AFRICA AND THE WORLD CUP: A Beautiful Tragedy
By Martin Maitha
2nd July 2010. Soccer City, Johannesburg. The score is 1-1 at the 2010 FIFA World Cup quarter-final between Ghana and Uruguay. In the 120th minute, Ghana have a promising free kick at the edge of the box. Some panicked Uruguayan defending, a proper goalmouth melee. Hang on, what’s this? It’s a penalty. Luis Suarez just saved a certain Ghanaian goal. The only problem is he’s not a goalkeeper, but a forward. He is shown a red card for his troubles.
Asamoah Gyan steps up. Could this be the moment an African nation goes to the semi-final, in Africa’s World Cup? Gyan is Ghana’s top scorer at this World Cup, with three goals – two of which were penalties against Serbia and Australia in the group stages. If there was someone you could bet on to have the sangfroid and the cojones to do it, Gyan was that guy.
The weight of a continent’s expectation is on his shoulders. He fires a shot, which cannons off the crossbar. Instead of winning it, he condemns Ghana to a needless penalty shootout which they late go on to lose – John Mensah and Dominic Adiyiah miss for Ghana and Sebastian Abreu hits a cheeky Panenka to send Ghana out of the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
This memory is so vivid because I watched every heart-rending minute of that match, cursing at Suarez- the ready-made pantomime villain who dashed a continent’s hopes; but more so at Asamoah Gyan? How could he miss? Why was he such a choker?
This is the story of Africa and the World Cup as we have always known it. A tale of the valiant underdogs who, like Icarus, flew too near to the sun and paid the price with their naivete. It is also a tale of self-sabotage, incompetence, gulfs in class and institutional racism.
***
The story of African football is about politics.
In 1934, Egypt became the first African country to participate in the World Cup, which was hosted by Italy. They qualified for the sixteen-team tournament by beating Palestine (then under a British mandate) and Turkey (who withdrew from the qualification round). In the World Cup, Egypt lost 4–2 in the first round against Hungary. This was to be the last time an African team participated in the World Cup, until Morocco did so in 1970.
In the 1950s and 1960s, many African nations became independent and naturally, as independent nations, they joined global bodies, like the United Nations, and of course, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which at the time was dominated by northern European and South American nations. This posed an existential threat– the FIFA Congress operated on the basis of one nation, one vote, irrespective of footballing ability. The Kenyas and Zambias, in the eyes of FIFA, had an equal say in world football, the same as two-time world champions Brazil, Uruguay and Italy.
Paul Darby, in Africa and the ‘World’ Cup: FIFA Politics, Eurocentrism and Resistance published in the International Journal of the History of Sport (Vol. 22, No. 5, September 2005, 883 – 905) observed that the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA)“made several attempts during the late 1950s and early 1960s to introduce a pluralist voting system that would more adequately reflect their self-perceived standing in world football”. When these efforts failed, they chose to assert their dominance in the FIFA World Cup. FIFA’s Executive Committee decreed that to qualify for the 1962 World Cup, Morocco, the winners of the African preliminary round would have to play a further qualifying match against Spain – a match they duly lost. In 1964, they made it worse by marginalising the Asians and Africans by pitting them against each other: the winners of the African zone would play the winners of the Asia/Oceania zone to qualify for future World Cup Finals.
Kwame Nkrumah, the-then Ghanaian president and pan-Africanist, persuaded CAF (Confédération Africaine de Football) to have its members boycott the 1966 World Cup. CAF’s Secretary General, Mourad Fahmy, argued that “the allocation of one World Cup slot to three continents (with more than 65 members)was absurd and did not adequately reflect the prevailing situation in world football.”
In 1974, João Havelange, a Brazilian, ran for the FIFA presidency on a pledge to improve the situation of Asian and African football – by increasing the World Cup final places from sixteen to twenty-four, and by increasing funding to improve infrastructure in African and Asian countries. He won handily, beating the incumbent, Sir Stanley Rous, who was widely resented by African nations for, among other things, supporting the inclusion of South Africa in the FIFA family despite their apartheid policy.
Under Havelange, Africa got two World Cup spots, which later became five under the expanded 32 team format that began in 1998. But it was under his protégé, Joseph ‘Sepp’ Blatter, that the African continent came to the fore. For all his faults, Blatter ensured that the dream of an African country hosting the World Cup became a reality. He backed South Africa over Germany in 2006. He backed it again in 2010. It later emerged that the win was not entirely legitimate; the 2015 indictments of FIFA officials by the United States’ Department of Justice showed that Jack Warner, a FIFA Vice President had accepted $10m from South Africa in 2008. Danny Jordaan, the chairman of the 2010 Local Organising Committee clarified it was not a bribe but a contribution towards the CONCACAF (Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football- of which Warner was President at the time) “development fund.”
***
The story of African football is about incompetence.
Zaire’s team, the Leopards, were Africa’s representatives at the 1974 World Cup in West Germany. The reigning African champions had been funded lavishly by the kleptocratic dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa Zabanga; he had given each member of the team a house and a green Volkswagen. Things had looked promising when they lost 2-0 to a Scottish team with the talents of Kenny Dalglish, Billy Bremner and Dennis Law. But it was the next match against Yugoslavia that will live on in infamy.
Before the match, Mobutu, or one of his minions, had assumed that the team’s coach, Blagoje Vidinić, a Yugoslav, of planning to deliberately throw away the game so as to favour his home team, so he was “secluded” from the team for that match. It later transpired that the players had not been paid their allowances – a story that will become all-too familiar – and they were in fact planning to strike before the match. The team lost 9-0 in the second-worst World Cup performance of all time (el Salvador holds the dubious record, losing 10-1 to Hungary in the 1982 World Cup, held in Spain).
Mobutu, predictably, was not amused. He gave the team an ultimatum: don’t bother coming home if you lose by more than four goals to Brazil. That was the Brazil – the defending champions who had thrilled the world with their canary yellow shirts and an exuberant display of swashbuckling football. Zaire creditably lost 3-0, not without its mishaps and led to arguably the most bizarre moment in World Cup history – Mwepu Ilunga rushed out of the wall and hammered the ball away before Rivellino could take the free kick. BBC match commentator, John Motson, termed it, “a bizarre moment of African ignorance.” But that was not the truth; Ilunga later claimed he was wasting time because Mobutu’s threat was all too real. In fact, on the team’s return to Kinshasa, they were briefly detained at the presidential palace for four days while Mobutu decided what to do with them, before he eventually released them. Minus their allowances, of course.
The singularly African spectre of disorganisation always seems to strike at the World Cup. In 2014, the Ghanaian team refused to train and were actually contemplating going on strike before their match against Portugal unless they received their bonuses. It took the personal intervention of President John Mahama Dramani, who ensured that the players received their money – in cash. The players did not trust their officials to bank it for them, so the cash (all $3 million of it) was put on a chartered flight to Brazil and delivered to the players in a police convoy. Later, Ghana’s star midfielders, Kevin-Prince Boateng and Sulley Muntari, who had shone so brightly in 2010, were kicked out of the squad for “vulgar verbal insults.” Cameroon also threatened to go on strike at the same World Cup and duly delivered another bizarre World Cup moment – Alex Song’s bizarre elbow on Croatia’s Mario Mandžukić. Nigeria went on strike and boycotted training too, and despite their woes, they made it to the last 16.
Which begs the question: why always Africa?
Endemic corruption is a way of life in Africa, and this extends to football. The sums of money in football make it a particularly lucrative feeding trough: during the 2011-2014 financial cycle, FIFA gave each member association an extraordinary Financial Assistance Programme (FAP) payment of US $ 1,050,000. Such sums in the hands of local football officials find more convenient uses. A week before the start of the 2018 World Cup, Ghana’s FA President, Kwesi Nyantakyi, was implicated in a corruption expose by Ghanaian journalist Anas. He has since resigned. Aden Range Marwa, a Kenyan assistant referee who was due to officiate at the 2018 World Cup, was also netted in the sting for allegedly taking a bribe of $600.
Poor youth development also plays a key role in Africa’s underperformance at World Cup. This is a direct result of poor investment in coaching and infrastructure. African teams are usually powerhouses at under-17 and under-20 level – Nigeria and Ghana have won FIFA tournaments several times. Football at the Olympic games are considered an under-23 event. Nigeria won the gold in the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Cameroon followed suit in Sydney 2000. However, there doesn’t seem to be a clear transition for most of the youngsters into the main national team. Take the 2005 U-20 final between Nigeria and Argentina: only John Obi Mikel can be said to have had a successful career. The Argentine side, on the other hand, had Lionel Messi, Sergio Aguero, Pablo Zabaleta, Ezequiel Garay and Lucas Biglia, who are bona fide global superstars today. Here’s another interesting statistic, Nigeria won the U-17 World Cup, beating Spain in the final. None of the Nigerian players have been capped to date. That Spain side had David de Gea in goal. Only Ghana’s U-20 side of 2009 seems to buck the trend – some of the youngsters formed part of the successful 2010 squad.
Another reason could be the perception that sport should not be taken seriously in Africa; it is usually a means to pass time or a political tool. This is why you can have a whole Sports Principal Secretary claiming that Kenya was ready to host the African Nations Championship (CHAN) because “we had the best hotels and roads, the only thing we lacked were the stadiums.” This attitude is hard to eradicate and shows up at the most inopportune moments. Sven-Goran Eriksson, a former England manager, was appointed as Cote d’Ivoire manager for the 2010 World Cup. Eriksson was appalled by the general disorganisation surrounding the preparations. An hour before a warm-up game in Switzerland, the players had no kit. One of the players couldn’t play because the kitman forgot his boots at the hotel. His captain, Didier Drogba, fresh from winning the Double with Chelsea that season, was not surprised. “Sven, it’s Africa. It’s like this.”
Which brings us to another question: why do African teams always prefer foreign coaches? Most African teams that make it seem to have foreign coaches. Of the African teams participating in the 2018 World Cup – only Tunisia (Nabil Maâloul) and Senegal (Aliou Cisse – captain of the 2002 Senegal side) are local. The perception by our football administrators, is that African coaches do not seem to know what they are doing. Yet, there are instances which prove that, with the right support, local coaches can hold their own. Egypt’s Pharaohs were led to three consecutive African Cup of Nations (AFCON) titles in 2006, 2008 and 2010. Stephen Keshi, the legendary Nigerian defender, won the 2013 AFCON and reached the last 16 of the 2014 World Cup with the Super Eagles. Kenya qualified for the 2004 AFCON under a local coach, Jacob “Ghost” Mulee. Kenya achieved its highest ever FIFA ranking, 68th, under a local coach, Francis Kimanzi. This is another interesting fact for you – to date, no foreign coach has ever won a World Cup.
***
The story of African football is about triumph in the face of adversity.
Some of the most memorable moments in World Cup history have been by African teams. Can you forget Ghana in 2010, who carried Africa’s torch brightly in 2010 in Africa’s World Cup? But before Ghana, there was a Cameroon at Italia ’90 with the iconic Roger Milla celebratory jigs at the corner flag during Italia ’90. Those were the lasting moments of Italia ’90 – neither Paul Gascoigne’s tears nor Toto Schillaci’s prolific form for the home side came anywhere close. François Omam-Biyik’s header at the San Siro against the world champions, Argentina, led by the captain, leader, legend and once-in-a-lifetime genius of Diego Maradona, was the biggest upset in World Cup history. This was bigger than the United States beating England 1-0 in 1950. Much bigger than West Germany beating the Magical Magyars of Hungary in the miracle of Berne. This was an African team, from you know, Africa. Beating Maradona’s Argentina with nine men – two deserved red cards for playing typical “African” football). Roger Milla, all 38 years of him, was summoned by Paul Biya (he’s still President to date) and in true African dictator fashion, ordered to play at that World Cup. Their preparations were shambolic- Cameroon’s training camp was rocked with the usual complaints of allowances not being paid. Their goalkeeper, Joseph-Antoine Bell, was an egomaniacal divisive force.
And yet, they hung on, match by match and were merely a Gary Lineker penalty in extra time from doing the impossible – reaching the semi-final. The Indomitable Lions inspired a whole new generation of footballers, both in Africa and elsewhere – Bell was dropped for the relatively low- maintenance, Thomas N’kono, who had a superb tournament and inspired the legendary Gianluigi Buffon to become a goalkeeper. In fact, Buffon named his son, Thomas, after N’kono.
Do you remember Senegal following an eerily similar script in 2002? The Lions of Teranga, making their first appearance in the World Cup, humbled France – defending World and European champions in Seoul with Pape Bouba Diop scored the scrappiest of goals to cause yet another upset. A Henri Camara golden goal in extra time against Sweden took Senegal to the quarter-final against Turkey, where the Lions too, succumbed to a golden goal. Fate, it seems, had a touch of cruel irony.
***
The story of African football is about hope.
Despite all the challenges that football in Africa faces, never have I been more optimistic about its future. A lot of good things are happening: Nigeria’s 2018 World Cup kit, manufactured by Nike, was sold out within three days of its launch; which goes to show that there is money to be made in the African game if things are done properly. Mohammed Salah, Liverpool’s Egyptian King running down the wing, is one of those you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it talents. He could potentially be the first African Ballon d’Or winner since George Weah, now President of Liberia.
Gianni Infantino has pledged to expand the World Cup further. The 2026 World Cup, to be held in the United States, Mexico and Canada, will have 48 teams, with Africa having 9 teams and Asia 6 – not a bad start to his presidency. He has also promised to end the culture of corruption at FIFA, but this is to be taken with a pinch of salt – after all, Blatter is still attending the 2018 World Cup as President Vladimir Putin’s guest.
For youth development and a solid technical foundation, we can look to Germany and Belgium for assistance. These two nations rebooted their whole approach to youth development, investing in coaching and better facilities. Germany’s squad which won the 2014 World Cup, demolishing home favourites Brazil 7-1 along the way, was the fruit of careful planning. England have caught the bug a bit too late, but they are catching up. All African countries should follow suit. Maybe we should do one of those benchmarking trips, with actual results.
Finally, we should get more organised and drop the “this is Africa” mentality. Oh, and stop the looting. Published by the good folks at The Elephant.
The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.
Follow us on Twitter.
AFRICA AND THE WORLD CUP: A Beautiful Tragedy
By Martin Maitha
To Mzee,
It is not your fault.
You did not fail to lead. You had no thought.
You did not fail to protect. You had no dominion.
You are not a child of two worlds colonialism and post-colonialism, pre-World War II and post-World War II, you are child of no world.
You are silent because you are lost.
How can you become what you do not know? Who knows what a Kikuyu was? Was like? So that you could be Kikuyu?
What does interring 1.5 million members of a primitive agrarian tribe do to its memory?
It sears. It purges it.
It prepares it for loading with new thoughts, new memories.
Mzee, you were de-centred before you were born.
What Riika (Age-Set) are you? Who are your relatives to the other in the larger family that is tribe?
Yes, Mzee, you would not know. And this is through no fault of your own. Your sole point of access to tribal history and initiation into the social order was interdicted decades before the birth of your generation. That is the “Riika” social system. It is not only the repository of the social map of the Kikuyu tribe, it also facilitated social initiation in ceremonies that defined transition from boyhood to warriorhood to junior elder to senior and finally to tribal council. It is this information void that makes every Kikuyu, a stranger to every other Kikuyu. It is the information that makes every Somali a brother to another Somali. It is the information at the heart of “Somali FIRST”.
There has not been a Riika ceremony in a century and a half. The Colonial Government in a stroke of diabolical genius banned the one dated for 1910 making the last one of 1898 the last existent social memory of self.
The breadth and depth of the Imperial war to enslave your people was multi-generational and socially kaleidoscopic in terms of spectrum of tools applied; consisting of conventional, economic, psychological, biological and cultural prongs.
Your history and identity were systematically erased at all levels of consciousness and awareness.
The Church Missionary Society that cultured you was all about Imperial mission. Did you know the idea of the Church Missionary Society was conceived by Charles Grant, the Chairman of Imperial British East India (IBEI). And it was executed by British Members of Parliament William Wilberforce, in the last quarter of the 18th Century, all Secular Imperialists, not a single clergyman.
Closer home, the Presbyterian Church of East Africa which was the institutional protagonist of Christianity in the Central Highlands is actually the bastard child of the Imperial British East Africa company believe it or not. Yes, it is not a secret, it is public information. One century after the establishment of the Church Missionary Society around 1891 Sir William Mackinnon, Mr. A. L. Bruce and other directors of the Imperial British East Africa Company dispatched another group of Imperial agents with Bibles in their hands to British East Africa. As incredulous as it might sound the spiritual values of the Kikuyu tribe were given to it by its expropriator and slave master, the infamous Imperial British East Africa Company.
Can you see why Kikuyus are capitalists by faith? Why sons kill fathers for land and wives kill husbands for property? Why poverty is the ultimate sin in Kikuyu land? Can you now see the source of the Kikuyu tribes’ pseudo-Imperialist hubris? The Imperial British East Africa (IBEA) Company is the Kikuyu tribe’s pseudo-deity, it is the sovereign source of its spiritual beliefs. During “the emergency” in the fifties, when the “Mau Mau” resistance rose, the church, both Protestants and Catholics, did not remain silent, neutral or inactive. The missionaries threw their weight behind the British forces and joined their ranks even serving on armed patrols. Yes, “the missionaries” did not call for peace and or love here, there was no division between the Catholics and the Protestants, there was a unified call to in-discriminatory armed action against all “natives”. Bring them to bear, how dare they resist Imperial expropriation and Christian occupation!
This language and phrasing as harsh as it actually sounds is actually quite mild. As bizarre as it may sound they did see themselves as Christian saviours of savages, and were surprised by the resistance. In fact, so much so, their analysis of the Mau Mau resistance ranged from a form of mental illness to spiritual evil. Language exactly equivalent to that being used to describe Muslims resisting the brutal occupation of their land, pillage of their resources and rape of their women; Terrorists, Irrational, Bloodthirsty, Extremist, Retrogressive, Deranged… How could anyone hate American Democracy? How could anyone hate British Christianity?
Mzee, not even your denomination is a matter of theological consequence. Your denomination is a result of imperial interest. What I mean is that your Catholicism or Protestantism was decided by the outcome of the Kikuyu 1913 Conference, a meeting wherein the Mission divided between its various missions different regions of the Kikuyu highlands with Sykes-Picot level avarice. Stating that it would prevent “unseemly competition”(sic) and ensure strategic obstruction of Islam into the region. It was the First Council of Nicaea all over again, pure empire.
I am reminded of a quote by Paul J. Getty “The meek shall inherit the earth, but not it’s mineral rights…”. Our dear father is the promise of transcendental real-estate, a “paradise” where we would continue, condemned to servitude, damned to sing for eternity, in praise of a nondescript god who denied us everything in all worlds, for eternity, yes father, for eternity.
Do you now see what the network of churches and schools in the Mt. Kenya region are? Do you understand the ramifications of their concentration in the ‘white’ highlands? It is Kenya’s “Iraqi Greenzone”. It is the network of snake pits, it is the operational heart of the occupation.
The network of churches and schools in the highlands you grew up in, formed the imperial psycho- socio-cultural beachhead. Its concentration intensity is an indicator of the special interest the British Imperialists had in the Kikuyu tribe and its land. Or did you think the appearance of Rev. Musa Gitau, the establishment of Musa Gitau Primary school in 1901, the 1907 recruitment, culturing and emergence of chief collaborator Johnstone Muigai Jomo Kenyatta from this institution and the simultaneous banning of the tribal Riika ceremony of 1910 as all coincidence? The Kikuyu tribe was being specially prepared for a special task. Remember the Kikuyu tribe was not simply broken like other tribes, it was actively re-programmed to serve as the vanguard of British Imperial order in the territory. A sociological scale “nyapara” (taskmaster).
