What does faith have to do with identity? Nothing. This is what I said when I was invited to give a keynote lecture on September 18th 2025, at a workshop the Center for Interfaith Studies in Africa at the Hekima University College in Nairobi. The theme of the workshop was “Law, Education and Interfaith Relations in Kenya.”

I will begin my reflections with this question: what does faith have to do with identity? My answer today, although I might change my mind later on, is going to be provocative. I think faith has nothing to do with identity. In my presentation, I argue that if we are truly people of faith, the question of identity should not be anywhere near our faith. And I will anchor my argument on the stories of healing in the gospels.

​When I received the invitation to give this lecture, the first story I thought of was that of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well, narrated in John 4. 

The passage reveals an extended discussion of identity, in the worldly sense of identity as we know it today. We know identity as exclusion, boundaries and conflict, rather than as unity, love and sharing. But remember the political regime of the time of Jesus was the Roman empire, which the British empire mimicked when they came here in the late 1800s, and then left another mimicry called independence. We are therefore living under a mimicry of the same Roman empire under which Jesus lived. 

The political logic that runs the Euro-American global empire, now in decline, was revived in Europe in the 17th century from the ruins of the Roman empire in a process that was baptized a Renaissance. As far as I'm concerned, there was no renaissance. It was a festival of exploring and excavating graves, just the way the colonialists did when they came to Africa in the early 1900s, and still do, in the name of verifying whether we were “civilized.” The Roman empire died in 476 of the Common Era, but when the wealthy of Europe, like the Medici family, wanted to impress the rest of Italy and Europe, they hired artists and scientists to excavate the graves and monuments of the dead empire and seek inspiration for something new. They essentially looked for the living among the dead. So ideas such as the state, senate, law, and even the management of people of multiple cultural backgrounds, were borrowed from the ruins of Rome.  

Rome operated as a centralized government with a multicultural mix of people from many areas of its peripheral provinces of the empire. Not all people of the empire were considered Romans or citizens. Historians mark the reign of Augustus as the point at which citizenship transformed from being an active one about rights and duties, to a passive one about legal status and honor. Under Augustus, the Latin language gained more prominence as a marker of “Romanness,” and the empire continued to make a distinction between those who were born in Rome and those who were not. Later on, as Rome began to decline, it invited the Barbarians, whom they considered the Germanic peoples to be, to fight for the Roman empire but simultaneously not access the rights of citizens of Rome.

“Barbarians” received the name from the Romans who considered outsiders to the empire, by reference to the fact that their languages were incomprehensible to the Romans. While western epistemology has since clarified that the Germanic, Slavic, Croat, Turkish and other Europeans were those to whom the Romans attached the tag “Barbarian,” it has not done equal favor to North Africa, where “Berbers” and “Arabs” are still ethnically tied to the imperial term. Meanwhile, the expression “barbarians at the gate” became a popular one to capture the fear of the insiders that their city was facing imminent collapse at the hands of immigrants.

Back to John 4. As we see in his conversation with the Samaritan woman, Jesus, who had lived in that same Roman empire, rejected this imperial view of identity, where discrimination is unspoken yet real when it comes to human interactions. When he asks for water, he's speaking as a human being to another. But what does the Samaritan woman say? To paraphrase her, she says: “According to my ethnicity, I'm not worthy to give you water.” Then Jesus replies, “but the water I'm providing is of eternal life, meaning that even when I ask you for literal water, I reject this imperial idea of human hierarchy.”

Then Jesus tests her with another identity, which is that of gender. He asks her for a husband, and then reveals that he knows she has had several, and she is living with a man who is not her husband. According to today’s world, the Samaritan would be a failed woman because no man wants her. But in revealing that he knows her marital status, Jesus is saying, in so many words: “I spoke to you as a human being, rejecting the socially accepted category of seeing you by gender or as the wife of a man.” 

In between the conversation, Jesus reveals the principle of his engagement. In verse 23 and 24, Jesus announces a new way of approaching humanity that rejects the imperial categories that dominate his time: 

​Spirit and truth. There's no identity there.

Yet another story of a Samaritan comes with the world famous parable of the Good Samaritan. The parable begins with the trick question about what one must do to inherit eternal life. In the end, the question becomes “and who is my neighbor?” And Jesus, once again, tells the story of the insiders - a priest and a Levite - who walk past an injured man. The Samaritan, whose identity excluded him, is the one who showed mercy to the injured man. You could read this story as saying that we can get help from the most unexpected quarters, but I see it differently. The story shows that humanity is larger than identity. What matters is that we’re able to see the humanity in someone else, like the Good Samaritan did, not see laws or religion, like the priest and the Levite.

I think I’ve made the point that what matters is human values - love, mercy, and most of all, we worship of God in spirit and in truth. Because God is spirit and truth. 

Thinking of the Samaritan stories made me notice that in many of the other stories of the gospels, Jesus heals those who have faith, even when many of those who seek his intervention fear that they are the wrong identity.

In Luke 7, the Roman officer, who should be looking down on a colonized subject, tells Jesus that the roles are reversed: he is not worthy of Jesus coming under his roof. In the passage, we read his words to Jesus:

​Again, the issue here is faith, not identity. This is a civil servant of the colonial government, whose colleagues would be crucifying Jesus later on. Personally, with my resentment of the colonial civil service of Kenya, and how we suffer under their harassment and corruption, I would rather Jesus didn't heal the Centurion’s servant. Moreover, we do not know if the Centurion would have sought such healing if the sick people was a Roman citizen.

But the Jesus understands that the relationship he is promoting knows no government. Just faith. And Jesus is amazed by the level of faith.

Let's try another story. This is in Mark 9, of a loving father who had pursued healing for his demon-possessed son for years. The story begins with a commotion caused by the fact that the disciples are not able to heal the young man. Let’s read from verse 21:

​I love this story because many times I go to God with the prayer “help my unbelief,” because like the young man’s father, I’ve seen so much suffering and my faith is shaken. I don’t pretend my faith is strong. Often, when I am this vulnerable, I am rebuked for not trusting in the omnipotence of God. Yet I believe that admission of unbelief is, paradoxically, the deepest level of faith. It shows a deep confidence that with Jesus, that it is safe to be honest about being weak. This is in contrast to our current dispensation of motivational speaking bravado, where social obstacles are denied in the name of “positive thinking.” 

We see another story in Luke 5, where some men who open the roof to a crowded room to let in their paralyzed friend, for Jesus to heal. The Bible tells us that Jesus was moved to act “when he saw their faith.” 

In Luke 8, the story of the woman whose period had lasted for 12 years, we are dealing with someone excluded not on ethnicity, but on the double exclusion of gender, and the fact that under Jewish law, her constant menstruation made her unclean. In this case, when the woman identifies herself, Jesus says to her “your faith has made you well.”

In each case, Jesus doesn't ask the people whom he heals where they come from. He is moved by faith in God and love of the friends and relatives seeking healing on behalf of the patients. No matter their background, he affirms that what unites them is faith. And his healing is not just physical; it is also social and philosophical. He is breaking the chains, pun intended, that tie their social status to their imperial hierarchy of identity. 

Jesus came to break boundaries so that we worship God in spirit and in truth, so that we are redeemed from the bondage of identity that freezes us in our bodily vessels. Yet here we are, people of faith, struggling to navigate identity. How did this happen?

Colonialism.

Europeans left their lands already having decided that humanity was split into two: the civilized and the barbarians. We must speak some uncomfortable truth here, which is about the document that Pope Francis repudiated, that is the doctrine of discovery. The doctrine of discovery dispossessed indigenous peoples and was still cited in legal judgements as late as 2005.

Europe codified in its documents that non-civilized necessarily meant non-European. There is an element of dishonesty here in the use of words, because the word “civilization,” should ideally refer to a human endeavor, but it was instead used to impose a boundary and distinguish people rather than recognize their common humanity. In fact, the Martinican poet Aime Cesaire clarified in very powerful words that the problem with Europeans travelling to other continents was not that they were foreigners. It was that Europeans were hosted as equals in the lands they arrived, but instead responded to their hosts with violence. The problem was not contact. It was a lack of mutual, human interaction. I quote Cesaire:

The goal of this civilization, from the European sense, was not to affirm common humanity. It was to fragment, create division and conflict. It is to do the opposite of what Jesus did in the stories I have cited, which was to look for the common denominator that united all the people, which is faith, spirit and truth.

If identity is not central to our humanity and our faith, how did it become so important, and why is it so divisive? Why does identity make people feel ashamed, rather than confident? Hostile, rather than friendly? 

The answer to that question lies in understanding the nature of knowledge, and what the state does to knowledge and identity. The state creates identity based on a narrow, truncated view of knowledge, in contrast to the knowledge on which faith is based. As James C Scott says, the state is interested in simplifying human beings to make them uncomplicated and easy to read. That is because the state’s only interest in people is three things: taxing the people; using the people for labor and war; and from ensuring that the people do not rebel. This means that the state’s only interest in human beings is 
​

1. how much tax can you pay? 
2. when are you going to work or fight for the state? And 
3. are you still going to comply with the state? 

The state, therefore, imposes knowledge that is narrow and restricted, and that makes people know so little, and that makes people base extraordinarily heavy decisions on so little knowledge. And the Kenya government announced its hostility to knowledge when it openly told Kenyans that Competency Based Education is all skills and no knowledge. It was a small statement that escaped the attention of most Kenyans, because the media has misled Kenyans to believe that knowledge, theory, cramming and examinations all mean the same thing. We were openly told that all we were good for was conscription as labor and war. 

And the church, the promoters of faith, faith that is supposed to see people beyond their social circumstances and in their complexity, had only one reply: make morality control the people more. They simply continued to play same role of the missionaries in the colonial era, which was to police Africans through morality, like the Pharisees in John 9 who were bothering the man who had been born blind after Jesus healed him. For the Pharisees in the story, it was more important to protect old beliefs than to welcome this new reality of a man who was born blind and could now see. 

And this attitude has implications for education. It means that the state has little interest in Kenyans being knowledgeable despite knowledge evolving and despite the people performing political “democracy.” 

Take for example, the vote. Millions of Kenyans put a tick on a small piece of paper, to make a huge decision about their governance for the following 5 years. But how much do Kenyans know when they are making that decision? So little. The media hardly offers any enlightening conversation. The campaigns are full of stupidity. I encourage you to read the article by Dan Ojwang on the post-election violence of 2007-2008. So many lies were told, not questioned by people with the education to do so, and not noticed by the Kenyan public because of the war on knowledge, and especially on history and memory.  

Right now, our children are going to school under a system which Ministry of Education officials declared was good because it had no knowledge; only skills. And our president declared that there is no need to study history because learning when Vasco da Gama landed in Malindi cannot fix a sewer or a tap.

In such an environment, anti-intellectualism narrows people to their geography and parentage of birth. The state is basically saying that it does not need to know much about an individual, as long as that individual is paying taxes and not challenging the state. The state plasters this truncated identity on a card, and even decides from that kipande how one will vote, as if the person doesn’t have a brain. 

Joyce Nyairo recounts her experience of trying to get the correct details of her birthplace on her ID card. Government officials kept getting the details wrong because of assumptions about her gender and ethnicity. She remarks that at the ID office, the government officials were engaged in banter about the identity of married women, of which the most alarming aspect “was the ease with which the records entered on the ID were connected to the vote - as if the mere act of transferring one’s district guaranteed a transfer of one’s political affiliations.” 

What is really at stake here is intellectual rigidity and laziness. We have just decided not to know people beyond what we see and assume. Not too long ago, Kenyans liked to say “your name explains everything,” which was another way of saying “you have no brain, no life, no ideas, no history, nothing, except what your ID card says.” Dr. Nyairo calls it the “anthropology of fixed identities” where people are assigned to static characteristics and geographies defined not even by us, but by poorly informed Western researchers who were often missionaries or explorers. “And so, Nyairo says, “right from that colonial moment, the question of tribe was sealed in stasis. Once a tribe was named and described there could be no suggestion of deviations, change or revision.”

In other words, if we must keep being told that there are parts of our lives that we must keep leaving out for us to be considered citizens, then we essentially do not belong. And so, we’re back to the Roman empire, where the people who were considered non-Romans were called “barbarians.” 

Faith, by contrast, requires a breadth of knowledge. As we see in the stories in the gospels, faith entails knowledge of people’s personal circumstances, empathy with their situation, and most of all, acknowledgement of one’s humanity that transcends one's place of birth or social circumstances, and seeing them from their humanity, or from their status as children of God who can worship in spirit and in truth. And knowledge sits at the heart of faith, because one cannot have faith without knowledge. 

This means that the church must abandon its complacency with the truncated, narrow conception of knowledge and education where Kenyans are reduced to what they can do for institutions, be it the state, business or the church. Faith calls us to see people in their totality, independent of the institutional benefits, whether they are thirsty, sick or powerful, as members of this large community that worships God in spirit and in truth. That is why faith contradicts identity as defined by the state. 

So what we need to be talking about is not identity. It's to what we belong. With the state as it is currently constructed, we will always be barbarians outside the gate. And we will never belong, because the state does not see us as human beings. And as we know from the history of the Roman empire, Rome fell because it did not want the Barbarians to belong and yet, at the same time, it wanted to use the Barbarians to maintain the empire. That contradiction was not sustainable in Rome, nor is it in Africa. And we have proof from how much pain and suffering we have witnessed on the African continent for the last five centuries. Our labor and our resources have been used by places to which we are not allowed to be full, human beings. We have fought and killed each other for the same reason since our mimicry of empire otherwise called “independence.”

But Rome fell, and when the state falls in Africa, because it eventually will, we should have taught our children not to seek a remedy in excavating graves of the past, but to build a new political logic where people worship in spirit and in truth.

It's time we faced reality and dumped identity as our primary preoccupation. But to do so, we need knowledge that empowers the people to accommodate knowledge of others beyond where and to whom they were born. Without that knowledge, people cannot have faith, and cannot worship God in spirit and in truth. And if we cannot worship God in spirit and in truth, we are going to fight over boundaries, identities and customs. 

However, our people are starved of knowledge because knowledge is being crushed by the state. Our people need philosophy, they need access to the metaphysical, and since I'm in a Catholic institution, we can also talk about philosophy as an academic subject being dominated by the church and not taught in our schools. Teaching philosophy is one way for us to reduce our conflict over identity.

The challenge facing the people of faith is therefore to abandon its alliance with the state in state’s delusions that it must keep people ignorant to govern them. There is no way to avoid faith leading to conflict without faith being embedded in knowledge. To avoid conflict over faith and identity, we must grow in knowledge and in so doing, grow in spirit and truth. That is the new political imagination that Jesus gave to counter that of faith and identity as the basis of the imperialism, terrorism and settler colonialism promoted by the state.

Eberle, Lisa Pilar. “Making Roman Subjects: Citizenship and Empire before and after Augustus.” TAPA 147, no. 2 (2017): 321–70.
James, Edward. Europe’s Barbarians AD 200-600. Routledge, 2014.
Nyairo, Joyce. Kenya@50: Trends, Identities and the Politics of Belonging. Contact Zones, 2015.
Ojwang, Dan. "Kenyan intellectuals and the political realm Responsibilities and complicities." Africa insight 39.1 (2009): 22-38.
Owuor, Yvonne A. “Reading our ruins: Postcolonial stories that float from afar.” The Elephant. https://www.theelephant.info/analysis/2018/03/22/reading-our-ruins-post-colonial-stories-that-float-from-afar/ 
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. 

Dear Dr. Nyairo

Ten years ago, you telephoned informing me that you were launching a book entitled Kenya@50: Trends, Identities and the Politics of Belonging. The book was interrogating Kenya after 50 years of the state project called independence. You requested me to read the book and be a panelist at the book launch. You were so committed to me participating, that you gave me a photocopy of the entire manuscript pending the arrival of the printed copies. In these days of copyright infringement, that was a great risk you took on me. 
​
I did not deserve it.

I did not deserve it because one, for a person of your great intellect and wisdom, I am unworthy to even untie your sandals. I should have been the one sitting at your feet, listening to you, but here you were, asking me to comment on such a monumental book that takes stock of Kenya over half a century of independence.

The second reason for which I was undeserving was worse. I did not understand what moment we were in, and worst, what your book was about. I had not even noticed that the book was marking 50 years of independence, because I was so absorbed in my own career struggles to protect from collapse the department I headed, which hosted our language and music programs.

I am now torn between hoping there was a video recording of the book launch and hoping there was none. I tend towards the latter, because I am embarrassed to even try to recall what I might have said during the launch event, which, if I remember well, was held at the Louis Leakey Auditorium at the National Museums of Kenya. I remember listening to your talk at the time, and being amazed at how you wove the radio airplay and TV programs of the entire period into your interrogation of what story Kenyans were telling about themselves, either individually or collectively. 

The problem is that I did not understand the important part. The story part. I just thought your book was an illustration of how literary studies can be interesting and “relevant to the market” because that’s the mindset I was in at the time. But you were doing something deeper. You were asking Kenyans: do you know yourselves? Do you know what are you saying about yourselves through your songs, your dances, your clothes, your experiences, your relationships, your thinking, your worships? And what truths do your stories reveal about Kenya as a people, rather than as a colonial state masquerading as independent? 

I am also embarrassed to say that I did not really pay attention to your book after the launch. I meant to later read it to the end, out of some academic snobbery of being “up to date” with the latest research, but I never got round to it. A few months ago, the first PhD student allowed to be supervised by me began his dissertation on radio airplay in Kenya, and I insisted that he could not authoritatively discuss the subject without reading Kenya@50. And because we could not find copies, I reached out to you. 

But even then, I still did not read your book for me, to know for myself, to know myself, until now. Ten years later. I’m embarrassed to even admit it.

However, I have a good defense. Or is it an excuse.

I did not know my own story myself, either.

The only reason I understand your book now, or at least in the way that I do today, is because I was tested by fire and burned through the Competency Based Curriculum. It is not in the personal way that one would think, that I was upset that a curriculum was implemented that goes against every fiber in my bones. The process of my publicly challenging CBC was a bruising wakeup call about the ugliness of Kenya. It’s that story – the story you ask about in your book.

As I narrate in my chapter “Education without consciousness” in an upcoming edited volume entitled The Education Alibi, my experience being a public voice against CBC was baptism by fire. I entered the public arena completely naïve. I intended to simply ask questions about the curriculum for the sake of information, because, of course, I will have to implement it at some point. But more than that, I actually imagined that Kenyan academics, especially those in the education schools that exist in almost every Kenyan university, would be excited to finally participate in such an important discussion about how we educate our children.

How wrong I was.  

The Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development basically stalled on the questions. The manager of its Twitter (X) refused to be forthcoming with the information I requested. At every mainstream media discussion I attended, I kept asking: where is the information? All we had was a curriculum framework about 40 pages, which was more of an uninformative internal government report than a document announcing commitment to the education of Kenya’s children.  Imagine, we changed a whole education system based on that scanty framework. 

But I got no answers. In the early days when the government officials still had the audacity to be on the same panel with me on mainstream media, they accused me of not respecting the expertise of the curriculum drafters and of attacking government officials in their personal capacity. 

Dr. Nyairo, I teach academic writing and about fallacies, and here were educators, who I thought would know fallacies better than me, throwing any fallacy that could stick at me. But it still didn’t click.

And it gets worse. There was one discussion on KTN where a government official even said that the reports supporting the system change had not yet gone through the necessary approvals, and that is why they were not available to the public. At that time, we were weeks into the implementation of the new system! How was such a major lack of documentation even possible?

And the media. The media. The media. I am embarrassed to say that I actually believed their hype about informing the public and keeping the government accountable. Yet innocent statements like that – that necessary documents were not available – seemed not to strike them as odd. Now that I’ve read your book, I’m sad to admit that cartoon of Gaddo of May 2013 was quite on point: the anchors had no clue what they were reporting, what they were asking. What they were really doing was performing an interrogation of CBC than actually questioning it.

But what was surprising, and still remains surprising, was the silence of the academic community. One unbelievable incident that is etched in my mind, happened in 2019. The previous night, I had been on Citizen TV debating CBC with the CEO of KICD, and a representative of the parents and of the NGO sector, in a conversation hosted by Trevor Ombija. It was a grueling night. I was talking to the wind, past the anchors and the audience and the panelists. The panelists, especially, were shockingly naïve about major historical landmarks and ideologies of the Kenya school system. I went home feeling extremely deflated. How was it that I, with no claims of scholarly expertise in education, could not find an education scholar able to challenge what I was saying? Why was I not being heard?

The very next morning, I bumped into a senior faculty of education. As I greeted him, I braced for a comment on the show and how the debate went. After all, education was his field of study. Do you know, Dr. Nyairo, that the person was not simply unaware of the show, but had no clue there was even a debate on CBC in the first place!

And the colleague proceeded to give me a standing lecture for 10 minutes on how great the new curriculum was! I felt like I was living in what I hear people call the Twilight Zone.

Dr. Nyairo, to this day, no university forum has ever been held to debate me on the CBE, something which I requested uncountable times. In 2022, soon after the inauguration of the current disastrous government, some lecturers dared to call me for a debate on CBC, since the Kenya Kwanza administration had promised to review it. By now, I had known better. So I smilingly asked: are you sure your colleagues can handle me? I was told yes, in fact, it was the university faculty who had requested we invite you. I said fine, I’ll be there. But I was prepared for any eventuality. 

And true to form, I received a call a few days to the event informing me that the event had been cancelled. And the reason would soon be obvious: even though the Kenya Kwanza government had set up a Working Party to query the curriculum, the new, tactless Deputy President announced at the launch of the review that CBC was going nowhere.

You might be wondering where this story is going, and what it has to do with your book. 

