There is a woman I know, and I will call her Mama Zawadi because she sells mitumba near the roundabout and she has seven children and the energy of a person who has decided, somewhere deep in the middle of her life, that exhaustion is for people with options, and last election season she woke up at four in the morning, stood in a queue for six hours in the kind of sun that doesn't care about your schedule, and voted. She voted with the kind of seriousness that I reserve only for eating ugali when I am truly hungry. She told me afterwards, slightly sunburnt, slightly proud, "At least I did my part."
Six months later the price of cooking gas had gone up.