Freedom; Lessons from Domestication of Chicken

                                      

                                              (Image courtesy)

My people, the Ameru, tell a story of the Chicken and the Partridge. The two were great friends and lived together in the forest fending for themselves and their young.  One day it was very cold, they were in desperate need for warmth but had no skills of making fire. Fortunately they knew of man who lived in the village, the chicken was sent to borrow the fire. When the Chicken reached the village, she met a woman who was preparing fermented porridge using grinding stones.  Before asking for the fire, the chicken started feeding on the droppings, known as makie, around the grinding stone.

After some eating, the chicken walked out, stood at raised ground and shouted to her friend, “Nkware gutirii mwankiῙ ῙῙ”, (Partridge there isn’t any fire here”), and went back in to eat some more. The Chicken never returned to the forest.

Ms Chicken realized the readiness of food is more important than fire for warmth that day.  In the forest there was Freedom to whenever and at whatever time but there was No guarantee of food, it was a hustle. Also one’s security was bear, predictors were many. Food was more important to the chicken than all the freedom; she therefore made a sacrifice Food over Freedom. She probably did not know man was also a predictor but what if he was? He was just one, better than the mongoose and tens of others carnivores in the forest.

But man turned out to be more vicious predictors of the chicken than all other monsters in the forest combined, he consumed most of the eggs and gave just a few for hatching. Therefore Ms Chicken had to produce more eggs to ensure survival of its species compared to forest life. What more the food wasn’t Free after all. Ms Chicken was being fattened up for slaughter. It can be argued that man saved chicken from Extinction if she had picked the fire and went back living in the forest like other animals. Yes, the population of this species is bigger than that of man himself.  However I opine that the chicken could probably have developed a Survival tactic in her natural habitat and increased its number substantially without the aid of man. Would the chicken be Content if they weren’t as many but FREE?

What is Freedom?  It’s exemption from restraints. The fundamental tenet of a democracy is Freedom. Freedom from what and to do what? In a colony, man cannot move, associate or pretty much do anything without consent of his master. Same case as being a child, or living under a dictator. But then one day all these rights are granted and you celebrate, Freedom at last! It’s all an ILLUSION, man is Never free; he has never been and Never will be.

Independent states may not serve a Master per say but new masters emerge that are more ruthless. The new masters, kill, maim, loot money and land, divide us, detain, say unsavory words, live large as we wallow in destitution. Man puts up with all this crap in the name of building a nation and securing a future for his offspring. We realize the new master is like the old one, now on steroids. There is No Freedom. You cannot move about at certain times of day or night, you risk arrest. You cannot associate at certain places or with people. There is a law prohibiting every goddamn thing a Free man wishes. A teenager who yearns for Freedom from overbearing parents soon realizes how Responsibilities chokes much of the air out of Freedom.  

Hell! Even believe in a super natural being did not offer Freedom  from the vagaries of life, fear of unknown , pain and agony as man had envisaged  and Death won’t either.

Brain's Multitasking in Different Locations

                                                       

                                                                 Courtesy www.fwbusiness.com

It is often assumed that man’s (humanity) biggest shortfall is the failure to create life using science.  However this is a far-short, it will be achieved someday in the future when requisite technology is available. In my opinion the possibility of our brain performing multiple tasks at the same time, i mean multitasking in the sense of time.

An average human being wishes to perform at least five or so tasks and complete them ALL at once at a given time. For instance I would want to be studying for a degree, master or PhD program and working too. That is instead of breaking for studies or doing part-time studies; you are simultaneously studying and working full time.

Also imagine a situation where one could be able to say:

        -Go out with friends

      - Be at home alone, with a loved one

       - At a date

     - Do some reading

     - Watch a favourite program or movie

    - Striking a business deal

Or attending a weekly job’s meeting on a Monday morning while taking your kids to school.

ALL at the same time. Simultaneously.

I am talking about activities that demand our mental presence and NOT physical presence. As such this function will involving ‘sending’ one’s brain or part of it to PERFORM  a number of Tasks at DIFFERENT locations simultaneously.  The brain will thereof recollect as one. Meaning the brain functions as the central command and database of data acquired from different locations and tasks.

But then, if we were to acquire such ability would we still maintain our unique identity as an individual as we are now? Or would our brains’ acquisition of different data/information simultaneously transform us into different individuals?

