EssayStoryJournalBook reviewReflectionResearchLetterPoemMemoir1,521 words7 min readAutosave enabledThey say money cannot buy happiness. What they don’t say is neither does poverty. In fact, poverty is the most efficient thief I know—it steals dignity first, then confidence, then esteem, and on its hungriest days, it gnaws at your intelligence too (yes, you can buy knowledge, and no, wisdom does not come free with suffering). Poverty empties your dreams, sells off your present, and replaces it with a layaway plan for a fantasy future that never arrives. Time? The rich buy more of it—maids, chauffeurs, faster commutes—while the poor keep overdrawing from a clock that always demands repayment. Experience? That too has a price tag. Travel costs, internships cost, even “exposure” costs—you don’t get rich in memories if you’re too broke to step outside your neighborhood. And yet, moderation is the fine print. A mountain of money might bury you, but the right handful can clothe you, feed you, and let you sleep without bargaining with God. Money is good; not holy, not evil, just good. Save it, invest it, tuck some under your mattress if you must—storms are always brewing, and you’ll want more than a paper umbrella when they hit. I know what it’s like to live without it. And let me tell you: poverty doesn’t sanctify; it humiliates. You scrub in undignified corners, you trade slices of your soul for slices of bread. Women sell their bodies to keep their children alive. Teenagers barter their youth to men thrice their age in exchange for survival. And we dare call this “godly suffering”? Where’s the dignity in it? Where’s the decency? Even pigs, rooting in their pens, know when they’re being fed scraps. Age isn’t “just a number”—I’ve sat down with my sixteen-year-old self over bitter coffee, and she reminds me: age is a currency too, sometimes the only one we have. Hence why I tell people I am spiritual, not religious. Religion was all I knew growing up, because it was fed to us like porridge—daily, unquestioned, compulsory. School and church were not two separate places but one continuous corridor. I cannot recall a single day of my early education that did not begin and end with mass, service, or prayer. To be taught was to be preached to; the two were inseparable. It wasn’t until high school that the veil began to lift. For the first time, religion was only one subject among many, not the air itself. Mathematics stood apart from the rosary, science stood apart from catechism. That simple division—that religion could be just a unit and not the whole curriculum of life—was my first quiet rebellion, my first taste of space to think. In the villages, Catholic missions were the only institutions that reached the edges of the map, building schools where the state refused to go. I am myself a child of that legacy: I studied in a school founded by the Irish missionary Fr. Martin Boyle, a man remembered for his selfless service, and mourned after his murder during Moi’s regime—a crime that, like so many in that era, was never brought to justice. So yes, the Church gave me literacy, structure, and even dignity at times. But it also carried the heavy cross of empire. It taught us to read but not to question, to obey but never to doubt. Obedience is a virtue, yes, but blind obedience is a prison. Descartes once wrote, “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am” —yet religion taught us to fear the very act of doubting. Cathedrals were raised to the heavens while the faithful starved at their doors. Poverty was preached as holiness, hunger as humility. But there is nothing divine about begging for bread. And so, as I grew, I realized that spirituality—fluid, personal, searching—made more sense than religion’s rigid scaffolding. For spirit can breathe, but religion, at least as I knew it, could only bind. History makes the paradox plain. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argued, the classroom could either liberate or colonize depending on whose script it followed ( Decolonising the Mind , 1986). Walter Rodney showed how missions often prepared the ground for economic exploitation ( How Europe Underdeveloped Africa , 1972). Frantz Fanon wrote of how religion soothed the oppressed into silence, dulling their revolutionary energy ( The Wretched of the Earth , 1961). And Chinua Achebe, in fiction, captured how the white man’s church unsettled the very center of African life ( Things Fall Apart , 1958). Taken together, they remind me that my schooling was both a gift and a chain. If that sounds heretical, so be it—because sometimes heresy is the only prayer left worth saying. Choose your struggle, they say. But make sure it’s at least a human one. The old binary—rich but unhappy, poor but happy—isn’t just false, it’s insulting. Show me a person who is both poor and genuinely happy, and I’ll show you a unicorn wearing Prada. Happiness isn’t some flimsy mood; it’s the summit of satisfaction. And you can’t climb that summit if your body is starving and your mind is stunted. A hungry man is not a happy man, no matter how many Psalms he recites before bed. But what do I know? This is just my “cheap philosophy,” purchased on installment plans with a meagre salary and my parents’ low wages. Maybe with more money, I’d have a richer library, therefore, a richer mind. But then I look at African politicians drowning in cash yet starving for meaning, and I wonder if wealth without discipline simply drowns you into another kind of poverty. And then there are the paradox people—the ones with little education, no wealth, no achievements by the world’s standards—yet somehow they radiate happiness. Their spirituality is intact, their values ironclad, their “no” is stronger than most people’s “yes.” They live small lives but with big souls. I envy them, and I don’t understand them. Maybe I’m The Idiot Tolstoy wrote about, bumbling through life in search of meaning I’ll never pin down. And maybe that’s fine. Maybe being the idiot is my only honest role in this charade. Still, I blame poverty for stealing my present these last three decades. I’ve been living in “better tomorrow” land, feeding myself on fantasies of brighter futures like they were three-course meals. My parents fed us the same diet of dreams: how one day we’d “make it,” how one day we’d repay their sacrifices. But reality is a cruel creditor. It doesn’t care how badly you need a break, or how many eyes are watching you, waiting for you to deliver. The world shrugs, and you lose again. Yet hope is a stubborn tenant. It camps rent-free in our minds, demanding actualization, chaining us to endless toil. We work not just for ourselves, but for our parents, who staked their futures on us. It’s not healthy, but it’s the contract life gave us, unsigned but binding. So we grind. We scrape. We bleed shifts out of our bodies for one extra coin. Torture disguised as labor. And still, we dare not quit. We’ve lived on the wrong side of civilization, and that trauma refuses to let us gamble with our survival. Freedom is a dream, but financial independence is the chain we willingly clasp around our ankles. Maybe it’s slavery, but at least it’s a shared slavery, a communal trauma we endure together. People like us are looked at not for who we might become but for who we already are—etched as tired bodies, accents heavy with elsewhere, pockets echoing with absence. They see our poverty as a finished story rather than a rough draft in progress. Perhaps that is the cruellest thing: not the hunger itself, but being mistaken for the hunger, being read as lack instead of possibility. Does that make it worse? Perhaps. But at least, in the dark, we hold hands, rowing forward, even when the tide drags us back. And the irony is not lost on me—that I have followed my colonizer across oceans just to make ends meet, polishing the very boots that once pressed down on my ancestors’ necks. Where is my self-respect in this theatre of survival? Poverty stole it long before I could hide it. That’s what poverty does: it makes you laugh at the very chains you’re forced to wear, clap for the very hands that robbed you, and call it a life. Someone pour me a whisky—cheap if you must. I’ll drink to my own defeat. “The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards.” — Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks “Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately in love with suffering.” Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground) “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby) References Achebe, C. (1958). Things Fall Apart . London: Heinemann. Fanon, F. (1961). The Wretched of the Earth . New York: Grove Press. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. (1986). Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature . London: James Currey. Rodney, W. (1972). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa . London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications.