'Twas ever thus

This wonderful cartoon satirises French society just before the French Revolution – more than 200 years ago. The clergy and the nobility are riding on the back of the peasant. Words alone will never communicate as effectively as this simple picture, though Rousseau’s claim that “Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains” comes close.

I was reminded of this cartoon when I read a very interesting article by Lucy Oriang' in Kenya’s Daily Nation. I quote: “There are only two tribes in this country [Kenya] – the rich and the poor. The difference lies in who pays taxes and who doesn’t, and who gets shot in the back by a policeman and who gets a security detail at public expense. It has nothing to do with your mother tongue.” (Her reference to taxes is, I presume, aimed at Kenyan parliamentarians who have opposed a proposal that MPs’ allowances (which are very substantial) should be taxed).

Of course, this analogy of the two tribes is not unique to Kenya: it persists, to this day, all over the world. In fact, it is now much worse than it was: there are many more people who live in bondage and slavery now than at the height of the Atlantic slave trade. What does seem to be missing, however, are campaigns, movements, politics and leaders who propose alternatives to our way of life. Even the recent financial turmoil, which has provided us all with a graphic demonstration of the impact of unalloyed greed, consumption and inequality at both a household and an institutional level, has not yet thrown up alternatives to the ways in which we are organized and governed as societies. Why is this? Was Francis Fukuyama right when, in his book The End of History, he presented the thesis that Western Liberal Democracy is the final form of societal organization to which all societies will ultimately conform?

In East Africa, the overwhelming majority of the population is poor: smallholders eking out a living on small plots of land given over to subsistence cultivation; the urban poor living in low quality housing with poor sanitation, struggling to make ends meet through petty trade or casual employment, or worse. The contrast between rich and poor is more stark than in wealthier European and North American economies. But there are other forms of injustice, inequality and dispossession which have developed and which contribute towards impoverishment of the majority. I am thinking here of the fragmentation of family life, the burden of personal debt, the de-skilling of populations who purchase ready-prepared dinners, who rely on mass media for their entertainment, who dispose rather than mend and recycle, and who are now coming to a slow but steady realization that their way of life is unsustainable….

This cartoon is just as accurate now as it was then. Sadly, it’s hard to believe that we will ever change.