On the roof of a building in Pangani, Nairobi, lives a silent but very active community. It does not need water, food or social networks to survive: all it needs is the wind, a few bolts and the stubborn will to remain standing despite everything.
These are the neighbourhood's television antennas — rusty, crooked, but dignified like old aunts who do not want to leave the veranda.
Some are supported by wooden poles made from tree branches, still covered in bark, as if they remember the time when they were truly alive. Others, more ambitious, climb up iron pipes welded together by some philosopher welder in the alley, one who perhaps still believes that metal has a soul.
And then there are the poor wretches, clinging to dangling cables, half-gnawed by the rats that even eat electricity in Nairobi.
If those antennas could talk, it would be endless chatter. The big satellite dish would laugh at the wooden pole: “At least I get CNN without interruption!”. The rusty tube would respond with an iron cough: ‘Yes, but I like Al Jazeera, it's more romantic.’
The younger ones, newly installed, would show off their new screws, while the older ones, bent by time and weather, would simply sway with an air of superiority.
The antennas dream.
They dream of the day when they will decide what to broadcast. When they will no longer have to obey greasy remote controls or cable packages that arrive two months late. When they can finally say, ‘Now watch what we want.’ A soap opera about stars, perhaps. Or a documentary about silence.
In the meantime, they stand there. They look up, as their masters do when life bends them down too much. They warm themselves in the African sun, they let the rain wash over them as if it were a sudden blessing, they are moved by the moon, which is the only channel that is always free-to-air. And every night, with their patience of scrap metal and dreams, they wait for the stars.
Because, deep down, they too know that sooner or later it will be up to someone else to decide what we will watch.
Perhaps them.