My experience with trying to discuss CBC is the reason why I now understand your book. Your book makes a very interesting point: there are so many gaps in the stories Kenyans tell of themselves, and the gaps are “crippling.” From government commissions, to autobiographies of Kenyans defining themselves as liberators or successful entrepreneurs, there is hardly any information to tell us about ourselves, what we do or the world we live in. We carry out no analysis of our lives and literally know nothing about the world. We have an amazing disdain for analytical and philosophical levels of knowledge even about ourselves. We have such “careless disregard for memory or remembrance” in both our private and public lives. Even more shocking, as you note, is that “we willfully destroy records, purge long-serving employees with all their skills and knowledge, and we wash over experience, all in the name of modernizing and building new.” 

And that’s exactly what happened to me. Just when I was at the cusp of using decades of my experience in the school to say that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we think about work, knowledge and education in Kenya, all what I know was wiped out of the system. Because we have a new “modern” school system, there are no more conversations to have about our school system till today. The implementation of CBC was actually an act of violence. They wiped out decades of independence-era schooling as easily as simply pressing delete.

Now I cannot teach my students anything I know because my knowledge has been declared irrelevant. In fact, now, CBC has now given us a travesty: it has told us that in this brand new system, “learners are self-directed” and we the teachers have to wait for their indication on what to teach. We have gone beyond wiping out memory from our society. We have now attacked adulthood itself. We are not being allowed to pass on the little we have been allowed to know to our own children.

Meanwhile, the colonial schooling philosophy that we are supposedly left behind at independence is still intact in the school system. With CBC, we are not saying what you are saying, which is that Kenyans do not know enough. We are now saying Kenyans know too much, especially for black people. That is why there is no conversation about the racist, disastrous, vocational training mindset that was invented in the United States in the 1870s and brought to Kenya in 1924 by the Phelps Stokes Commission. And, my dear sister, last year, the Ministry of Education held celebrations of this racist education policy! What kind of country makes this absurdity possible?

That is the point you make in the book. You discuss this stock and barrel success that Kenyans like to publish: stories of village-to-school-to-wealth, or village-to-school-to-liberator, and in between those themes so little information about life emerges. The war on information especially during the Moi government, was followed by a harebrained idea that the government can use the police and laws to fight against the rumors that inevitably arise from the same lack of information. It’s absolute insanity!

I cannot complete this letter without thanking you, profusely, from the bottom of my heart, for your attack on that suffocating narrative of ethnicity. My God. Ethnicity is the other “delete” button of the Kenyan memory. Anything you do, anything you accomplish, disappears into a small card that insists on ensuring that your place of birth corresponds with the geographical region which colonial authorities assigned to your ethnic group. It does not matter who birthed you, where you were birthed, and what languages you speak or don’t. Your whole essence is stuck to a damn card. And you make this powerful declaration that Kenyans constantly miss: the problem with tribalism isn’t the emotions or the discrimination. It’s the problem of fixed identities. Let me quote you directly: “And so, right from that colonial moment, the question of tribe is sealed in stasis. Once a tribe was named and described, there could be no suggestion of deviations, change or revision.”

And thank you for attacking the grammar of return to African cultures for which our recently departed ancestor Ngugi wa Thiong’o became famous. I’m telling you Dr. Nyairo, that thing has been suffocating! It has been used to avoid material realities and guilt-trip people for not being African enough. 

Of course, I am not placing the responsibility for that hegemony on Ngugi wa Thiong’o. The academy is largely responsible for insulating that narrative from interrogation, and training millions of Kenyans to think that every material problem can be explained by the phrase “we are ashamed of our African roots.” Right now, my comrade in the struggle, Mordecai Ogada, is narrating about communities handing over the land of their children to foreigners for a song and demanding the compliance of their grandchildren in the name African respect for elders. There are Kenyan academic scholars who argued that the racist education philosophy of vocational training is a return to our indigenous knowledges!

All this to say that I understand your book now, ten years after publication, because that is what Kenya does to us. It delays our knowledge. It constantly gaslights us, denies us information, performs violence against us, to ensure that we are unable to process our “deeply personal experiences,” and in the end, we know nothing beyond our identities. The “grammar of the state,” you powerfully say, “was not coined so as to explain or elucidate anything. It was crafted to achieve the very opposite: to obfuscate, to cloud, to hide and sometimes to deceive.” With our range of knowledge so restricted, it is no wonder that you conclude that the state “willfully holds the public hostage and aborts their moments of truth and freedom.”
​
I burst out laughing when read these observations about the “ultra-Kenyan form of criticism”:

Touché! 

So, great sister, my apologies that  I am here ten years later. But I was not ready for your book. And I was not ready for many others calling to question the stories we tell about ourselves. When Yvonne Owuor writes about our demons and ghosts that need exorcism, or when Rasna Warah questioned the developmentist narrative, or when Bantu Mwaura questioned why developmentalism was hanging around the arts, or when Binyavanga Wainaina railed against the anti-creativity crap, or when Grace Musila wrote about rumors, or when Parselelo Kantai wrote about the “Redykulass Generation,” I did not get it. I was in the heart of the gaslighting machine itself, the school system, and only emerged out of it with the introduction of CBC. Each of you, and a long list of others since, have challenged us to do what Yvonne Owuor calls an autopsy, which is more than a search for the cause of our decaying soul. As she puts it, 

​That is the honesty you call for. You challenge the Generations Y and Z, (yes, and this was 2015), to “fashion new dreams… their own icons and new heroes.” To do so, you say, they "​​should walk into this enterprise knowing that the focus should be on ideas and actions, not on the individuals who articulate them. It is time to wake up from idle dreams. In reality, there are no heroes; but there are heroic acts."

​I need to bring this long letter to a close. Let me end by saying that at during the panel session at the book launch, there was one question that an audience member addressed specifically to me. The member asked: “why do we not have analyses like Dr. Nyairo’s happening in our university classrooms and coming out of the university?” I must have ranted something about neoliberalism and the market ideology destroying the arts. Of course now I know better. But I hope there’s no recording to verify.

Thank you for your patience reading this letter 10 years late. 
Wandia

by Wandia Njoya and Mordecai Ogada

On the first anniversary of the protests against the Finance Bill and the storming of Parliament, we cannot help being struck by the reality that Kenya was at this same point it was 30 years ago.

​Thirty years ago, we who were in our twenties were facing the same circumstances. The elites had become wealthy from doing business with the government, which they gave themselves the license to do through the Ndegwa report of 1971. They had rigidly stifled dissent, exiled and persecuted people of faith and ideas, massacred whole communities, and in the 90s, were stifling the voices of an emerging generation whose economic prospects were being crushed by SAPs from IMF and World Bank, and who were being broken by an AIDS pandemic with no treatment at the time.

In this decade, young Kenyans are facing similar circumstances. The economy is completely hostile to production of any sort, and crushes innovation that emerges from the people, after which the state implements a bastardized version of that creativity through “policy” or “startups.” This behavior is inevitable in a country governed by a wealthy elite that has no innovation or achievement to its name, and that uses police violence to cover up its shame and emptiness. Meanwhile, Kenyans suffer from the ripple effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, and of Structural Adjustment Programs from the IMF and World Bank, in the name of paying back debts whose borrowing Kenyans had actively campaigned against. 

When one generation faces the very same dynamics that their parents faced 30 years ago, and is facing a deaf government like their parents did 30 years ago, and is paying loans to the same sharks which destroyed its economy 30 years ago, it is no longer enough to speak the usual language of listening to the youth and seeking dialogue. We’ve been here before, calling for police restraint, and for respect of the judiciary and human rights. Clearly, those calls have not worked. Therefore, the next question we must ask is “why are we still here after 30 years?” 

​We are here because, as Patrick Gathara once said, Kenya has “tried everything except reform the 'systematic patterns of thought' that generated the repressive and kleptocratic regimes of the last five decades, patterns of thought that find their genesis in the attitudes and divisions of the half century of colonial rule that preceded them..” For the last three decades, a generation that fought for, and finally won a people-initiated constitution, has said that the problems of Kenya go beyond respect for the rule of law and for the three arms of the state. There are underlying beliefs, economic practices and structural issues that are blocking Kenya from leaving its colonial legacy behind once and for all. 

That generation, relying on the legacy of its elders, examined everything from the way we built our roads, to the way we managed our environment, the way we produced popular culture, the way we educated our children, the way we grew our food and stored our seeds, the way we managed our water, and even the way we expressed our religious faith. But at every front, we came up with the same verdict: our practices and institutions are solidly colonial. However, the political elite would not use the knowledge from us, people who were trained by the resources of Kenya. Instead, the government subjected us to the humiliation of watching experts from the West, many times less educated, knowledgeable and experienced than us, having access to government offices, crafting government policy, and supervising us in patronizing workshops and public participation meetings, in the name of “international standards” and a plethora of harebrained “startups.”

In other words, we are where we are, with our youth having no job prospects and no meaningful social life, shouting at a tone deaf government, because Kenyan institutions have remained solidly colonial and have stagnated, blocking Kenyans from building their own country. 

We therefore have to say more than the insipid calls of the Western embassies on the state to respect human rights and to embrace dialogue with the youth. We are taking the next step from where our parents left off 30 years ago, and questioning the international actors responsible for Kenya’s stagnation. Just like colonialism was not a local effort, the maintenance of the colonial structure 60 years after independence cannot be said to be exclusively local. 

It is no longer sufficient to draw balance sheets and calculations to figure out how the international loan sharks, IMF and World Bank, have kept us in this mess. Especially not after the revelations about USAID under the Trump administration confirmed what we had always known: there are deliberate efforts to sabotage African economies. We knew it from the days when Nkrumah wrote about neo-colonialism, or when we read about John Perkins’s experience as an “economic hitman,” or from the work of several political economists like Dambisa Moyo, Thandika Mkandawire, François Xavier-Verschave and Michael Hudson. But now we got the confirmation from the heart of Washington itself. Africa’s plight is not of its doing alone.

​Because of these international actors, we cannot help but tie the economic mess in Kenya to what is happening elsewhere on the continent, from Somalia to Sudan to Congo to Nigeria. It cannot be a coincidence that Kenyans are experiencing the same shadowy convulsions of their economies as other African countries, accompanied by a concerted effort to control what Africans know and the conversations which Africans have. It is not lost on us that Nairobi is the hub for international media houses in the region, and that foreign embassies, donor organizations and corporations have made a concerted effort to manage our journalists and our education systems. Meanwhile, our home grown media like African Stream and journalists like David Hundeyin are singled out for shut down and smear campaigns.

We have no option but to conclude that this 30-year cycle of social implosion is deliberately instigated by the institutions masquerading as financial. What is really happening is that Africa – and Kenya in this case – is being reset the way it was 30 years ago. Any innovations, possibilities of industrialization, from a youthful generation which the global oligarchs can’t stop yapping about, are being smashed by these so called economic reforms. This maneuvering forces the youth to fight their way into the economy, and those who manage to scrape by are forced to begin from ground zero, as the West singles out a few young Africans to train to become the next predatory African elite. We will recall that the political career of Ruto was incubated in the same way, when he was involved in the Youth for KANU 1992 whose goal was to crush dissent against Moi.