FIVE QUESTIONS ON THE DONALD E. CARR ETERNAL RETURN

In Chapter 5 of the book THE ETERNAL RETURN, titled Déjà vu and the Mysterious Flashes, the late American author Donald E Carr in trying to explain the concept of Individual Memory in the eternal return, he poses the following scenario to his imagined recalcitrant and stubborn antagonist Marvin

    DEC: Your real objection, I take it, is the common one, not to say vulgar one, of the whole-hog    

    materialistic. You insist that memory must pounding or making holes in a piece of funny putty. Let’s take a look in space-time at a hypothetical experiment by some neurologists the future. This a very important experiment and takes a very long time and exacts an enormous amount of skill. We shall call it the “Experiment of the Cut-Down Brain”

 Now, what the experimenters do is to carefully and gradually cut a human being into pieces. However, the subject does not know he is being cut into pieces because the surgical neurologists, as they remove arms, legs, finally the whole torso, leaving only the head, cleverly substitute an artificial sensory and sympathetic nervous system (which may be a big black box full of wires) so that the brain still imagines it is still receiving sensations from the trunk, the stomach, the arms and legs and even thinks that it is moving its hands, that it is digesting and evacuating, etc. on the next step, gradually, oh very gradually, perhaps over a period of centuries, the eyes are cut out, along with the nose, the mouth, the ears, but immensely ingenious artificial substitutes are implanted, so that the subject imagines, he sees, tastes, smells, hears, talks, experiences, closes his eyes to sleep, dreams, scratches his head, etc. the cutting process continues now into the brain. Yet because of substitution by artificial neurons, synapses, glia cells etc., which need not be in the subject’s brain at all but can be in the black box, the subject still maintains some degree of consciousness. As we cut down perhaps the last cubic inch of original brain, there is still consciousness. Finally, still making the immensely complicated substitutes, which now perhaps require several millions of years to assemble properly, the last cubic inch is removed and thrown away, and its artificial simulacrum is connected in to the black box…. Now what would you say we have done?

      Marvin: You’ve killed the poor bastard.

However Donald explains that the poor bastard has not been killed rather he has been reproduced as a different event sequence in the space-time continuum.

     DEC: As consciousness has faded from the original brain it crept into the artificial devices. The black box is now a conscious entity. It possess not only memories of the original brain, but as the great experiment has proceeded over the millennia, the black box has acquired its own private memories. There has been no total loss of consciousness. The amount of consciousness lost by the original brain has been recovered by the artificial system. Like energy, consciousness has shown itself to be indestructible…

I follow and understand the train of thought that Donald Carr and even imagine the whole experiment of Cut-Down Brain sequence. It is a fascinating and the book itself is very enlightening. I would have loved to meet Carr in person, but unfortunately he passed on in 1986 some years before I was born. Since I read this 1968 publication by him, I have been bothered by the thoughts of a REVERSE EXPERIMENT. What would happen if the whole body cut down to the last cubic inch of brain were to be reconstructed? The process is assumed to take the time, cautiousness and perhaps more advanced technology. Then,

     1. Would the brain still have consciousness?

    2. Is it possible for the brain to remember the Cut-Down experiment carried on it and the body?

    3. Can the brain detect there was a time break or gap between then and now?

    4. Is it possible to maintain the thoughts or say consciousness of the original brain and Black Box   

          as separate entities?

     5.  And if the two entities were let to live alongside each other subjected to the same life events all

          the time, would we be able to tell who is who, I mean would they be different individuals or an 

          individual in two forms? Would their thoughts be the same always?

I will be glad to get answers to these disturbing questions. I invite anyone out there with thoughts on them to contact me via email kithinjikinotikk@gmail.com or use any other platform to settle them.

Cameroon;the Anglophone crisis

Steve Biko said,"The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed".
Colonization wasn't evil because we were enslaved,displaced, tortured, raped and murdered in our ancestral land, rather that our minds were conquered forever.
In Cameroon there is a crisis between Anglophone Southwest and francophone government of the despot Paul Biya. The then German Kamerun was handed over to France and Britain(Southwest and Northwest),after the defeat of Germany in WWI. In 1961 Nortwest Cameroonians joined federation of Nigeria while southwestern became part of Le Republique du Cameroon on the promise of being treated equally. All governments of independent Cameroon have however reneged on promises made to the anglophone southwest.
  Public documents are printed in French with no English translation as do other matters of state. For over fifty years these citizen have treated like second class because nature's rule (the advanced society must conquer the less) hence colonization.
It's embarrassing that a people of one race are fighting over the language of the oppressor. The fathers of independent Africa really failed us big time,they never picked any of our languages to be official for the continent. Too busy looting and assassinating opponents! In Canada anf the US there are French speaking states and run their governments without conflicts with the rest of the country, so Cameroonians should go back to the original federal republic,become bi lingual or separate.

Death of Nyamwezi the Watchman

             

There was a time when being a security guard wasn’t considered a job or work, you were just a security guard. My bad, the name wasn’t fancy either you were a Watchman! You could not hear of anyone who worked as a guard.it was such a downtrodden and undermined activity and so was its association. Ask anyone their occupation and one would answer, “Well, I am a farmer” and may be add “but in the evenings I do look over that school”. That was before the security and courier services firm G4S came into the country and made being a watchman a thing.

Nowadays watchmen attend some kind of training, have fancy uniforms and get paid through a bank! After all they are no longer watchmen but security guards or ‘solders’, men and women alike. You ought to even have attained some level of education and has the qualms to introduce yourself as having a career in a big security company headquartered in Nairobi. Back in the day especially in upcountry only schools and coffee factories were guarded, in most cases only at night.  The work wasn’t liked could be because one was only armed with a club, a bow and arrows and a machete against better armed thugs , no uniforms or had had handouts instead of salaries in  some godforsaken institution  that never valued him enough to build a shack to shield himself during the rains. That such a job never attracted young men or women of any ages isn’t a wonder. The characters were men in their fifties, sixties and above, mostly as a side hustle and not a full time job.

