Recently my colleague Larry Ndivo and I travelled for the second phase of a discussion over a service we’re thinking our department can offer the community. Personally, this was my dream: that we would be offering our greatest asset: our ideas. However, for those ideas to work, the government officials had to be clear in their heads what the goal was, and our job as the creatives and as thinkers would have been to thrash out the details of getting to that goal.

At our first encounter, everything sounded quite great as they spoke of what they wanted to do. There were big dreams and big names involved. Fair enough. It all sounded great, until I chewed on it a few hours after the meeting and finally realized that actually, we had nothing to go on. I went and vented with Larry later that evening, feeling quite disappointed because I had been excited about this project.

So when the officials called to ask for a working document, I said that we needed to hear from the person in charge so that it was clear in our heads what the bigger picture was. They considered that fair enough. We set up the date a week in advance, and on the day itself, Larry and I travelled and arrived two hours in advance. I had taken this thing very seriously and dressed up. But do I say.

By the time we left the place, we had a clearer picture of what the officials were looking for. But we got it not from what they explicitly said, but was from what they talked about. Again, I don’t mind that as much as the fact they gave us no indication of what they were willing to commit in terms of time and resources. So right now, we’re going to work on some ideas, and spell out the resources those ideas will need for them to work, but frankly speaking, I’m a little skeptical of what will be available.

Until this week, I always used to think of the story of Thomas, the disciple who would not believe Jesus had risen until he had placed his fingers on the Lord’s hands and touched the Lord’s side, as a story reprimanding people for not believing without direct experience. After all, Jesus did say that that those who believed without seeing are blessed. 

But now I realize that Thomas did a good thing to doubt, and that’s why the story is there. Because he was honest enough to doubt, the Lord used the opportunity to prove that He had resurrected in the flesh. And Jesus was gracious – He did give in and allow Thomas to touch Him, because what was most important to Christ was that Thomas believed, not that Thomas was proved wrong. And if Christ could die on a cross so that people believe, appearing to Thomas to clear doubt is such a small thing in comparison. 

And Christ’s action shows us what leadership is. The leader knows that there’s no resurrection without pierced hands, a wounded side and death on the Cross. And that’s why the leader is confident enough to be challenged and to answer questions. Leaders know that there is no resurrection without death, and no faith without doubt. They say “blessed are those who believe without seeing,” only after allowing doubters to put their hands on their wounded hands and pierced side. 

That is why doubt is godly. Christ will use our doubt to help us experience the faith and power of the resurrection. And because of that experience, we Kenyans can have the confidence to ask our leaders to do the same. If the people we voted in promise big things, they must allow us mere mortals to touch their wounded hands and their pierced sides. If they instead turn around and call us names, they are simply confirming our doubt. 

The other day, following my post on feudalism in which I suggested that Kenya needed a different economic logic, some fellow with the nickname Thomas Sankara engaged me in a conversation on twitter. He began by questioning my idea of artists using their craft as loan security. As the conversation went on, the ideas he espoused seemed rather odd coming from a man conscious enough to use the great revolutionary’s name. And I said as much:

His immediate reply was “Do you believe in socialism?”

Now unfortunately for him, I’ve read enough history to know that that question, especially when posed to someone from the so-called third world, is actually a trick question to put us on the defense. From Lumumba, to Castro to Sankara, each revolutionary was often at pains to explain to a reductionist Western media that their concern was not capitalism or communism but the dignity, freedom and welfare of their people. Even Fanon said in his first chapter of the Wretched of the Earth that the West had basically called our ideas of freedom “communist” because they didn't believe that great ideas – or even the human instinct to be free – could originate from Africans. And of course, the West was so dogmatic about calling our heroes communist and wouldn't even allow a conversation about justice.

In this age when the buzzwords for dealing with youth unemployment are “developing talent,” the Parable of the talents in Matthew 25 provides interesting lessons about what talent actually is, and what it should do.

