Modern Miracles We Take for Granted
As I write this, we are about to land in Addis Ababa the capital of Ethiopia. It is nearly 10.30 pm and we have just started to descend from 38,000 feet in our US Boeing 777
Our journey started at Cape Town's International Airport at 4.00 pm EAT. That is exactly six and a half hours ago.
In the process, we travelled across the entire Republic of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Kenya before entering Ethiopian airspace around the Kenyan town of Moyale. Altogether an air distance of some 4,200 km that is an average speed of 600 km per hour.
So, you ask, what is the big deal about that? We do it all the time and never think twice about it.
But, wait a minute. In this airship that we travelled in, there were some 300 or so travelers plus a crew of at least 8 (I guess because the captain would not tell us all the details) - just in case some Al-Qaeda guy was on board. Most of them headed in all sorts of destinations as I learnt on arrival.
Some Comparatives.
According to my Google map magician called GPRS, if we had chosen to drive from Cape Town, the distance would have been 6,822 km and would have taken 3 days and 18 hours, say 4 days. That is at an average speed of 76 km per hour an unlikely speed knowing the little that I know about the terrain between the two places.
If, on the other hand I had chosen to walk, it would, according to the same good old Google taken me 55 days to cover the same distance. Works out to be at an average of 5.2 km per hour NON-STOP. Can you imagine walking for 55 days non-stop? Someone should tell those guys at Google that walking is done by humans who have to do a few things along the way – like sleeping, border checks, mosquito bites and the man-eaters of Tsavo not to mention a few tribes with cannibalistic tendencies along the way.
Which sort of makes me wonder about that infamous Kenyan settler called Colonel Ewart Grogan who, to prove that he was worthy a wench called Gertrude (she of the fame of a Nairobi children’s hospital bearing her name), offered her father to walk from Cape Town to Cairo a distance of some 9,700 km that would take a modern day walker around 82 days. Knowing when it happened (around 1902), one just wonders how he could have made that journey at all let alone in the time he said he did it.
Which makes me wonder: If a famous explorer could romanticize such a momentous event and make it sound so real (he actually got his prize wench), how many other fables were we told by our British colonisers and made to accept as God-sent facts? And worse, they made us as kids to learn all of them as the history of Africa and Kenya in particular. Has anybody ever tried to verify that story? But that is a story for another day.
Back to Miracles
If you ever put your mind to it, you will realize that there are so many modern- day miracles that we never think twice about. Like flying on that jet plane from Cape Town to Addis Ababa or wherever. Without even thinking what might happen along the way. The modern long distance jet liner was only perfected 50 years ago.
Another miracle is the ubiquitous mobile phone that has now become part of our lives not as a means of communicating with our friends but as a tool for sending all sorts of messages some lewd others quite distressing like the current wave of fake news. I am sure if Alexander Graham Bell - the inventor of the telephone - woke up today, he would not realize the mess he had unleashed on the world. And yet, as late as 20 years ago, a former president of Kenya had sworn that Kenya would never allow those funny telephones into the country which his Special Branch police force could not listen to...
For us Kenyans, a greater miracle is something called Mpesa – “pesa” is a Swahili word that simply means money, a commodity that we did not know anything about until the Brits introduced it here around the time Grogan was doing his crazy walk for love. The currency then in use was the Rupee brought in from India by those fellas who helped the Brits build a railway line from Mombasa to Kisumu at a cost of £5 million, a tidy sum even by the standards of today.
Incidentally, compounded at 3% per annum over the 115 years since the railway line was completed and adjusted at an average rate of inflation of another 3%, the amount adds up to £4 billion today. A simple conversion to Kenya shillings gives an equivalent of Sh 570 billion. You can make your own conclusions about this amount and the current cost of the SGR that the Kenya government is putting up.
Mpesa simply stands for mobile money and it has really transformed this country’s spending habits. For a start, you can pay for just about everything in the country using this ubiquitous currency. You no longer have to go to the bank to withdraw or deposit money and this is playing havoc with commerce as we used to know it.
Even banks are beginning to offer free currency transfers for everything from Sh 10 to Sh 999,999. Beyond that, you can only use RTGS which the Central Bank of Kenya will know about. Goodbye cheque books and currency notes. A true modern-day miracle. Which has also made a fortune for Safaricom our modern money-minting machine that made a whopping Sh. 38 billion in profit in 2016.
Desk-Top Computer
This will come as a shocker to the millennials. Until around 1970, there were no desk-top computers. To the best of my recollection, the first desk-top appeared in Kenya around that time and I had the rare privilege of being an early adopter. The machine was made by an Italian company called Olivetti and used direct programming which few modern techies know much about.
Now, it is all over the place including the iPad that I am typing on. Another true miracle courtesy of one Steve Jobs a college dropout who was “born a crime” - a mixed race kid which neither parent wanted to keep and so gave up for adoption.
Not to mention its close relative: the ubiquitous mobile phone.
The Motor Car
The modern motor car, while not new as such, is a modern marvel of improvement. From the contraption made by Mercedes and “perfected” by Henry Ford, there are few who believe that the main means of transport before the coming of the rail was the horse or donkey – many still use them today especially in Lamu.
But just try to imagine life without cars, motor cycles, lorries, buses and all that goes with it – the engines, like Firestone, the oil riches of investors in the Middle East and the whole industrial world.
The Light Bulb
For me, the greatest miracle probably still remains the electric light bulb. Imagine two pieces of wire meeting and through some form of magic, producing light.
In case the Kenyan reader wishes to know about this magic, all you have to do is read a story in Elspeth Huxley’s book “The Flame Trees of Thika” describing the first encounter between the Kikuyu natives and Mzungu’s lantern which they thought a terrible source of evil. They would not even get anywhere near it at night.
For those who are more inventive, remember Thomas Edison failed 1,000 times before he finally got his Eureka moment: The rest, like they say, is history – a reminder that no matter how many times you fail, never ever give up on your dream.
Finally, the bulb needs re-thinking because it uses non-renewable sources of energy and yet we have an inexhaustible source especially for those of us living around the Equator: The sun. Located 93 million miles from earth, it supplies us with light 12 hours a day before it disappears over the horizon. Yet, through technology, we can harness its power and literally, go on FOREVER using that source of power. Truth be told, the solution is already within reach – solar power in all its forms.
So I ask: If you read the Judaic Bible, Genesis 1:3 it says: “And God said: Let there be light and there was light.” Each and every new day without exception. Capable of doing things we do not even understand. Yet, we just take the sun for granted.
So instead of just singing about the sun like my latest find Gikuyu singer Justin Muturi says in his now famous song “Irathiro Ria Riua”(The Rising of the Sun), why don’t you go out and REALLY find out what you can do with that eternal source of power. And improve the lives of mankind.
I am sure you have your own ideas about modern miracles. Let us talk more about them and see how we can use them creatively.
JH Kimura,
Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia,
18th May 2017