It is hope that kills, so we say.  The bitter part is that peculiar feeling of darkness that comes when whatever we were hoping for evades us at the end. The hopelessness which sweeps through you after losing something you’d hoped for can be crippling at times, especially after numerous disappointments. Kenyan playwright Francis Imbuga in his play, Betrayal in the City, perfectly captured that disappointment which comes after a period of waiting with his iconic line: “It was better while we waited. Now we have nothing to look forward for.”

From time to time, I usually chance upon that hilarious (and a bit pitiful) meme of a sad-looking man with a caption running like this: ‘Man loses extra hope he didn’t know he had’. 

Our man here was probably saying to himself, “I’m done, I have to quit.” Or as Estragon would say in Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot, “I can’t go on like this.” But a part of our man would still want to remain hopeful and put up a fight. In the deep recesses of his heart, there is still more hope, even after losing the one he didn’t know of.  

Man is a resilient creature. There is no doubt about that. Across the ages, humanity has endured calamities and wars and injustices that wiped out populations in the thousands, millions at times. They came out of the ordeals, unharmed when luck was on their side. Other times, charred, maimed and weak. Either way, they hardly despaired. They allowed the seeds of hope to take root in them. They nurtured the next generation, which brought up the next, and that the next, till we came to be. 

Courage and hope have kept people going in different eras, people of different races facing different adversities. People have clutched onto nothing but strings of hope in their darkest hours.

I will speak of the Southwest dustbowl of the US. This was in 1930s. A dustbowl is an area of land that has been turned into desert by lack of rain or too much farming. The dust storms that hit the region caused many respiratory disorders, including ‘dust pneumonia’. I haven’t mentioned that the majority of the farmers in this region didn’t own the land. They were sharecroppers. A sharecropper is a farmer who gives part of his or her crop as rent to the owner of the land. Since the farmers couldn’t harvest enough to pay rent, the owners of the land moved in with tractors and the farmers were forced off the land. 

Thousands of families were rendered homeless in Kansas and Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico. The displaced people left in droves heading west (California) where they believed the prospects of working in the vast green Californian plantations would sustain them. 

There were thousands of miles to cover, mountains to climb, a terrible desert on the way. The highway leading west was full of jalopies (old, worn vehicles) jammed with households and their belongings. 

John Steinbeck, the acclaimed American novelist, wrote his magnum opus The Grapes of Wrath on this arduous journey to the west and the multiple problems facing the migrant workers. 

 Steinbeck writes: “Two hundred and fifty thousand people over the road. Fifty thousand old cars – wounded, steaming. Wrecks along the road, abandoned. Well, what happened to the folks in that car? Did they walk? Where are they? Where does the courage come from? Where does the terrible faith come from?”

There, the last two lines. Where does the courage come from; the terrible faith to wade through life, even when the odds seem to be heavily stacked against us?

Kenya’s prolific author, Prof Ngúgí wa Thiong’o, has brought forth many works set in colonial and post-colonial Kenya. As you’d expect, his characters are pregnant with hope of how the new Kenya under its own leaders would look like; land to those who had been misplaced by the imperialist government, free education, affordable healthcare, good paying jobs. Then disappointments set in. 

Ngúgí’s characters find themselves on the verge of despair in the wake of the harsh reality that things had not turned out as rosy as they’d expected. Through his writings, Prof Ngúgí is an ambassador of hope. He stresses the need to remain hopeful. In his novel Devil on the Cross he equals despairing to sinning. “Despair is the one sin that cannot be forgiven. It is the sin for which we would never be forgiven by the nation and generations to come.”

Dear one, keep hoping, keep dreaming, keep going. Walk with that terrible faith, the kind of faith that will get people wondering what steroids you are on to give you so much energy and purpose even in the starkest situations. Even when you’ve hit rock bottom, find something to look forward to.

Fortify yourself with the ‘dum spiro spero’ optimism. That’s Latin for while I breathe I hope. 

Have a hopeful time, won’t you? 

N.B. Definitions of dustbowl and sharecropper are from the Oxford Dictionary.

About the Author:

Muinde Ngao was born in Machakos, Kenya. He greatly enjoyed reading stories for children from a young age of around eight. His love for stories and literature saw him read dozens of novels by the time he turned eighteen. After high school, he started writing, first a few poems, then a few novels which never saw the light of day. Ngao holds a Bachelor of Science degree (BSC -Botany) from Moi University. He splits his free time between reading and writing about his experiences and observations made around him. He has written several short stories, and a novella – nothing published yet.

*Feature image by Thomas Bormans on Unsplash