Three of those lessons are that

1. just like in the parable where the talents were given by the master, talent comes from God

2. to make the talent bear fruit and multiply, one needs to work. What distinguished the first two workers from the one who buried his talent was not what they received, but the work they put in

3. talent is for the benefit of people other than one’s self – in this case it was for the master, and  in a socially conscious society, talent is for the service of others. Remember King David, for example, whose musical skills were for soothing King Saul, or Dorcas who had made garments for people in the community. If we serve the people, we serve God as well. Remember what Jesus said – those who will enter the kingdom are those who feed the hungry, heal the sick and visit those in prison.
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So from the parable, one can say that there’s no such thing as “talent development.” And everyone has a talent. Some have several different talents, while others may have fewer which they use to make a great impact. So what matters is that one is in a context where the talent becomes evident, and usually that context involves a collective project at church, in a class or elsewhere. Usually, we get to find out our talents from how people respond to the work we do.

Several decades ago, Leopold Sedar Senghor, a great African poet of the French language (think what you may), wrote an essay that carried a formula for which he was never forgiven by some, and for which he was remembered by many more: “emotion is African as reason is Greek” (“l’émotion est nègre, comme la raison est helène”).

As part of the Negritude movement, this formula was meant to assert Africans’ mark on the world, a mark that colonial historiography had tried to obliterate by calling Africans uncivilized or absent from history. But as we now know from the many responses to Senghor’s theory, this formula was very problematic. It basically accepted the argument about Africans being irrational, but explained our apparent irrationality and lack of civilization as innate because we were emotional. We Africans feel, the explanation went; we don’t think.

To this day, every academic who studies history, philosophy and literature of the continent must go through a course on Negritude, which includes a ceremonial tongue –lashing at Senghor for being too French (he spoke French better than many of the French), for setting up African women on an impossible pedestal, and for accepting myths about Africans. Fair enough. 

But looking at reactions to the World Cup win by Germany on Sunday, it is evident that the world still divides the human race into the rational and irrational, reserving the former for Europeans (specifically Germans), and the latter for South Americans. This time Africans are not included because the conduct of the African teams, specifically Cameroon and Ghana that were burdened with in-fighting and indiscipline, seems to put us outside the realm of discussion. We were worse than irrational; we were incoherent.

And we African fans perpetuate these myths at every World Cup. We cheer our continent’s teams with no conviction that we actually stand a chance of reaching the semi-finals, let alone of lifting the trophy, as we wait for African teams to be eliminated so that we shift to cheering the South Americans, whom we think stand a chance. We also look for hot button names like Neymar and Messi that we can keep mentioning. It’s easier to remember larger-than-life individuals than pay attention to details about team-work and unity. Rooting for the Germans, the French, or the Dutch is not an option, I guess because of our historical baggage with Europe, which is understandable. Never mind that these teams often have people of African descent, or even born in Africa, like the 1998 French World Cup Champions.

So when the Germans thrashed Brazil 7-1, the narrative of the rational and irrational was shaken, but not uprooted. Journalists in our dailies called the German team a “machine,” and used words and metaphors to depict a cold, unemotional and mathematically calculated win over a team known to play with “flair.” Come the finals, most of the world knew that Germany was the better team, but many Kenyans still rationalized their support of Argentina as the fact that the country is excluded from the “first world” like us, that Argentina has Messi, and that it plays with flair and emotion, and football is supposed to be an emotional sport.

The problem with this narrative is that it misses the essence of humanity, that we are simultaneously rational and emotional, spiritual and rhythmic, and every beautiful aspect that makes us human. 

​My friend and colleague Larry Ndivo has written a powerful piece in which he describes his tribulations trying to fund his doctoral education. No bank would fund him because, at the time, he was not permanently employed or in business, and other avenues for funding had dried up. He candidly says that his frustrations have left an indelible mark on his life: “My bitterness with an unforgiving economic environment and a country without proper support mechanisms for education have transformed me into an introvert.”

Dr. Ndivo’s bitterness reminds me of an argument I made last year that our country’s economy could open up to the youth if we changed our system and values of providing the youth with resources. For instance, I said, artists could be provided loans on the basis of their ideas, rather than on title deeds, which most youth don’t – and are unlikely to – have.