And now to compound an already irreversible problem, the colonial territory’s administrative order many think is “their” government, “Serikali nisaidie”, entrenched, expanded the socio-cultural and psychological warfare infrastructure that is the Christian Imperial-Missionary schools it inherited. It not just the physical infrastructure but the organization i.e. schedule, format, management method and all. Not just the syllabus but even the book contents as well. Imagine, the native administration did not even bother to either review even re-write the history books. In effect, it became natives yoking each other and their young physically, economically, intellectually, culturally in a never- ending cycle of self-driven slavery into perpetuity.
The Kikuyu tribe was totally socially reprogrammed. Not even your diet was spared. But how could diet escape control, food in that age was the entire economy. Food is sustenance, to enslave people control their survival, bringing me to my next point.
Total cultural re-engineering via economic and belief interventions. In 1893 depending on which version you want to believe, Mr. John Paterson who came to support the “Christian mission” introduced the first coffee seeds.
Why is this significant?
The use of food as a weapon can be later seen as captured by the insidious intent of the Royal Commission on Population, which King George VI had created in 1944 “to consider what measures should be taken in the national interest to influence the future trend of population.” The commission found that Britain was gravely threatened by population growth in its colonies, since “a populous country has decided advantages over a sparsely-populated one for industrial production.” The combined effects of increasing population and industrialization in its colonies, it warned, “might be decisive in its effects on the prestige and influence of the West,” especially effecting “military strength and security.”
Let me digress a bit to magnify the ramifications of this, not as articulated by me, but by the imperialists themselves. Henry (Heinz) Kissinger in a report for the United States of America, the imperator of our century, in this rather obviously labelled report “Food as a Weapon” revealed knowledge and awareness that dependency on imports for basic food ultimately lead to famine and death that for them has the intended positive outcome of population reduction outside of Birth Control means.
It has statements and questions that any human being would find fiendish. Listen to the “celebrated Statesman” Heinz Kissinger state; “Mandatory programs may be needed and we should be considering these possibilities now,” the document continued, adding, “Would food be considered an instrument of national power? … Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can’t/won’t control their population growth?”
He also predicted a return of famines that could make exclusive reliance on birth control programs unnecessary. “Rapid population growth and lagging food production in developing countries, together with the sharp deterioration in the global food situation in 1972 and 1973, have raised serious concerns about the ability of the world to feed itself adequately over the next quarter of century and beyond,” he said.
The report goes on to predict, that the cause of the coming food deficit would not be not natural, but a result of western financial policy: “Capital investments for irrigation and infrastructure and the organization requirements for continuous improvements in agricultural yields may be beyond the financial and administrative capacity of many LDCs (Less Developed Countries). For some of the areas under heaviest population pressure, there is little or no prospect for foreign exchange earnings to cover constantly increasingly imports of food.” Kissinger Said.
“It is questionable,” Kissinger gloated, “whether aid donor countries will be prepared to provide the sort of massive food aid called for by the import projections on a long-term continuing basis.” Consequently, “large-scale famine of a kind not experienced for several decades—a kind the world thought had been permanently banished,” was foreseeable—famine, which has indeed come to pass.
Based on my understanding it becomes clear that the I.B.E.A and P.C.E.A Church were the modern day Monsanto and Bill Gates Foundation G.M.O alliance of your time. Where the founding P.C.E.A church wielded the Imperial Bible to justify subjugation and domination, Monsanto and Bill Gates Foundation wields science and influence to push ‘democratic’ equality in a veiled philanthrocapitalism agenda.
The introduction of a cash-crop economy coupled with taxes and forced labour, Mzee, was not economic warfare, it was slavery, a brutal war to enslave.
Everyone loves to quote Winston Churchill “We can afford to be generous in victory…”. The British were definitely generous; to the French they granted Limestone mining concessions, the American’s off-shore oil drilling rights. They, the British, own everything else; the Gold, the Oil, the Titanium, the Land and even the Women. And what in terms of land or minerals they have been unable to exploit for capacity, timing or other political or economic reasons, they have cordoned off with expropriatory legal tools titled “Natural Wildlife Reserves”, “National Parks”, “Conservancies” and all other manner of evolving terms.
One hundred and sixty seven years ago (Jan. 2nd, 1851), Henry Venn uttered these words:–“If Africa is to be penetrated by European missionaries, it must be from the East Coast.”
Mzee, consider us fully – penetrated. From the East Coast. If only you would have been awake to their designs.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi a pre-eminent Daimyō, warrior, general, samurai, and politician of the Sengoku period in the 16th Century is regarded as Japan’s second “great unifier”. In November of 1586, Hideyoshi ordered the expulsion of all Christian missionaries on Kyushu. Later on in 1596, he ordered the crucifixion of six shipwrecked Spanish Franciscan missionaries, three Japanese Jesuits, and seventeen Japanese Christians at Nagasaki.
This moment, I submit Mzee, was the moment that bought Japan another 500 years of independence. This was the reception Dr. Johann Ludwig Krapf should have received when he hit the East Coast beach in 1844, under the patronage of the Imperial British East Africa Company via it’s psycho- social-cultural warfare arm – the Church Missionary Society.
Mwene-Nyaga does not exist, Gikuyu is lost, there are no Kikuyu. The land has been conquered and the tribe has been scattered. It was actually effectively scattered in 1890 when the last Riika ceremony turned out to be the last. With its history lost its identity evaporated in a Century even awareness of genealogical existence will cease to exist. In simple terms, the tribe will not exist in 100 years. Imperial British East Africa Company with its socio-cultural prong the Presbyterian Church of East Africa succeeded in reprogramming an agrarian Bantu tribe into an amorphous mass of secular capitalist individuals. The Kikuyu are victims of the victory strategist Sun Tzu classified as not just victory, but a victory that is complete. The Kikuyu tribe vanquished, never to rise again. The women who bear Kikuyu genealogical heritage should be married and absorbed into the tribes that survived the imperial scourge, this is their only hope for safety, security and honour. The Kikuyu men who cannot establish new colonies and tribes should dissolve into the nihil of time.
The only way is forward. The Kikuyu as a people or as individuals must reject Man as Sovereign. In Monarchical form or Demos form both have translated to tyranny. There is no way back to the past, the “Mungiki” attempt revealed everything about where the path back into the past would lead. The Kikuyu must find a new Sovereign, or be damned to eternal humiliation.
If the new Sovereign be a man or material being, it can bring nothing but misguidance and oppression. For the true sovereign must be able to answer the question of where we have come from, why we are here, where we are going. The true sovereign must be established above and outside our material reality for creation cannot define its own purpose. The true sovereign will create just, cogent, tranquil internal and external order. I have walked my journey, conducted my search, and found a sovereign who qualifies vengeance, guarantees inheritance of the earth to those who serve him unreservedly and promises Jannatul Firdaus, an afterlife replete with spoils of war that make Valhallah pale in comparison, adorned couches and raised thrones, wide-eyed virgins and youthful serfs.
This is the Sovereign I will serve, this is the Sovereign my son will serve, this is the Sovereign I invite you to serve, Oh Gikuyu.
Your son,
Empire Man
References
Kissinger’s 1974 Plan for Food Control Genocide by Joseph Brewda Executive Intelligence Review
Origin and Growth of PCEA
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya – Caroline Elkins (2005)
The early attempts at ecumenical co-operation in East Africa: the case of the Kikuyu Conference of 1913
Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae, October 2010, 36(2), 73-93 – Julius Gathogo
Published by the good folks at The Elephant.
The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.
Follow us on Twitter.
AFRICA AND THE WORLD CUP: A Beautiful Tragedy
By Martin Maitha
The illusion of sovereignty and state arising out of territories created in 1885 is fast disintegrating. The false political medium in Africa modelled after the Westphalian nation-state which Zbigniew Brzezinski aptly described as “pseudo-states”, is undergoing Samual Huntington’s political decay. In this case a situation where social-political awareness and activism has evolved at a pace beyond the ability of the colonial institutional order’s ability to adapt.
Natives under the delusion of rights that they presumed they had as a natural outcome of the false liberation from colonialism, make untenable demands on the imperial order. These demands consequently lead to fracture of the illusion citizenship and statehood. As the political medium has matured and aged natives’ attempts to align what they have been taught in school and what they instinctively believe to be the reality they exist in, is testing the fabric of the medium to it’s limits.
This was best exemplified by the March 26th 2017 Jomo Kenyatta International Airport incident in which the Kenya Government removed a native born lawyer by the name of Miguna Miguna to Canada. Miguna Miguna was born in the Kenya territory but had acquired Canadian citizenship. Simply, a man was expelled from his country of birth and ethnic heritage, not by his people but by the instrument of colonial imperialism that had long since been presumed defunct.
The moment revealed the incorporeal prison grid that is the Westphalian nation-state geopolitical system. For both the ignorant and informed the Miguna Miguna “deportation” debacle exposed fundamental contradictions that are intrinsic to the Westphalian nation-state system.
His courageous demand to be allowed to re-enter his country of birth without passport validation created a clash that spewed to the surface the rotten core of colonial imperialist thoughts carried by a native elite whose vacuity was now beyond the political but also human.
To the south, another native, the founder and current leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters Party – Julius Malema threatens the illusion of the Rainbow Nation. Challenging the South African independence fraud which granted “political freedom” without release of the reigns of control of the economy, yet another falsity of such ontological improbability, it’s mere existence is testament to the ideological bankruptcy of natives of the African continent.
“I was born here! This is my country of birth!” shouted Miguna Miguna
While standing at the doorway to the plane that was meant to fly him to any destination but his home country.
A native, begging for jus soli (Birthright citizenship).
Native. Jus Soli.
The irony of our dystopic reality.
“I am a Kenyan!”
Declared Miguna Miguna demanding jus civile in a state of colonus, intending jus naturale, while in an actual state of jus gentium. Ignorantly claiming jus civile where no state even exists.
“I am JaLuo”, directed at the JoLuo Ruoth would have been more conceptually consistent with jus civile, though even more impotent. Given in our coloniality, we have obsequiously embraced inane oxymoron like “negative ethnicity”, at once de-legitimizing our own “larger families” and compelling submission to colonial abstractions like “Kenya” which are defined and redefined at will by the imperialists, as we witnessed in Sudan and other regions of the world. An example being the current re-engineering of identities in the Middle East through the Greater Middle East Initiative GMEI which is re-mapping the old and worn genocidal British-French Sykes-Picot colonial order of the 20th Century in America’s sociopathic imperial image. The cry “I am JaLuo” would sadly not only have been impotent but also politically incorrect.
One is only allowed to identify with the identity imposed by the imperial colonialists, any other is met with ridicule at best, and the potential danger of political lynching for “tribalism” by fellow serfs, at worst. No-one dare shout “I am ndorobo!”, on an international stage, where when Phil Neville says “I am British and Proud”. His ethnicity is not only acceptable but is also recognized institutionally and procedurally. White ethnic identity has citizenship, in fact sufficient jus civile to cater for any whom the white power structure would deign to grant use of their ethnicity i.e. an Arab and Somali can say they are British without fear of contradiction while the reverse would be preposterous. The small “n” in “I am ndorobo!” and the capital “B” in “I am British and Proud” is deliberate.
With this simple “sleight of hand”, the imperialists can enjoy citizenship in expropriated lands where they do not belong. They have created political aberrations like “kenya”, which enable contradictions that sustain a system that keeps the native inhabitants of colonies and occupied territories from enjoying the rights of citizenship in the suzerain’s homeland, while allowing the imperial citizen to enjoy rights in the occupied land equivalent to those in his own.
The colonial status and identity structure Prof. Mahmood Mamdani effectively described is based on the melanin phenotype. Rights belong strictly to low melanin individuals who look pink but are termed white and defined as imperial citizens, they are governed by Civil law. This superstructure is also occupied by a sub-class of individuals with more hyper-activated melanin, termed as brown. Though this subject-class occupy the upper strata governed by Civil law, they exist below the citizens and only have privileges. Natives occupy the substructure as a large muddy brown to black muck that has neither rights nor privileges and exist outside the remit of Civil law. The implications of which are, for example, murder does not apply when it is of a black (notice the absence of the term person) by a white person.
Simply put, the right Miguna Miguna demanded was a right of being a Luo to the Luo Nation. He was demanding this natural right from the un-natural entity of a colony which itself masquerades as a State and therefore has in essence no citizenship to offer, anyone.
“I am a Kenyan!”
Cried Miguna Miguna for the umpteenth time to any and all who would listen, a peregrini (alien), now out of his depth desperately using any and all means of identity available jus coloni (Serf; status of tenant farmer in Rome between freedom and slavery), jus soli (Birhtright citizenship) in order to be granted access back in to the “Kenya” province of the Imperial Empire, not knowing neither civile nor gentium exist for the natives.
“I am a Kenyan!”
Demanded Miguna Miguna the house negro, through the transparent airport departure lounge door to excited members of the Ministry of Truth in a bizarre moment loaded with dramatic scenes and contradictions that leaped back and forth between shakesperean drama and orwellian dystopia.
He flashed his chattel tag, the infamous kipande.
Yes, he was definitely one us, a slave, he belonged in our fields.
No longer a resistance “General”?
The curse of native cyclopia. Given yet to “form” “mind”, “essence” makes no “matter”.
He demanded to be allowed back in to the field. He had realized, that though being a field negro was wretched, being amongst his fellow slaves consolidated his identity and reinforced his esteem and sense of self, compared to living in the lap of the master where there was all comfort, but total deontological corrosion.
Why was he now seemingly rejecting the safety and security of his master’s house? In exchange for what we dare ask? The negro had tasted life. The field promised fame, power, relevance he could never enjoy in the master’s house, which though comfortable was cold. Nothing beyond the comfort was real. Man was not created to live in the comfort of another man’s house. It is not natural, not for any Man, only for a slave.
The fields though harsh are real, hardship strips masks, revealing us to ourselves, giving rise to struggle, struggle to meaning, meaning to purpose, purpose to life.
The life the negro had tasted.
“I am a Lawyer!”
Exclaimed the plebeian in patrician outrage. Shocked by the treatment meted out on him by fellow members of his own underclass.
Neither being “born here” (wherever “here” is), nor being a Lawyer, nor being “Kenyan” entitled the poor agitator to anything. In actual fact, being “a Kenyan” his greatest defence actually qualified him for the greatest subjugation. As being a Kenyan unlike being a Somali or a German, was the actual slavery.
According to the Kenya Gazette Supplement No. 93 of 7th December 1960 the term “Kenya” means, the colony and Protectorate of Kenya Crown Land.
What is the “Kenya Crown Land”? It rises from the Crown Lands Ordinance (C.L.O) of 1902.
To be “Kenyan” is to be chattel property of the Crown, to be “proudly Kenyan” is to be proudly chattel property of the Crown.
“I am undocumented!”
Protested Miguna Miguna. Imagine that; A world in which to be undocumented is to be institutionally non-existent. But close scrutiny reveals that “some animals are more equal than others”, as the “Citizens” of the world do not need to prove their right to re-enter their countries using Passports. Reaffirming the fact that the native has no systemic rights in the imperial order, even in his native land of birth.
“I do not have status!”
Shouted Miguna Miguna at the highly professional pilot. “I have no status in Dubai!” he cried very legitimately. As landing in Dubai without immigration status could expose him to unnecessary harrasment, potential prosecution and even temporary incarceration.
This, for the first time was serendipitously correct in literal terms, and in Dubai he would have been treated exactly as such, a runaway slave.
Without the chattel tag in form of passport or identity card, the native literally has no status, anywhere. While the Queen of England does not require a passport to travel anywhere, not even his President escapes this procedural requirement essentially exhibiting the pecking order even at Head of State level. As for the native he is no less a slave now than he was a century and a half ago, secular imperialism has only evolved an incorporeal yoke for him.
Guns mean nothing! Guns are not issues!” sneered Miguna Miguna disdainfully… while standing at the barrel end of the insurmountable power of the loaded gun of imperium, he inadvertently revealed why he and his ilk are damned to eternal slavery to men.
Guns are key. Gun ownership is organically related to political agency. Gun ownership in the sense of right to arms is fundamentally integral to Citizenship. The “Gun control” controversy the World has witnessed in America is not about the civilian attacks conducted by deranged gunmen that the main stream media so loves to amplify. It is about political agency. The American people having an instinctive sense of the true essence of slavery having been both subjects and slave owners, and now FREE MEN. Americans deeply understand that “Gun regulation” is political subjugation.
Arms and guardianship were defining characteristics of Citizenship even in Ancient Greece and Sparta. Only chattel slaves were not allowed to own arms then, guns now. Natives. If one can take a moment to flash back to the “Westgate”incident. The Asians who out of nowhere filled the parking lot, for local citizenry, bore a strange arms configuration – Semi-Automatic and Automatic Weapons. No organized group of native civilians is known to be armed in this way, not even in the Private Security Companies. Begging the question, how? Why?
Prof. Mahmood Mamdani in his treatise on Citizenship equips us with the tools to understand the colonial system. Once clearly understood it reveals the existing socio-political identity and dispensation to be simply a paint job, cosmetic makeover of the imperial system established in 1885.
To recap, the top rung is occupied by individuals like Tom Chomondeley, the great grandson of the 3rd Baron Delamere, who has the three vital characteristics necessary to citizenship under Secular Imperialism; very low melanin, property ownership and guns. The bizarre drama all witnessed where then “state employee” Attorney General Amos Wako, flew “state employee” Director of Public Prosecutions to Nakuru NOT to initiate but to terminate the prosecution of Tom Chomondeley, in a case where he was being charged with killing Samson Ole Sisina, a state employee!? This conundrum is only effectively explained by Prof. Mahmood Mamdani’s classic treatise “Citizen And Subject” which revealed the real imperial writ, that has been insidiously cosmetically masked by a bankrupt native elite using a false constitutional order. A white man killed a native, a legal non- person. The promulgated constitution of the territory did not and does not apply to imperial citizens. The constitution is then in reality the amalgamation of customary norms of natives into a social contract strictly for natives. Scaled to state level where the property is “oil and minerals” and the guns are “nuclear weapons”, one finds an analogically equivalent order, which qualifies and enables “white” nation ownership rights to all the oil and minerals on earth and possession of Nuclear weapons. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is the demarcation line between Civil States and native territories. Thus the great political effort to de-nuclearise the East.
The materialist nature of Secular Democracy compels a logic of power as the criterion of rule i.e. “Might makes Right”. Citizens for this reason must guarantee their rights from the sovereign, their rights are not guaranteed by the Sovereign. The right to ownership of arms is not manifest in the “Firearms license” local drug dealers, elected natives and other petty bourgeois who like flashing at restaurants, when not terrorising family members and competing lovers with.
Gun ownership is epitomized by Cliven Bundy. It is manifest in Cliven Bundy’s ability to exercise defensive power against an organized expropriator in the form of the United States rogue government. The legal dispute between Cliven Bundy and the United States Federal Government is not the primary issue of importance. Of concern is how the armed standoff between Cliven Bundy’s armed militia and armed agents of the United States Government Bureau of Land Management between April 5th 2014 and April 12th 2014, ended with a United States Government standing down.
Why did the United States Government hesitate? Why not another Waco? This is a government which is infamous for love of overkill, be it by conventional, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons means. Death of innocents is no matter for the United States Government, what about an armed militia?
One has to understand how the white horizontal rungs intersect with the columns of the global property rights regime to create the power structure that Imperial elites depend on to subjugate the World. It is in this interstice, that Cliven Bundy made his stand.
The United States Government could not de-legitimize Bundy as a fanatic like David Koresh and neutralize him, given first, his call was Patriotic, second he is a “White Property Owner”. Patriotism is the call the United States Government uses to raise canon fodder for its imperial wars around the world. Such contradiction would have endangered the false basis of its existence with exposure. Given second he is White and owns Property, his execution would have potentially undermined the power structure that the imperial elite depend on to subjugate the entire world.
This is why the Imperial United States Government, owner to a standing military of a million plus clones, Nuclear Submarines, Carriers Strike Groups, Nuclear and Ballistic Missile arsenals unrivalled by any other power (now and in history), X-37B robotic space plane and the HTV-2 hypersonic glider prototype, when confronted by a small band of armed, white, property owners… blinked.
Had “the people” owned arms in England during the expropriatory “Enclosure” policy (essentially robbery of land by the elites), the history of the entire World would probably be different.
Guns matter. Raising the question, how does the other errant native, Julius Malema intend to accomplish his mission?
“Expropriation without compensation!”
Declared the Leader! “Expropriation without compensation!” chanted the crowd in ecstatic consent! “Expropriation without compensation!” demanded the renegade! “Expropriation without compensation!” saluted Africa!
What is your method, Julius Malema? Who or what is your sovereign source, Julius Malema? Given you support Democracy, from where will you raise force to compel, reward and punish? What is your new “post-expropriation” world order? Where are your guns?
The title deed is an article defined by law but more importantly anchored in the sovereign. Thus Beth Mugo’s infamous statement “The title deed is sacrosanct”, implying to undermine it is to undermine the sovereign. It is the most powerful manifestation of the concept of “property rights”. To expropriate is to negate “Property Rights”. Property Rights are a global regime. To negate property rights is tear up the global property rights regime. It is an attack on the global imperial sovereign.
Lenin, Trotsky and their merry band of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks respectively, tore up Tsarist ancien régime and instituted Communism. A world that promised equality to the masses, “distribution” to everyone as much as they needed, “expropriation” from everyone as much it could. To the elites party membership and safety from the Red Army and dreaded Cheka.
The Queen of England massacred natives around the world, tore up their communal order and instituted Secular Imperial Colonialism in the form of “In-direct Rule”. For the masses who collaborated, the Queen promised acquisition of transcendental real-estate through Christian conversion. For the elites who collaborated, the Queen granted English as a Language, token real- estate and a place in her extractive administration overseeing native labour. For all others, her soldiers torched their villages, mowed down men, raped and killed their women and children of all ages, pogromed and interred their entire tribes and nations into camps and reservations where she would starve them into submission and death.
America killed hundreds of thousands using nuclear weapons to send a message to the entire world, Imperium. Like the Queen of England in a necessarily paraphrased copy and paste, America has “massacred natives around the world, torn up their social-political order and instituted Secular Imperialism in the form of “Democratic Rule”. For the masses who collaborated, America promised “Freedom” through Secular conversion. For the elites who collaborated, America granted “lives of the Rich and Famous”, and a place in her extractive capitalist order. For all others, American soldiers torched their villages, mowed down men, raped and killed their women and children of all ages, pogromed and interred their entire tribes and nations into refugee camps around the world where the United Nations Security Council would use them as pawns on Zbigniews Brzezinksi’s Grand Chessboard as their ‘Peacekeeping Soldiers’ abused them and their children”.
What is your source of authority Julius Malema? What imperium will you leverage to execute expropriation? What framework will you use to phase-in to a new political post-expropriation order?
Or are you Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whom after successfully stamping out resistance through the Haitian revolution of 1804, then sought to re-engage his nation to the same Imperial system that gave rise to his oppressors? This was repeated more recently through Democratic process by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. A journey of blood tears and sacrifice out of Misr, literally, then right back in to the arms of Firaun.
While vengeance is sweet, vengeance is right, and vengeance is just, vengeance is only linear at individual level. At sociological level it is evolutionary. The sequence of events in relation to cause and effect only move in one direction along the timeline. A simpler but poor analogical example is, in contracts of kinship. When one marries to end the marriage one undertakes a divorce, one does not undo the marriage by un-marrying.
The failure or inability of the natives to successfully defend their land or conduct a revanche created a new reality which cannot be altered by the same political praxis that created it. Iraq and Afghanistan cannot remove the Imperial occupier through Secular Democracy, this is a matter of ontology. Somalia cannot remove America’s proxy occupation – AMISOM by the method of invitation which it presumably used to create it.
Expropriation is materialist praxis, the method of Secular Imperialism. One cannot “undo” expropriation by expropriating. Expropriating the expropriator (though fun and probably vindictively satisfying) does not undo the first act of expropriation but in essence effects a new act of expropriation with it’s own effective outcome. Vulgarly, equivalent to “raping the rapist””murdering the murderer”. It is a completely new, different, separate action/event in the continuum of life. The purpose here is to create and share a template that can help understand and discuss the nature and consequence of this line of action. This submission is not advice to “do or not do”.
Iraq and Afghanistan will lift the yoke of Imperialism by Islamic revolution. A new Islamic dispensation ordered on the sovereignty of the Sharia of Allah (Mighty & Majestic), enabled by the praxis of the Sunnah (Method) of the Prophet and last Messenger to Mankind, Muhammad (PBUH). The method for Islam to acquire dominion and the post revolution civilisation are clearly articulated in Islam’s holy texts. To those whom Islam would rule, Islam governs by rational gravity of truth, not the brutal logic of power. Islam for instance solves the problem of land concentration by instituting a land tax based on the productive potential of the land rather than expropriation. This compels productive use of the land triggering an explosion in employment opportunities (as Agriculture has in economic terms the largest potential for employment at all levels, low skill, middle to high), a drastic drop in food prices, food security, all the while averting the social and economic upheaval that devaluing the title deed would cause. As, for those who have neither the interest or capacity to cultivate the land and used the title deeds purely speculatively, the will have the opportunity to voluntarily surrender the excess they hold of the limited resource that is land through voluntary commercial transaction. Taxing the land rather than labour not only increases the treasury of the state but also the disposable income of the population creating an explosion in economic activity. Islam articulates purpose of and for life. Islam gives Language. Islam grants individual and societal tranquillity by answering the pan-ultimate question of Man. The reordering process compelled by rout and replacement of existing sovereign, is therefore complete.
Expropriation is impossible without the establishment of a new sovereign through revolution. As the Economic Freedom Fighters Party Manifesto does not articulate any new or potential sovereign source, no revolution is possible let alone in the offing. The EFF’s commitment to non-violence and democratic process will lead the people to activity that will exhaust their energies ultimately leading to surrender by the vast majority. The few strong willed and committed to ending the imperial occupation will either pressure for armed insurgency or break away to form an armed insurrection. In the South African context, this path of events seems highly unlikely.
What for Mzansi, Julius Malema? What is your promise for Mzansi?
Melanin as political criterion will not cut it as the Khoisan lady at your Cape Chamber of Commerce debate with Clem Sunter showed. To succeed you must establish a new sovereign, then lead us. The Dialectic Material sovereign failed. Only one of two choices of possible sovereign anchor remain; Extant Secular Capital and revolutionary Islamic Shari’yah, tightly coupled with their commensurate praxis of Expropriation and Proselytizaton, respectively.
Choose carefully. Do not shed human blood in vain.
Published by the good folks at The Elephant.
The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.
Follow us on Twitter.
AFRICA AND THE WORLD CUP: A Beautiful Tragedy
By Martin Maitha “Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it. In underdeveloped countries the preceding generations… fought as well as they could… we must realize that the reason for this silence lies less in their lack of heroism than in the fundamentally different international situation of our time.” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Nairobi, 2003: Following the indefinite closure of Moi University due to a students’ strike against the system that privileged self-sponsored parallel students over the regular ones, I teamed up with a friend who had graduated from Catholic University and set out to mentor and inspire primary and high school students in the name of Preparing Leaders Of Tomorrow (PLOT). However, we had limited access to the students owing to Michuki era matatu strikes and watchmen who, lumping us together with religious missionaries, turned us away or directed us to officers least interested in our proposals. While we contested the misrecognition and missed opportunities, the fact that we spoke to more watchmen than students and the contradictions of our own lives was also a cause for laughter at the time. However, with the insight of hindsight (mediated by significant ideological shifts), I came to learn that this was not a laughing matter.
Here I was, a public university student whose comrades were now serving long suspensions due to resisting the privatization of higher education walking side-by-side with an unemployed private university graduate (then postgraduate) trying to prepare leaders of tomorrow while being ill- prepared to make sense, or inhabit the present effectively. Also significant for me was our inattention to the political lives of the readily accessible watchmen who, knowingly or unknowingly, had prevented our short-lived, and ill-conceived initiative from reproducing the same maladies that we were desperately seeking to break away from.
Reflecting on our inattentiveness to the watchmen’s lives often returned me to childhood memories of an episode of the KBC TV drama/ situation comedy Plot 10 where the plot watchman Munai (Ronald Kazungu) reminds the caretaker Kajogoo (Joseph Njogu) of the cold nights he endures while the tenants sleep in their houses and the end-of-month hunger experienced due to salary delays while the tenants go for their monthly feasts. However, Munai’s own suffering does not translate into empathy for tenants such as Adam (Thomas Onsongo) who requests for an extension on his rent payment due to his wife’s medical bill.
Munai’s lamentation and impatience with Adam was crucial in helping me to see differently, and in more politically perspicuous ways, the tragic inattentiveness that makes it difficult, if not impossible for urban inhabitants to compose lives in common even with those with whom we share a time/space — our contemporaries. From the intimate space of the plot, we learn of the multiple webs of assistance and resistance that tenants create in order to survive. We are also reminded of adaptation, self-help mechanisms, and resilience developed in response to the privatization of key services and amenities that make urban life more precarious.
Like actual multi-occupancy, low-rent, tenement spaces, the fictional Plot 10 is hospitable and hostile in equal measure. But this understanding of the word plot does not exhaust its meanings. Plot also has connotations of the designs/plans for a ravenous night out (plot/ plan/mpango) and an undeveloped piece of land. More recently, the desire to have a plot of land of one’s own has turned associational life into a means of individual gain, credibility/creditworthiness, entitlement, self- actualization, and ultimately, pleasure. It is a guarantor of intergenerational hope for those who possess it and a cause for hopelessness and rage for the dispossessed.
With the moralization of plot ownership, being plotless or homeless is considered an individual rather than structural and systemic pathology related to the institutionalization of private property and disposal of unalienated land in ways that benefit those closest to the sites of power. Similarly, the plot, the dark underside of the colonial ideal of the green garden city that kept the black native quarters separate, unhygienic, overcrowded and male-dominated is normalized. In a postcolonial city characterized by fragmented rhythms and fortified enclaves the simultaneity of concrete plots and green gated communities make it difficult to imagine common times and a generational politics that is not predicated on class.
When inequalities such as those alluded to above create an existential rift between age-mates, the idea of generational mission becomes frivolous and unattainable. Accordingly, Fanon’s call for each generation to find its mission and a politics attuned to the weight of international structures from the standpoint of time raises fundamental ethical/political questions regarding how to live (well) with those with whom one is in synchrony with. Better still, we are forced to ask what it means to be contemporaries, to share a time/space, or even a mission with others in a world characterized by alienation.
In cases where the ideal of the generation does not acknowledge how different people are situated in the world/time, it becomes difficult to imagine a new human due to fidelity to the land, to the (mother) tongue, shibboleths, oaths, bloodlines, race, or class. Generational lines here involve the passage of things and meanings between variations of the same in ways that maintain foundations while disavowing foundational and other forms of violence. This desire to stay true to the name of the father, the son, and any other thing that they find holy, which in most cases is race, property, and group propriety, makes people inattentive to the lives of some of their contemporaries.
However, it is possible to compose a dissensual sense of time, ‘other’ contemporaries, and a common world with those who we are told are carriers of an insurmountable difference. In the Kenyan context, this involves refusing colonial inscriptions and narrow crisis-based sympathies that invoke old bloodlines as moral lines and even lines on the map. It is also a refusal to join alliances that invoke elite destiny/destinations and origins while being inattentive to our co-presence, people’s material conditions of existence, and ambiguous ethical relations.
Unlike co-presences that bring together multiple lifetimes, there are conceptions of the contemporary and generational times that fetishize a consumption of the present that erases the past and ruins the earth. These presentisms makes life in the present intolerable for many and the future improbable for other generations of human and non-human beings. They also invoke alternative histories and family stories that treat past injustices, dispossessions, and broken promises as anachronistic threats that call up ghosts that are too old for us to be concerned with today. So, they go on their knees and call on us to Forget! Forgive! They want a chance to develop the present without the burden of the past and responsibility to the future.
This is the mantra of the leadership of ‘our’ generation. In its quest for reconciliation, it shies away from the truth that the dry bones from the past constantly throw at it. It remedies the quest for justice, or dissenting voices through violence first and then development projects underwritten with human blood. With blood-soaked hands, they point upwards invoking gods of forgiveness. Downwards, they point to rails and roads that project today’s debts into the future. Pointing east, they contract comrades who pour concrete over the blood-soaked lands quickly entombing the dry and not so dry bones. To cover up their tracks, they accelerate time. They turn history into ethnology; compare one group to another, crunch numbers, and then project them into a perverse developmental scheme. Schools, roads, hospitals, language and other common entitlements become communal favours and bribes that individuals can plot to plunder.
In defence of this time of development and/as plunder, young tongues are sharpened. They sing praises and lick crumbs from the floor. They silence their own multi-lingualisms and disavow their impurities. These young tongues traffic in diglossia— two versions of the same language— one for the people that they now want to constitute as a single and unproblematic whole, and another for those that they consider part of their proximate, exclusive, and intimate world. A world that, even in the face of gaps in material conditions of existence and incommensurate world-views, considers itself to be one with the potentate, the potentate in waiting, or the one who is robbed of the status of potentate and pursues it perpetually.
As committed presentists, the figureheads of generational wars and cleavage stand hand-in-hand. They claim to be forming something new but only speak the old language of Peace, Love, and Unity now recast as grand projects of anti-graft and neoliberal development. In this monolingualism, the oneness of tongue ensures that only a few lick the bones dry. For them, being a contemporary is a perverse gastronomy. It involves eating together and then devouring those who serve them. It is a potential cannibalism that turns away from the cries of their contemporaries – “Watameza mate sisi tukikula nyama.”
During this orgasmic feast, we are told to suspend politics in the service of the economy. For these brothers turned foes, and then turned brothers again, the present is “our time to eat.” Others, other generations, must wait for their turn. In the meantime, their tongues can be put to better use…speaking in tongues, singing praises, and hurling abuses. After all, we are a generation of forgivers.
For the impatient, the generation of leaders-in-waiting, and those whose time has come and passed, they are summoned to hustle! Gamble and speculate. To be a plotter of one sort or another. To learn many trades and always throw their eyes askance. To learn how to wink and lick their lips. Engage side-hustles, side-kicks, and ‘side-dishes’ “…you never know which one will land on your lap. You never know which one will be an economic boom, or which one will make your loins ‘burst.’” They are told to plot and have no time for the plotless.
Beyond the shared games, our generation is forced to ask what it means to inhabit a rift between oneself and those with whom one shares a living space but whose rhythms of life, recent tongue- waggings, and eating habits, make it impossible to share a common world/time? Are they still your contemporaries? We are forced to speculate on how we can live with those who, owing to their dealings, do not only live in an exclusive space, but have fractured our present such that they can afford to live in another time. Those who shared our childhood but, in order to secure the future of their own children, have accelerated accumulation and destabilized the present for today’s children.
Speaking of our times in common involves breaking hegemonic temporal rifts between those who declare that it is their time to eat and those who live in perpetual hunger. Between men, women, and all others. Between those who are made premature elders complete with ceremonial adornments irrespective of their age and experience, and those subalterns who remain perpetual children. It involves disabusing ourselves of the times of otherness that is assigned to those who, according to Johannes Fabian, are located allochronically – in another time of human development (infantilism) or of social development (primitivism) and therefore must be represented, converted, developed, and brought into national or capitalist time even if they resist. For, according to the owners of our time, these people from another time do not know any better. If they resist, watajua hawajui.
But hope persists. Not due to a panglossian optimism that always announces that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds,” or a focus on the soul (for which it is well) even when things are evidently broken. Hope persists because we believe it is possible to compose new, ethical, and more equal ways of being-in-common while refusing to adapt and live with otherwise intolerable indignities. For a generation that had its hopes domesticated through the mantras of positive thinking, the fetishization of the hustle, funny memes, fancy civil society themes, and the language of adaptability and resilience rather than resistance against the intolerable, a new and raging hope becomes an imperative. One that breaks up with those children of the first and second liberation who salivate waiting for their turn to sit at the table as it is currently constituted. Like the South African Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall movements, this hope that is all the rage invokes old names and devises new revolutionary games for the dispossessed who refuse to be crushed any further.
This hopeful rage for a postcolonial age exists in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel Matigari where Matigari ma Nijirũũngi returns from the bush and finds a new generation of neo-colonial collaborators such as Johnny Boy Junior (the son of the colonial collaborator John Boy).With new contemporaries from another generation— Muriuki , a poor boy who lives in the wreck of a Mercedes , Guthera, the sex worker, and Ngaruro wa Kiriro, the leader of the workers’ strike—, Matigari imagines and works towards a dissensual, yet more life-affirming present and future. These dissenters, children-turned- comrades do not only tell us what is amiss but point out that what we think is a gap, is really a gaping abyss. They make it apparent that the land problem, police brutality, education, and exploitation of labour, are not things to be solved through individual effort or some perverse form of self-help. They can be addressed by composing a more affirmative commonwealth.
Like the old laws of the fathers that Matigari contests, an old bifurcation is descending upon us today. One where familiar and familial handshakes on screen or behind the scenes are presented as solutions to ‘our’ problems without acknowledging their spectral character, their sacrificial logic, and their global connections. Standing hand-in-hand, the sons vow to get over with politics and return to economics (not political-economy) as if the economy were a domain devoid of politics.
But ‘our’ generation should know otherwise. Having lived through the tragedies of structural adjustment programs, the explosion of neoliberal self-help and occult economies, we know the violence of moves to naturalize the separation of the market and the state. We know that the economy is political and that the public / private split has been mobilized for the ruination and privatization of the commons as part of our neoliberal common sense. We know what IMF letters of intent mean and tremble when the appetite for borrowed money pushes us to live in borrowed space and borrowed time. We have seen how the things we “cannot not want”; development, democracy, life, have been projected into the logic of sacrifice, enmity, and abandonment where some lives have to be given up in order for ‘our’ democracy or development to survive. For those who lived through the Moi years, we know the death-deploying force of emergency measures geared towards getting rid of traitors and ‘treasonous plotters’ by constantly asking people whether they want to be free or secure. Whether they want peace and security or free and fair elections. Whether they want politics or development. Whether they want peace, love, and unity under a single party and the ‘stability’ it guarantees or chaos and disorder of democracy and pluralization. These false choices affirm the sacrificial logic and sovereign violence that has always been part of our national plot.