These structural adjustment programs are not simply about finance. They are a social reset. Every 30 years, imperialism destroys whatever little that African countries have managed to scrape through with blood, sweat and tears, so that the next generation of youth start from ground zero as if the previous generation did nothing. In this way, imperialism ensures that the accumulated knowledge of the generation that was on the streets 30 years ago is severed from the generation on the streets now. This rupture is made complete by the media that is runs a concerted campaign telling the same youth that their salvation lies in artificial intelligence instead of knowledge.

And the Kenyan elite, in their hubris, pursue the same myopia by increasing bureaucracy and taxes to ensure that anyone who wants to innovate, who wants to join a profession, who wants to receive an education, has to wade through a higher mountain of paperwork and digital apps. In every sector, the Kenyan state tells Kenyans that no one can grow, work or produce without first kissing the ring of politicians, bureaucrats and security officers. The government would rather shut down businesses than give them a grace period to pay taxes (or bribes for that matter). 

The poisoned chalice with which we are serving this the pacifier is referred to as “communication”. It has permeated every sector of our society and become our favorite substitute for justice. When our youth smell the putrefaction of our society, we suddenly have a wave of clergy, politicians and ‘elders’ lining up to “talk” to them instead of doing right by them. When parents start sensing that they are getting short shrift from the failed education system, schools convene parents’ meetings and ‘talk’ to them about their shortcomings as parents and deflect their attention from the injustices they and their progeny face. It is even entrenched in our 2010 constitution as “public participation”, poisoning policy processes and normalizing the imposition of all manner of injustice, as long as it has been through ‘public participation’. 

Philosophically the ‘public participation’ is abusive, because it presumes consent. Is there any member of the public for instance, who approves of a punitive tax? Or an eviction of a community to make room for a random government project? Participation is not discourse, and should never be construed as such in a civilized society. Even with our troubles now, an innocent person gets killed in police cells, the top politicians immediately call his father to “talk” rather than prevent the extrajudicial killings. When the youth plan a protest in memory of their lost colleagues, what does the interior ministry do? They declare their preparedness to meet and “talk” with the affected families. We have the dubious distinction of being one of the only countries on earth to turn a basic function of human civilization- communication into a lethal toxin and an ingredient of violence.

This is the global landscape that young Kenyans, with nothing but courage and conviction, are confronting. Their calls for Ruto to resign go beyond the man to attacking the root of an entire political and bureaucratic elite who just don’t get it. Kenyan elites do not see any problem with our economy; they consider the people as the problem which is bedeviling the economy. And the elites genuinely believe that eating cake, or digitizing cake, is the solution to Kenyans having no bread to eat. 

Africa must realize that the source of our destabilization is one: a global system that keeps resetting our economies and putting in place an incoherent, rigid elite that cannot lead their countries forward, but will stay in power until they progressively shrivel in the public eye, or until the next generation of youth forces them out. These kinds of inter-generational transitions are violent and humiliating for the entire societies. They distort the dignity of knowledge, aging and wisdom. They make the older generations entrenched in power mimic the youth and as they atrophy. In the process, older elites make our youth disparage knowledge, wisdom and age, only for them to later on become the monsters they once despised. 

It is said that a civilization is where one generation plants trees under whose shade it will never sit. But in Africa, each generation plants trees, and just when the trees are about to become the shade under which the next generation sits, structural adjustment cuts down the trees, and then tells the next generation to plant more trees and sit in the hot sun while waiting for the trees to grow. In Kenya, this reset has been done to our healthcare system, our education system, and pun not intended, even to the forest trees themselves! 

And this is the cycle to which the west has subjected Africa for the last five centuries. It has crushed every generation with slavery, then colonialism, then neocolonialism, then structural adjustment, and at each stage replaced the aging insipid, decadent elite with a youthful, freshly trained one. And after all that, the West has the audacity to instruct us on how to develop. 

The youth of Kenya have rightly understood that Kenya’s current political and bureaucratic elite are incapable of understanding, let alone delivering, an end to the stalemate that has blocked the youth from assuming their rightful roles in society. But as always, Western embassies are meddling on behalf of the insipid Kenyan elite, presumably giving instructions on how to manage protests through lame statements on human rights, and inviting the Kenyan youth to see which of them can take over from old guard. 

That is how Kenyan society has operated since the 1960s when the British planned the Kenyan civil service before independence, and American foundations constructed our higher education and wrote our economic plans. Since then, every generation transition is decided in the Bretton Woods institutions and managed by embassies here. That is why Kenyan politicians and top bureaucrats have no qualms citing Dutch and American police professionalism at us, clearly unaware of the violent record of the police, especially in the US, that sparked of the Black Lives Matter protests worldwide. Or journalists are more concerned about Kenya's reputation among Western nations than about whether Kenya serves us.

Sixty years later, the formula of depending on the West to manage Kenyan social transitions is wearing thin. Kenya does not need to rely on Western “partners” and benevolent local politicians for “development.” We want to grow our country ourselves. With our own brains and muscles. Our young people have gone to school, they  have the energy, knowledge and ideas to put to work. And most of all, they have the commitment. Only Kenyans can decide what’s best for Kenya. Only Kenyans can build Kenya. The people SHALL.

​Keynote address to the 2025 Comic Arts Festival, 14 March 2025
Kenya National Library, Nairobi

​Thank you for this invitation. I was not sure whether I am the appropriate person to address the theme of using comics for learning. The reason is simple: I am a great critic of the new school system, and especially of its treatment of the arts. And from my struggle to articulate the issues with the school system, I learned that the philosophy of education and knowledge in Kenya is deeply, deeply flawed. That said, I understand my role here to be to explain how the visual arts, and specifically comics, can intervene in the school system by introducing fun to teaching and learning. 

​That concept of fun already highlights the fundamental issue I take with Kenyan schooling. Fun is about entertainment, not education. When we say that the arts can bring fun to learning science, we are saying that the arts are not something people learn. Rather, the arts are something that helps us teach something else. So if we are concerned about using comics to teach science concepts, the main subject here is STEM, and the value of the arts is subordinated to the value of STEM. And that’s the problem I have with CBC, and especially with its view of arts education. CBC does not see the arts as a legitimate form of knowledge in its own right. It sees the arts as a means to an end. 

​And actually, since colonial times, this has been the attitude of the school system towards the arts. When the British were in power, they did not envision the arts in the curriculum. They wanted not even STEM, where students would learn the principles of science and do experiments and innovation. What they wanted is technical subjects, where science is used to implement a goal that was pre-determined by Europeans, and not by Africans. In that logic, the arts were seen as a waste of time. In fact, the British said that 1) Africans had no arts to speak of, anyway, and 2) the arts would give Africans stupid ideas like that of freedom. 

After independence, the Kenyan state continued to see the arts in this way. Moi thought that arts created rebels, and so he insisted that arts should be taught to teachers because teachers would be contained by the state.
That already should give you food for thought. It reveals that Moi saw teachers as safe, which means that the school is not intended as an institution where creativity is nurtured. So the violence and lack of creativity of our schooling system is not un-intended. It’s deliberate.

Since Moi, the public attitude towards the arts has undergone two major changes. Under the Kibaki era, the arts suffered the tag of being a useless subject that offered no development or commercial solutions. Business gurus went on TV and radio railing against our school system, calling Kenyan graduates half-baked and unhelpful in the workplace. The culprit was the arts, which they said, was the training of 80% of Kenyan university students. That data is inaccurate, but no one held the business leaders to account. We Kenyans did not push back and also ask whether we are educating our children only for employers. 

The school system, especially the universities, also accepted this abuse and started to pressure arts departments to become “relevant.” The universities did this by reducing the arts to specific goals other than education. So instead of language arts like acting and poetry, we now taught communication and reading from a teleprompter. Instead of fine art, we taught graphic arts. Instead of history, we taught conflict studies. Instead of political science and sociology, we taught development studies.

The same reduction happened in the public. People no longer needed to learn music; they just needed to sing in the shower, enter and win a “talent” contest. Comedians started joining advertising agencies as creative directors. The church also started seeing that music and dance were essential to worship. 

So even though the arts were now expanding to the market and the church, they were being reduced to specific, narrow goals. Now, the arts were acceptable IF, and only IF, there was a specific institution using them. It was now not only schools that could use the arts. The churches could use arts to keep the younger generation attending services, businesses could use the arts for marketing, media could use them for programming. But the central problem still remained: the arts are not for the people and their humanity.

Here is a clear illustration of this dynamic. In 2017, Ian Mwaura Njenga, a student at Bahati Boys High School, was expelled for drawing art that the school called “demonic.” After a hue and cry from the Kenyan public, the Nakuru County Education officer rescinded the expulsion but with a condition: he said that the young man had to undergo guidance and counselling. That incident reveals what the government and our education system think of the arts – they consider it a form of mental disorder that needs psychiatric and psychological intervention. 
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And actually, that is the attitude that capitalism has encouraged in Kenya. Artists are portrayed as people who are deviant, incoherent, and psychologically unhinged. And the tabloid industry promotes this view of artists. It floods the Kenyan public with stories of hedonism, consumerism, dysfunctional family life and even mental illness related to artists. When an artist takes their own life, there is no discussion of that incident indicating that society needs to ask itself serious questions. That is why, for example, Kenyan artists need to consider the jokes they make about alcohol consumption, especially in a country where we are more prone to addiction because the political economy is so dysfunctional. But this attitude explains why so few parents want their children to pursue arts education. The arts have a bad reputation.

However, since the 2010s, another thing was happening. While this war on the arts was taking place, social media was also allowing artists to bypass the businesses, the concert halls, the museums and other institutions and make their art directly accessible to the public. People could share their cartoons and paintings online without having to look for a newspaper, book publisher or art gallery to display them.
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So much as it hated the arts, the Kenyan state was realizing that it could no longer contain the arts. Luckily for them, UNESCO had now come up with the language of “the creative economy.” In other words, the arts were now being seen as a cash crop. A cash crop is a plant that is cultivated for sale abroad, rather than local consumptions. Similarly, the interest in the arts was still not in how the arts serves society. Instead of us creating a political economy where all sectors thrive, politicians could now tell young people to keep doing what they were doing on social media, and something might come out of it. This logic was introduced into the education system with the Competency Based Curriculum and its concept of “talent.”

