The Shame of being ‘Rich’

When I was 7, my father used to tell us the most intriguing stories from his childhood. He had these anecdotal parables that he conjured from memory.

“You know you and your brother are very lucky, when I was small, I had no shoes until I was ten years old so stop complaining!”

“When I was your age, my brothers and I used to walk to the river many kilometres to fetch water. You guys have never seen hunger…”

“In my day, we used to walk to school uphill both ways…”

(That last one made no sense, but in our childhood naivety, we believed it.)

My brother and I never questioned my father’s parables. Instead, we carried them in our minds like facts, like bricks to build our lives with. Although my father’s stories from the village were well-intentioned, and meant to teach us lessons, the truth is sometimes they also had an adverse negative effect on my brother and me.

When my father told us of how he would play football barefoot as a kid, we weren’t only more grateful for the shoes we had, we also felt ashamed to ask him for new ones. When he told us of the hunger he felt “on the farm” back in his day, we would bite our tongues before we’d ask to go out to eat.

It was this perpetual cycle of thought, however well intentioned, that slowly changed the way my brother and I saw ourselves and reasoned with our environment. Over time, in the subtlest way, we grew ashamed of what we had. We felt as though ‘we didn’t deserve it’. In our minds, we began to believe that we were just — as my father would say — ‘spoilt’ kids. A belief I know I’ve carried with me for years. It still hurts me to admit, but I’ve always been ashamed of having more than I feel I deserve.

Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems

I’m ashamed that I feel ashamed of being ‘Rich’. I’ve allowed the life that my parents worked so hard to give me feel like a crutch I’m forced to walk with. The house they worked to build, sometimes feels like a place I don’t deserve to live in. I must be crazy.

But my family is not ‘thaaaat rich’… I am not the son of a politician, or the beneficiary of some ‘tender-preneur’ — I know that there are many families much richer than ours in this country. But I live in a city where income inequality is so rampant that when I say that my brother and I studied in the ‘white schools’ and went abroad for university, we are definitely exceptions.

In Nairobi, you can get a complete meal for lunch with rice, beans and vegetables for only 80 Shillings at a local ‘Kibanda’. That’s less than one dollar. But you can also walk 20 paces down the street to a sit-in restaurant, and find nothing on the menu even close to that price. I know shops that buy their produce at the local market, bring it to their stores and triple the price. And nobody flinches. We’re used to this. The poor exist among the rich here in Nairobi. Even BMWs, and Porsches can’t fly over poverty, it’s all around us. Just sometimes, we pretend not to see it. But I can’t.

Every day I am reminded that my family is richer, luckier and more ‘spoilt’ than many of the people I interact with. I see kids on the streets, workers pushing handcarts, homeless people begging, and I simply sit in the comfort of my car trying to shun the questions that flood my mind: Why do I deserve what they don’t have? Why am I the lucky one?

This is the insecurity of being ‘Rich’. The price you pay for ‘having everything’ is a life of being ashamed of what you have that others don’t.

I see people who are richer than me — or at least appear so — everyday. I hate to admit it but there is always a slight spite I feel toward them — a jealousy and a sense of loathing at the fact that they don’t have to ‘struggle’ like I do. I know this is how poorer people see me. I know because I would see myself the same way from their perspective; “a guy who grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth”.

I think that’s where my insecurity comes from. I want to be able to tell the stories like my father did. I want to have a “village” to come from. I want to be the one who came from nothing… but the privileges my parents gave me may have rid me of that long ago.

How to Deal

I must admit I have struggled to deal with the insecurity of being rich for much of my life, I still do. But I have learnt not to judge a man by how many talents he is given, and instead by how he uses those talents. I don’t decide who gets what, everyone is different. You can be born ‘rich’ or ‘poor’ by no fault of your own. The only thing we take responsibility for is what we do with what we’re given. If I can multiply my life enough times, then even the suburbs of Nairobi that I grew up in will look like the “village” my father spoke of. That’s what I’m working toward.

And if I were to give any respite to all the rich people plagued by the shame of ‘having’, I’d say “don’t think about it too much; judge yourself not by what was given to you, but by what you have chosen to do with it”. To twist the words of Spiderman's father:

“With more money and privilege, comes great responsibility.”