A logic of sacrifice holds multiple generations captive. It asks them to choose between friends and enemies, politics and economics, modernity and tradition, good and evil with violence being deemed permissible if not necessary for the maintenance of order. As liminal figures, the uncertainty- generating youth become a problem to be solved through uncritical pedagogy, entrepreneurial services that turn them into a lootable resource and discipline. To maintain order, youth disorder or dissensus is dealt with violently at home, on the streets, at school, and across the border. Putting the youth in their proper place becomes a state fetish that ‘our’ generation silently condones or loudly cheers on in the name of restoring discipline, certainty, preserving the sanctity of property, and securing the nation.
But loss of certainty is more than a youthful concern. The uncertain times that ‘our’ generation is living through are tied to larger displacements of certitude on one hand, and the emergence of new forms of certainty or resurgence of old ones on the other. Under such circumstances, familiar political codes and coordinates do not hold. Calls for peace serve as a moral alibi for pacification, and developmental encroachment on wetlands and accelerated ventures into extractive carbon economies (like oil and coal) cover up the slow violence, corruption, and environmental destruction that is already here and that which is yet to come. They also pave way, not only for the end of the world as we know it (as Immanuel Wallerstein put it), but for the possibility of a world without us. A world marked by more drought, floods, smoke, choked seas, and more blood owing to backhand plots that decimate spaces that human beings (not a generation) share with other non-human beings.
These are the signs of our uncertain times where seemingly small acts in this small part of the world have effects elsewhere. After all, aren’t the fault-lines in Mai Mahiu causing speculation about continental drifts in the anthropocene — an epoch where man is recognized as a geophysical force. As UoN’s Amollo Kenneth Otieno (2016)states, we cannot continue relating to the land and construction in the same way in light of increased flooding and subterranean erosion along the existing fault line as well as the fissures arising from the liquefaction of less cohesive soils. However, the hustle continues. We people of the plot, even in the face of the earth opening up see opportunity in the weak volcanic ash/sand from Mai Mahiu. With this sand, we mercilessly build the ever- collapsing vertical plots of Huruma.
The episodic killing of contemporaries is part of the political imaginary we grew up with. It is not merely part of the assassin state’s extra-judicial violence, it is also a demotic people-sanctioned violence. Today, we cannot be critical of the militarization of the police in Kisumu without seeing its connections to the violence in Kismayu and the martialization of society. All the talk of “Our boys in uniform” in Kismayu intensifies hatred of the enemy without and prepares the ground for the violence, preemption, and revenge of ‘Our boys’ in Kisumu. The scandal, the tragedy, is that ‘we’ cheered on the KDF when they ravaged the Somali as part of Operation Linda Nchi. We turned a blind eye when they threatened to close Dadaab and deport the refugees. Silence…when the police ransacked Eastleigh and incarcerated the Somali in Kasarani as part of ‘Usalama Watch.’ ‘We’ are silent when Boni forest is bombed as part of Operation Linda Boni. We cheer politicians who wear military fatigues and dare each other to a fight.
Now that the guns are turned inwards and contemporaries deported, we put our faith in the handshakes of the sons of founding fathers even though we know that they conceive violence narrowly. With each embrace, with each song, with each prayer, we see new capitulations each generating a narrower sense of those one considers their contemporaries. These capitulations show that the old games do not work. The political appeal to the human conscience and moral good sense of the state and the ‘international community’ is falling on deaf ears. The Kenyan democratic order, borne out of popular struggle in concert with allies is now being sacrificed based on business and security interests. Based on the imperatives of the War on terror, AFRICOM strategies, Chinese business partnerships, and a gluttonous political elite that misreads diplomatic codes and trivializes the suffering of Kenyans, and non-Kenyans in Somalia, Palestine, and elsewhere. In their dealings, they reproduce the complicities of a previous generation that sat silently, exploited, and turned a blind eye, to the violence of apartheid in South Africa.
Whither the reformers of yester-years? They are both the subject and object of betrayals. In their perpetual calculations, capitulations, and political realignments, they too lost the plot. They betrayed the cause. The liberal democracy they summon is no longer compelling for it is taking place in an era when liberal ideals and the neoliberal economic order is in its terminal crisis globally. An age characterized by what some call illiberal democracy. An age that privileges resilience over resistance and as always, holds Africans and African politics to a lower standard… “rigged peaceful elections are good enough.”
We have been betrayed. Like their predecessors, the younger leaders remain inattentive to precarious lives at home and abroad. They reproduce the phallic logics of an older generation rather than composing something totally new. Because we are held captive by the law of fathers (patria) and the fetish of the fatherland (patriotism), both elite and subaltern classes articulate a phallic logic of comparative entitlement: “My suffering is bigger than yours, we are a bigger community than you are, our cut is deeper than yours.” The resultant phallocracy, if we are to borrow Grace Musila’s words, haunts Kenya’s politics. It is transgenerational and involves one generation of men learning the phallic logic from the other men in their lives. It permeates institutional and popular narratives about the ‘return to tradition’, fidelity to ‘our son/ our people’, the impossibility of co-habitation or mwanaume ni kujisimamia. The contest of sons, and protection of ‘our’ corrupt sons/daughters has become the basis of new friend/enemy distinctions. It is the basis of moral calculations about lesser or necessary evils and ultimately, the possibility or impossibility of co-habitation with those contemporaries marked by an insurmountable difference. It is the basis of the desire for more virile versions of an old self as a guarantor for ‘our’ survival. It is a most tragic and self-perpetuating sovereign ‘cock-fencing’ based on anxieties over ‘spending power.’
Can we, in search of a different plot, in the name of a new hope, dis-identify with the familiar/familial categories through which we are counted today? Can this generation, this composition of contemporaries, betray the forms of affiliation, phallic logics and fantasies, as well as the violence, and desires cultivated by the generations past? Can we decolonize our bodies and minds? Can we proceed in ways that question rather than merely assert what it means to be a part of a community (broadly conceived) or to be contemporaneous with others? Can we compose commons rather than seek our seat at the table farthest away from the commoners?
To do any of the above requires the betrayal of some of the things ‘our’ generation holds dear; its plots, its hopes, and speculations. It involves dis-identifying with the ideal of the generation and composing new contemporaries. From Matigari, a man who composes new contemporaries in the struggle against oppression, we learn that struggle and hope in struggle and life is vital. That victory, if there is one to be won, “is born of struggle” and even in crushed times and moments of darkness; “There is no night so long that it does end with dawn.”
Published by the good folks at The Elephant.
The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.
Follow us on Twitter.
AFRICA AND THE WORLD CUP: A Beautiful Tragedy
By Martin Maitha
At almost 35, I’m yet to find balance in life. I was born into a family of five, two parents, two boys and a girl. I am the first born. My two siblings are doing just fine. Set in the family way, raising children, pursuing and living life by their own personal terms, happily, no less. Given all the trouble they put me through growing up, I can honestly say their success is my success, and wouldn’t have it any other way.
My personal life however, is a conundrum of sorts. No family. No (real) job, No prospects! Growing up in Kayole, Eastlands in ‘94, life was harmonious and easy for a child who saw the world through innocent eyes. Kayole estate was a World Bank housing project designated for the middle class. In the original plan, facilities such as schools, dispensaries and markets were strategically placed to serve the residents with paved roads and functioning streetlights. The houses came with large parking lots and a fully functional drainage system that stands to date. Crime was rare. In early 90s, there were a few white folks living in Kayole before they all moved out and relocated as the neighbourhood lost its gentrified status.
Apart from the few model houses that were built to World Bank standards, the rest of the dwellings were squatting houses that mushroomed into a hostile takeover after residents began flaunting the building regulations with no consequences. Those who were connected, began constructing 8 to 12 rooms on 50×100 plots and the Eastlands suburban vision that was part of the original plan fell apart. Toilets, bathrooms and cloth lines were communal in these new dwellings and with it came congestion tension between tenants.
In the early 90s, Kayole was characterised by wide open spaces everywhere, a gigantic play ground. Our days were marked by childish pursuits that included, football matches played using improvised polythene plastic paper bags rolled into a tight ball then fastened with sisal strands to give it a firm texture. My love for the sport was, as my mother put it, more than that of life itself. She had a point. I had a dream of becoming a professional footballer and joining the ranks of Roberto Baggio, the Italian midfielder, Luis Figo, the Portuguese Forward, and the Brazilian striker sensation, Romario, my football godfathers of the 90s. All of whom I followed on KBC, thanks to a portable radio that my dad had bought to keep himself updated on the politics of the day.
I must have been 12 years old when I first started noticing the three white men visiting our neighborhood and spending a lot of time watching us play. Two tall men, both lean in frame and the third, a bald man with the beginnings of a paunch. They drove an old Nissan Sunny. After the matches they would sit us down and offer us soft drinks and cookies engaging us in polite conversations about our families, our education, dreams for the future and whether we wanted to play footie in Britain! I particularly intrigued them a great deal.
Their talk of playing in Britain, cast a spell on me and I became obsessed with the idea. They kept on showing up every few months each time bearing gifts of new balls and sport shoes. Eventually, they insisted on meeting my parents to “introduce” themselves. My mother was super elated and quickly gave in to the request after I broke the news at home. My father however, a hardware store employee off River Road, downtown, warned me about fraternizing with strangers. His authoritarian style of parenting stifled any designs I had about my own life choices. So when he said no, it was final. Attempts by mother to bring him on board bore no fruit. His refusal adversely affecting me and I was diagnosed with clinical depression that required psychiatric evaluation.
The final blow came in 1997 when the indiscriminate land grabbing linked to David Mwenje, then Member of Parliament for Embakasi and other politicians in the Moi era arrived in my neighbourhood. The political class and their cohorts embarked on a privatisation spree, leaving no open public space untouched including our playground. Marooned and helpless, the sport died a natural death and the football scouts stopped coming. Consequently, my hopes died shortly thereafter, my dreams, valid as they were, with me as well. It would only come to emerge later that they were UK agents scouting for new talent in Africa and I was on their watch list. Twenty two years down the line, I wonder how my life would have turned out had I gotten my professional football break! To stave off the pain of loss, I began drawing and sketching and my scribbling morphed into a budding career in calligraphy and poetry. My passion for creative writing was inspired and fueled by Tupac Shakur’s 1996 Album, Me against the World. I felt like a social pariah and Tupac’s music and US hip hop on inner city experiences became relatable. In the mid 90s, the transport sector experienced the emergence of a new breed of vehicle in Nairobi as the privatisation and free market bug hit with the collapse of the two major state funded public transport bus services, the Nyayo and Kenya Bus. The privately owned matatus ushered in a new-fangled culture that revolutionized the whole matatu industry and gave it its present day mojo. This was the age of the Manyanga, a name drawn from the original street Sheng term used to depict a young voluptuous woman. The pimped matatu was a far cry from its weathered predecessors, with graffiti cutting across its body, both inside and out. They spotted large sport tyres with flashy rims and loud music systems that played a lot of hip-hop and reggae music to lure customers. Influenced by both American hip-hop and Jamaican ragga cultures, both weed smoking and baggy jeans hip-hop fashion became vogue as the flashy touts paraded their brand of swag that quickly caught on as a trend that started in Eastlands and spread on to all parts of the city.
My two skill sets found a place in the industry where I spent my days in garages designing creative works and getting paid for it. I became a matatu graffiti artist and settled in my new ‘career’ until a directive from the Ministry of Transport under the famous “Michuki Rules” instituted by John Michuki in the Kibaki era banned matatu art. Flashy matatu art was term as a conduit for “hooliganism” and undesirable social elements and in an effort to streamline the industry, monochromes and yellow strip became the new civilised matatu look. Most garages closed shop ostensibly forcing many youths to look for alternative means to survive. All I was left with was my poetry and prose.
While moonlighting as a matatu art creative, I completed a certificate course at Utalii College specialized in food and beverage and joined the multitudes in the job market hunting for opportunities. My first stop was at The Norfolk, Nairobi, where a college buddy worked courtesy of his father, an industrial kahuna. He tried pushing my case with the head chef who agreed to an internship but personnel blocked my entry sighting my “nobodiness!” Undeterred, I kept pushing my luck for about a year until the management had enough of my persistence and finally physically threw me out of the premises.
Disillusioned, I decided to send over a hundred applications all over the country hoping for the best only to receive one reply, a regret letter, no less. In my desperation, I stormed through hotel doors demanding to see human resource managers to explain the problem! Was it me or them! Most would ask in surprise rather than shock at my audacity, “Who sent you?”
“Myself,” I would reply, “I sent myself” but that was not the response, they wanted to hear! I had no godfather in this skewed system, essentially, a nobody. As the post election conflict of 2007-2008 and the ensuing unrest blew over the country, I despaired, weeping and wiping my tears silently as my country burned with my hopes and dreams.
After a year of listlessness, a job vacancy landed on my lap in March of 2009, when I received a message stating, “a tour company is looking to hire new drivers, for more details, call the number below,” The number and company was unfamiliar but I went ahead and called the number immediately. A lady shared directions to their offices, in industrial area where I reported for an interview and despite my absolute lack knowledge of the tour operator space, I got hired on the spot and training started promptly. I began travelling to the country’s game parks, Nairobi, Nakuru, Meru, Mara, Tsavo guiding visitors and learning about wildlife. I experienced the novelty of museums, hotels and resorts as a tour driver, met new people and got wide exposure to Kenya’s rich natural and cultural heritage. There was one challenge though, the company was not paying us salaries even after seven months of hard labor. Frustrated and fed up, the bunch of disgruntled workers decided to exercise to two options left at hand, paralyze the operations and sink the ship or jump overboard and swim to shore. We settled for the former then bailed. Needless to say, I was once again on the streets scratching my chin, staring into space, my college certificates in hand. There were no breaks for another year and a half. Thankfully, the seven month stint had equipped me with enough skills and contacts to maneuver.
Shelving my academic credentials, I began hustling every top dog I had come to know in the industry, head-on. Luckily, my number came up and I got absorbed by one of the many I reached out to. Wilfred was a good man who wanted good for everyone. The management sadly misconstrued his kindness for nepotism and fired him. Without a safety net, my godfather dispatched, I knew it was only a matter of time before things went south which happened a week later. From then on, the job tap ran dry. At my wits end, living an insipid existence, I started entertaining suicidal thoughts.
My turning point was triggered by an old, torn bible handed down by my mother which sat gathering dust on my table. I was never a religious person and my church attendance was incidental but something caught my eye between the pages. I opened the book and stumbled on Acts 17:26-27
“And He has made from one origin and blood all nations of men to settle on the face of the earth, having determined their periods and boundaries. So that they should seek God in the hope that they might feel after him and find him, although he is not far from each of us.”
This verse provoked my contemplation on my spiritual purpose and the place of God in my life.
About to close the book, I happened upon this,
Romans 10:13 “Whosoever calls on the name of Jesus shall be saved.”
I stared at the verse, blankly, then vividly remembered a quote someone had once shared of a drowning man clutching on to a serpent. I closed my eyes and uttered a very simple prayer, crying, then shut the book and put it aside. Nothing happened and life went on as usual. Three months later when I started having psychic revelations, that correlated with live situations during the day. I started noticing very “mundane” things like a person’s energy, when one is in distress. I could discern impending illnesses, investment outcomes, accidents, robberies, even death, surprisingly. I attributed all this to a divine revelation and embarked on a new spiritual journey in the Christian faith my mind renewed. Jesus saved me!
Meanwhile, old buddies I had met along the dusty streets of struggle kept enquiring about my welfare. Some had joined the taxi business to earn a living. With nothing to lose, I found myself reunited with them chatting the days away, occasionally covering for any absentee drivers and developed an interest in the taxi business as a new career path. My first car was a Nissan B14, silver in colour that belonged to a senior police officer in Nairobi who always threated to shoot me if I ever played him. He had a serious demeanor. The threat was not taken lightly.
I entered in the taxi world feeling like a fish out of water. By day, Nairobi is the city in the sun. At night it is a hell hole that requires intelligence and a thick skin to get by. A puzzle to be solved before one can advance to the next level. By any measure, a pain in the butt. Police want a piece of you. City Council use any opportunity to shake you down. Thugs lurk at every bend and fellow operators want you dead.
The experiences I have faced are surreal. I remember my first case, her name was Dorothy. Heavy with child, we had just left Uchumi supermarket, at Adams Arcade and were discussing baby names headed to Nairobi hospital where she was to be admitted waiting to deliver. The two way Ngong Road was legendary with traffic jams that turned full blown chaotic during the rainy season. Everything was fine until she started feeling some kind of “wetness” and sharp pains from her lower abdomen that saw a previously calm woman turn breathless and scream in agony. I was clueless in matters of childbirth. The screaming sent me into a panic seizure and my thinking brain was suspended. It would take the intervention of two good Samaritans to deliver a newborn baby in my backseat. Between them sat Dorothy, looking half dead with blood all over. A few meters stood a cop directing traffic away from us, shooing curious onlookers that had gathered. It would take me months to recover from the ordeal.
Another bizarre episode happened at The Junction months later when a thug put a gun on my skull intending to steal my car as I walked towards it. His mission however, proved impossible when two police officers arrived and stood by obliviously waiting for a matatu. I took off singing Amazing Grace. I have ferried a corpse, had distressed a woman ditch her 2 year old daughter in my cab, had to deal with horny couples copulating in the back seats and met a long list of unsavoury characters in line of duty. The taxi business is Nairobi peppered with drama but the best was yet to come. In February 2015, more disruption came knocking when Uber, the app-based modern day taxi hit Nairobi streets running.
With its remote management capabilities, cheap rates and new cars, industrial dynamics changed drastically giving it an unfair edge over us old school traditional taxi types. Mass protests by local operators to have it deregistered met with tear gas courtesy of the government as we fought for the measly crumbs off the taxi table. This would mark the third time the government and free market forces had kicked me in the nuts and arrested my development! Days turned into weeks and weeks into months and years but nothing gave. My story was now akin to that of a wounded dog of war relegated to the back alleys to leak its wounds, waiting for death. To cope, most of my peers found solace in alcohol, gambling and prostitutes.
I have been caught between the proverbial rock and a crazy place, for almost a decade now and my youth is spent with nothing to show for it. I kill time by writing. It is my alcohol, my mistress, my prostitute. I love her and together we stare at the horizon hoping for better days ahead in this, my country.
Published by the good folks at The Elephant.
The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.
Follow us on Twitter. AFRICA AND THE WORLD CUP: A Beautiful Tragedy
By Martin Maitha
Before I gave birth to my daughter I was probably what the embattled boy-child would today call a ‘toxic feminist’. My place was not in the kitchen, nor was it in a labour ward. I considered myself the stereotypical, ‘strong black woman’, never giving a thought to the origin of the term, the baggage that came along with it, and the culture within which it originated. The ‘strong black woman’ stereotype is considered positive but it is problematic because, one, it characterises an entire gender and race based on a singular attribute, and two, it creates the impression that black women do not need help.
But then there is another complication: See, while I am a woman, black, and strong, I am not an African American, and it is to African American women that the term refers. It comes heavily laden with years of oppression that was targeted specifically at black women in America. A history that required them to dig down deep for the kind of resilience that is only unearthed under severe pressure. So for me, as a woman born in post-independence Kenya, the term did not really apply.
Yes, I am a black woman, but I am not an American – and the term ‘strong black woman’ was coined for that demographic specifically. Therefore, anyone who appropriates it should at the very least understand the history. I described myself as such for the aesthetic. It sounded like something I should be as a woman, and a feminist. But it wasn’t my reality. It wasn’t my history. As my parents often reminded me, I was never exposed to the sharp edge of Kenya’s colonisation. I was born in an age when those who fought for freedom had laid down their weapons, and those who received the gift of independence had created lives that were far removed from the poverty of their childhoods, and the socio-economic shackles of their white oppressors.