Now, I cannot say this enough: talent is NOT the arts. And unfortunately, the people who most need to understand the threat of talent as an idea, but don’t, are Kenyan artists. “Talent” generally describes that inexplicable, unique ability of an individual that cannot be attributed to anybody or anything. Except God, maybe. Talent is something you are born with. And as the Ministry of Education officials kept telling us, everybody has a talent.
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Arts, on the other hand, is knowledge and work. The arts come from culture, experience, history, and most of all, dialogue with the world. Arts is how we respond to the world through tunes, color, words, dance and other media. Our artistic expression is nurtured and refined through interaction with other artists and through exposure to other arts. That, in a nutshell, is what arts education should provide. By contrast, arts in CBC is a space for “do whatever you want and we’ll call it art.” Here’s an example of what CBC is promoting as arts education. A teacher in a prominent school said this: 

What the teacher is presenting as learner-driven activity here is, in reality, a teacher not assuming the responsibility to guide and mentor the child. And this hands-off position of the teacher is not how the great painters we know learned to paint. They were actually taught how to use strokes and colors. They were shown paintings by mature artists. They apprenticed in the studios of master painters where they saw the master painters at work. That is how the Wakamba learned sculpting from the Makonde who came to Kenya. But CBC is minimizing that slow process of guidance. It is diminishing and withdrawing adult intervention in learning because, in the parlance of neoliberals, teaching is dictatorship. 

In other words, CBC is promoting an ideology that disconnects our children from us, the older generations. This means under CBC, the intervention you artists would like to have in Kenyan schools will most likely not be welcomed. And of course, Ministry of Education officials will refute this argument. They will even allow you to perform some sort of intervention in the school system by meeting with you, but they will not allow any arts education that fundamentally challenges this ideology.

The second problem with reducing arts to “talent,” is that talent makes us disrespect the arts as a skill that is learned, of work that is done, and of legacy that is passed on. We have all experienced what the idea of talent implies. It means that Kenyans refuse to pay for our artwork, because they do not consider our work useful. I mean, why should I pay you for artwork when you have put no knowledge or skill into it? You’re just doing what God made you to do. And yet, the work artists do is more than simply illustrating the work of others. Artists make concepts understandable. They put a mirror to our societies. They cultivate our emotional lives. They strengthen our communication skills. They sharpen our understanding. The work which artists do is necessary for a humane society. 

From what the parents have been told about CBC, there’s no arts. There’s talent. And the talent pathway is separate from the sciences. In 2019, the director of KICD even said that children in poor areas like Tana River county, who do not have access to laptops, need to realize that science is not their talent and they can become DJs instead. Think of that for a minute. DJs use laptops to sync their playlist. So how is science not a part of music? Music is produced by airwaves hitting our vocal chords, and amplified by microphones, and the sound we hear is determined by acoustics. We’ve all been at events – especially church services, where the sound is sooo bad, it feels like the noise is scratching our ear drums. That’s more than a talent problem. It’s a failure to understand the physics of sound. So arts and science interact with each other all time. To keep separating one as the illustrator of the other, as the consolation prize in case one does not access the other, is a form of violence.

This separation between the arts and other forms of knowledge is the last dysfunction of our school system that I want to highlight. Here we are, proposing that cartoons or comics can be used to explain science. For that to happen, artists are supposed to understand science in order to illustrate it. But just this week, a top Ministry of Education official said that students studying the arts and humanities would be confused if they also had to study mathematics. So what STEM are we proposing to illustrate when we’re not being allowed to learn it? Remember, that artists cannot illustrate that which they have not either understood, or at least grappled with. 

So, to come back to the question of arts as a way to make learning “fun.” We need to be careful about ideas like this that seem common sense. “Fun” is not something we should aspire for in learning. Learning is work. There are things children learn unconsciously, and others which they learn while being aware of themselves learning. The teacher’s work includes both. Our job as teachers is to try in as many ways as possible to make knowledge accessible to children. Fun is only one of them. But even then, we need to remember that not everything is learned at the time it is taught. Sometimes exposure to concepts is enough, and the lesson clicks much later on in a person’s life. Are there not things you heard about in class, that made sense years later, when you started working? That is how life is. Life is always teaching us, and we are always learning.

So we do not need to bribe children with “fun” to learn, like using sugar to make a child swallow bitter medicine. We should not treat science as something bitter to swallow, and the arts as the honey of entertainment to make that process easier. Arts are knowledge with their own value, the sciences are another type of knowledge with their own value. All the diverse types of knowledge enrich the human experience. A concept in science may easier to understand when a child develops the ability to understand multiple layers of something at the same time, a skill which they learn through symbolism in art, for example. Understanding comics also teaches children to develop different types of intellectual knowledge.

​So we need to teach all subjects in their own right. If we reduce the arts to a fun way to learn science, we will be teaching children not to deal with information unless they find it entertaining. But there is a lot of knowledge we need to have that is necessary but not necessarily entertaining. That doesn’t mean that learning should be violent, as it currently is. 

​Now, I’m almost sure this was not what you expected me to say. I suspect that what you wanted me to address is the material concern about how cartoonists and comic storytellers can access the school market through book illustrations or even comic books as text books. My answer to that question is that in the current system as it is, you would have to sell your soul. You would have to make the arts subordinate to science, you would have to kneel before the censors at KICD, and you would have to reduce yourselves to illustrators of what the government considers “acceptable” content. If you decide to do, for example, science fiction or comics to explain science concepts, you would need, for example, the patronage of UNESCO or other foreign donors to talk to the Kenya government, because the Kenya government – especially Jogoo House – listens only to foreigners. They do not respect Kenyans as generators of knowledge. They see us Kenyans as implementers of knowledge from outside Kenya.

Should you take this route, you will encounter a paradox. By demeaning the value of the arts, and by rendering the arts subordinate to science, you would be affirming the already bad attitude to the arts that is already in the school system. So the schools will simply continue not take the arts seriously. Which means even parents won’t take the arts seriously. 

Right now, we are bracing for a fight over the pathways which grade 10 children will be entering next year. I can almost predict with certainty that few parents will want their children to pursue the talent pathway. There are hardly any fine arts teachers anyway, because the colleges are not training them, because the fine arts are not an examinable subject in the outgoing 8.4.4 system. A few months ago, I got credible information that only 14 public schools in Kenya are offering art at KCSE level. Think of that. 14. And TSC does not employ teachers to teach a subject the teacher did not study in high school. So art teachers can only come from those 14 schools.

The cure for this mess is to fight for the arts to be respected as a subject in its own ways. Personally, I think the pathways must be removed. If a child wants to study history, art and mathematics, they should be allowed to. That’s the child that who become the next science comic illustrator. That child will not come from being told that mathematics is too confusing for someone who loves literature. 

To borrow the words of Brown vs. Board of Education, the US court ruling against school segregation, there’s nothing like separate but equal subjects. Separate subjects mean unequal subjects. Pathways mean that the arts will always be treated as an appendage, as something for children who do not perform well in academics or science. And those children will be invariably those attending poorly equipped schools. And that attitude towards the arts has an implication for ALL KNOWLEDGE, not just the arts. It means we remain mediocre, uncreative, and unimaginative. It means that Kenyans will remain blocked from inventing, innovating and creating, even as institutions perform innovation by creating hubs and innovation funds.
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Just this morning, Dr. Joyce Nyairo posted on X something that I think explains this distinction between substance and performance. In response to the president’s stunt of serving chapati to children yesterday, she said:

​A lot of what the government passes off as art, like “talent,” or “creative economy,” or “innovation,” is simply spectacle. It doesn’t make us think; it just makes us engage in cheap talk, and does not fire us up to debate meaning or appreciate aesthetics.

What are the practical implications of what I’ve said? Practically, it means all Kenyan artists – from the visual and performing arts – need to come together and demand arts training for teachers, and an arts curriculum that actually contains books by all the artists sitting here. By now, universities should be offering fine arts units specific to comics, and whose curriculum includes biographies and cartoon books from Kenyan comic artists. There should be academic publications on the evolutions of style of Kenyan artists. There should be exhibitions held in Kenyan museums and libraries, not just in foreign funded cultural centers. Artist have to aggressively pursue an agenda to place the arts in their rightful place as a field of knowledge in Kenya. 

In other words, my message to you today is to be more ambitious. Aim not just to be included in the school system. Aim to restructure our education altogether, so that the arts are respected like every other subject. And then knowledge, no matter which subject it comes from, thrives.

Thank you.

​For the last decade or so, I’ve been puzzled about how the global academy has proved impotent in helping societies clarify social problems. In Kenya, for example, academics whine about the “loss” of African cultures at the hands of “the white man,” and yet they fail to articulate the imperial and material roots of many of our problems. With all the condemnation they express for “the white man”, and sermons they preach on “decolonizing the mind,” you would think that Kenyan academics would be bothered by the “capacity training” to which we are subjected and in which we are treated like idiots as we are trained on foreign agendas. But I rudely discovered that we see no contradiction, because the few times I’ve raised this issue, I’ve been politely scolded for not appreciating the work of others. 

​At some point, my questioning led me to the colonial era. I traced our intellectual cowardice to the moralism of Carey Francis who, unfortunately, set the tone for schooling in Kenya. But also, my investigation took me to the Democratic Party in the US, and particularly to Thomas Frank’s book Listen Liberal! which is a fascinating account of how highly educated leaders of the Democratic Party became out of touch with working class America. Frank wrote his book before Trump’s first presidency, but there was an upsurge in interest in his book following the disastrous defeat of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Interestingly enough, the American Left still refuses to look squarely at the major role that American elitist education plays in demobilizing the mind, yet the problem has been flagged by William Deresiewicz in his book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite, or better still, by Carter G Woodson in The Miseducation of the Negro and Marimba Ani in Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior.

There is a major spiritual and psychological problem with what the Euro-American empire has exported abroad as “education.” It renders people spiritually and intellectually impotent, obsessed with morality, and notoriously scared of contradictions in which there are no obvious heroes to praise, victims to plead on behalf of, and villains to condemn. Western education trains people to equate moral condemnation with astute political critique. And since that education is notoriously racist, when it comes to Africa, there is little effort to carry out historically nuanced analysis. Instead, the liberal media and American Left settle for a Hollywood-type simplistic narrative of heroes, victims and villains, and then they condemn those who question the narrative as supporters of massacres and genocide. 

That, unfortunately, has been the case of the crisis in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

This article is not directly about the crisis, but about the moral suffocation in the discussion of the crisis. The American Left and pan-African media have framed the discussion in a way that acts as liberal intellectual blackmail. According to their framework, you either condemn Rwandan president Paul Kagame or you are supporting his invasion of Congo and the atrocities happening in eastern DRC. Pointing to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi as a major factor in the crisis is called giving excuses and disregarding the violence. In fact, that IS the point of violence, especially in the Western conception of politics. Violence is, ironically, weaponized to guilt-trip people who have a different political perspective, on the grounds that they are “wasting time” on theories that won’t save the people who are being brutally slaughtered. The real agenda of pointing to violence is not empathize with the victims, or to search for a political end to the violence, but to block the work of thinking, historicization and nuance. As David Graeber said, "violence is the only way to influence people without really understanding them."

According to this narrative of the takeover of eastern Congo by the M23 rebels, the problem is only one: Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his logistical and military support for the rebels. For the sake of argument, let’s accept this assessment. An inconvenient question arises: how is it that Rwanda, over 80 times smaller than DRC, is able to inflict such havoc? That’s easy to answer, we’re told. It’s the imperialists. They feel guilty for the role they played in the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, so they are supporting Kagame to do whatever he wants in Congo. It’s the equivalent of US support for Israel. For instance, the folks at Break Through News believe that Kagame is the Netanyahu of Africa. 

