It made me remember being struck by the fact that I would go to work, where I'd be told that the arts have "no market," then when I leave work I'd see adverts and bill boards for private schools which did not show kids in labs but kids doing performance and having fun. At GEMS Cambridge school on Magadi road, there's a huge wall with pictures of students in acting costume and make-up. So why would there be no market for the arts, if parents who can afford good schools are choosing where to take their kids by the presence of the arts and sports?
Muoki Mbuga has posted an excellent piece about the irony that while the political elite are funding their children's education in the arts, on political platforms they discourage wananchi from taking "unmarketable" subjects like history, languages and performing arts.
It made me remember being struck by the fact that I would go to work, where I'd be told that the arts have "no market," then when I leave work I'd see adverts and bill boards for private schools which did not show kids in labs but kids doing performance and having fun. At GEMS Cambridge school on Magadi road, there's a huge wall with pictures of students in acting costume and make-up. So why would there be no market for the arts, if parents who can afford good schools are choosing where to take their kids by the presence of the arts and sports?
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About a month ago, our students were privileged to have Jeff Koinange accept their invitation to talk about his life’s journey and his latest book Through my African eyes. From the discussions with students before the event, and from the questions they asked Jeff, I could tell that the students were most impressed by fact that Jeff had scored a perfect GPA in Kingsborough Community College in New York, and had gone on to join NYU. Besides marveling at Jeff’s scores and his Ivy League experience, the students’ engagement was also dominated by the persistent question, albeit rephrased differently, on how they can get jobs in the media once they were done with school. As a teacher who constantly invites guests to come speak to students so as to expand the students’ world view beyond examinations, I must admit that I was a little disappointed. I would have preferred that the students not focus on scores and instead discuss with Jeff what his book reveals about journalism, international politics (especially in Africa) and on education, and reflect on what they could learn from Jeff’s experience as world-class journalist. I wanted them to see that a broad-based education, exposure to international history and culture, and good writing skills (of course) open up a person to dialogue with the world. It was heartbreaking to hear people celebrating the withdrawal of charges against Kenya’s president for crimes against humanity at the ICC. The irony of their joy is simply mind-boggling. The people who are rejoicing are the same ones who are victims of extra-judicial killings. So even the luxury of having a government stall on providing evidence, or of affording Queen’s Counsel to defend them in court, or having parliamentarians escort them to court, doesn’t count, because many of them are tried and executed before they even get to court. For those who are lucky to be alive, they get hit with ridiculous sentences, like the three men in Thika who were convicted of robbery with violence and sentenced to hang for stealing pineapples worth Ksh 2,400 (about USD 27), pineapples which Del Monte recovered anyway. But the irony gets worse. These are the same people who suffered many losses in 2007 when politicians became tribal warlords and negotiated sharing power using the lives of their citizens. It doesn’t seem to bother them that over 1,300 people died, 500,000 others were displaced, thousands of women raped, and no one has been called to account. How do we reconcile that irony in our minds? Boniface Mwangi has done a great job of putting Uhuru Kenyatta’s latest remarks on security into perspective. The president’s remarks, made after a belated jetting back into the country after almost 30 Kenyans were executed in Mandera on Friday, include the trivializing of sexual abuse. In the clip, the president blames the rape of a three-year old by uncles (plural) on the child’s parents. What is more interesting is that the media houses did not consider that statement significant enough to put in their news clips. They just talked about the so-called overarching point that security is everybody’s responsibility. What is worse, the remarks were made at a university, and get this, at the launch of 16 Days of Activism against Gender Based Violence campaign. I’m so horrified. That example is so, so, so inappropriate. It is a desecration of humanity, innocence and intellect. And it is worrying. Ever since Kenyans found a way to rationalize that suspects of crimes against humanity were acceptable presidential candidates, I have been saying that something bigger has happened to us other than having a cool president: we have declared that Kenyan life isn’t valuable. As a minority of Kenyans argued before the elections, the issue here is not the innocence or guilt of Kenyatta II and Ruto; the issue is the value we place on Kenyan life. Crimes against humanity are a big deal, and the two should have sorted out those charges first, and when they’re acquitted, they can run for president. Because Kenyan lives matter enough. But tribe, property and power prevailed over humanity, reason and ethics, and the president’s well-oiled PR machine managed to get Kenyatta II into office.