My parents worked hard to make sure that even the cell memory of oppression was removed from my DNA. So the strong, black womanhood I was envisioning was in the words of Bell Hook, a “half- told tale”. It was not my story to claim. But I did. I used it to justify my non-expertise in the cooking department, because no man was going to chain me to the kitchen sink, and expect me to keep him fed, watered and bathed. I brandished it when I declared that if I had a child I would never be referred to as Mama Nani. I had a name dammit, and Baba Nani was going to put some respect on it. I was that girl who would wear a turtleneck and then compulsively pull it over her chin because my body was not an exhibition and men were not welcome to view it. I became what I recognise as a caricature of strong womanhood. A caricature which existed to amplify ‘strength’ at the expense of authenticity.
It wasn’t until I gave birth that I understood that feminism cannot be defined in broad terms that every woman must adhere to. Strictly speaking, it is the idea that women and men should have equal rights and opportunities. But what it’s really about is the right of a woman to choose how she wants to experience that equality. Feminism is personal and women should have the freedom to decide what it looks like on their own terms. I grew into my own version of strong womanhood through motherhood, but every woman should feel free to discover who they are, and what they want, through a variety of their own experiences. So, now I have become the kind of woman who wears that ‘Mama Nani’ tag with pride because motherhood requires a woman to dig deep to find the kind of resilience that is only unearthed when you have the weight of another human being on your shoulders.
Which brings me back full circle. See, much as I loved my own mother, I had often thought of her as ‘less than’ because she was a traditional wife. She was the quintessential homemaker who spent a good amount of her time making sure my father was comfortable, even when it caused her discomfort. For her troubles, I viewed her as disempowered. I thought of her as a woman who refused to use the power of her femininity to temper her man’s overbearing masculinity. This was despite her achievements in the workplace which quite frankly, were larger than life. She was an advocate for the empowerment of the girl-child way before it had become a catchphrase. Paradoxically, I admired her advocacy with the same fervour that I disdained her choices as a ‘traditional’ wife, and mother.
I rebelled against her version of womanhood and took up a form of feminism that I mistakenly believed to be my own. But with the birth of my daughter, which was six years after my mother died, I began to see very clearly that I had internalised a form of female empowerment that had precious little to do with my experience as a Kenyan woman.
In my rebellion against what I viewed as conservative, unimaginative, and weak, I reached into my spirit and grabbed onto a version of feminism that I felt was authentic, real and right. But then came another contradiction in my feminist ideology, and that was the assumption that men were the enemy; and that every woman, regardless of race, colour, or nationality, was fighting that same adversary. Even as a self-confessing ‘strong black woman’ I embraced feminism in all its late 20th Century, white-woman glory, never once viewing it as a construct that was designed to overlook women of colour, and specifically women in Africa. White women approach feminism from a ‘second- in-command’ position, coming immediately after white men in the global social construct. Black African woman approach it from the bottom-up, many times having to fight injustices that are unique to them on account of the colour of their skin. So yes, we all struggle, but we struggle differently.
See, to subdue Africa, the white colonising forces attempted to strip entire populations of their culture, and to replace it with foreign norms and traditions. People from my parent’s generation had no choice but to embrace those norms and traditions because they were born in the age of colonialism. For them it was truly a matter of survival. So they raised us from the viewpoint that white was right, and we internalised that belief. Aspiring to whiteness became deeply embedded in our core. Even in an independent Kenya, many in my generation – the so-called Generation Xers born in the 60s and 70s – looked to white culture for our cues. It was in this context that I latched onto the Western ‘burn-your-bra’ version of feminism, interpreting it to mean that men were the enemy, and every woman had been enlisted to fight them. Fighting them meant railing against all the parts of Kenyan tradition that required women to assume a deferential position. To my mind, Kenyan women were expected to genuflect while cooking, cleaning and bearing children, and I wasn’t having any of it.
But see, I’ve come to understand that African women in their natural habitat are the epicentre of societal power. Through the ages we have built a familial construct that allows us to cleverly wield that power, and to tilt the balance of influence in our favour. We have our ways, which don’t typically include masculinising our femininity, or the reckless disempowerment of our men. This type of behaviour derives from the colonisation of our minds. From the parts of us that reject what white women reject, and accept what they accept without pausing to reflect on the fundamental differences in our experiences. And it doesn’t really help matters to appropriate the black woman struggle either. Yes, we are black, and we are strong but we have our own history, and our own experiences, which are distinct from our African American sisters.
It is at this intersection of white, African American, and black African feminism that I have come to the realisation that I have to write my own feminism bible, and to apply it religiously to my own unique circumstances. I was born in 1977, 14 years after Kenya gained independence from colonial rule. I did not experience the humiliation of white imperialism, but I was raised by parents who still had the sourness of colonialism on their tongues. They carried the weight of that oppression on their backs even as they used the very same colonial systems to navigate a free world. In their liberation, they used a colonial compass to find their way in life, and because of it, I subconsciously assimilated a colonial mind-set. Everything worthy of having, and aspiring to, was steeped in whiteness.
This is why many in my generation still take pride in speaking with an accent. Why we privilege British system schools. Aspire to study abroad. To live in areas that used to be reserved for white folk. We continuously cast ourselves in the image of a settler because the subliminal goal is not just to be good, but to be as good as a white person. Or at the very least to be viewed as embodying cultural whiteness.
For me, the realization that I needed to emancipate myself from mental slavery came when I contemplated my daughter’s future. When I stopped to really reflect on the kind of woman I wanted her to be. I realised that in my core, I valued my blackness, but that I would only thrive in it if I let go of the idea that I had to act white to be valued. This meant that I had to redefine what womanhood meant from a black cultural perspective.
In the end, it came down to enjoying the respect that is implied when folks call me Mama Kayla, honouring the masculinity of my Kenyan brothers without devaluing my contributions as a Kenyan woman, and raising my African vibration so that I would consistently bring the richness of my proud ancestry to the table.
Published by the good folks at The Elephant.
The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.
Follow us on Twitter. AFRICA AND THE WORLD CUP: A Beautiful Tragedy
By Martin Maitha
We are all born into the world of humanity at an ordained moment in time and space with a spiritual ordained mission yet we are the creators of our destiny. The world I came to was full of turmoil. My parents and their parents had been uprooted from their own homes to go serve settlers under very harsh conditions in the white highlands. I was born just before the end of the Second World War in Kamara, in Mau Summit. My father, who went to Sudan and afterwards Mozambique, told me that when he returned from World War II, he found a beautiful little girl born in his absence. The short sojourn between Sudan and Mozambique must have brought my conception. During her pregnancy, my mother felt like she was going to have a baby boy since she felt a boy in her womb. But instead of the boy she expected, I showed up. Before I was born, she had had five children, both male and female.
The End Of Childhood
With the aftermath of World War II, the battle for Kenya’s independence was now underway. My uncle Waweru, who was very involved in that battle was captured by the Brits and was sent to Manyani concentration camp, a death hole. He once told me that the beginning of the freedom war took place many years prior in the form of a secret movement. In the early forties, he was one of the organisers of “rika ria forty”, a very secretive oath taking movement. The movement comprised of young men and women who had sworn to take back their land which had been stolen by the white colonisers.
Read Also: THE BIBLE OR THE BULLET: Reclaiming My Redemption Song
He was also a teacher trained by the African Inland Mission in Kijabe but opted to go and teach in Gikuyu Independent Schools under the system “Gikuyu Karin`ga”. These schools had their own curriculum system based on African nationalism, religion, history and agriculture. I attended “Kiai Kia Ng`ondu” (nursery school) for two weeks where I learnt the history of my people. I learnt that I was an African and a Kikuyu girl. Soon after I started school, the British colonial government closed all the Gikuyu Karing’a schools and arrested and detained everyone who was involved in that education system and threw them into concentration camps. I still maintain that the reason they were closed was that the schools were teaching children how to liberate their minds from slavery and were developing their dignity as humans. I often wonder why after independence this type of education was not incorporated into the present day education system. We would have been better- oriented African Kenyan citizens for it, with that kind of self-knowledge based education.
From Heil Hitler To Hell
Originally, the area we lived in comprised of people from all parts of the country. There were Luos, Luhyas, Masaai, Kalenjin, some Ugandans, even a man from somewhere in the Coast. Soon after the closing of the schools, Kikuyu families were isolated from the other tribes. The Gikuyu were apportioned a separate piece of land to build their houses, far from the other tribes.
My father was an evangelist with the Africa Inland Mission posted in Kamara, before I was born. Because of that privilege, my older siblings got admission to a boarding school in Kijabe. One morning, after my mother and the other women had gone to fetch water, many trucks arrived. There were boarded trucks and flatbed open trucks lined up for half a mile. The soldiers jumped off the trucks, ran towards us and started whipping people and herding them towards the trucks. There was fear and pandemonium as we got onto the trucks. They took us to Molo concentration camp. My father had already left that day for his evangelical work hence he was not there when the trucks arrived and for years, we would not know where he was or what had happened to him. My older siblings were in school thus they were saved from the fate that begot the rest of us. My immediate older sister, my younger sister, and my baby infant sister only a few weeks old and I were in the truck with my mother. I was not yet 12 and already I was a detainee.
Of Auschwitz, Dachau And Molo
The Concentration camps were typically built in a clinical style. It was a field enclosed by mesh fences about 10 metres high. On the outside of the camp were a series of razor wires, each about a metre high. On the inside of the fence was another layer of razor wire, about a metre high. After the razor wire was a barbed wire fence, about ten metres high. After the barbed wire were 1-metre high poles. On those poles, there was a wire interlinking them. At given intervals on the poles were signboard warnings – if you touch or pass the wire that is towards the fences you will be shot. There was a watchtower with an armed soldier and floodlights at intervals. The pit latrines were open roofed and near the watchtower so the guards would monitor us so we would not be tempted to dig escape tunnels under the latrines.
There were also U shaped dorms built on the inner perimeter of the fence. At the centre was an open field, which had two purposes: it was where lorries dropped the incoming detainees and also where the head count was conducted on everyone in the camp, including children and the sick. After the head count, the detainees had to go through another gate to the stores for the food ration of maize meal and beans. For years, that is all we ate. Maizemeal and beans.
We went every day to get our rations after the headcount. If one missed going through they would not eat that day. The adults were sent to labour while the children were left at the camp. Many people and even more children died from disease and malnourishment. I was so traumatised that I was constantly sick and frequently hospitalised.
When I had the opportunity to watch the 1987 British television film – Escape From Sobibór – about the German concentration camps during WWII, I could not see the difference of those German camps and the British concentration camps in Kenya.
We stayed in Molo for more than a year then one day we were hauled in trucks and we were moved to an even worse concentration camp in Gilgil town. It was situated where the present police station is. We were there for another year or so.
More deaths occurred. The body count of children grew. More torture, more punishment, more men and women died. Death was constant. It was every day and it was all around. It had become our new normal. My baby sister learned to walk in a concentration camp. My mother did what she could to keep us alive, but it was often no more than a narrow escape from an ever-present death.
The African Inland Mission Eldama Ravine had informed the Kijabe headquarters of our detention and the mission sent a search party to look for its evangelists and their families. They finally received word that we were in Gilgil. They made the necessary interventions so that we could be released into their care. We began what was known as a screening process. The screening was designed to repatriate people to their homelands. We were on the move again, from one screening post to another, ending in Shura, Kiambu, now just a village before the Kikuyu bypass. From there, we were transported to the Kijabe mission station.
We Are Together Again, Just Praising The Lord
The missionaries and colonial government were two arms of one body. Education of the African was designed to prepare Africans to serve the white man. My father told me he was lured to Thogoto Church Missionary Society School as a young man. There were promises of education and more. When he finished at Thogoto, he was sent to Jinn School by the Thogoto (Scottish) missionaries (where the site of the now Mary Leakey School for Girls is) in Lower Kabete to learn how to bake and work in a kitchen. He had no choice. You got what you were informed you got. After completing his course, my father went on to the African Inland Mission in Kijabe, in order to continue his education. It was the Kijabe missionaries who had posted the newly trained evangelist to the Hemphill estate in Mau Summit. His task was to evangelise and to serve his master.
My father was a head chef at the Hemphill estate which must have been thousands of acres, a sub- county. There were well over 100 homesteads of workers each with wives and children. He and his fellow workers used to bake a lot of bread, cakes and other wheat items, especially at Christmas time. You cannot believe how much milk, butter, cream, wheat, hay and meat used to be sent to Britain. Whey (mathaci/machache) from milk was taken to the farm workers every evening. There were over 100 homesteads of workers each with children. I would collect about 2 litres of whey every evening when it was my turn to collect it. We liked it – it was very nice with ugali. At this point in time of course, those days were a distant memory of another lifetime. The Concentration camp experience had ended that. We were released on Christmas day in 1954. Those who met us settled us and generously gave beds, bedding, clothes, food and utensils to my mother and her four little girls including my baby sister who was now just under three years old. We were happy to find our older siblings alive and together. We were almost complete but not quite.
We still did not know where our father was. We were worried because when the coloniser took men away, they rarely ever came back. Our mother settled us as much as she could, but it was not easy. A few months after our arrival in Kijabe, my mother was called by the head of the mission station and was told that they have found out which concentration camp her husband was taken. What remained was to fill documents so that he could be handed over to the mission since they had sent him to evangelise at the A W Hemphill estate. Our father was home by Christmas 1955. He never spoke of where he had been or his experiences.
Someni Vijana, Muongeze Pia Bidii
In Kijabe, the family was together and we all went back to school. I joined class one at Kijabe primary school in 1955. That gap of not going to school had created a hunger and a purpose studying hard through the twelve years of that British system. The system comprised of four years before common entrance examinations, another 4 years before the Kenya African Primary Education Certificate, another four years before the Cambridge school certificate, two years for the higher certificate and then, for those lucky and rich enough, college or vocational training. Then it was teaching or nursing. We walked to school barefoot, carrying a stone slate mounted on a wooden frame, with a special pen. One had to have a special permit to wear shoes and even with the permit; shoes were too rare, too expensive and too precious to wear to school.
We sat on long wooden benches and stored our lunch in a corner of the stone classroom. The education system was designed to eliminate young Africans. The grading system involved a forced curve grading which meant that in the years where students had passed well, their marks were regraded so fewer would progress. I did not repeat a grade and always got one of the few passes available. We had experienced so many traumas that we held on to one another with a true feeling of belonging and worked extra hard.
Free At Last…
I remember the time Kenya got her independence. I was so happy. Whenever I see the clip of the British flag being brought down and the Kenyan flag being hoisted, I still well up with tears of joy. It was overwhelming. This is a whole story on its own, but I can tell you, it was like reaching the Promised Land. I remembered the camps, the children who died, the men and women who were killed and starved and tortured to give us Uhuru.
My greatest moment was when independence was declared as it abolished forced curve grading, shoe licences and the need to get a pass to visit my sister, who lived far away. I had had the chance to visit her in Murang’a, during colonial times after obtaining a special passbook in order to see her. We even needed a passbook to leave the Kijabe mission station even if it was to go to the nearest shops in Kimende town, 8 km away.
My parents both lived to see independence and to see their grandchildren. My mother passed away in her eighties around 1979 but our father stayed on until he was one hundred and seven in 2003. All of his contemporaries and younger siblings had long left the world of humanity before he did.
To My Grandchildren My country is perfect. It is all right. There is nothing wrong with it. My country is beautiful, it is resourceful. It is only occupied by people who are brainwashed by a foreign colonial ideology.
When I see the ethnic conflict in the present, it makes me sad because of the knowledge that this is a devil planted in our country by the coloniser with the aim of making Africans hate one another for power and material gain. Then it was the white coloniser, today it is our brothers who have occupied the role of the coloniser. Do not be surprised by our people who still send our country’s resources to the west to fulfil the desire of that demon whose power Kenyans are yet to overcome to date. Why? Because the Kenyan society has avoided addressing the psychological effects of colonisation.
The poorest families in our land are those whose parents fought in the war of independence or those who had no opportunity to take on senior offices or political positions. Jua Kali inventions in our land are thrown out of the window so that we can import instead of encouraging and nurturing our young inventors. Did the coloniser bewitch us? How can you steal national wealth and give it to the very entity that diminishes your existence as a human? Many of our leaders and administrators have been to the west and seen how they treat blackness, like trash! Until we begin believing in God, who is the Innovator, the all-Knowing and respect our ancestry, we shall remain where we are – food for the enemy. Lazima tuheshimu our Africanism, Our Creator and our ancestors who left us soil, forest and unsurpassable wildlife. For those who empty the national coffers and send it to your evil master coloniser, for Kenya to remain in a pathetic economic state of affairs, this is your warning: You will die leaving an evil legacy to your lineage. Truthfully, it is sad that I live in a beautiful Kenya with this kind of mentality.
I wish we would realise our worth as Africans, which is not less than other races on the planet. My prayer and desire is that we would wake up and claim the glory of who we are. We have bottled this evil in our hearts long enough. It needs to be addressed in a therapeutic manner, recapitulation.
My children, realise that you are Africans. Not less than any other human being on the planet. What my fellow Kenyans are missing is respect for themselves as themselves. Know that you are a wonderful creation with great abilities. That whatever you desire will be yours, as long as you create it in loving kindness to benefit all humanity. Rise up Kenyans who love this nation of ours, God will bless your efforts.
Published by the good folks at The Elephant.
The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.
Follow us on Twitter. AFRICA AND THE WORLD CUP: A Beautiful Tragedy
By Martin Maitha
Won’t You Help To Sing?
The young man grabbed the microphone with relish and held onto it so hard, I thought he would break it. Then he said,
“Ukikatia dem na umefanya every effort ka gentleman, alafu akatae, and you are in a senior position let’s say at work or even you are stronger than her, lazima ujue vile utafungua iyo server.”
His friends cheered, some of the women in the room laughed. Other young men looked down as though in shame but said nothing. I saw the tears well up in one woman’s eyes, before she quickly threw her head back and blinked rapidly, violently trying to push them back.
I was moderating a Gender Forum at the University of Nairobi, Lower Kabete campus. The year was 2018. This year. The month. May. We had just celebrated Mother’s Day – a day that brings so much pain to so many women in a country where rapists can walk away from their children, but women must pay for life, with life, the physical evidence of their violation. The young man who was speaking comes from a long line of rape apologists. But he is not even aware of this. His history class did not teach him that rape has been a form of subjugation used to break nations, men and horses since colonization, slavery and before. He is only following his master’s footsteps blindly, playing a record that has been played repeatedly in time and space and that was used against his own people. The young man punched the air triumphantly as he sat down. “Comrades, TIBIM!” “Boychild POWER!!”
Old Pirate Ship They Rob I…
This is the country I live in. A country where might is right and if you are the victim, it is because you did not “jipanga, mtu wangu.” I am a child of conflicting definitions. My mother spent three harrowing years in British concentration camps and gulags in Kenya between the ages of 10-13. She does not talk about that time but whenever we put on a movie about the Second World War, she tenses and her body becomes rigid. She was a victim of colonial crimes because she came from the Rift Valley and her parents were registered as Kikuyu.
Read Also: WHAT WE NEVER SPEAK OF: Reflections of a Britain’s gulag survivor
My father was raised in the Central Kenyan county of Nyeri. His father was a teacher. A harsh cold forbidding man by every description that I have ever heard. His food was never cooked in the same pot or served with that of his wife and children.