In Meru School were had four or so watchmen, they worked in shifts of two at night and two during the day. The work in the day shift entailed checking vehicles, attending to visitors and more importantly checking in or out students who were either suspended, expelled, sent away for school fees or out to do some shopping or ‘shopping’. ‘Shopping’ meant just being out and about in town checking out the ladies (more of ogling than checking out) at Uchumi Supermarket entryway, going to Wind View pub to imbibe some third generation concoctions or burning a music Compact Disk. The movie shops were making such kill then, imagine music CDs were burning at between Ksh 150 and 200 and movies were more expensive my buddy Kimto bought the Lord of the Rings at Ksh 350. It was in 2005 therefore that like Ksh 1,500 in 2018, damn expensive! There were guys who were out every weekend doing that shit but I never mastered the guts to seek that permit, I was a mischievous but shy boy. 

Enough! Back to Nyamwezi, he was among the four watchmen I can at least recall by name in Meru School. In the company of Ngatia, Boss and the other guy who had sideburns, Nyamwezi stands out because of his character a mean cold-hearted son of a bitch! You see the watchman on duty had the responsibility of opening and closing all the eight dormitories as well as ensuring nobody was hiding in the dorms before he closes them or anywhere else in building during assemblies, preps, class time or the stupid weekend challenge. I despised morning assemblies and weekend challenges so I would hide in my dormitory Njuuri Ncheeke alias Barracks before it is closed or in the vast ceiling of the Multipurpose Hall. The lanky Nyamwezi had an eye for details and he caught me almost every time in hid in the dorm and had had somebody spread my bed while lied in it as a disguise. He was not fooled by that time old trick, the best bed for it was a spring’s one but it would also sag and Nyamwezi’s eagle eye would always spot it. Once caught Nyamwezi was so uncompromising, no amount of pleas, bribes or threats would stop him from dragging you to the ‘Office’.  Save for the papers and not knowing anyone that watchman could probably have made the best Anti-corruption Commission chair Kenya has ever had.

 Now my crew of mischievous boys had grown tired of having the best of six regularly courtesy of Nyamwezi. We had to teach him a lesson. We were big boys now in form three and there was no way in hell a mere watchman could make our lives more miserable than the Snakes (prefects and captains) and Mr. Ithinji the deputy principal were already.  So sometime around the June of 2007 a bunch of very nutty boys met at the cubicle of the Sports prefect Cos Kavinda at 9:45 pm to plot how to bell this cat. We gathered Intel about the rounds he makes at night, to where and at what time. It was discovered that Nyamwezi ate his supper at 2100 hrs. And spend an hour dozing off near a fire. Beating him up was extreme. The following day in the evening at around ten minutes to ten the considered criminal gang of seven or so boys walked out of evening preps for varies reasons but with a single mission Nyamwezi! We fetched water in ten metallic buckets, three in soil and ballast in two and ended towards the kitchen area where the enemy would be warming himself by the fireplace in the kitchen annex. The intel was reliable and the operation a go. Unceremoniously Nyamwezi was hit by a cocktail of bucketful after bucketful of cold water, soil and ballast, for a minutes or two the poor broke tasted the wrath testosterone raging teenagers. Before our victim could gather his composure we ditched the buckets and run toward the classes, fortunately the end of preps bell rang at 2200 Hrs so we joined the crowd ending to sleep. In the morning I was very attentive in the assembly since I knew we couldn’t get away with crime. We had assaulted a watchman who was famed for noting visogos (what the heck is the English for that part of the head anyway?) not facial appearances only.  

That the case was not mentioned was a surprised and we thanked our lucky stars for it, but I guessed it was because Nyamwezi had too many enemies and the timing was ingenious, many boys would end out minutes to ten so that by the time the bell ran they were at their dorms’ doors.  However he caught a nasty cold and had to take a week’s leave. It happened that the snitch suffered from Diabetes and later that year dead while at home. Rumours spread like Ebola virus that attack by the gang was the real cause of his passing on. It became one of those indisputable legends and myths in a schools in spite of facts proving them contrary. That dude could have died anyway attacked or not. In the words and voice of William Ruto let me state without fear of contradiction the gang had nothing to do with this death, Nyamwezi paid the wages of his uncompromising snitch habit I the ambush and mother nature is trying to kill us every damn day till we die.

I know there are folks especially in the #Classof08 who hold the shit true. Anyone who believes the legend that we anyway accelerated the demise of Nyamwezi then he ought to be one of the many who believes the far from true miracles Mrs. Ntoiti the C.U patron was fond of telling on Monday mornings. “Boys on Friday I prayed to the lord and said do not let the disco near my home which is spoiling young people go on. And there was a black out all weekend long. My lord is faithful and answers players, so don’t joke when I say the C.U music system is cleansed by the blood of Jesus and can’t play dirty songs. You try it!”