And the gods have not left us alone for the choice we’ve made. Since those elections, we have seen senseless killing of Kenyans in markets, bus stops, mosques and churches. We have seen corruption at top levels of government remain unpunished. A woman was gang raped, her back broken, and the culprits got away with it. Now women are being stripped and beaten in public. Ethnic hatred is on the rise. And now the president expects us to digest an unpalatable, horrifying example of injustice – the rape of a toddler – as an illustration of the irresponsibility of ordinary citizens. That’s how devalued our lives are. But tragedy tells us that this is the price we’re paying as Kenyans for refusing to sacrifice politicians for the sake of the nation. In his great book Myth, Literature and the African world, Wole Soyinka explains that be it in African or Greek tragedy, the suffering of ordinary people, of the innocent, indicates that the society must right a wrong, must appease the gods. There is a folk tale recorded by Wanjiku Kabira and Karega Mutahi of a time when there was a drought, and the community was told by the rainmaker that the ancestors needed to be appeased, and the community chose the most beautiful girl of the village to make amends. And the girl sang as she went, and then the rains fell. Christians believe that the same thing happened at the cross. Christ, who was without shame, was crucified to set right the broken relationship between God and humanity. Tragedy is a basic human reality of living in this world. And tragedy dictates that, as Harvey Birenbaum said, that “we kill the king because he matters enough.” That is why, at a very basic, human, African, Christian, philosophical level, the president must bear responsibility for insecurity in the country. Every child raped by an uncle (yes, Mr. President), every woman stripped or raped, every ordinary Kenyan killed at the market, in a place of worship, travelling in a bus, is the president’s responsibility. And by choosing to be president, he loses the right to devolve that responsibility to the ordinary citizens. That’s the work of preachers, teachers and parents, and if the president wants that job, he needs to resign and join the ministry. Or join us in the classroom. But the president has no right to use the seal of the President as a moral pulpit while he is Commander-in-chief with his own security detail to protect him. And we will continue to hold the president responsible for the safety of every human being within Kenya’s borders. He signed up for this job. And if every human being is so valuable that God sacrificed Christ for their lives, every Kenyan life is valuable enough for the president to resign if he can’t run a coherent security system. And valuable enough for him to apologize for those remarks blaming a three-year old rape victim for having reckless parents. The president must receive the blame, and be sacrificed if need be, because he matters enough. And because Kenyan lives are so, so, so worth it.
The reports in the local press about the recently concluded US-Africa business summit reminded me of some time back, between 2000 and the 2002 general elections, when I was a student in the US. Like every homesick Kenyan, I was checking the local newspapers online when I read about this great visit of President Moi to the United States, where he was warmly received at the White House for bilateral talks and hosted at a black-tie dinner by the Kenyan community abroad.
The story shouldn’t have struck me as odd, given that I had grown up watching Yaliyotokea on Monday evenings when VoK (Voice of Kenya) would bring documentaries of the president’s local or international trips. But it did, because this time, I knew too well that President Moi's visit was not in the American papers or the news. In the US, you wouldn’t tell there was a foreign head of state or government in the country unless the person was from one of the G8 countries or from the hotspots like Israel or Afghanistan. And as it so happened, I had just read an article by an American journalist that marveled at how African presidents seem to jump at a chance for two seconds of the US president’s time. Unfortunately, I cannot remember who wrote it, but one thing I remember reading was that African presidents are treated badly when they visit the US. Apparently, one can find them sitting in the corridors of the White House, waiting for a seven or another odd minute window in the US president’s busy schedule when they could be allowed to talk to him briefly between meetings. And then it all came together. 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. 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. |
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