The comparison to Israel is disturbing. It comforts the idea that Africa cannot be understood except through analogies of Western history. No effort is made to draw a direct blow by blow comparison of what is happening in Goma with what is happening in Gaza. The Break Through News discussion glosses over it by saying that just like the Palestinians are fighting against Israel and America, Congolese are fighting against Rwanda and its imperialist backers.

But that explanation is not enough. With the Palestinian liberation struggle, thousands of hours have been put into explaining the colonial roots of the Zionist project, the colonial settler ideology and the link to the Holocaust. A trajectory of 105 years. When it comes to DRC, this meticulous attention is conspicuously lacking. 

And then, the question also arises: why is the wrath against imperialism directed at Kagame and barely any at Washington and Brussels? But as we know in the case of the genocide in Gaza, American citizens have been meticulous in detailing the support of the US for Israel. They have combed through the ideology of Zionism and have made it clear that criticizing Zionism doesn’t make one anti-Semitic. They have made American politicians pay the cost of supporting Israel, including refusing to vote for Kamala Harris, even when not supporting her attracted accusations of sexism and racism. American citizens have told the world about the funding that makes their politicians too impotent to criticize Israel. They have articulated the ideological, financial and political dynamics of the settler colonialism from 1919 when the Zionist project was first declared.

Is similar political and intellectual work being done for articulating the DRC crisis? Oh no. If we bring up the 1994 genocide as a factor in the crisis, we’re told that that is going too far back, because that was 30 years ago. One person even told me that the issue of the FDLR, the rebel group based in DRC with genocidaires among its ranks, does not count because those who committed the genocide are too old to fight. That is already an admission that the genocidaires are in Congo, it’s just that they’re too old. And the premise of that rebuttal is that the ideas that propelled the genocide cannot still be alive 30 years later in a new generation of Africans, because no, Africans do not think. We act on instinct. Even the genocide in 1994 was an instinctive reaction.

Actually, this argument has been fought against, since some African intellectuals committed themselves to combat genocide denial. One of the most insidious threads of the denial is the commitment to proving that Africans were not capable of employing the logics of the state to organize a genocide. According to this logic, the genocide against the Tutsis in 1994 was not a meticulously planned program with its own ideology, organization, political network and social context. It’s Africa, after all. Joseph Conrad’s "Heart of Darkness," to be precise. In places like those, as French president François Mitterand famously said as the slaughter waged on, genocide is not a big deal. Nothing is political in Africa. We do not think, we do not plan, we are incapable of institutional life. Every evil afflicting Africans comes from who we are, and is not organized by any institution, idea or socio-political context. 

This kind of denial is so insidious, because it leads to the absurd situation where we Africans have to fight for the right to consider ourselves human enough to meticulously organize evil. 

But let’s work with the argument that M23 are not rebels, but the Rwanda Defense Forces, as has been argued on Break Through News. The problem is, if the people fighting in the Congo are the Rwandan army, then we should not be talking of “rebels,” but of a foreign incursion into a sovereign territory. But again, that would lead us back to the question of how a country so small would annex territory of another over 80 times its size. 

Ideally, that question should lead us to the Congolese elite, who seem to be lacking in political imagination. At the time of the Break Through News interview, president Tshisekedi was at Davos, and Patrick Muyaya, the Minister of Communications, was in Paris, and Vital Kamerhe, the president of the DRC National Assembly, was in Vietnam. As I write, Tshisekedi has been avoiding forums with African leaders, preferring to attend others in Europe. Those are the people whom the Congolese citizens are holding to account as they demonstrate in Kinshasa, and whom the rest of the continent should call to account for what is happening in Congo. 

But, unfortunately, we never get to hear a Congo-focused perspective of the crisis. All we get are the speeches and photo-itinerary of the travels of Tshisekedi and his foreign minister, Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, who was appointed in May 2024. Wagner, of Congolese and German parentage, is good for the optics. She worked in Rwanda, and later in Goma. She speaks English, so she can speak directly to the Anglo-American imperial media without suffering the interruption of translation. And having worked in an international aid agency, GIZ, the German equivalent of USAID, to be precise, she can move fairly seamlessly between Western political spaces. But in the Western liberal views on the crisis, the Congolese government is exempt from accusations of being imperial lackeys. That accusation is reserved for Kagame, and occasionally for president William Ruto after announcing that the first person he called on the crisis was French president Emmanuel Macron.

Not only are we told that we cannot go back to even 30 years, the West is kind enough to give us a simple explanation to all this. It’s the minerals. Everybody wants Congo’s minerals. Kagame is sabotaging the DRC government’s efforts to settle on mining deals that would benefit the Congolese economy, and that’s why he’s supporting the M23 rebels. Or shall we say, that is why he is invading DRC. 

A number of us Africans, like Nigerian journalist David Hundeyin and myself, no longer accept the mineral argument. In his brilliant TED Talk, Hundeyin criticizes the Wakanda Complex, which he defines as the “state of political and economic consciousness in Africa that places an exclusive and destructive focus on the alleged abundance of mineral wealth under Africa’s soil.” The Wakanda Complex sees minerals as giving value to Africans, rather than the other way round. Drawing on the film Black Panther, Hundeyin takes a swipe at the ridiculous idea that everything in the fictional kingdom of Wakanda, from food to healthcare, depends on the single mineral of vibranium. The film implies that there is no need to think of politics, culture, social services, hell, of the people, because all of that can be summarized by the one mineral under the ground.

The minerals in Africa, Hundeyin rightly argues, are barely unique to Africa. Similar minerals can be found around the world, sometimes in larger quantities. But it is only when it comes to Africa that the people who live in the location of the minerals are rendered invisible. No effort is put into understanding politics or history of those people. Focus on the minerals, we are told. 

This narrative is not only racist, but has an explicit financial purpose: to make mineral mining in Africa extremely cheap. If the Kenyan experience is anything to go by, the places where mineral deposits are located are deliberately kept poor and in conflict, because then, the multi-national companies or local comprador elite do not have to deal with an informed population that demands fair wages, social services, respect for environmental protocols and a share of the revenue. What the West likes about mining in Africa is not the so-called quality or abundance of the minerals. It’s the fact that mining is cheaper than anywhere else in the world, thanks to the poverty of the people, which is maintained by the corruption of the African elites serving imperialism.

And this racist deal comes with bonga points, in the name of a racist narrative that Africa is the space beyond humanity. When things get really bad, a few pictures of miserable children and the sweet voice of a Hollywood star are enough to give the US the moral capital to raid the country in the name of a humanitarian response, and to get even more minerals while at it. 

And that has been the story of DRC for over five centuries now. The Congo was raided by slave traders in the 16th century, looted by the Portuguese in the 17th century, turned into King Leopold’s personal property in the 19th century, and tortured in 20th century for American war interests. This history is not just for information. It’s an explanation not only as to why Congo is poor, but also why it must remain poor. The Congolese people must never have education, institutions, or even a viable economy that is not necessarily linked to the minerals. Congo is just like Wakanda, but a worse version. Africans must not be educated, because that would make it difficult for companies to waltz in for minerals, waltz out after wreaking havoc on African lives, and not have to account for their actions at all. Imagine if those minerals benefited the African people. The whole continent would blossom, and the West knows that. So central Africa must be kept mired in poverty and war, by fetishizing one leader, fueling identity wars, and everybody, especially Africans who do not know the history of the region very well, will accept whatever explanation they get. 
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That distraction and exploitation of ignorance is linked to the fact that Belgium deliberately undereducated Africans in its former colonies, which is, ironically, the common ground of both DRC and Rwanda. The Belgian colonial policy on education was, simply put, “no elites, no problems.” The ruthlessness with which the Belgians barred education from expanding in Congo is, cruel to say the least, as is reflected in Barbara Yate’s observations in 1981:

The most important resource for any country, as Hundeyin says, is her people, and it is the one resource that Belgian colonialism viciously suppressed. At independence, the region therefore started on such a weak foot that few of us Africans appreciate. When so few people are allowed to look beyond their immediate needs and their borders, and when outsiders are always trooping in and out, it is inevitable that identity becomes the dominant rubric with which the people read politics. And of course we know that this problem is built into Western capitalism. And now, we know from the USAID leaks, that the US government pours money into fanning those flames. 

The point here isn’t that Congo is suffering because it did not have a developed western schooling system at independence. As I noted at the opening of this essay, western schooling is problematic and stands as an obstacle to producing a politically conscious and productive population. Neither is my point that other colonial powers were better at providing education than Belgium was. In Kenya, at least, the number of Africans who had gone to school by independence was largely the result of efforts of Africans themselves, a point which Walter Rodney makes. Left up to the colonial government, fewer Kenyans would have gone to school by independence, especially given the powerful lobby of settlers who were scared that education would “spoil” Africans and turn them against accepting their place at the bottom of the racial hierarchy.
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The point of raising the education problem is this: under the racist, colonial logic, Africans must always be confined to their skin color and labor. They must never be seen as capable of thought, of work, of politics or of history. That is why they are denied education. This Belgian policy against education for Africans was explained by a representative in his report to the United Nations on the Trusteeship of Ruanda-Urundi in 1946:

Africans did not need education because they were thoughtless. This ideology laid the ground for leaving Congo with a weak elite who could not put their foot down on the sovereignty of their country. The one man who did, Patrice Lumumba, was murdered by Belgium and the CIA in the most barbaric fashion that makes one wonder at the temerity of Euro-America to call Africans savages. Lumumba had the audacity to imagine that Congo’s people, not resources, should be the primary concern of the Congolese. The lynching of Lumumba was followed by the puppet regimes of Kasavubu and later Mobutu, whom the West drowned in money while the scanty infrastructure and institutions all but collapsed, and as eastern Congo was literally cut off from national development. 
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All that history is being shaved off the liberal narrative of the DRC crisis. Unfortunately, most English-language speaking African intellectuals are hewn from same the Western liberal block, and so we are most likely to voice the same explanations. The Western school system has trained us to unsee ourselves, as I have reiterated in several of my interviews. In Kenya, it is difficult to get people to focus away from the minerals and more on the people living in the areas where the minerals are found, who are deliberately impoverished. Poor Kenyans dig rocks out of the ground with crude instruments, cannot get decent wages, while local politicians exploit their plight to negotiate with foreign investors and the central government.

​In case the mineral explanation for DRC does not suffice, there’s another response: a dictator. After all, African problems can be explained by demonizing one leader and everything else is supposed to explain itself. And Kagame fits the role. But funnily enough, this fetishization of Kagame is not a recent narrative. The Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop placed a huge part of the responsibility of the persistence of the narrative on African intellectuals. In 2016, he wrote:

The typical response of Western liberal narrative is that such an argument “justifies” Kagame, or worse, supports dictatorship in Rwanda, or worst, supports the massacre of the Congolese. This accusation cannot be avoided because it is typical of liberal moralism. 

