By Dr. Wanjohi wa Makokha
There is a quiet paradox that manifests itself across our motherland each time Xmas comes calling. It is a relational and social phenomenon which reveals itself because the cities we inhabit as the middle class throb with work and ambition while the villages we originate from as Kenyans, hold memory, meaning, and rest. Urban centres drive the economy and shape daily survival across the country yet they form only one part of a wider story that is completed in the countryside, where families, ancestors, and customs wait with patient certainty every year for relational percolation. Each December, when countryside buses fill and roads stretch from metropolitan centres towards the rural interior, our beloved country remembers that progress is counted in wages and also in the currency of belonging.
This annual end-of-the-year cacophonous return of urban workers to their ancestral homes shows a truth that policy debates often soften or forget, that our fast growing cities and towns are places where people earn a living while our often neglected villages remain places where the final meaning of life (which is death) is understood. Christmas carries more than celebration and rest, since it invites reflection, forgiveness, and reunion, and these values sit most comfortably where the dead are remembered and the new living are named within a lineage using names of those who departed and got their bodies inserted into rural soils all over Kenya. In this movement between city and village, we Kenyans as a nation of diversity breath as one body.
The newly energized planned growth of transport links under the Fifth President, which aims to connect Nairobi to Naivasha, Nakuru, Eldoret, and Bungoma and to push the railway towards Kisumu and beyond, speaks to more than concrete and steel, a grammar made common by the Chinese models of postcolonial progress. These routes promise a fiscal and physical renewal of connection between social classes and extended family groups, because they make it easier for rural-urban migrants to carry gifts, savings, and stories back to the rural home and extended kinship while they also carry duties to graves, rituals, and elders.
At Christmas, such journeys remind many that death to us the blacks of Africa a threshold rather than a final destination. Death to us Kenyans is not the closing door but rather a crossing of sorts. This is why our villages of origin are the places where life completes its circle even when our urban areas of work are where life performs its origins and climaxes on the stage of successive years and their eleven months!
Our economic engines like Nairobi, Kisii and Mombasa remain spaces of hard effort and constant motion. In the spirit of rural-urban migration they draw people who hope to secure a future through work and sacrifice. Many endure long hours and high costs because the city is a tool rather than a final home, and this understanding allows them to persist. While the city offers income and exposure, it rarely offers spiritual rest, which is why many see their time there as temporary even when years pass.
Rural areas carry a different weight, since they guard tradition and shelter the presence of those who came before. Funerals, weddings, and seasonal rites gather families together, and these moments renew bonds that money alone cannot sustain. For those who live in towns, returning home during Christmas becomes an act of healing, because it restores balance after months of distance and strain.
In this light, the push to improve roads and railways is also a political and cultural act, because it respects the rhythm by which Kenyans move between work and meaning. Easier travel can support rural trade, ease pressure on cities, and build trust between citizens and the state, especially when people feel seen in their places of origin. Development gains strength when it aligns with how people actually live and remember.
Still, infrastructure alone cannot carry the full promise of renewal. Policies must also protect cultural spaces and support health, education, and local enterprise, because dignity grows where people feel secure both materially and spiritually. As the country looks towards future elections, leaders may find wisdom in the Christmas story itself, which teaches humility, return, and shared hope.
When city paths and village roads meet with care, Kenya moves closer to a wholeness that honours both the living and the dead, and in that harmony the nation may yet find its truest strength. A luta continua. Vittoria e certa. Merry Christmas, comrade Kenyans .
– Dr. Makokha is the Secretary General, Literature and Performing Arts Society of Kenya (LPASK), and a staunch Afro-optimist