The boy is father to the man

Today I give a shout-out to the kid I was twenty years ago. I looked at myself in the mirror today and realized that I would not be who I am today were it not for the choices and decisions that the younger me made. So in one way or the other, the bed-wetting 5-year-old, who created the tantrum-throwing 7-year-old, who made the hormone-crazed teenager I once was, who decided to go to college just to see the campus hotties, all of these earlier versions of me contributed to the shaping of the man I am now.

But I am most impressed by that young kid in the slums who dared to dream, who dared to reach for more, without even knowing what he was doing. Those days he spent in an ill-equipped library reading GooseBumps, Hardy Boys, Famous Five, and many a fairy tale are what shaped my mind. As far as I am concerned, he’s more of a man that I can ever hope to be. It is an impressive fact that he took himself, sans hope, sans opportunity, and made a way where there was none. Today he made me fully grasp the significance of one of Shakespeare’s quotes: The boy is father to the man. Indeed, the young boy or girl you were a few years ago is who gave birth to the person you are today.

After this retrospection and introspection, I turned my eye to the future and saw who I want to be ten years from now. And I realized that there was a huge task at hand for the youth I am today. The question is: will the man I become tomorrow be grateful for how I shaped him, or will he look back and curse me wondering how I could’ve been so stupid, careless, and visionless?

Nyashinski’s Aminia – The Dream Maker

The first time I listened to Nyash’s Aminia my eyes welled up with tears. The next thing I did was click on Now You Know to play in the background and then launched MS Word to type this. The thing is, I grew up listening to Nyash, to Klepto, back when E-Sir’s golden age was still in its plateau after the sudden demise of that other King (RIP). Aminia simultaneously took me too far into the past and way into the future that my heart was overwhelmed. Let me explain.

First, in this track Nyash stands up and honestly says what I want to be able to say someday, everything any real man wants to be able to say: I’M IT, y’all! I am the King! I am THE conqueror! And then he gives a shout-out to young ghetto kids with dreams. This is the part that touched me the most. Just over ten years ago I was that ghetto kid. Reading Pulse every Friday and Buzz every Sunday, getting my inspiration from the people who were doing it and succeeding. Most of them were either in the arts or in media, but still many had a rags-to-riches story I could relate and aspire to even though I knew my calling was in neither arts nor media.

So, when in Aminia Nyash tells young children to imagine themselves on the stage already successful and doing their thing, I felt 12 again. I felt the fire of passion within me – a fire that was ignited majorly by artists like Nyash — come to life again. It was like that single line had refueled my soul and fanned my passion. In that moment I saw my 12 year old self in Mathare slums dreaming of being a graduate; at the same time I saw myself where I want to be 10 years from now; my past and future converged within that line. This was Nyash once again magically speaking in a language I understand; the language that makes me believe that I’ll get where I am going; the same way he and others got me to believe I could get out of the slums and become someone.

Art is indeed powerful. For me art is that which enables me to connect to depths of my soul that I did not even know existed; that which makes me feel things I could never have felt otherwise; art makes my heart believe paradoxical and impossible things and know it is not foolish for believing those things. Nyash, Aminia I will never forget where I came from, and I will never forget too what my destination was when I started out. Whoever you are reading this, never forget either. And thanks, Nyash, for reminding us again!

— NBA (The writer of this post is a graduate engineer currently working as a software developer)