When singularity and plurality are at a crossroads

As an observer said the other day, Kenya is at “a crossroads”.

Crossroads is a good metaphor because it refers to that point in space-time at which a person, an organisation or a country must make a choice among many possible ones in order for it to achieve its desired future.

But, where English grammar is concerned, “a crossroads” looks like a horrendous contradiction in terms.

How can the plural noun crossroads be introduced by the singular article “a”? The answer lies in the fact that the word crossroads is a terrible self-contradiction.

LITERAL MEANING

For the word is composed both of a plurality (roads) and yet of a singularity (a crossing). Our plurality of stars meet at a singularity which, with regard to the universe, the physicist Stephen Hawking called “event horizon” beyond which there is no returning to reality.

In short, a crossroads is a singular spot on which a plurality of roads cross one another. Nairobi has plural examples. But Place de L’Etoile in the French capital of Paris is perhaps the world’s most famous crossroads. That is why it is called L’Etoile (“the Star”).

From the bird’s-eye view — through, for instance, the windows of a low-flying plane — the streets, which converge upon Place De L’Etoile, may remind the imaginative tourist of the rays of a star.

That, then, in a nutshell, is the literal meaning of the word crossroads, a crossing of many real roads.

RURAL PEASEANTRY
What about its figurative meaning? What about the place or time at which many ideas may come upon one another in such a manner as to appear to the naked eye like veritable thoughts?

What about a circumstance like what our starry-eyed “democrats” who once claimed to be Kenya’s “second liberation”?

Against President Daniel arap Moi’s Nyayo holocaust by means of a party singularity, the rebels promised instant salvation by means of a new miracle machine called party pluralism, though the majority of Kenyans — the Massif Central composed of the rural peasantry and urban labour — have been waiting as if "For Godot".

The Niagara of “pluralist” salvation ideas that fell upon the ears of Kenya’s longsuffering massif of human beings soon revealed itself as a hideous uniformity of minds all intent merely upon replacing the Nyayo gormandisers in the hall of what the ilk of John Githongo called “eating”.

GRABBING AND GRUBBING
It was on account of the increasing swollenness of their midriffs from the daily grubbing on material grabbed from the national stores all over the Democratic Republic of Kenya that cynics in the newspapers and other media came to recognise those stomachs as “the patriotic fronts”.

Patriotism came to refer to the licentiousness with which one rushed to the high table whenever one saw “yeating going forward”, as Oliver Goldsmith, puts it in a delightful theatre piece called She Stoops to Conquer, which was one of my high school set books.

“Yeating”, then, was the sardonic Irish playright’s word for both grabbing and grubbing. Like ours, Goldsmith’s was a veritable crossroads of maggots.

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