My father died when I was too young to know him, a light skinned silhouette of a shadow, never quite there, never quite not. Those who knew him or his family of origin would often comment on how I took his shade, in the right light and with the right make up, I could pass for mixed race. That, apparently makes me beautiful. As a child, I always worried. My mother had often told me how, when she was growing up, if you were a clever, studious or beautiful girl, you were in constant danger of being raped. She and her sisters never walked alone. Until I met my paternal grandmother, I always wondered if my father was the offspring of “British style civilization”.
My mother is the beautiful one. Even in her seventies, you can see why she and her sisters received a special pass from the colonial District Commissioner exempting them from cutting their hair like other natives. The District Commissioner, no less! They also got a pass to allow them to wear shoes on Sundays! Somehow, this was a privilege only given to natives on merit. I love shoes and I long to own many many shoes. I grow then cut my hair every 8 years, shaving locks that usually grow down to my waist. Perhaps, it is my residual, subconscious defiance, to a long gone violation that we believe ceased to exist. But has it?
From The Bottomless Pit…
I was born after Flower Power and Love had given way to bell bottoms and brief skirts. When I showed up, Black Panther was a movement, not a movie and the country I was born to was so powerful, so endowed, so focused that countries such as Singapore and Malaysia benchmarked themselves against mine. Their presidents and politicians took long trips to come find out how they could trade with us and how we could assist them to develop. What they, and we, had not contemplated was that what we had on paper, we did not believe in our hearts. That we are worthy of our own resources.
The crisis in our country is not a crisis of action, it is a crisis of the mind. Having been born to colonized minds that never quite undid their own colonization, it was inevitable that the values of the colonizer would become the values of the colonized in a twisted form of generational Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. After all, their most dominant reference of power and leadership is looting, stealing, extrajudicial killings, and amassing by whatever means necessary as witnessed in the killings, displacements, lootings and rape in 1993, 1997, 2008, 2017. Atrocities are followed each time by an apology and a handshake. As though a hug can resurrect the dead, or heal the wounded, or restore the property and dignity of once self-reliant IDPs told to lie low like an envelope.
The bizarre thing is that we seem to make the same mistake over and over, not understanding what Carter G. Woodson unwittingly wrote of the mindset that operates as the Kenyan voter’s does, when he penned, in the Miseducation of the Negro,
“When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.” ― Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro
Maybe that book should be on the compulsory reading list for primary schools.
Have No Fear Of Atomic Energy…
My mother was Christian by choice, her parents’ “choice”. The choice had been very simple. The Bible or the Bullet. One of her aunts, my great aunt Wanjiru, had chosen the bullet version. Everyone knew the consequences of the wrong choice.
My mother grew up in Kijabe, a little mission town nestled in the folds of the East African Rift Valley escarpment. Until the 1990s, the sale or consumption of cigarettes and alcohol were strictly prohibited and you could be expelled from your home in the village if you beat your wife. Mum worked for a series of church organizations. I saw her bum pinched by men in collars, I heard her prepositioned for sexual favors and casually informed that her “thing” would rot if she did not give it up. To this day, I have a healthy distrust of any man of the cloth. Mum is a constant seeker. She introduced my brother and I to the Qu’ran when I was 12. We read all the books by Eric von Daniken we could get our hands on and we regularly discussed the color of God’s skin. In all the bible story books, Sunday school sketches and bible study books, he was always white. Jesus was always blond or a light brunette even though he came from the Middle East, and the holy spirit was a white dove. Suspiciously, the devil was black and red.
I constantly questioned the Bible. Why would God discriminate against some of the people when he created all of them? Why would the apostle Paul tell Timothy never to take care of young widows as they would soon get married. Obviously I had both a vested interest in the treatment of widows by the church. Why would God allow one people to enslave another on the basis of colour? Mum, having grown in the Bible Belt, warned me not to ask these questions outside of our home.
“People will judge you and they can be vicious if you question the Bible. They will say you are questioning God.”
In my naïve youth, I would retort, “Mum, how can questioning the Bible question God?” But I was obedient in this one way. One day though, in frustration, my 13 year old self turned to my grandfather, my hero and an evangelist during the colonial times. I said,”Guka, why did you agree to sell out when you knew their god was meaner and crueler than your god?” He looked at me with those big black soft pools of sadness that looked out to the world from behind curtain length lashes and said softly, “Because, Mami, there is a level of beating you can be beaten and it will break you like a horse. And you will do your master’s bidding.”
Years later I read Frederick Douglas and a discourse dubbed the 1712 Willie Lynch letter to the Virginia slave owner. I cried like a baby. My grandfather had been strung up and whipped in front of my grandmother and my mother, aunties and uncles. As the story goes, the young white soldier ordered the black “gatti” home guards, who were beating him to get a bigger bullwhip. My grandmother in distress, broke free of the gatti who was holding her, ran up to the white soldier and grabbed him by the throat and screamed in her broken English,
“Beat him!! I kill you!! They kill me!! We die!!”
Startled by the wild look in her eye and the clearly suicidal act by this diminutive woman who dared to touch him, he choked and spluttered an order to cut my grandfather down from the tree he was strung up.
While We Stand Aside And Look…
I must have been in my early teens when I had the very first experience of celebrating thieves in the church. We were at our local church in the village where we had gone for a special service in celebration of the Passover. In the middle of the service, a well-known public figure walked in, loudly, noisily, with a small entourage of young men in sunglasses. The congregants murmured, “Thief”, “Grabber”, “Overlord of thieves”, as our local “Master Thief” walked into church. The main pastor, not to be confused with the more lower ranked preacher, hastened to the lectern at the front of the church, grabbed the microphone from the preacher and announced,
“Could all our regular attendees who are seated in the front of the church please move to the back of the church to allow for our important guest to sit at the front.”
There was a little shuffling but no one moved. The pastor repeated, “Could all those seated at the front of the church, move towards the back of the church now, so our honorable guest can sit at the front.” The congregants began to arise and move.
One old lady obstinately refusing to move, said loudly, “I am not moving for a thief. Tell him to go to the altar and confess where my cow went.” The congregants burst into laughter. The pastor hastily whispered to the preacher who was standing next to him. The preacher and one of the altar boys walked quickly towards the old woman, our newly discovered Rosa Parks and stood over her, one holding each of her forearms, ostensibly to assist her to stand up. She acquiesced and raised herself, grumbling. As she walked past him on the aisle, she said loudly, “Bring back my cow.” He smiled condescendingly and wafted past her, his arrogance apparent in his gait.
When the “guest” sat down, the preacher announced that we would not be reading the passage from the Gospel of John 2:13-17 as earlier planned. Instead, we would be reading from John 3:16. Jesus whipping merchants at the temple did not please the “guest”. God’s redemptive Son was safer. I was not sure for whom it was safer – the pastor or the thief. After the sermon, the “guest” was asked to address the congregation. He immediately launched into a monologue on his greatness, followed by the removal of a large wad of money which he handed to the pastor – towards a project of the pastor’s choice. Pre-Lutheran indulgences for sin at work in post-colonial Kenya. Praise god!
None But Ourselves Can Free Our Mind…
In the late 1980s, the government of Kenya announced that it was moving from the 7-4-2 system of education, to the 8-4-4 system of education. I was in that pioneering class. One day we were studying Kenya’s colonial history, as interpreted by Malkiat Singh, a prolific writer and publisher of school books. The next day, the books were replaced by the study of early man. While the earliest human remains were found in Africa, all indications of early man in Europe included fire, wheels, hunting tools, fur coats, things their African contemporaries did not seem to have mastered. Even amongst our monkey-like ancestors, there was a marked difference in development and “civilization” levels.
The history lessons continued in that vein into high school. Cromwell was examinable. Kismayo was not. Auschwitz was an exact figure. Hola was an “indeterminable number of rebellious natives”. I knew more about World War II coming out of high school than I knew about the war for independence [I call it a war, but you will note that even that is downgraded to an “uprising” or a “rebellion” as though a people fighting for over 10 years for their country’s liberation at the official cost to the colonial government, of a whopping UK Pounds 55 million in 1950s money, can be equated to a school riot].
Is it a wonder then, that I would empathize with the Jews held in Sobibór and not with the Kenyans massacred in Manyani, whipped and beaten for hours and hours until, screaming and cowering, with flesh torn open by bullwhips and hanging off their bones, they died for a country that does not remember their names?
I saw the pictures of the Jews, read their stories, crammed dates and numbers and figures. I know more about Hitler and Goebbels than of Tom Askwith and the euphemistically named Swynnerton Plan, or how many Kenyan lives the Embakasi airport cost. I can speak with greater authority of the experiences of Ann Frank, a little Jewish girl who died in a German concentration camp, than of Wanjiku Mirye, a little Kikuyu girl who survived Molo and Gilgil concentration camps – and who is my own mother. Is it a wonder that I and millions of post-independence children including the millennials we birth, identify with a people other than our own or those like us? We don’t know ourselves. We are not the authors of our own stories. Yet.
We’ve Got To Fulfill The Book…
It matters that we know our history. It is important to know that Kenyans lived in close proximity and intermingled villages, tribe being of no consequence. It is important to know that colonial administration used sequestration and segregation as a form of subjugation. It is vital to know that rape and tribalism and segregation were part of a Final Plan To Quell The Mau Mau and people were rewarded to turn in on their fellow Kenyans. It is important because that knowledge informs the pernicious aftermath of the vexatious tribal narrative perpetrated by politicians, the press and the pulpit in an unholy triumvirate.
Maybe, if that young man at the University of Nairobi had read this history, had met my mother, had heard of the concentration camps and the enforced villages and the gatti…maybe if he had met my grandfather and listened to him tell his story of the day my grandmother choked a white man, maybe he would not be so hasty to advocate for the “justifiable” rape he so gleefully spoke of. Maybe he could be part of the writing of a new book. Our book. The Book Of Us By Us To Us.
Maybe we could change our destiny as Kenyans and not just play to a narrative that is not ours by right. Maybe Redemption would cease to be a disjointed broken song that begins with “mkoloni” and “tulipigania uhuru” as a refrain to drown cries of “Thief”, when we discover Goldenberg and Chickengate and NYS scandals.
Maybe Redemption would not only be a red covered hymnbook of English 1950s hymns.
Redemption would be our song. In our words. Lugha yetu. Sauti yetu. Rangi yetu. Sisi wote.
Published by the good folks at The Elephant.
The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.
Follow us on Twitter. AFRICA AND THE WORLD CUP: A Beautiful Tragedy
By Martin Maitha
Ask any child of the 80s what, “Polisi wa kae kama raia” means or why August is called the “ Black month” and the question evokes a chain of memories buried deep in our psyches. The children of the 80s try to forget but we remember.
I started my remembering again after I took my 26-year-old nephew on a trip down my memory road. Didi is the firstborn of my eldest brother John. He is a true blood millennial, born in 1991, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Falklands War, the failed assassination of Ronald Reagan and the assassination of Indira Gandhi.
He was born after the release of ANC’s Nelson Mandela, the end of apartheid, the victory of Museveni’s NRM in Uganda and Sam Njuoma SWAPO in an independent Namibia.
After Said Barre was overthrown in Somalia, the SPLA civil war in Sudan, Jonas Savimbi’s CIA backed war against the Marxist government in Angola, the rise and fall of Samuel Doe in Liberia,
After the assassination of Walter Rodney, Captain Thomas Sankara and the plane crash that killed Samora Machel in South Africa.
After the murder of Dr. Robert Ouko, the mysterious death of Bishop Alexander Muge, and the hanging of Senior Private Hezekiah Ochuka.
After the Wagalla massacre, the devastating Ethiopian famine that killed half a million people, the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing and the unaccounted extermination of young lives to the AIDS virus.
After the July Saba Saba riots, the repealing of the Section 2A of the constitution that made Kenya a multiparty state that promised a future of dignity, liberty and prosperity in a democratic society.
We stood on Menelik Road facing the house where my innocence was lost. Menelik II was the emperor of Ethiopia who repelled an Italian invasion in the great battle of Adowa, a fact I learned years later in a history lesson in high school. There was a high drab wall surrounding the maisonette compound. We could only see the upper part of the house, the rain gutter that peeled and cracked paint under the mouldy black tiled roof. There was a kiosk and vegetable stand right outside what used to be the main access gate now completely sealed. The road was dotted with potholes and marked by high walls. The neighbourhood had changed like the rest of Nairobi. Closed, neglected and cold.
Nairobi of my childhood was a green city in the sun. In the 80s, one had to go to the military barracks or the prisons to find high walls. I conjured up a picture of Menelik Road in the 80s. Red and purple blooms of Bounganvillea hedges, bamboo fences, gated homes with manicured cypress fences, see-through gates, mbwa kali signs where white foreigners lived, mature Jacaranda trees and children taking turns riding a single BMX bicycle. At the closed end of Menelik Road was Kilimani Primary school run by a Goan man known as Mr. Fonseca, fondly known as Fonyi.
The first time I saw President Moi in the flesh was at this school. The President had stopped outside the school gates on the road named after Kenya’s first African lawyer Argwings Kodhek who died in a suspect road accident in 1969. The entire school assembled by the roadside to greet the President who had built a reputation for making surprise public stops to interact with adoring ‘ordinary wananchi’. I do not remember what Moi said but he distributed boxes of tiny biscuits afterwards, leaving us elated and in awe of Presidential power.
Menelik Road fed into Ngong Road from where the KBS buses run on time and the traffic congregated at Adams Arcade shopping centre. Adams Arcade had a timeless design that has endured the onslaught of Nairobi’s mall culture and a history dating back to the 40s. The open verandahs with large walkways, a post office, butcher shop, a bakery, basement bar are still contemporary. The iconic artistic cement slide we darted up and down as kids remains stuck in stone. The star attraction of the arcade was the Metropole cinema. I only ever watched a film there twice as the movies were adult rated but we still showed up at Adams every opportunity to drool over the movie posters and envy lucky movie goers. Adams Arcade is named after its enterprising founder Abdul Habib Adam who acquired the piece of land as payment on debt owed by the colonial government and then went ahead to design East Africa’s first shopping complex even though he was not a trained architect. On the lower level now occupied by Java coffee house was Tumbo’s bar.
Metropole cinema closed down alongside a host of cinema halls in Nairobi some years after the ’82 coup and little did we know that our privileged middle-class bubble was about to burst. My pre-teen worldview was manufactured by a father who kept up the fiction to save his children from the trauma of real world events happening around us. It was an alternative universe, much like Italian director and actor Roberto Benigni’s critically acclaimed film “La vita e bella” (Life is Beautiful). In the film, Benigni plays the role of a Jewish Italian bookshop owner, Guido who embarks on the imaginative game of positivity to shield his young preteen son from the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp while under captivity. Like Guido, I had a father who coped under duress of disruptive post ’82 years by choosing silence or humour because they were the most powerful ways a father could cry during hard times.
I lost my innocence of a predictable and certain world in 1982 on the first day of August. I was 8 years old. My elder brother returned from a party on the 31st July and had turned on his portable transistor radio to catch the 6 am news. That Sunday morning, the hesitant voice of radio veteran Leonard Mambo Mbotela on VOK’s national service announced that the government of Daniel Arap Moi had been overthrown. On the national broadcaster, an unfamiliar voice pronounced afterwards,
“You are hereby informed that everybody is requested to stay at home. They should be no movement in town. The government has been taken over by the military. There should be no movement of persons and vehicles. The police should now assume their roles as civilians until further notice,”
For the next three days, there was a protracted firefight between the Kenya Airforce soldiers cheered on by University of Nairobi students against the elite General Service Unity and the Kenya army led by General Mahmoud Muhammed. The city of Nairobi shut down, looters broke into shops and the head of state was nowhere to be seen or heard until days later when he appeared on TV looking thoroughly shaken. The poorly organized coup was crushed in 3 days but for the next three weeks, we stayed marooned indoors listening to the radio playing martial music under a dawn to dusk curfew. At the end of the month of August ’82, 100 soldiers and about 200 civilians had died and President Moi was primed to crush any threat to his hold on power.
The men who led the military revolution that never was were in their 20s drawn from low ranking Air force personnel and the public universities. There were sons of the working poor who died for their revolutionary ideals. The leader of the coup was 29-year old Senior Private Hezekiah Ochuka of the Kenya People’s Redemption Council.
Nairobi went through drastic changes after the failed coup attempt and a new kind of silence fell over our house. My parents never discussed politics in our presence. I was never certain what my father, who worked for the Ministry of Health, thought of the president. Media was government controlled and the news for public consumption feted the benevolence of our great leader, Baba Moi. Oblivious of the ongoings, we had no idea how quickly the country was slipping into repression. We watched as the adults stood aside and cheered like frogs placed in a pot of cool water complacently adjusting to the rising temperature until they boiled to death.
Night watchmen started to appear in the Kilimani neighbourhood – typical men from the pastoralist communities, the brave warriors to stand guard at night because house break-ins had reportedly increased. The bamboo fences disappeared replaced by cement block walls. Burglar proofing on windows became a standard house feature. The wooden gates replaced by solid metal ones with small access doors that one had to hunch over to get through. We started to notice ‘chokoras’ roaming through the neighbourhoods scavenging through growing roadside garbage piles that had gone uncollected for months.
The political and economic changes of the 80s and the 90s were disruptive to the lives of hundreds of thousands of government workers and their families who suddenly slipped overnight from the middle classes, no longer able to afford the privilege of security. In just a few years, there was massive flight of former civil servants from Kilimani and Woodley for Eastlands and villages across the country. I became part of the generation defined by what cartoonist Gaddo characterized as the Nyayo error.
The education system changed from 7-4-2-3 to 8-4-4. We became Moi’s guinea pigs, trained in the ethics of loyalty and patriotism. Moi’s hold on the country affairs was iron-fisted and totalitarian. As children, we totally succumbed to the Kool-Aid of the Nyayoism, programmed by the elaborate state propaganda machine, the original Cambridge Analytica. Living under the grip of Moi’s media hegemony had us parroting Nyayoism propaganda slogans.
The free school milk deprogrammed critical thought. Moi benevolence was God inspired and we knew this because TV cameras followed him to church every Sunday. Competing mass choirs emerged in droves singing in chorus in praise of the Great Leader. We memorized the ‘Nyimbo Za Kitamaduni” raising our voices in complete reverence as we sung the words to Mwalimu Thomas Wesonga choral hit song, “Tawala Kenya, Tawala, Rais Moi”, wagging a single finger in the air and unconsciously endorsing the one-party state of affairs indoctrinated with the Nyayo philosophy of Peace, Love and Unity. During the morning assembly, we recited the loyalty pledge with pride.
I pledge my loyalty to the president and the nation of Kenya. My readiness and duty to defend the flag of our republic. My devotion to the words of our national anthem. My life and strength in the task of our nation’s building. In the living spirit embodied in our national motto – Harambee! And perpetuated in the Nyayo philosophy of peace, love and unity.
Moi was the wise leader, the visionary, a man of God and the sole reason Kenya was an island of peace in a sea of conflict. There was civil war in Uganda, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. Any version of events or literature contrary to the official narrative earned one a subversive and dissident tag and the consequences that came with the label. As we sang and danced to patriotic songs in praise of the great leader and the beautiful life he accorded his subjects, our parents bore the brunt of the dismantling social pillars of society.
