Imagine you are that little baby born in an African village or a small town somewhere in a developing country.
Develop me: Tapiwa Gomo
As you grow and try to make sense of the world around you, in your own imagination, life seems good, because your parents are feeding you, giving you attention and everything that makes you smile.
As you continue to grow, you realise that your parents seem happy only when they want you to smile.
While they are meeting the immediate needs, their faces frowningly suggest the existence of a distant good life.
In your small world, you begin to wonder as you try to figure out how that good life, which seems to be in a quite distant horizon, looks like and how it can be achieved or reached.
It begins to weigh in your mind that by the time you are able to talk and have a proper conversation, you start inquiring more about this good life.
And one day your parents respectfully decided to break it down for you.
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There is a world somewhere out there where access to clean water, food, shelter, health care, proper roads and transportation and technology is available and this world exists, but far away from us.
It is a world that come to shape how we define our taste for life, the future and development.
Everything your parents tell you at this stage seems imaginary. But you listen as they continue to break it down.
To enter this world, you need to acquire its education, which enables you to secure a job where you will earn money to pay for your upkeep and access the nice roads, clean water, good food, good shelter, health care, technology and other nice things about life.
When you thought just getting an education and a job were easy tasks, your parents remind you that the queues are long, winding and expensive, and you may have to hold the place for your children and not yourself.
And again, it becomes complicated and incomprehensible.
With each elaboration, new questions arise. You ask how such good life became remote from your village or small town and why it never came somewhere nearer.
You also wonder why your village or small town did not invent their own good life or why your parents and grandparents did not spearhead their own good life.
Why did they have to leave it to your parents to toil for a living when a good life could have been invented to make life easier for your people?
We don’t choose where we are born and neither can we choose who we want to be, nor change our identities.
Each stage of the conversation becomes deeper and complicated.
So your parents tell you that once upon a time, their ancestors had their own good life which was, however, not so good compared to the current good life.
When foreigners came and invaded the fertile lands, they came along with their good life.
The foreigners preached about and introduced their good life to your ancestors and converted everyone to think that the villagers’ ways of life were not good and they needed to dump them and follow the foreigners’ lifestyle.
That word spread wide and far, but it was those close to the foreigners who accessed part of this good life first.
In fact, when it came to the allocation of resources and opportunities, it was the foreigners first because it was their good life and there was no way they could have put themselves last in a situation where they owned and controlled everything.
So the prioritisation into the good life was simple, the foreigners, their children and grandchildren first, then those in the proximity before considering those in the remote villages.
The lack of their education is not out of lack of appetite by locals, but the good life system favours their foreign relatives.
The queue to acquire this education is also slow, long and not affordable for many.
Attempts by local elders to inquire why the good life was not absorptive of their children into the system, they were told that this good life system is a fast-growing economy which requires ready-made skilled workers and their turn shall come when the economy slows down.
But the most important reminder was that good life was their own project, designed to benefit the foreigners first before anyone else can access it.
Your parents tell you of an uprising by elders in the neighbouring areas to reclaim control of good life from the foreigners.
They also tell you that even after chasing the foreigners away, accessing good life became even more tougher, as they left with their knowledge and material resources needed to sustain it.
It begins to dawn on you that what your parents called good life was actually foreign life, initiated, owned and controlled by foreigners.
It is at this stage you start to wonder if at all it was possible to acquire good life of your own, or if your people are condemned outside the good life.
Many questions start to linger in your mind. Are you in this situation because you were born in a village or that small town that never initiated its own good life?
Are you unable to access good life because of the colour of your skin or you must just accept the fact that good life is a foreign concept to you and you just have to be content with the little access you have to good life.
Tapiwa Gomo is a development consultant based in Pretoria, South Africa