For those of us who believe that social media can be used to inform, to inspire and to teach, the past month has been a violent one. Of course, there is the overt violence that has claimed the lives of tens of Kenyans in Mpeketoni, thanks to Al Shabaab. And it doesn't help that the president and his croonies are saying that the attack was ethnically motivated and not the work of the terror group, while Western governments are saying it was Al Shabaab. Something tells me that the truth lies in-between. Kenyatta I's export of the settler logic to Mpeketoni in the 60s, rather than uprooting it as Jaramogi Oginga Odinga had suggested, has simply provided fertile ground for the terror group to operate. And Kenyans better be warned: we're headed for bloodier times if we don't settle the land question soon enough. There must be a cap on the amount of land a single family can own, and those families with huge tracks of land should pay taxes at a percentage heavier than I pay from my salary, and that tax should be calculated based on the value of the land. It is because of the land-centric economy (where title deeds are second to cash as a transaction currency) that the landowners are stinking rich because of wealth they did not create, while the landless are dirt poor.

And then Kenyans are nervous about the commemorations of Saba Saba this coming Monday. The back and forth in the media between Raila, Cord, Kenyatta II, and Jubilee over the so-called national dialogue keeps reminding we the average Kenyans that we are just pawns in a power tussle that isn't ours. So we're counting down to Monday to see how the Cord coalition, nostalgic for revolutionary times but completely lacking in revolutionary ideology, will pull off this latest effort to convince Kenyans that it has correctly diagnosed the state of the nation.

These are weighty, life-and-death issues, and in no way do I mean to trivialize them. But there's another form of violence that is sweeping through the urban, techno-savvy youth - that of sexualized decadence.

It has always been there, as the Mavuno pastoral team reminded us a few months ago, to the self-righteous furor of many Nairobians. But over the last few weeks, it gained a notch when Larry Madowo interviewed a so-called socialite on The Trend, and now the latest discussion is the decadence witnessed during the Masaku sevens rugby tournament last weekend. The appearance of such characters on mainstream media and respectable blogs has meant that the violence of skin bleaching, or hypersexualizing African women, or flaunting wealth (real or imagined), or pictures of  binge drinking and frolicking in public are becoming common place and acceptable in a country where most young people are under-occupied. What does this mean?

It means that Kenyan youth from the so-called middle class, who have the intellectual tools and resources to think about this country and stop it from sinking to the dogs, have their minds distorted and preoccupied. That is worrying. And as Fanon warned us almost sixty years ago in his last book The Wretched of the earth, such distractions are a political problem. In his chapter on national consciousness, Fanon said that proper African leaders needed to be aware that African youth were more vulnerable to decadence than the youth in the West where a good proportion of that decadence comes from. The difference, his argument implies, is not in the amount of decadence in either continent, but in the availability of strong institutions and ideas to give a support against that decadence. And I paraphrase:

Normally, any given society maintains a balance between the mental and material level of its members, and the entertainment it provides. But in under-developed countries, young people are exposed to forms of leisure designed for the youth with more resources in capitalist countries, forms such as detective novels, gambling machines, sexy photographs, pornographic literature, films banned to those under sixteen, and above all alcohol. In the West, more youth are protected from the harmful past-times by their family circles, their education system and the relatively high standard of living of the working classes. But in an African country, where education and consciousness are uneven, where societies have been destabilized by the violent collide between contemporary trends and African traditions, the youth - who are naturally vulnerable and impressionable by virtue of their age - are more vulnerable to the assaults from Western culture. Their families, communities and institutions are very often unable to unite and have a coherent response to such attacks.

So while we may think that a woman showing off her behind, or her expensive shoes or her bleached skin is simply something to either laugh at, or be embarrassed about and move on, something more sinister is going on: the minds of our rich youth are in the clouds while the lives of the majority poor youth are crumbling around them. We have the proverbial Marie Antoinettes binge drinking on weekends, thinking about shoes, wigs and buttocks, while millions of their agemates around the country are wondering if they will be alive tomorrow, or are seriously considering being paid to blow up a building a meaningful job. And the media thinks they can be the neutral party and cover both sides equally. This form of mental and moral violence on the youth who have the resources and education to improve the country is such a tragedy. And sorry to say, NACADA boss John Mututho - bless him - is not helping much, because he thinks the problem can be solved with an administrative stick rather than with conscientious leadership and increased opportunities for our youth. 

I worry for our country Kenya.

A week or two ago, I was chosen to represent administrators at our university’s council. Initially, I hadn’t been thinking about the council but about how honored I was to continue the legacy of two colleagues whom I greatly admire for being rigorous scholars and leaders who take care of the “least of these.” 

I would have remained blissful if I didn’t start receiving congratulations.