Why Athi River is no place to bring up a young donkey

Early in the morning in Athi River, a young donkey wakes up, stretches his muscles by making a few hee-haws, trots a little way down the road, and digs in for breakfast; his meal of choice, a sprawling heap of garbage behind a block of flats. He has commandeered this particular heap and seems to have grandiose territorial plans for it. Every donkey, he seems to say, to his own garbage heap, and to hell with anyone who wishes to move in on mine, as if there were not enough garbage heaps in Athi River for each and every donkey, monkey and mangy dog worth his/her tail.

But there is no blaming the donkey for being a little selfish. Heck, you would be selfish about your breakfast too if you spent every working hour supplying hoof-power to an ungrateful Athi River Donkey-cart Driver and had no choice to either escape to the KSPCA stables in Langata or run off to the Animal Orphanage, where you can conspire with the wardens to paint your butt scarlet and exhibit yourself as a Doboon (donkey-baboon) right there beside the Zeedonk (Zonkey) and the Zoryx; anything to escape the daily bodily and psychological abuse that is supplying hoof power at the hands of the ruthless, greedy and super-fast donkey-cart drivers of Athi River, but more about that later.

In the evenings, when it is unsafe to be on the road with an unlit cart-load of water, the donkeys of Athi roam the grassy patches of the residential areas in twos or threes, browsing quietly on every blade of grass they can lay their maws on and every bit of garbage they deem edible. They roam the plains aimlessly, feeding, mating and generally enjoying their temporary reprieve until when it’s almost dark, time to form a single file, muzzling each other with their noses as they quietly trudge home, none ever daring to wander off.

“That’s what the beating does to them,” explains Hamisi, who has spent some time around donkeys in Lamu. ”It tames them, makes them obedient and loyal.”  

Looking at the donkey’s dark sad eyes as he digs into his garbage heap breakfast, it’s not hard to imagine the humble beast recalling something terrible about a tail but not quite putting a hoof on it, and - with a ruminative flap of his long ears –dismissing the thought altogether and putting his head down to continue chomping at bits of discarded diaper etc. He knows that soon, the young tout employed to run him will come hurrying like an MP who is late for a meeting about tax evasion and tie him to a blue cart full of plastic jerry cans for the next twelve hours. He knows he will need all the energy he can get. So, chomp, chomp, chomp!

            At this point, this story shifts perspective and stops being told from a donkey’s point of view – beyond here, it would not be a good idea for the human reader to continue to imagine being a donkey in Athi River; not with the perennial water shortage, it is not. 

“Sometimes I think the shortage is artificial,” says Hamisi in his coastal Swahili. “The water sellers and the transporters may all be working together to hold the residents hostage,” he adds bitterly.

Further attempts to get more specific statements from him and his buddies at the water kiosk quickly degenerate into the usual vague pronouncements about shadowy civic leaders and village elders and their strategies of making things scarce so they can make money out of them. It becomes, in other words, political– not good.

Quite curiously, it also calls to mind a depressingly desperate but unrelated case that took place a long time ago in the village where I grew up, when the community water taps suddenly went dry after we had spent a lot of money to ensure they never would, and we suspected a rich and respected elder of diverting the water to his coffee factory and other water-intensive projects to the detriment of everyone downhill– a good thing to call to mind, but also political, so not good either.

So let’s not talk about who owns the many tankers of “Clean Soft Water” delivered every day in the dusty little place that’s not exactly a town but a collection of little dwellings (and a few big ones) and cement factories and steel plants and railway crossings; neither digress any further and discuss a certain trusted church elder in a village far away (even though our suspicions were later confirmed by his children when we all grew up).

Let’s instead finish the story about the trouble with being a donkey in Athi River.

And the vicious ways of the wickedly ruthless, greedy and fast donkey-cart drivers that run their lives.

You see, the faster a donkey-cart driver, the more jerry-cans of water he delivers, the more money he makes – just like a matatu driver on any busy route. Unfortunately for the donkey, the donkey-cart driver knows no other way to be the fastest and richest on the circuit but to clobber the donkey harder and harder. So, the faster the cart, the worse the beating the donkey gets.

In actual fact, only last year, one of the fastest donkey-cart drivers beat his donkeys so much that he not only split both ears of one but clean chopped the tail off the other. Ask anyone in Athi River Makandara where the two donkeys are frequently sighted to the horror of residents and visitors.

(Authours Note: For the sake of all the hardworking donkeys of Athi River, we can only hope that Jean Gilchrist is still at the KSPCA and is reading this.)