Just follow the road and sooner or later you go around the world, said Jack Kerouac.
But the ordinary Kenyan people will never go around the world.
It is a people who rather than being "on the road," live on its edges.
They almost always move for material, tangible needs.
To find something, not to look within.
To survive, not to make their souls live.
People who can't wait to stop, to find an easy situation that will allow them to no longer have to go around their little world.
So the best situation, for those waiting for the ideal life, which is a life just above decency, is to stand on the side of the road and if the road is living, on the edge of existence.
Yet another terrible car accident a few days ago, in Londiani in the northwest of the country, reaffirmed this habit that we can now call "by-the-road" culture.
Inside the vehicle whose brakes failed, there was only one person, the driver who was saved.
On the matatu, the rear-ended minivan, were two or three passengers, plus those waiting to board.
The other 50 victims, plus some 60 injured, were part of the people who are the most numerous, the most visible and the most frenzied.
Who are capable at the same time of walking or standing still for hours, trading, negotiating, quarreling, bartering, chatting, greeting each other, shouting or sleeping, loading and unloading.
Mothers nurse their children, the elderly look for support or the (increasingly rare) shade of a tree, children scamper and goats scamper.
All on the side of the road.
Portly women behind fruit and vegetable stalls daub clay dust kicked up by tractor-trailers, poisonous exhaust gases glaze sweet fried doughnuts, two-wheeled boda-boda cab drivers show off their contortionism and manage to rest, stage shows to attract customers, get riled up, munch and drink, stretch and watch videos on their cell phones. Almost all at the same time, before accommodating aboard their nags 2 to 5 passengers (only one, rarely).
Africa's road is not only, to return to the American beatniks "the road of the saint, the road of the fool, the road of the rainbow, the road of the imbecile," it is everyone's road.
With the exception of large cities or towns that dream of becoming such, all of Kenya's urban agglomerations overlook one major thoroughfare, where everything happens and where motor vehicles speed along, or attempt to do so held back by speed bumps, carts, herds, bicycles, sacks of potatoes and coal, fallen branches, potholes and other unforeseen events, including work that never started or never finished.
Everything happens before everyone's eyes, everything is comedy, and in a matter of seconds it can turn into tragedy. The street is anarchic and democratic, it is free and authoritarian, because if it is true that everyone can pass through it, it is also true that everyone must pass through it.
That is why the street is life and for people on the margins it can sometimes mean death.