Ronald Kosgei

Life in the Grave Ronald Kosgei

A snake that does not cast its skin has to die!Life in the Grave highlights the social plight of a girl subjected to harmful, primitive and retrogressive cultural practices at the expense of her education and promising potential. The above snake allegory is true in two ways: One, through her own conservative father who despite his position as a man of God and possibly an agent for spiritual (and ultimately physical) change, still clings to the obsolete primitive ways of his people. A man who preaches equality of all humanity before the eyes of God and indelibly draws huge gender lines in his own family. His monopolistic views drive the lives of everyone in the family into a turmoil to the extend of his own daughter choosing death. Secondly, the society in which all this is happening is blind and quiet to the insensitivity meted on the girlchild; so long as she is alive to bear. Silence, female genital mutilation, early, marriages and caged life is her portion. Many a girl is conceived with great potential but immediately she is born, her fate and destiny is predetermined. Education is known to be a tool for change and equality in all societies and where it does not work, then the law should. This rings true for this society; stubborn and adamant to change as finally it collectively sheds their skin and conforms to the dynamical society, and even before it is established anew, it starts to thrive on the flourishing potential of the very souls it tried to rob.