“The forces of neo-liberalism are on the march, dismantling the historically guaranteed social provisions provided by the welfare state, defining profit-making and market freedoms as the essence of democracy, while diminishing civil liberties” (Henri Giroux, 2004).
The government under pressure from the IMF adopted the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) designed to create rapid and sustainable economic growth but instead, they ushered in unprecedented loss of jobs and income equalities uprooting thousands of families and their dependants from the security of government social services. The state surrendered the economy to market forces, prioritising paying off foreign debt over social services. The social systems collapsed overnight as funding was choked, passing public institutions and services into private hands in the name of efficiency. Cost sharing became mandatory and the inequality grew overnight. The public education standards plummeted. The intellectuals were hounded, undermined, exiled, detained, subdued and turned into puppets.
Peter Oloo Aringo, the then Minister for Education captured the sentiment of the times when he publicly announced in biblical and Shakespearean rhetoric during a Nairobi university graduation ceremony that Moi was the Prince of Peace.
Unemployment increased as formal employment opportunities shrunk and the jua kali sector mushroomed. Public bus system broke down descending into a matatu culture of urgency and trickery. Potholes started to become familiar, a thing and public facilities sunk into a permanent decrepit state. Freedom of movement and association was curtailed as police officers turned rogue. Beards became profiled as marks of dissidence or Marxist in leaning, as dangerous as a young man in Kenya’s ghettos spotting dreadlocks during in the later day Mungiki crackdown. The politics became a contest of loyalty to the big man and a new cast of uneducated but loyal court jesters filled the ranks of important state positions. After ’82, Moi ran a tight ship silencing protest effectively, with the perpetual dread of the shadowy Special Branch hanging over the population.
The white man is very clever. He came quietly with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.
Chinua Achebe, – Things Fall Apart
Fear and loathing of one’s helplessness is what defined the brand of enforced ‘silence’ of the Moi years. I had little idea that I had inherited my parents’ traumas growing up in an autocratic patronage system. Even during my boldest moments of protest as a university student in the fight for second liberation in the late 1990s, I knew my boundaries. I knew when to reserve comment, speak in code, choose my word carefully and keep my political opinions to myself in public. Stronger, braver and important men had disappeared. I had no illusion what the state was capable of.
The only other thing that rivaled the dread of Moi state repression machinery was a mysterious virus that hunted young lives like Tekayo the cannibal character in Grace Ogot’s “ Land Without Thunder”. On January 15 1985, the Standard newspaper carried a headline “Killer sex disease in Kenya”. HIV AIDS virus compounded by a broken public health system devastated my generation and it became the single biggest contributor of orphaned children. The safe sex and abstinence campaigns coincided with the rise of evangelical churches capitalizing on the despondency that defined the times. By 1988, AIDS had taken on a religious dimension as the curse of our generation. Reinhardt Bonnke, a German preacher arrived to great pomp and razzmatazz to save the souls of Africans and packed stadiums preaching the gospel of healing and miracles. Tens of thousands gathered at his mega-crusade including senior government officials, swept away by the frenzy of spiritual warfare against the demonic forces unleashed on the “Dark” continent.
In traditional Anglican, Catholic and Presbyterian churches, a band of bold men spoke softly and firmly, using their pulpits to preach the gospel of redemption from an oppressive status quo. There was Bishop David Gitari, Alexander Muge, Henry Okullu and Reverend Timothy Njoya. Two years later in 1990 Bishop Muge was dead and Timothy Njoya had been severely beaten in public by state agents outside the parliament buildings.
36 years since the coup of ’82, Kenya remains deeply entrenched in the politics of pilferage and division. The wealth and poverty gap is immoral. The country that the late JM Karuiki once decried as one of “10 millionaires and 10 million beggars” is firmly entrenched. The former Chief Justice Willy Mutunga bluntly called Kenya a bandit economy run by mafia-style cartels. Grand theft has become the enduring characteristic of the historical state and the common denominator co-joining successive generations.
On January 20th, 1961, at the Capitol in Washington DC, newly elected President John F. Kennedy inauguration speech ended with a line that would shape a generation in America,
“Ask not what your country can do for you- ask what you can do for your country”.
The leadership of all progressive nations have demanded the same unwavering patriotism of their citizens and bled the rhetoric of national service to death. However the contrary question is never tabled,
“Ask what your country has done to you?” Are we willing to talk of the past human rights abuses, the forgotten events of historical injustice, the systemic traumas that we continue to stuff in the storehouse of national amnesia? How can a country that is unable to face and deal with its past move forward?
The millennials I meet ask this question in collective wonderment. How did it go so tragically wrong for a generation that ate the bitter fruits of the Nyayo philosophy? Why did the foot soldiers of the second liberation turn into eager oppressors and ethnic bigots driven by an unprecedented level of greed? If we are to make any sense of our presence and our future we have to go look back to where we lost our way in a Sankofa-esque way. The literal translation of the term Sankofa is,
“ It is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind”.
When I name my defining Kenyan traumas, I start with ’82, the year that I first experienced the existential angst of Kenya’s middle class. I think about the good intentions of my late father, part of the silent generation born between 1924 and 1942. He was defined by the Second World War and the Mau Mau state of emergency. By 1982, he did what any loving father would have done; shield one’s children from the harsh reality and until they were old enough and equipped to deal with it. My own father died in 1989, the year that Berlin Wall came down and it was the same year that I realised that life was not beautiful, aware of my mis-education in a postcolonial reality, I began my own personal journey of consciousness and awareness.
In 2002 after the inauguration of Mwai Kibaki, I made the number of those Kenyans described as the most optimistic population in the world. Moi was gone. My generation was unbwogable. We had survived the repressive years 80s and 90s and gotten rid of our collective problem. The impossible dream achieved and a bright future beckoned.
By 2005, Mwai Kibaki had been in power for three years and already the optimism of the year 2002 had worn thin. The politics of ethnic hegemony that had taken temporary leave returned with fury. It came to a head in disputed 2007 election and I watched my generation fall into line and retreat to the safety of ethnic bastions. Indeed, there are no atheists in the foxholes. The illusion of national unity faded and the same fears that stalked my father to silence had returned.
We had become our parents, silenced, cynical of everything political, distrustful of those who did share our story and uncertain about what the future held for our children. It might be 2018, yet 36 years later Moi’s protégés continue playing by the same rule book of economic mismanagement, rampant corruption, political assassinations, electoral theft and violent suppression of dissent. The uncertainty that defined the 80s is still here but the unbwogable generation that came of age in 2002, is invested in personal cultivated bubbles of security, no longer willing to rattle the status quo.
We have morphed into our parents with children living in bubbles and disinclined to sabotage our beautiful lives.
Published by the good folks at The Elephant.
The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.
Follow us on Twitter. AFRICA AND THE WORLD CUP: A Beautiful Tragedy
By Martin Maitha
For the last few months, students at the university where I teach have been pitted in a standoff against we the faculty and administration. From the drama so far, my greatest impression has been that I do not recognize my generation.
I do not recognize us because we knew there was a problem long before. Our problems began with the marketization of the academy, something that researchers – including Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani – have been talking about for at least two decades. But we still followed the idol of marketization, despite the fact that academics are terrible at business.
Academia, by its very nature, is a profession of idealism – we don’t do the reality of business very well. But Kenyan universities persisted in the business logic of turning universities into profit institutions because we thought that we could do business better than business people (academics find it very difficult to admit that there are skills that they are not good at). And the business logic failed.
We refused to acknowledge the glaring symptoms of that failure that we had already been warned about: increase in student cynicism, obsession with exams and increase in cheating, deterioration of support services, and a rise in corruption as the inevitable result of outsourced services. We blindfolded ourselves to the problems with strategic plans and performance management.
Now the students are raising the same issues scholars like Noam Chomsky and Henry Giroux identified as happening to higher education. And true to script, we their elders are exhibiting the behaviour of management that they warned us about.
*
First, we treat the students as children who don’t understand. Then we doubt their intellectual competence and maturity. When they are persistent, we offer explanations that suggest that the problem is with them: maybe are drunk, incited by politicians, or anxious about exams. Other times we say they are inconsistent.
We also moralise. We say that the students have lost traditional respect for elders. We criticize them for choosing bad methods for voicing discontent, even though the channels for voicing that discontent fail, or do not exist. We say that we have let them take over control, which we must get back. I didn’t even know that academia was about control.
We essentially forget that we are with dealing adults, who are voters and have ID cards. Adults who happen to be the age of our children. Adults who are saying what some of us, their parents, have said before. And in fact, the greatest disappointment of the students has not been our failure to deal with the issues; it’s been our persistent denial of those issues. The young people can see the elephant in the room, and they know we can see it too because we walk around it. But our response is to deal not with the elephant, but with the students pointing out the elephant. And these same actions appear in Mary Serumaga’s rebuttal to the articles in the millennial series in The Elephant.
*
The Elephant has made the ground breaking move of hosting the conversations by millennials and border-millennials. The conversations perform two broad functions. One, they narrate the experiences of living in the contradiction of being an adult who is socially prevented from achieving adult milestones. Two, they use that experience to theorize what is happening in the world. In their view, their elders are blind, by choice, to the contradictions between social expectations and the lack of social structures needed to meet those expectations, and that blindness is generational.
The goal of the conversations is not only to define their experience, but also to add to our global understanding of reality in this neoliberal age, and appeal to our sense of human empathy across generations. If we understand what younger people are dealing with, we would stop making unrealistic social demands of them, or better still, we would fight for the social structures they need for those expectations to be achievable.
The most obvious tactic of undermining the voice of the youth is to question the authority by which the youth speak. Serumaga does this in two main ways. One is the use of colourful adjectives like “verbal deluge,” “musings of the youth” (as if elders don’t muse),“pouting,” being “glib,” and “childish.” In other words, Serumaga is saying that the pieces are not written by whole human beings with legitimate experiences, but by a segment of their being, that is their youthfulness. And since youth is temporary, so are the ideas that they are articulating here, and so we cannot take the ideas seriously.
The irony of this dismissal was that some of the people Serumaga cites as authoritative, such as Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon, were the same age as the “millennial” writers, if not younger. Biko was about 24 years old when he wrote the column “Frank Talk,” which would produce his publication I write what I like. Fanon was around 27 years old when his book Black skin, white masks was published.
But the greater irony is beyond these men’s age. They actually wrote from their experience, their observations about the oppression around them and the failure of academics to actually study that reality. One obscene contradiction between academic study and reality cited by Fanon, is when psychiatrists studying the dreams of those traumatized by colonialism say that the gun is a “phallic symbol,” when in fact, it is a reference to the AK47 carried by colonial soldiers to terrorize and kill the colonized. Fanon even has a section in his book entitled “the lived experience of the black person,” asserting the authority of the lived experience in academic study.
And as Lewis Gordon, the Fanonian expert and existentialist philosopher says in several of his works, asserting the authority of the lived experience is important for black people, because racism denies the complexity of our lives. This denial makes the black biography, the lived black experience, central for black people in theorizing, for how can one express one’s humanity with tools of institutions that deny one’s humanity? One has to then appeal to lived experience, which is what the “millennial writers” have done. The writers literally have nothing to use but their experience, because we, their elders, who should be doing a better job of dissecting the neoliberal age and its impact on the youth, have denied them access to the spaces where they can institutionally articulate what they are dealing with.
And the dismissal of experience becomes more disturbing when one looks at the special attention that Serumaga pays to Kingwa Kamencu. Kingwa’s piece captures how racism and neoliberalism interact with the female African body. Kingwa mentions the millennials as being more comfortable than their forebears with wearing natural hair and modern fashion with African inspiration. Serumaga refers to these unique gestures as making claims to “a new form of decolonization,” and then refers to the afro and cornrows of the 60s as evidence that there is nothing new about the millennials’ fashion sense.
The dissonance here is the skipping of whole decades in this rebuttal. Kingwa is talking about a generation who lived 60 years after the Civil Rights movement. The parents of her generation are not the people of the Civil Rights movement, but their children, who had a totally different experience. If I would cite my own experience, I would confirm that what Kingwa is saying about the shame of the black female body is true.
I grew up being told to either perm or braid my hair. When I converted to dreadlocks in 2000, and later when I started sporting natural hair, I was asked if I’m Rastafari or when I’m going to comb my hair. I am currently a member of a facebook group of African women, with tens of thousands of followers, who are finding solidarity in resisting the pressure to straighten our hair with blowdrying or to cover natural hair with weaves. From Americanah by Chimamanda Adichie, one of the most celebrated writers of this era, we know that the struggles around black hair are far from over.
In fact, the issue here is not that elders were part of the black pride movement of the 60s; rather, the question is: how did the children of the 80s and 90s become ashamed of their hair, so that they now deride their children for going back to the sixties? I think Silas Nyanchwani explains the reason why. My generation, born to parents of independence, grew up during the cold war, and were alienated from the people who raised their voices for an African independence that meant more than a black president, a national flag and anthem, because those people, like Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Micere Mugo and Ngugi wa Thiongo, were killed or exiled by dictators.
And there is a gender dimension in the attention to Kingwa’s article – Kingwa’s is one of the two woman contributors and one that mentions the woman’s personal space. But Serumaga considers the article the least authoritative of all, faulting Kingwa for mentioning the broad social phenomena like structural adjustment programs at the end, unlike the articles of Kobuthi and Okolla which are more “factual.” Yet the other writers also do evoke their personal experience. They talk about their parents and their families. Nyanchwani even gives a deeply emotional account of the birth of his daughter. So why does Kingwa get so much flack for personal narratives?
And yet, we see this in the academy all the time. We repeatedly alienate the lived experience from what we study. And that’s what the millennials are calling us out on.
Generalization
The other rebuttal of Serumaga is one that we’ve seen before: that the writers are using generalizations about age and history. Serumaga cites several exceptions to the judgements that the writers make of their parents’ generation, such as Biko and Fanon. This is the familiar and very odd post-modern refutation of arguments solely on the grounds of generalization.
Pointing to the “generalization” in another’s position usually does not refute that position. We see this, for example, in the response to Trump’s shithole comment, when some Africans offered beautiful pictures of Africa to prove that not all of Africa was as bad as Trump said. Pointing to generalization did not counter the deeply racist and immoral premise of Trump’s comment.
The generalization retort also misrepresents generalizations as rigid formulas, which they are not. If I say, for example, that the long rains fall in Kenya in the months of March to May, I am not saying that the rains fall at absolutely the same time every year. I am referring to a pattern observed over a period of time, not an absolute formula. There will always be exceptions, and those exceptions do not necessarily refute the rule. And sometimes exceptions confirm the rule, and that is how we start to ask whether the change in rainfall patterns could be a sign of global warming or environmental degradation.
In other words, the purpose of pointing at exceptions should not be to just do so but to refute the general principle and offer another one. Biko was not, as Serumaga implies, an exception that proves the rule that the writers were wrong about their parents’ freedom struggle credentials. And the point of black consciousness is not that Biko’s predictions about an exploitative black ruling class were proved right. The point is that we must translate the political struggle for independence into concrete social-economic gains, which is precisely what the millennial writers are calling for.
And so citing instances in which Africans fought against colonial rule misses the point. The millennial writers were not assigning personal responsibility to each and every individual member of a whole generation; they were referring to general trends that they have observed about the current decisions made by people who seem united by their age.
We talk about general trends because if we don’t, we can’t find commonality, and we can’t make decisions. Without generalizations, we can’t theorize, because theory, by its very nature, is a generalization. So by condemning generalizations, we are denying the millennials the space to theorize what is happening to them. And that is dangerous because if our youth cannot theorize their condition, the only option we leave them is to change things through irrational violence.
And the writers are not the ones who began theorizing the millennial challenge as a generational problem. It is we, their parents, Gen-X or whatever one wants to call us, who first used the generational framework when we said that their behaviour and attitudes were unique to their age. We chose to explain the contradictions which our youth face, many of which we created or at least know about, as a problem with them. We said that our kids can’t get jobs because they want unrealistically high salaries and do not want to soil their hands with work. That our children are not getting married because they’re selfish and care only for instant gratitude. That our children are not working hard in school because they’re spoiled. The writers are simply responding to the generation framework.
But the millennials are also pointing out that we, their parents, are the proverbial emperor who is naked. The jobs we’re telling the youth to get are not there for us either. My parents’ generation and my colleagues have been retrenched and given golden handshakes over the last 20 years, since the structural adjustment programs began. So we know that good jobs do not exist, and yet we’re telling the youth to get them. Our youth know that we witnessed the undermining of social services like transport, education and healthcare, but we accepted the propaganda of private solutions to public problems, and being told that we cannot complain if we do not offer a solution. Our youth have seen through the lies in this neoliberal reasoning, and they are not willing to use this reasoning any more.
Serumaga’s article essentially refuses to engage the millennial writers as thinkers in their own right. She diminishes the authority of their voice because they have not conformed to her rules, and therefore she doesn’t engage the arguments that the writers are actually making. She invites them to “come together to heal, for each generation to show empathy for the others,” when she has shown little empathy for them.
And in fact, this is the contradiction that my students and the millennial writers are talking about. We, their parents, do not take them seriously. And after indirectly showing them that we have no respect for their opinion, we patronizingly invite them to dialogue. Our children can see through us. We’re contradicting ourselves. We’re preaching water and drinking wine.
It’s time for our generation to actually treat our young adults like the adults that they are. We have to end this gate-keeping where we dictate the rules of engagement with our younger adults and allow them no space to manoeuvre. After all, the younger adults are not speaking an entirely new truth; they are speaking a truth inspired by reality, and by what we, their elders, have taught them.
Published by the good folks at The Elephant.
The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.
Follow us on Twitter. AFRICA AND THE WORLD CUP: A Beautiful Tragedy
By Martin Maitha
It is 8:30 am on a chilly Saturday morning punctuated with light rain showers. I prompt the driver to reverse the pickup truck into the entry porch. They begin unloading my stuff. A couch, office desk and a chair that I purchased with the proceeds from my first contract. These items remind me of the hurdles I have surmounted in a bid to make a mark in this world.
I am moving back to my parent’s house at the age of 25 when I should be out there conquering the world. I feel like a total loser. A disgrace to my entire lineage but deep down I knew I had met my Waterloo.
****
I was born in 1991 in Kwale County. Soon after my birth, my family moved to Nyahururu only to relocate back to Kinango, a little-known town in Kwale when I was five. I left like an outsider, laughed at by other kids since I could only speak in my mother tongue but I soon mastered the national languages.
In 1997, Kenya becomes engulfed in political animosities in the run-up to the general elections. During the campaign period, the former PM Raila Odinga and hordes of politicians held a public rally at Kinango Secondary School, which was close to our house. My friends and I attended the rally, squeezing through the crowd until we stood a few feet from the podium. I do not remember what was said. What I remember was the amount of money one of the politicians contributed to the school. Ksh. 200,000 in cash! That was the largest amount of money I had seen at the time.
A few days later, news of a militia group called Kaya Bombo spread throughout Kwale. Something changed in the playground. The local kids started taunting kids whose parents were not natives of the coast region. Before this, we played as children, paying no attention to our origins. Overnight, we had turned into upcountry folk, unwanted in the coast region.
“Nyinyi ni wabara. Mrudi kwenu!”
Some of the locals regarded the Kaya Bombo militia as heroes out to redistribute wealth and land back to its ancestral owners, addressing historical injustices and expelling immigrants believed to have stolen opportunities meant for locals. Some kids even fought over who would move into our house once we were all slaughtered. It was rumored that the militia members had mystical powers. When they broke into houses at night, they ethnically profiled their hostages by holding out a one bob coin and conducting an accent test. If you said something like silingi or shirigi they would cut off your head.
