Is the Carnage on the Kenyan Roads a Case of Literary Dystopia?
Within the last two weeks, over thirty Kenyans have died violently and un-fortunately in the accidental carnages on the roads while travelling, their deaths is attributed to what can be described as tragic road accidents. This is conventionally so though history of English language and other modern languages do not have a case of farcical road accidents. Interestingly, there is a mystery from the same situation that these same roads that reap fortunate Kenyans money and money they are at the same time the ones that occasion violent ant fateful deaths to the most unfortunate Kenyans. For example, in a fortnight ago, fourteen people died in kamukuywa, Bungoma County, while nineteen people died in Nakuru around a place known as Salgaa. In literature and social aesthetics this type of a condition in which some people overtly benefit as others desperately loose is known as dystopia or very hard conditions along-side very nice conditions. If we are allowed by the dear editor to separate, then the literature word for the very hard conditions is cacotopia, but the word for very ideal conditions is utopia. Hence, it can be described as dystopia if the two elements of dystopia blended, but hystopia if at the same time they both threaten to break the circumstantial ceiling of human experience.
Above all else, even as encountered in the specific literatures of dystopia like that epic case of IQ84 by Haruki Murakami , there is always a case for each and every situation,Haruki Murakami universalizes dystopia of religion to show an example that even in politics and traffic management, there are pre-conditions for the traffic dystopia-extreme deaths and extreme profits from high-ways. The question is what are the positives reasons and negative causes behind road related carnages in Kenya. Reasons are many , however by if I confine myself to my passion of literature, I am only un-apologetic to deem that lack of good manners among the traffic system managers is the key focus of my ken.
By this argument I mean that politics of survival, governance threatened by political partisanship, selective employment based on loyalty, and the ethical structure of the NITSA is actually a force among other forces behind rampart deaths caused by road accidents in Kenya. Going back to literature of déjà-vu and dystopia as experienced in Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 people derive benefits from every bad situation as victims agonize. This is not a mistake but a phenomenon of social reality just as seen in the case of beneficiaries and losers in the experience of slavery on the slave market at Tripoli, Libya. It is under the same context that Aristotle was moved to say that slavery is a gift of nature; actually it is victimhood which is the gift of nature but not only slavery.
Thus, as lovers of literature solutions to carnage along Kenyan roads are humble in taste and nature; trained drivers, traffic police officers that are not addict to bribe taking, remove the cult of performance target or pay based on performance among the drivers, widen our roads and de-ethinicize the Kenya roads and traffic inspectorate board of NITSA.Thank you.