My only rebuttal is that we’ve been here before. Africa is often denied the discursive space to complicate issues. Only simplistic explanations are accepted. When Sekou Toure defied France and led Guinea to vote for complete independence, the French punished him by destroying the little infrastructure they had built, and constantly undermined his regime afterwards. Eventually, Sekou Toure became paranoid and began to persecute his perceived enemies. But pointing to the role of the West in this decline would attract the accusation of supporting dictatorship. 

Same thing currently happens with the Alliance of Sahel states, and especially Burkina Faso. Popular African support for Ibrahim Traore has attracted the ire of the East African liberal commentariat who have scolded Africans for endorsing “military dictatorship.” No amount of history on the destabilization of the region through the US bombing of Libya, or the exploitation of the region by France, moves the needle on the moral outrage. But such is the nature of simplistic, liberal morality. There are only two sides to every issue, a villain and a victim, and to try to render the issue more complex attracts accusations of supporting the villain and being heartless towards the victim. And now with the revelations of David Hundeyin about the role of USAID in disrupting social media conversations in Africa, it is difficult to brush away suspicion that the accusations of supporting dictatorship are a concerted effort to engineer consent.

And what is with the obsession with Kagame? It is difficult to fathom, but the most plausible explanation is the fact that it was under his leadership that the genocide against the Tutsi was ended. It was Africans who ended the genocide. That truth has proved very difficult for the West and African liberal intellectuals to accept, presumably because it doesn’t fit the African hopelessness narrative. Africans are supposed to be rescued by Western intervention, yet the truth is, the West ran away from Rwanda when the genocide began in 1994. The UN withdrew its peacekeeping force, and Bill Clinton refused to jam the radio airwaves to block the RTLM from giving instructions to the killers. The best the West could do was provide tractors to dig out the bodies that were washed into Uganda through the Kagera river. 

In typical parasitic fashion, the West finally found its voice only when the work of ending the genocide was already done. The West was belligerent in raising concern about the refugees fleeing to Goma, but often avoided the conversation about what the refugees were fleeing, and the crimes committed by some who were among them. It was easier to come up with a double-genocide narrative, in line with Mitterand’s ideology that genocide in Africa is not a big deal. Even Victoire Ingabire, the West’s favorite voice of democracy in Rwanda, began her political career espousing that narrative, and only later replaced it with the simpler one that Kagame has outlived his tenure and needs to step down.

Granted, Kagame handing over power is a fair argument. The same for Museveni in Uganda. So is the focus on human rights record of their governments. I am not qualified to confirm or deny truth in the stories about Kagame's ruthless dealings with his opponents or critics, or of his corruption. But the truth is, he’s not a devil operating in a sea of innocence. He arises from specific historical circumstances that affect many people, some of whom have a legitimate reason to be afraid of a regime without him in power. If such people feel under siege, when the criminals who committed genocide are still across the border, actively pushing genocide denial in a world that couldn’t care less, to a new generation which is espousing their ideas, it is normal for such citizens to wonder if Western liberal democracy is a bargain for the risk of the horror they experienced resurfacing. 

If our dear pan-Africans really want Kagame to step down, they should assure Rwandans of support and safety. Outside of the Kagame critics who are educated enough to access international media spaces, many Rwandans are deeply suspicious of the west. Unfortunately, Rwandans know from 1994 that everybody – Africans included, walked away when they most needed international help. The person who withdrew UN peacekeeping troops was an African, Kofi Anan, and when refugees fleeing the genocide came to Kenya, the Kenya government sent them back. Kenya also voted against UN intervention in the name of our cowardly, fence-sitting foreign policy of non-interference. 

The simplistic formula of regime change without democratization or regional solidarity is one which is imposed everywhere by American hegemony. Even Kenya grapples with it, despite its progressive constitution and its successive presidents. US diplomats in Kenya have been key in initiatives to whittle down the constitution, sometimes making proposals about reducing counties, or supporting the Building Bridges Initiative that sought to mutilate the constitution. They have even voiced underhand support of tribalism through patronizing attribution of electoral malpractice to “age-old rivalries.”
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And there is a material interest of the African intellectual elite in promoting liberal democracy. The agenda is readily accessible, and gets one access to international publications and meetings. It means grants and international platforms. Better still, it saves one the trouble of being accused of supporting genocide and dictatorship.

Ultimately, there is no way to get the bottom to understanding the DRC crisis within the Western liberal intellectual framework of hapless victims and obvious villains. Most of all, we as Africans cannot arrive at a lucid analysis without confronting the demon of racism, and especially so, in the treatment of central Africa for the last five centuries. Congo is, unfortunately, the center of racist imagination, where everybody, including African comprador elites, satisfies their thirst for looting at a large scale that they would not get away with in their home countries. Even Kenyan politicians are behaving like the colonial settlers they ape, because some are farming in Congo as they undermine Kenyan agriculture on behalf of foreign interests. But we Africans are blinded to that implication by intellectually weak narratives about the challenges we face. 

What is particularly sad, however, is the role that African intellectuals play in propping the narratives. As we learn from Jemima Pierre’s study of Ghana, the one word that African studies avoid mentioning is racism. Since independence, we African intellectuals raised on that intellectual tradition restrict European racism to the anthropological documents of colonial times, or to images of Africans in contemporary Western media. But when it comes to bureaucratic forms of control, like foreign policy, the United Nations, and loans from World Bank and IMF, the word “racism” is conspicuously missing. In Kenya when we protest the debt imposed on us, we go through the statutes, write to world bodies, and rarely address the racist elephant in the room.

I also do not think it is a coincidence that this narrative sanitizing the role of the Western racism in the crisis is being ramped up at this time. Since the genocide in Gaza started, strange narratives on the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994 have been showing up on social media. It appears that there is a concerted effort of some intellectuals from the Great Lakes region to take advantage of the interstices of Israel's assault on Gaza, to promote genocide denial when it comes to Rwanda. The hope, it seems, is that people who do not know much about Rwanda can use the lens of Israel to sanitize the atrocities in Rwanda in 1994.

One tell-tale sign of genocide denial is the idea that the genocide in 1994 was ethnic, rather than committed by the then Rwandan state. After October 7, 2023, I noticed an increase of this narrative not only on social media, but also in Kenyan university circles. Because Kenyan university education is hostile to learning about regions outside one’s own, many lecturers lack the regional consciousness to detect these narratives in the students’ work. I have also confronted bizarre cases in my classes, like that of a Congolese student, from Kinshasa, who had never heard of Lumumba, or a Burundian student unable to tell her own country’s history and instead preferring to write a whole paper criticizing Kagame. The student was puzzled when I asked: is there nothing to say about Burundi, surely? The reply was that since Kagame and Rwanda are on everybody's lips, she thought that that is the only thing to talk about. These experiences reveal to me an intellectual gap in what we Africans from East and Central Africa know about ourselves and each other. 

It is time for Africans to make a more concerted effort to understand global geopolitics. Our ignorance about each other, even within our own countries, is nothing short of criminal. Our naiveté about the African continent’s position at the bottom of the global racist hierarchy is reckless. We also seem unable to reckon with the extent to which African elites are a continental class used by the West to keep the continent and its education in check. And it is not coincidental or inadvertent. Imperialism knows that if it controls the African mind, exploiting African resources is a walk in the park.

But the focus should not be on our material conditions alone. The truth is that our misery as Africans is central to the identity of the West. This is a factor that infects the stories it tells about Africa and the stories it tells us about fellow Africans.

In all the moral handwringing and scolding about DRC, there is no discussion of Congo itself, its history, and the aspirations of the Congolese people. Accusations of imperialism are reserved for Rwanda and none are used for the top Congolese officials traveling around the West. Most of all, there is no questioning of the Wakanda logic that condemns Africans to experience underground resources a curse, yet the West sabotages our education, healthcare and democracy. And this limitation is not unique to DRC. When people like Assimi Goïta, Abdourahmane Tchiani and Ibrahim Traore are forced to leave the barracks to take over their countries, the sleeper cells of African intellectuals are also whipped into action to condemn “military dictatorships.” 
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Ultimately, the concern here is with the simplistic, moral narratives on the complex and POLITICAL problems of central Africa. We Western-trained African intellectuals must be honest and face the fact that liberal democracy is inadequate addressing the challenges that face our people. Liberal education makes us naïve to the racist global geopolitics, and it confines us to discourses of liberal democracy in the name of being “objective.” We must find the intellectual courage to offer explanations for African problems more sophisticated than moral blackmail and Wakanda narratives. We Africans must also think in layered ways. But that layering requires work, and we must do the work.

If we really care for the pan-African project, our concern should be for getting the Western middlemen politicians and narratives out of the hair of the Congolese and the Rwandans, for the citizens of those countries to hold their leaders to account, and to have the social resources necessary to do so. We should be calling for the political elites of the two countries to talk to each other without the noise of the West ringing in their ears. DR Congo and Rwanda are neighbors, surely. They share common people and cultures. They share a common painful past. They can agree to bring culprits of past crimes to book, and to fight against the identarian, genocidal ideologies with a humanist, pan-African one. Both countries can succeed together, not each on its own. We derive no benefit from trying to prove which president is more of an imperial lackey than the other. And intellectuals, those whom Fanon said fight on the battleground of history, should do better in clearing the intellectual ground needed for those dreams to become a reality.

​During the first term of the Uhuru presidency, when the Kenya government was preoccupied with swaying public opinion as opposed to being political, it was not unusual for citizen criticism of the government to be met with cynical comments on social media that one is always complaining and never satisfied by anything. If the speaking citizen was a woman, she would be told to stop being emotional. Another common pushback was that we were keyboard warriors, who were all words and no action.

Of course, such comments were draining, especially because of the sexism. But until the 2017 election campaign period, I did not notice that these comments were part of a coordinated attack against coherent public discourse. It was with the 2017 elections that we discovered that the high emotional content online partly came from Cambridge Analytica, the company hired by the Jubilee campaign team. The Channel 4 undercover investigation of Cambridge Analytica’s work in Kenya opened my eyes to the weaponization of emotions in political life. These words from one of the officials in the news report, are etched on my mind:

State Management of Knowledge

Two concepts are important here. One of course, is the most obvious, which is that facts hardly play a role in political campaigns, and that the focus of political manipulation is on emotions. But the second more important fact is this: the emotions that are manipulated are “unspoken; even unconscious.” What this means is that two important elements are necessary to protect a society from being emotionally manipulated: speech and knowledge. We remove our fears from our unconscious when we know our fears, and when we are speaking about them. A democratic public sphere must therefore have people who are free to speak, and who are knowledgeable, because, as we saw with the 2017 elections, ignorance and lack of informed debate lead to highly toxic politics.

And that is exactly what happened in the 2007 elections, where the rigging of the presidential vote was the matchstick that lit the dry hay of Kenyan politics and led to one of Kenya’s most extensive episodes of violence.

