The kerosene economy

Before I understood money, I understood kerosene. Kerosene is honest currency: you can see exactly how much light you have left, and when the lamp starts coughing you know precisely how many pages of homework remain in the day. No banker has ever given me a statement that clear.

In Lugari, the lamp was our streetlight, our reading light, and — when the wick misbehaved — our fire alarm. My grandmother rationed it like a central bank governor. There were interest rates: finish your chores early and the lamp burned an extra half hour. Default on your duties and you studied by moonlight, which sounds romantic and is not.

What growing up broke actually teaches you about money is this: money is time you can see. Every shilling was a unit of light, of maize flour, of the bus to Lumakanda. Nothing was abstract. When I hear economists say "liquidity," I picture a jerrican.

But here is what poverty lies to you about, and it lies fluently: it tells you that you are the shortage. That the empty tin is a character reference. It took me years — and one very patient grandfather, a reverend with a preaching voice that could bend weather — to learn that broke is a location, not an identity. You can be shipped out of a location.

These days I get paid to talk, which my childhood self would find suspicious and my grandmother would find obvious. She always said the mouth would either bury me or build me. She lived to see it start building. We keep a lamp in the house — full tank, never lit. Some receipts you keep.