Petrified by these stories, we, the children of wabara helped each other learn how to pronounce Shilingi in order to pass for locals in event of a gang attack. Back at home, my parents stocked up on foodstuffs. By 6:45 pm, every evening, we would switch off all the lights, barricade ourselves indoors, huddled in one room, on the floor, farthest from the windows to avoid getting hit by stray bullets as gunshots echoed all night long. The District Officer was our immediate neighbour and family friend so we enjoyed the privilege of security of his armed guards.
That year, Likoni police station was ransacked and burned to the ground. Members of the migrant communities along Likoni-Kombani-Tiwi-Ukunda-Msambweni stretch lost property. My folks permanently halted the construction of some property in Ukunda. Once the violence was quelled, we attempted to restore our normal lives, although a few of our family friends moved back upcountry fearing for their lives.
10 years later, in 2007, the political temperatures soared again after the disputed presidential election. This time we were prepared. We all moved into my grandparent’s farm in Shimba Hills. The licensed firearm holders in the extended family kept their guns close by. The rest of us armed ourselves with machetes, clubs, bows, and arrows in a bid to protect our women, children and property. This period rekindled the intense fear, suspense and painful memories of the ‘97 Likoni clashes as news of the wanton destruction of property and ethnic killings in the Rift Valley reached us. Fortunately, most parts of the coast did not experience incidences of election-related violence.
Towards the end of January 2008, a sense of normalcy resumed. I was excited to go back to school at Kenyatta High School, in Taita for my final year. However, in class, I became a target of profiling, tormented by my business studies teacher. Every time he walked into class he would call out.
“Mark Maina Mwangi, where are you?”
I would meekly stand up.
“Ohh the mungiki is still here! I will personally make sure you are sent home…”
The insults and threats became a regular affair and I realized that I was paying for the sins of those behind the disputed presidential outcome. One evening class, the teacher walked up to my desk, grabbed my exercise book and tore it into pieces. I received a slap on the face and got kicked out of class for a crime I did not commit; writing a love letter.
For weeks I had endured his abuse but he eventually got to me.
What if I was indeed a mungiki and murderer as the teacher claimed? I was broken. I called my folks that night to let them know I was done with schooling. I could not take it anymore. The next morning my mother came to school to see me. She gave me two options. To gather my stuff and leave for a new school or stay there and fight for myself like other men. I chose to stay. A choice I have had to make throughout my life.
In 2010, I joined Kenyatta University to pursue engineering for my undergraduate studies. Before I began pursuing civil engineering, I thought it would be interesting. That we would be learning and doing things that would revolutionize the world only to end up studying same old concepts without any real-world application. In my sophomore year, we started reading stories of young people in the west, dropping out of campus to start tech companies that turned them into billionaires overnight. We debated the merits of tertiary education with my comrades while contemplating quitting school for entrepreneurship. In the 2nd semester of my 2nd year at university, I quit campus, pulled together my savings and borrowed some cash to set up my first business. I used up all the capital to import a couple of Tablet-PCs. I envisioned building an electronics import business empire, raking in millions and never having to work for anyone or need a degree. Unfortunately, I did not conduct an extensive market research. The same week my shipment landed, a giant Telco rolled out a series of cheaper Tablet-PCs. I ran into huge losses and returned to college humbled, spending the next several months paying off my debts.
But once a hustler always a hustler and in my final year of campus, I was running a construction consultancy company on the side. I landed a project and contracted three of my lecturers to do the job for me. This was a campus life highlight. However, the succeeding contract came with drama. After spending my last coin to undertake the project, the client disappeared without paying a dime. In my naivety, I trusted too much and forgot to sign a contract. Who would want to pull down a young man trying to build an empire, right?
I was completely broke and too embarrassed to ask help. At my wits ends, I started writing for online magazines in order to stay afloat. Everything else I touched had turned into dust. During this low moment in life, I channelled my frustration into creativity and wrote The Kenya’s Middle-Class Nightmare blog post which went viral receiving over 400,000 reads. Suddenly, I was getting job offers and speaking engagements from all over the country. I settled on two, one in media and the other in marketing.
As a man who gives his all in everything he does, in a few months, my projects in both companies were hugely successful. I was working 8am-4pm in one company and 5pm to 11pm in the other from Monday to Friday and most weekends. I did not have a life outside of work. Nonetheless, my quick rise up the ranks did not sit well with a number of older and senior colleagues. To them, I was not only an outsider but also someone who was yet to pay his dues like they did over the years. They began frustrating my projects at every turn
My boss became inordinately toxic. Nothing I ever did was right. Shouting, insults, threats and intimidation were his weapons of choice. At first, I took it to the chin, trying to keep level-headed but the aggression chipped at my soul every single day, leaving me trapped, constantly stressed and walking on eggshells. I would have either to sell my soul to the devil or return to a life of uncertainty. I choose the latter. Something else happened to trigger this decision.
One afternoon, I get a call from a lady I went to college with. In a voice devoid of emotion, she says, “Hi Mark! Do you know your friend is gone? Ebu come to MP Shah Hospital…He just died.”
I dismiss her and get back to work trying to process the news. Minutes later my phone begins to ring incessantly with numbers I do not recognise. I decide to switch it off. This can’t be possible. I talked to him two days ago and he was responding well to treatment. We had even planned for a road trip as soon as he was discharged.
At 5:30 pm, I head out to the hospital in Parklands to find his family and former college mates, huddled at a lounge next to the ICU, grieving.
‘This is an elaborate prank. He is okay. He will walk out in any minute now and laugh at how sad we all are.’
The hospital staff lead the gathering of family and friends to a windowless building where the humming of freezers could be heard from outside. A gentleman and lady in scrubs usher us into an eerily cold room. A faint stench of bleach hangs in the air.
Lying in one of the freezers is my best friend wrapped in a white sheet like an Egyptian mummy. Eyes closed and peaceful. Except for his pale lips and bulging forehead veins, he might as well be sleeping. I call out his name. Try to wake him up without success and the reality finally descends like a ton of bricks. He is gone. Crossed to the land of no return. Unable to contain my emotions anymore I break down. Weep like a toddler without care of who is watching.
The next couple of days are terrible. I have lost people before. Friends. Relatives. But this loss is too personal. For almost a decade he was my best friend, wingman, confidant and more like an elder brother. He taught me pretty much everything I know about being a man. He was the man I went to for advice. Whenever I was in trouble he bailed me out.
To deal with the loss, I start drinking more than usual. I switch from beer to whiskey in an effort to numb the pain. I begin doubting the existence of God. He was such a selfless, loyal, caring and a stand-up guy yet he died young, why was I spared?
I bottle up these feelings while trying to avoid the places we used to frequent together. Despondency sets in. One of my initiatives as a lifestyle blogger involves helping out people. I listen to their problems while trying to find solutions. People of all ages, both online and real-life come to me for help. I am their rock. A shoulder to lean on. Tens of people reach out to me with their life issues every week, however, none of them ever inquires how I am doing. My pal was the guy I went to with my problems. Now, I have nobody in my corner.
To deal with the emotional turmoil I begin hooking up with random women for no strings attached sex. The actual human connection I seek proves elusive. In Nairobi, it is way easier to hook up with a random person every night than it is to find someone who is real.
The drinking intensifies, cheered on by my acquaintances. I become that guy, the life of the party on the outside but wounded inside, crying out for help. Those around do not seem to notice it. I rapidly sink into depression and loneliness but I am too ashamed to admit for I care too much for my public brand.
One morning I step out of bed only to lose balance and fall to the floor. The room spins in circles. I feel terribly sick. My stomach churns. I stagger to the toilet, sink onto my knees, pull up the seat, hunch over and try to puke. Nothing comes out. That is when I realize I have not eaten anything for over two days. It was clear I had completely lost control to my addictions.
My denial only exacerbates the situation. I try travelling, sampling the nightlife across the country but there was no escape from this labyrinth. I have to face my demons head-on.
So, I de-clutter my life and give away most of my possessions including gadgets clothes and shoes. Then I hire a pick up to ferry what was left to my parent’s home in Kwale, the only safe haven I could think of.
Just as the crew finishes unloading, my old man walks out of the house. If at all he was surprised to see me, he does not reveal it considering I did not notify him of my impending arrival.
At 26, my old man built his mother a house. He lost his father at a young age, faced adversity forcing him to single-handedly take charge of his family, educate siblings and change his fortunes. Having gone through that tough life he made sure I lacked nothing. Sons are supposed to be better than their fathers in all aspects of life. Sadly, I may never to be half the man my old man is despite all advantages life has given me.
“Come in and have some breakfast.”
My father fries two eggs, toasts bread and serves me together with some coffee.
My parents never ask me why I came back home. Instead, they seem genuinely happy to see me and welcome me back like the prodigal son. After two weeks, I open up about my struggles and why I needed time off the city to heal.
“Son, there is no shame in a man asking for help. You made the right choice to come back home. Even when you are fifty years old, you always have a place in this home.”
The next day, my parents give me a house to move into, appoint me as a manager to the family ventures complete with an office and access to a car. I work twice as hard masquerading as an entrepreneur does but deep down I know I am only lucky and not the self-made man I pretend to be.
Time off the city changes my outlook towards life. I take time off social media in an effort to reconnect with my inner-self, hang around people who I have known for years.
I had been harbouring hate, avoiding dealing with grief, trying to seek acceptance, unconditional love and support in all the wrong places because I was too embarrassed to ask for help. I learned that being a man should never be an excuse to bottle up everything. I am human after all and there is no shame in stumbling. It takes courage to continue and failure is such a great teacher.
The true measure of a man is not defined by the invincible cloak we wrap around our public personas but by how we continually respond to the challenges of life.
After almost a year of working for family, I hand over the reins and move back to the city a bit wiser with a single goal. Reclaim my life and work on becoming a better man.
A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it. ~ George Moore
Published by the good folks at The Elephant.
The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.
Follow us on Twitter. AFRICA AND THE WORLD CUP: A Beautiful Tragedy
By Martin Maitha
My dad was born in 1946. His dad, my grandfather, was born in 1918. Both of them were born at the tail end of wars that everyone thought would be the wars to end all wars. Many things happened between those two births. Kenya officially became a colony, the Great Depression ruined the global economy, and a new, bigger, and more destructive war begun and ended.
My grandparents got married, hurriedly, in 1941 (or 1942). Their black and white wedding photo tells nothing of the turmoil that was already taking place. All it shows is a young couple in love, with my grandmother sitting in her white dress, shoeless, and my grandfather standing next to her. Nothing in the photo tells you that it was only months before my grandfather was conscripted to fight in a war he had no stake in.
His war was not in the trenches. At least not the literal ones. His was in the camps, in the medical tents, and wherever men and women trying to hurt each other finally succeeded. There was Burma and Egypt, and every battleground in between. In lieu of bullet or shrapnel wounds, he came back with his face and soul permanently marked. The reminders of chickenpox he contracted trying to make sure other soldiers didn’t. He came back with those scars, a metallic service bowl, and a virile need to survive. So immediately the guns went quiet and he could finally come back to his wife, they set at it. They spent the next decade doing exactly that, through the turmoil of the ‘50s. My grandfather spent his lifetime as a health officer. He sought stability and discipline, and his scars survived not just as physical marks, but as a nickname given to him by his boys.
I was born to my father in his 40s. He’s a man’s man and an introvert who prefers solitary walks to long conversations. On his face he has a scar from one such walk at night. Years before I was born, he was attacked on a walk and slashed on the forehead. He healed, but the scar hasn’t faded with time. On his ebony skin, even as age grows on him, it still defines the right side of his forehead.It made him more careful, but didn’t kill his love for long solitary walks.
But there were other things. Like his dad, who grew up in the early years of the formal colony, my dad also was raised in a land in brutal transition. His was not the kipande or labour system, it was the Mau Mau war. He was arrested, at least twice, while he was a kid in Kiambu. Once, no one knew where he was for three days. He and his cousin had been picked out of a random line-up by snitches covered in sacks-called gakunia-as Mau Mau sympathisers. They were barely 10 years old. Those experiences made them cautious, and the trauma made it easy for them to see enemies where there weren’t.
My dad does not say much about the Roaring 60s, but I think the decade meant a lot to him. He was in his 20s, he had hope, and he lived in a country full of opportunity and promise. Then the 70s had responsibility and commitment. The 80s too. The 90s even worse. Somewhere in between those decades, he became a police clerk, then settled on teaching as his lifelong work. And retired just at the start of the new millennium. In those decades he could count among his students two of my future teachers, and one future Attorney General.
As three generations of firstborn sons, our childhoods couldn’t have been more different. One lived through the early years of colonialism. The next through the Emergency years. I lived through the austerity years of Nyayoism, in the dying embers of the political revolution that begun in the early 80s. Did that define our chosen crafts? From a health officer to a teacher to a writer?
Of these men, I am the only writer and the only atheist. At first it felt unique to be these things, like I had the privilege of not having the trauma of war and conquest in my childhood. But it doesn’t feel like that anymore. Now it feels as if I carry the traumas of their generations as well as mine, and my love for history doesn’t help. As if my quest for knowledge is a quest to understand them, and at least find little ways to help my generation not repeat the same mistakes, and to process its trauma differently.
In 2002, my dad told me he would vote for Uhuru Kenyatta. I did not understand it. The man would lose, we rightly agreed, so why would he still vote for him? I thought he more than most would understand. He had seen bad politics break the society he worked in. He had lined up to swear the 1969 oath as a young adult, not by choice, but it still markedly defined how he views Kenya as a nation state. His trauma from the 1950s was weaponised for political gain, yet he was a curious soul for whom tribe has never meant anything in social and business interactions. He was there, not just as a witness and a student of history, but as a teacher of it for three decades.
I thought he would understand. He should have. But now I get him. I think. His reason at the time was loyalty, or something like that. Loyalty to home. To people. To an idea. It sounded incomplete, but it was a lesson in experiences.
For most of my life, he was an agnostic, the first one I ever knew. He still identified as Christian, but something about denominations bothered him. He was a seeker, an open book as he called himself. Then, as the grey took over and his gait became more deliberate, he made a decision. He became the people he had been sarcastic about, choosing one denomination over all others. One way to worship over everything else.He had only seen his father as a man with the scars of war in timeless patterns on his face and heart; a man for whom death had been real and close. Perhaps his father’s commitment to a single church, the Anglicans, was why he needed to seek first. Decide later.
I have always been an avowed atheist. Still, every few years I wonder if age will make Pascal’s Wager look more enticing. Like it did for him, until it did not. Am I walking the same journey as he and his father, only in a different time with different experiences? Is it cascading through us, three men with alternating surnames, this life experience? Sometimes I think the difference is in what age they had to raise the next generation of men. My grandfather was just two years shy of 30 when he got my dad, while mine was well into his 40s. Their ideas were markedly different; one wanted to raise a strong son who would be his legacy, the other wanted his son to find himself from an early age. The only thing that made my dad tick, other than bad grammar and bad grades, was my experiments with all the girly stuff that littered our home.
I write because my father made writing, even letters to him, an exercise in expression. Letters came back marked with corrections and notes to improve diction. History books littered my childhood, and knowledge, especially questioning history, were one of the few things that made his eyes light up. His father was a distant man with the demons of war tormenting him even before the previous one had abated.
I write because I can’t not write. Even if I had ended up in a lab or at crime scenes, which was my chosen career, I would still write. I wanted to live in a lab to tell stories of sex, money and murder, the three pillars to any great story worth telling. Yet I found myself miles away from a lab, from trace evidence and semen samples, and in a world where they still exist, but seem to make more sense. What if that’s how, when he ended up in the war, my grandfather found himself treating the wounded and the dying. Making sure they didn’t contract more diseases or injuries than they already had? What if it was taking the road less travelled, and finding that there were several little paths that led from it? How my father, in the decade after independence, found himself offered managerial jobs in several companies but chose, instead, to be a police clerk. Then a teacher of women and men. A man who, even after he retired, still found time to teach older men and women. Who loved languages and history and everything in between. Was that his war, ignorance? Does he have scars from it I haven’t understood yet? What is my war? What is it that, by virtue of the person I am in the sands of time, is my lifelong work?
In my culture, there would be a generation transition every 30 or so years. It was a massive affair where aging men accepted they couldn’t fight any more. They couldn’t fend for all. And most importantly, that they had done their part. They needed to let younger men find and do theirs. Each generation understood it had a short window to get its work done. Its life purpose. Whether that was war or peace didn’t really matter, because each is a version of the other. The last one was just a century ago, the same year my grandfather was born, but its tenets are now lost. Its rules should have survived in some way, not just in retirement age, but as a concept. That youth is fleeting. That it’s the time to be energetic, and reckless. With your physical self, with your ideas of the world. A time to fail and succeed. To make stupid mistakes about whatever the new technology is at the time. To rage and fight and protest. To work and cry and try. To experiment. To simply live.
In our family this transition was marked somewhat by the death of my grandfather just months after I came into this world. He had done his part, and once told my mother that at least he had lived to see himself. Did he hope, like I see my father with his grandkids, that life would be better for me than it had been for him? That I wouldn’t carry his scars but I would learn the lessons they left behind? I often wonder how these lessons have cascaded in ways I don’t understand yet. I am a millennial in a world where my generation is seen as needy, aggressive, liberal, reckless, and distracted. Like my parents were when they walked into the ‘60s with unbridled optimism, youthful exuberance, and a taste for the latest fads. That forced those older than them to ban miniskirts and long hair, because they were ‘spoiling the youth.’ Kenya has been here before, because the experiences of each generation shape how it raises the next. I think of this when I see how my generation, now young parents, are struggling to raise their kids in a world on steroids.
What makes a millennial a bad word? What makes it a thing to be said disparagingly? Is it because we live (according to Western statistics-which are wrong) in the most peaceful time in recorded human history? Is it because not only do we talk to each other remotely, we now live and work there too? Is it because we are more informed about sexual and reproductive health, about gay rights and right of Palestine to exist?Or is it because we didn’t live through some of the most defining moments of the nation-state we call home.Will we find, as we age into our 30s and 40s, the smartphone generation as obnoxious as older generations find us today?
Life is a lived experience. There is only one way to do that, to live it. To seek. To find, sometimes. To accept Trump as the clarion call to the next phase of American aggression, which might just drive us to the next war we historians will describe as the war of our generation. To accept that each generation has a purpose, and ours isn’t defined by colonialism and independence, as much as it is defined by our need for jobs, better Internet, fewer wars, more inclusion, and a more humanist approach to social problems. By rapid political transitions, a debt bomb, the traumas we inherited, and those we are inflicting on ourselves. Those are our wars, so far, and they are real. If the next generation has different wars, then so be it.
My grandfather, my dad and I are three different men, all born in the same century yet defined by different experiences. We are broken in different ways yet we have, if my mother is to be believed (and she’s a mostly solid source), similar in our ways. Our reactions. Our decisions. Our stubbornness. Our messes. Our mistakes. Yet still, our views of the world, our politics and ideas, are a world apart. Even though we mostly have the same genetic tools, we are different because we were born in different times, and we processed them differently. Their generations were broken, but they were also blessed. Mine is too. I am a millennial, and my generation is struggling to define itself. To find its purpose. To do its best and worst.
We are different. And that’s okay. For those of us who don’t believe in an afterlife, this is the only run. And fucking run we shall!
Published by the good folks at The Elephant.
The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.
Follow us on Twitter.