I don’t know how many of you have ever taken the time to watch ants, and wonder about them as they go about their business. Maybe none of you have, and it’s just something weird a writer would do.
That said, I am sure most of you, at some point in your life, have come across ants — more specifically, a train of ants
— making their way to a food source (a slice of cake, perhaps), where they congregate, then cart the food away in bits, back the same way they came. But since, I assume, most of you aren’t writers and weird, and, therefore, don’t watch and wonder about ants, let me tell you more about them.
That train of ants I just mentioned, they’re known as worker ants. What they’re doing is taking food, bit by teeny-weeny bit, back to the colony, and the queen ant. An ant colony isn’t just the physical structure where ants live, which consists of tunnels and chambers deep underground. It is also a description of the social order in the ant world.
The queen is the founder and leader of the colony. Her job is to populate the colony by laying thousands of eggs. You’ll also find drones in the colony. These are male ants, whose only function is to mate with the queen and then they die.
While the queen and her drones spend all their time in their chambers, sheltered from the elements and the dangers of the outside world, living in a bubble, one would say, worker ants spend all their lives toiling.
Not only do worker ants go out to forage for, gather and allocate food, they’re also responsible for building and maintaining the colony’s infrastructure and amenities, and protecting the colony from foreign ants. Worker ants are never idle, for they live to work for others.
Once in a while, though, I’ll notice a solitary ant moving about searchingly. A worker ant all by its lonesome self, not doing what the social order in the ant world expects it to do. Outlier ants, I call them, though I’m fairly certain no one else calls them that.
This whole business with ants isn’t about ants, as I’m sure you’ve guessed. What I’m talking about is our society. The queen and her drones represent our politicians, captains of industry, and policymakers, which in our case is often one and the same thing.
The worker ants are the rest of us, the regular folk, aka the wananchi. But what I’m really talking about is our Deputy President’s leanings towards science, technology and technical training for the purpose of our youth meeting the requirements of industry and the job market.
First off, I read self-interest in this call for science and technical courses to take precedence so as to serve industry, for who in our society owns those industries; who benefits the most from more workers, but the queen ant herself.
There’s nothing wrong with being a worker, but humans are more like my outlier ant. We’re not uniform. We can’t all be workers in service to the queen, nor do some of us want to be.
You see some humans, like the lone ant, would much rather search for their own place in the world, instead of being assigned one in the social order.