KAYAYO,"BEASTS OF BURDEN"

KAYAYO, “BEASTS OF BURDEN”

ARE THEY" HORSES"?

How does it feel to see a girl, who is barely twelve, run after a rickety 207 bus in any city across West Africa? This girl could be your daughter. This girl has a mother. This girl has rights; the right to sound education, free or quality, the right to belong to a home, the right to be protected, the right to sleep and wake under a shelter, the right to enjoy such things as fit for humans to enjoy. But she wakes up from the struggles of the night to face the day with an agony of the dejected soul. She …begins… the day from the darker side of life and ends it even more pathetically. People run after vehicles in our part of the world for various reasons but none is as awful a sight to behold as the marathon of competition the girl does across the disordered streets of our major cities. Before the vehicle could descend on “gear one” the "Kayayo"  runs and some of the time gallops on the rusty wheels of the moving vehicle just to spy whether or not it carries something she could further carry to where the car would not go just for a fee as insignificant as her vision.

Do you know what struck the soft part of the heart, the society abuse her. I witnessed one incident. The girl carried a load that only a "kayayo" would agree to carry to a lorry station. The owner of the bunch of louver blades, who happens to be a mother (she had a female saddled at her back), offered two cedis. Imagine. She had carried the load over half a mile. She looked up to the woman and asked politely, “Would you let your child, when she reaches my age, do this for a living?” I do not want to talk about what happened. You think about it. WE scorn THEM because of their background; WE fight THEM when they charge us for the work they have done for us; WE cheat THEM even when they deserve better; and WE even beat THEM when we disagree with them. Why do we exploit them? Is it because they have no “life” or because we have no love?