remain aware that these market women in Luanda are an exception rather than the rule. This deliberate stewardship of resilient self-propagating seed is a response to the commercialisation of indigenous vegetable seeds, and in the face of capitalised seed control, they become the face of the resistance movement.
Their actions embody generations of knowledge and a tradition of survival in the midst of a sophisticated assault on the diversity of food crops. The place of seeds and their preservation is a conversation that happens in the margins amongst groups of community women creating alternative seed economies. North America has witnessed a revival of native seed exchange banks as indigenous communities re-imagine management systems to store and protect native heirloom seeds that sustained Native American plant-based foods.
Seed Keepers Networks are emerging to revitalise native plant species and the inherent rich cultural knowledge that accompanied traditional food pathways.
Alongside that are foodie movements returning to tradition of reclaiming and re-imagining pre-colonial African diets that were largely vegan. Many of these initiatives abide by a funding model that involves foreign experts jetting in with capital to solve local problems that were exacerbated by neo-liberal economic policies. Where the women are acknowledged, they merely serve as mascots for narratives of rural poverty that appeal to saviour mentality complexes.
It is loss of knowledge, memory, culture and food sovereignty that is replicated among communities in the global South enduring the trauma of colonial dislocation. The future of seed commons is going to be grassroots-based and sustained by networks of conscious actors organising to dismantle the power of the agroindustrial complex.
The confluence of challenges arising from modern food pathways has triggered a case for re-imagination, not only of what we eat, but how we produce what we eat.
What we need is culture recovery that revitalises the relationship with land and the foods we produce and consume. Views expressed in the article are not necessarily those of the RTFI. The Elephant is helping to build a truly public platform, while producing consistent, quality investigations, opinions and analysis. The Elephant cannot survive and grow without your participation. Now, more than ever, it is vital for The Elephant to reach as many people as possible.
Your support helps protect The Elephant's independence and it means we can continue keeping the democratic space free, open and robust. Every contribution, however big or small, is so valuable for our collective future. When I left my abusive marriage, I thought the worst was behind me and things could only get better. Then life handed me a breast cancer diagnosis on my thirtieth birthday. I have been a registered nurse for eight years now and have spent two of those working in the United Kingdom.
Like many who have immigrated to Britain, the search for greener pastures and working systems brought me here. I had my career figured out and I was sure that turning thirty would herald the dawn of a financial breakthrough, better roles and, if the stars aligned, a family. And you have breast cancer. I have heard people say, I have read, that a cancer diagnosis makes you deaf and dumb, that it stupefies you. I thought they were just unable to express what they felt. Words abandoned me on that last day of May It started with a lump in my left breast.
A tiny immovable grape-like elf hugging my chest wall and kissing the underside of my breast. It was located in a peculiar place and my General Practitioner GP — known as a family physician in Kenya , my first point of contact, had struggled to palpate it. My breasts are medium-sized and I did not expect that she would find it difficult to feel the lump.
Yet I had had to direct her gloved hands to the place where that little monster was hiding. Close to my heart. Crossing my heart. On the 31st of May — the day my nephew turned nine and my elder sister sent me adorable photos of the boy celebrating his birthday — I took a Number 33 bus to the Edinburgh Breast Unit for my appointment with the specialist breast doctor and surgeon at the Western General Hospital where my GP had referred me when I saw her sometime in late April He started by commending me for detecting the lump as it was quite small and well concealed.
Yet I had not been actively looking for it; I was just fiddling with my left breast absent-mindedly when I felt it. After a thorough physical examination of my breasts, Mr J, as I will refer to him here male surgeons in the UK are referred to as Mr not Dr, welcome to Britain mate!
He then focused on my left breast and with the assistance of a brilliant clinical support worker the equivalent of a patient care attendant or nurse aide in Kenya my breast became a specimen under investigation. But even as the clinical support worker did her best to distract me, my eyes remained fixed on the screen of the ultrasound machine.
I saw the outline of the lump and the edges looked irregular. Mr J confirmed this and sent me to the mammogram department where a core bilateral mammogram and a fine needle biopsy of the lump were done. My mind kept going back to Kenya though. I wondered how much I would have had to pay for the consultation and for the tests.
To be honest, the financial implications would probably have intimidated me enough to ignore that lump. Small cancer? You got to be kidding me! In all my years as a nurse, I have never heard of anything like a small cancer.
I have also been a nurse long enough to know that breast cancer kills more women than cervical cancer. I will be turning thirty tomorrow and you tell me that I have breast cancer? I went through a rough childhood and stormy twenties only to crown it all with a bloody cancer diagnosis at thirty?
Suddenly I broke down. I bawled and wailed. I know I spoke in Swahili and Kikuyu much to the amazement of the good doctor. How he maintained his composure beats me.
Mr J held my hand and took me to another room where I was introduced to my personal Breast Cancer Nurse. Mr J and Nurse A did their best to comfort a dishevelled and inconsolable me, all alone in the UK with no family and no romantic life to speak of. I cried harder. I missed my family and friends.
I wished they were there with me. But I could not risk telling them anything over the phone. When my abusive and manipulative marriage ended, I had thought that I would never go through worse times. I wish to correct that and say, if you think it cannot get any worse, it actually can. It did.
Right there, in my full view, it got worse. There followed a series of blood tests and imaging tests and more blood tests. I did not even flinch when the nurse said she would need more blood samples. I would have to wait about a week for the results of the biopsy that would determine what stage the cancer was in and how management would look like.
In contrast with common practice in Kenya, the management of patients in the UK is largely patient-centred. Patients take part in the management of the disease from the initial point of diagnosis. There are no surprises. Doctors do not dictate what treatment will be given. They offer options, complete with alternative routes, and discuss the risks and benefits of action or inaction. You would be a fool to ignore science.
Mother dear raised no fool in me. A week later, it was determined that the cancer was Stage 1. Sigh of relief… because Stage 1 is curable. Results also came back positive for female hormone receptors.
This matters because cancer cells behave like padlocks and we must know what type of padlocks they are. For each identifiable receptor, science has the keys or medications needed. Sneaky little witches. On 25 June , I underwent surgery under general anaesthetic to remove the lump at the Western General Hospital.
The United Kingdom has since invested heavily in breast cancer units, making breast cancer care effective and efficient. Waiting times are reduced because breast cancer patients do not have wait in line with patients seeking other services. Thankfully, the cancer had not spread beyond my milk ducts. But I needed radiotherapy to kill any remaining cancer cells and to reduce the chances of recurrence.
All this happened in less than three months. I had to put on my big-girl pants and face my treatment. I did not have the time to mourn my lovely breast. I seem to be doing this a lot lately. Gazing at my breasts. As if I want them to say something to me. A habit that intrudes on my attempts to focus elsewhere. They are clearly asymmetrical; the left one dwarfs the right one. My bra size has also changed. I am glad that they did not have to remove my breast.
I still look forward to starting a family and breastfeeding my babies. I do not know how pregnancy will affect my breasts but I have come to accept that worry and fear are the nub of anxiety. I just am grateful to be alive and still have both breasts.
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