Anti-Machine Activists not Serious!

Published on 11th July 2006

In his article in the Daily Nation, a Kenyan newspaper, opinion leader Kwamchetsi Makokha astutely argues that mechanisation is stealing jobs and condemning Kenyans to unemployed poverty. In a direct demonstration of his own manual labour, he 'points a finger' at colonialist contraptions like tea plucking machines as the tools of economic saboteurs. 

He recommends not only a ban on such job-grabbing gismos, but also suggests some retrospective de-mechanisation, like removing all combine harvesters to create tens of thousands of jobs for men with scythes. 

An interesting concept. But he does not go far enough. What about jembe tu to prepare the land in the first place and pestles and mortars instead of unga mills to process the scythe-cut grain? Gangs pulling ropes to get the Likoni ferry from beach to beach? Why should we use machines to put the corrugation in mabati? There would be a jobs festival if every ripple in every sheet was applied, hammer in hand, by jua kali artisans. 

Indeed why even mains water pipes, and that new-fangled gadget called a tap. What's the matter with a bucket (hand-made, of course) and a well (hand-dug, of course)? Anything and everything could be manualised, all the way to cowrie shells instead of credit cards (what a cultural renaissance!) and hand-written notes delivered in cleft sticks instead of email? Ponder the possibilities if we took this principle to its logical conclusion. Indeed, the idea won't work unless we do. 

Let us consider even the banal example of petrol stations. There are a thousand of them. Every one has a mechanised air pressure pump, definitely introduced by the British, which requires no attendant and inflates a tyre in a matter of seconds. If these gadgets were banned, we could revert to foot pumps which require manual labour, and are so slow that every station would need half-a-dozen. That's 6,000 jobs (and a lot of potential for long-distance runners in all-day training. What the economists recommend - that we exploit our natural "factor advantages"). 

Out on the road, too, we could ban bulldozers, graders and rollers, and have all roads made by hand using tirimbos, shovels and those tambi-tambi chunks of iron on the end of a pole. 

Come to think of it, why do we need vehicles of any kind? Think how many jobs there could be if all the cargo now carried in 40ft containers on juggernaut trucks was instead carried from Mombasa, packet by packet, on foot, on shoulder, by hundreds of thousands of porters! Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! Where were the unions when vehicular transport hammered the first nail into the coffin of employment? 

And even the engines of super ships that deliver these boxes could be replaced by Viking-style (or is it Luo-style) oarsmen, tens of thousands of them paddling furiously on each side to propel 80,000-tonne vessels. But wait a minute. If we don't have any cars and trucks, we don't have any tyres to inflate. So all those happy people now employed to huff and puff with foot pumps would be out of work. And what about all the unemployed road makers and menders, motor mechanics, and traffic cops, and matatu touts, and car thieves 

Oh dear. Win-some-lose-some won't get us anywhere. If the manualisation concept is to work, we must go the whole hog. No half measures. We must expunge, in its entirety, the Industrial Revolution, no less. 

No powered machines of any kind whatsoever. In fact, no unpowered "machines" either. Roll individual strands of spaghetti by hand! Everything done using hand tools. And those, too, should be hand-made. 

Many of these measures have a double benefit. When we've got decomputerisation, for example, any one who uses a Mac or PC would be guilty of antedecomputerisationalism, and there would need to be a new cadre of council askaris called contrantedecomputerisationalists. Even more jobs. 

When we've got no vehicles, for example, government mileage allowances could be made as big as you like and it wouldn't cost a cent! Is that economic genius or is it economic genius? 

But then another problem. No machinery means no factories. No mabati sheets for jua kali to hammer corrugations into. No pills. Hand-made condoms (knitted, maybe, using hand-made needles). Combine that with a deliriously happy, fully employed, physically exercised and energetic population, and what you'd get is a lot of babies, who would all grow up needing more jobs. 

By Gavin Bennett
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