Dogs, cats and Jamhuri Day

Kamawe had thrown stones at Poole’s dogs after they threatened him as he rode his bicycle. Poole was the only white settler executed in Kenya for the murder of a black African—despite their many crimes against Kenyans.

If you want to know how Kenya—and many European colonies in Africa—has changed since independence, follow the story of the dog. Kamawe’s murder wasn’t the time Poole had used violence against black Kenyans who had had a run-in with his dogs. He had in the past been charged for shooting a black Kenyan police officer whom his dog had attacked.

The idea in all that was that the “native” stood a rung lower than the settler’s dog.

There was something else. As Innocent Dande argues in The Colonial State, African Dog-Owners, and the Political Economy of Rabies Vaccination Campaigns in Southern Rhodesia in the 1950s and 1960s, “British colonialists derogatively othered African-owned dogs as bad animals, vermins and demonic creatures that deserved to die.... Colonised people across the world pushed back against these ideas as they fought to restore indigenous values”.

The above is one of the places where the idea of despising the African “village dog” (or “native dog”) and giving pride of place to the “European dog” comes from. African nationalists and freedom fighters also had a big problem with dogs as they were used to hunt them down in forests and attack them during protests.

What has happened to the dog in Africa, therefore, is, perhaps, the most dramatic change in our post-independence times.

Not too long ago, a report by Citizen TV spoke of residents of Nairobi’s Eastlands raising concerns over the rising number of dogs kept in crowded residential buildings: “...the dogs have become ‘a nuisance’ to tenants who often have to contend with annoying barking noise and poop”.

In May, Michael Muyoma, a serious dog man, wrote in Money254 giving some expert advice on the kinds of dogs Kenyans should own, but first noting that “[Kenyan] ...dog ownership is on the rise in cities and large towns.

It is common to see a Maltese Terrier in Gachie as it is to find a Belgian Malinois in Kakamega town and its outskirts. The rural areas are no longer the fiefdom of the Boscos. Large pedigree dogs are taking over with kennels mushrooming everywhere in small towns, all in the spirit of entrepreneurship and making a quick honest living. No one (sic) is to blame, dogs are hotcakes in the current market, and everyone is on the money train that sells and acquires them”.

Early last month, an article had Kenyan dog and cat lovers complaining bitterly that pet food prices had almost doubled due to the high dollar rate and taxes. It had some insightful quotes from Ms Brenda Michelle, who has 15 cats and dogs!

A much earlier report in How We Made In Africa had Riaz Gilani, director of Kenya pet food manufacturer Gilani Gourmet, speaking about how Kenya’s rich are increasingly spending “hundreds of thousands of shillings” to purchase dogs.

Explaining why pets, and dogs, are so popular, he said modern parents are too busy to give enough time to their children, so some buy for them pets. Pets, therefore, become substitute parents.

He might have added that, in times when people have one or two children, not 10 like decades gone by, pets are proxy siblings and play companions for children.

There was an eye popper from Business Daily of March 5, 2021, in which we learnt that one of the few trades that didn’t suffer in Kenya during the Covid-19 lockdown was the pet business. It boomed, as people trapped at home sought the companionship of pets. It resulted in the Kenyan pet industry “seeing unprecedented growth as spending on cats, dogs, ornamental fish and parrots skyrocketed”.

A smart Kenyan started a business “to deliver pet happiness”. She found that Kenyans were willing to spend big on pet manicure, pedicure and buying pet sleep worth Sh40,000. Pet pregnancies, she told Business Daily, are celebrated with “baby showers” complete with photography sessions.

Like in the developed pet markets, from Nairobi to the Rwandan capital Kigali (according to a report in The East African) some folks now work as pet walkers. In Kenya alone, according to Statista’s take on the local pet food market, it amounts to a cool $64.41 million (Sh9.9 billion) this year and expected to grow at a compound annual rate of by 8.76 per cent.

Were Kamawe to resurrect, he’d shake his head and put his hands up in resignation.

- Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. @cobbo3