A colleague and I were admiring photos of the redesigned Uhuru Park, something that ended up taking us down memory lane to the good old days of our childhood when fun was mostly free.
It turned out that both of us had visited Uhuru Park a few times when we were children, where we enjoyed affordable boat rides, swung, played with merry-go-rounds and then had a picnic with our families, a picnic, in this case being a bottle of soda and a piece of marble cake sold by hawkers who eked a living there during weekends.
Those whose parents could not afford to pay for the boat rides or games were content to run around and simply be children. Then, the place had not been overrun by muggers and rapists, therefore parents and their children felt safe enough to spend a few hours there unwinding before returning home.
We cherished those moments of unbridled fun where we had the opportunity to run wild and free away from our familiar home environments. Then, fun and games did not cost an arm and a leg. Green spaces where children could socialise the way they knew best, through play, were in plenty.
Today, those spaces have been occupied by concrete jungles, including malls, monoliths housing ridiculously expensive games and even more expensive eateries which are beyond the reach of the majority of Kenyan families.
If you have three children and decide to take them to a mall for a meal and a game or two, (games that involve sitting) you will not spend less than 5,000 shillings, and this is on the lower side, a very conservative estimate, in fact. How many families are able to afford this kind of money for entertainment even if it is only once a month?
The fact is that today, taking your children ‘out’ is a financially painful exercise that is planned for in advance and with lots of trepidation because you know that it will leave a huge dent in your pocket, a dent that will take time to mend. But for the majority of Kenyan families, entertainment and holidays are unheard of, since they can barely feed their children or educate them.
Parks that were free to access now charge entry fees, discouraging visits from families struggling to stay afloat in a crushing economy. The fact that there are no green spaces to talk of in most of our neighbourhoods compounds this problem.
With no place to play and expend their energy, our children have been forced to spend all their waking moments indoors partaking of the only entertainment they have access to – television and other gadgets that enable them play a variety of video games, ensnaring them into the world of social media in the process.
Gadgets have replaced the running and the skipping that our generation used to engage in outside our homes. To play football, rather than join their friends in the village playground which was free and accessible to every child, to partake of this game, our children have to join clubs, which demand a membership fee. Besides this, parents have to buy a uniform, not forgetting transport cost to and from the club.
As bare spaces disappear, swallowed up by a rapidly growing modern world, we have ended up mechanising and commercialising play, robbing our children of the most natural unencumbered form of socialising. How I mourn the good old days.