The role of ignorance in the 2007 ethnic violence was wonderfully explained by Dan Ojwang in his 2009 article “Kenyan intellectuals and the political realm:  Responsibilities and complicities.” Responding to the question of what role Kenyan intellectuals played in the count down to the crisis, Ojwang argued that the real problem was that Kenya’s public sphere was notoriously narrow, thanks to the state’s control of knowledge. During the campaign period, both sides of the political divide spread rumors and highly polarizing lies about ethnic groups on the other side of the political divide, leading to a public discourse that was shallow and polarizing.

However, this situation of induced ignorance has been centuries in the making. In earlier decades, the persecution of intellectuals who disagreed with the state left Kenyan public life bereft of information and reflection. As Ojwang says, sources of information ranging from the media, the arts and publishing were heavily censored. Government documents and archives were not, and still are not, available to the public. The schooling system treated the arts and humanities as “provocative” subjects that are irrelevant to Kenya’s development needs, and it limited and confined these subjects to specific vocations like teacher training and government administration.

Ethnic identities have remained so rigidly fixed and unquestioningly propagated by Kenya’s academic elite. Academics have treated ethnicity as natural, rather than human made, but there is no space to discuss this intellectual laxity because ethnicity has become so entwined with merit, decolonizing narratives, and squabbles over who should take the credit for Kenya’s independence. It was because of these rigid demarcations of ethnicity that Kenyans still struggle to develop other forms of political solidarity besides ethnicity. 

The public intellect of Kenya as described by Ojwang remains roughly the same, despite solid resistance from Kenyans using social media to defy the state limits on knowledge. Political affiliations such as labor or ideology are consistently sabotaged by the state. Through the political and bureaucratic apparatus, the state rigorously blocks political gatherings whose agenda is not ethnicity. In 2017, MPs tried to undermine public support for doctors on strike by suggesting that the strike was ethnically motivated. Similarly, in 2022, the government used compromise and bureaucracy to split the leadership of the Communist Party of Kenya and block the vice-chair, Booker Omole, from appearing on the ballot for the elections of Gem constituency, which essentially was an attack on ideological affiliation. And academics remain silent because, after all, they need to publish their next peer-reviewed journal article on Kenyan elections, in which they calculate the polling and voting based on the ethnic blocks.

In other words, what is called ethnic consciousness by politicians, bureaucrats and academics is really a case of engineering knowledge in a way that ethnic parochialism becomes the only platform where any kind of learning, debate, consciousness or political activity is allowed in Kenya. And once thinking is limited to ethnicity and biology, it can never go to ideas, politics, resources or even God. Kenyan theology is notorious stuck in the missionary logic of building schools and hospitals, and liberation theologies or African spiritual histories are not taught in classes of philosophy, theology or religion.

Besides political affiliations beyond ethnicity, another important requirement for robust debate is memory. As Ojwang says, memory is important for “bearing witness” to human suffering, especially in a country where victimhood has been turned into a tool for elite negotiations for power. Memory in the public sphere also helps the public make connections between different dimensions of public life over time and time. As keepers of public memory, intellectuals should ideally “[weave] together fragments of the past so that the public can develop a more coherent sense of its experience and develop an ability to engage in debate about that experience.” 

However, in Kenya, history that provides a meaningful contextualization of Kenyans’ experiences is not taught in the school system. Lack of such history makes Kenyans pathetically ignorant about communities that are not their own, and susceptible to believing lies about other communities. Lack of memory also makes Kenyans cynical and un-empathetic with suffering that is not endured by one’s own ethnic community. With no public memory, Kenyans are compelled to depend on rumors and innuendo for political thinking.

As Ojwang says, the Kenyan state manages information, dissemination, publishing and even education to prevent memory from informing Kenya’s public consciousness. The botched effort to change the constitution under the Building Bridges Initiative contained a proposal to have the National Archives move to the Office of the President and an official historian be appointed under the same office. That historian’s duty was to write an official history of Kenya for the last 1,000 years. Never mind that Kenya did not exist until the 19th century when the British empire invented it. The point was to capture any historical consciousness, even pre-Kenyan, that risked disrupting the story which Uhuru wanted to tell about Kenya as the country founded by and embodied in the Kenyattas.

In every intellectual space, the Kenyan state is obsessed with controlling what Kenyans know, indicating how powerful knowledge is and how threatening a well-informed people are to state power.

In addition to controlling physical access to knowledge, there is a plethora of myths and lies that block Kenyans from pursuing knowledge. The media rants about half-baked graduates and a university system dominated by the arts at the expense of the sciences. The education system, government ministers and even professors find no contradiction in saying that education which teaches students to think is irrelevant to Kenya’s developmental needs, and that such education opens no employment opportunities. There is therefore a rhetoric of shame that is used to smear any benefits Kenyans may derive from education outside the pursuit of mere certification and employment.

And with that intellectual suffocation from the crushing of knowledge, Kenyans are inevitably unable to recognize their fears or name them, which means they cannot contextualize these emotions for the purpose of understanding the context that stimulated those emotions. The absence of such discussions leaves Kenyans vulnerable to companies like Cambridge Analytica. 

Political Theatre

Worse, an anaemic Kenyan public sphere makes Kenyan politics become so theatrical and turns politics into an emotional roller coaster. To borrow Ojwang’s expression, Kenyan politics are dominated by “symbols and entertainment genres, so much so that politics now seems to be about who can stage the most impressive drama.” 

The events of October 2024, provide a perfect illustration of these emotional swings. Kenyans were subjected to heavy duty changes that left many people on X (formerly Twitter) openly admitting that they were emotionally exhausted. The month began with the disastrous rolling out of SHIF that led people in need of emergency treatment like dialysis and chemotherapy to their own devices, and some have since died. This change in healthcare funding engulfed Kenyans in deep sorrow and desperation as they tried to save the lives of their loved ones. They were also bewildered at the insensitivity and cruelty of the government.

However, the government was keener on impeaching Deputy President Gachagua than on the plight of patients. Again, the impeachment was equivalent to a lynching. It was a highly emotional drama that shocked at many levels, because the state was weaponizing the constitution to get rid of an elected official who contributed to the win of Kenya Kwanza. For one to even coherently understand these political shenanigans, one had to follow the intrigues of opportunism and betrayal between Kenya Kwanza and ODM, which many Kenyans dutifully did by spending hours watching the drama televised live from the houses of Parliament and the Senate. It was an insult that this should have been taking place when people and their families were struggling to get treatment. But not even the anger expressed by Kenyans at the public participation meetings on the impeachment deterred the MPs from proceeding with the theater, even as heartbreaking stories emerged of Kenyans who did not have the luxury of time to wait for the new SHIF system to work. 

But that was not enough. Before Kenyans had time to get used to the double drama, Senator Cherargei of Nandi County was driving yet another emotive bill proposing the extension of the terms of politicians from five to seven years. Public opposition to the bill made the Senate email server crash after being inundated with emails.

While I have no doubt that the elected officials want to extend their terms, I think that the greater value of the bill is the excitement and the drama. Extension of term limits is a highly emotive issue, given Kenyans’ long struggle to limit president Moi’s term in 1992 and even after that, wait another 10 years before Moi finally left office. But with such a vacuous political sphere riding on no knowledge, Kenyan politicians have all the room to be hyper-emotional and dramatic to compensate for their stupidity, empty headedness, and insane wealth built on theft and deals. Charargei maintains himself in the headlines saying nothing remotely intelligent, and being abrasive and provocative as he makes threats saying that the Finance Bill will pass, come rain or shine, or that the president should remain in office for life. His political role is to annoy and excite, rather than suggest anything remotely beneficial to anyone. 

And the media maintains its click bait when they report the degrading things Cherargei says. Journalists can pretend to engage in intelligent conversation by asking him about servers and citing statistics of 200,000 emails. To which the Senator replies with vocabulary like “the 4th estate” to give an air of credibility to what is essentially nonsense.

As Ojwang argued 15 years ago, this demented, knowledge-deficient and theatre-dominated public discourse has led to a situation where marketing, social media trends, psyops and public relations drive Kenyan political debate, even on hefty matters that have life and death implications for the majority of people. The resulting political alienation has become so spectacular, that elected officials cannot tell the difference between political debate and social media following. One incident illustrating this absurdity occurred during the Senate debate on the impeachment of the Deputy President, when the Speaker Amason Kingi, cautioned Senators against using the opportunity to ask questions “as a moment to get a TikTok clip.”

​For a long time, Africans have been baffled at how foolish and grotesque African politics became after independence. At some point, it seemed to confirm the narrative of Africans as incapable of rationally governing themselves. In a speech many years ago, the late revolutionary Walter Rodney attributed the absurdity of African and Caribbean politics to distortions caused by economic policies and Western political institutions in African and Caribbean states. Drawing laughter from his audience, he said:

Rodney attributes these absurdities to Africa’s position in international capital, where Western economic and democratic models are so untenable that they produce political monsters, after which the West, whose policies produced the monsters, gains propaganda value from pointing to African leaders as proof of their racist myths about the continent.

The same problem which Rodney sees in the context of the international capitalist economy, I now see in the context of knowledge. When the population of Africa knows so little about itself and the world in which they live, there arises a political class of cartoons and buffoons who get away with their stupidity. These political cartoons and buffoons are partly supported by the international community’s interest in them for propaganda value. And sadly, African people lack the knowledge, and therefore theoretical tools with which to correctly isolate and respond to the problem. In Kenya, much of what passes off as political discourse is morality talk about liars and bad people, or is similar to character analysis in a KCSE literature examination.

Kenya, in particular, gets away with such mediocre politics because the Western media protects Kenya’s status as the perfect colony. Reports about Kenya are divorced from systemic issues and reported as interesting idiosyncrasies. During the Reject Finance Bill protests, media like the New York Times, CNN and Reuters persisted in narrowing the protests to the youth and social media, as if there was no political agenda or historical build up to the protests. Even as Kenyan politicians are spectacular in their comedy, Kenya’s international reputation in the foreign press remains squeaky clean and coherent. In media and academic literature, Kenya is depicted as implementing all international agreements to the letter, and the failures are neatly packaged by citing some human rights activist or clueless academics. Few African leaders outside Kenya would admit that historically, Kenya has always been a two-faced, pro-imperialist state that has never taken the side of justice.

Kenyans themselves are insulated from this reckoning by the tyranny of aggressive ignorance. Ironically, Kenyans are so committed to Western schooling, to the extent that they will accept violence and tragedy as long as children are going to school. 

For the last 15 years, I have been puzzled about why Kenyans seem so committed to ignorance and yet we worship the education system. I have attributed the problem to the ideology of the market that destroyed thinking in university and, ironically, caused an exponential increase in graduate schools and research publications. 

Then came the education drama of the implementation of the Competency Based Curriculum, during which the Ministry of Education remained tight-lipped about what it was doing, gaslighted its critics, and refused to answer any meaningful questions about why the decision was made to replace the school system. It took me around three years to realize that the Ministry of Education had no idea what it was doing and was never going to be open about how they made the decision. However, Kenyans believed in all the lollipops they were promised and celebrated the system. I traced this apparent naivete of Kenyans to the Moi and Jomo Kenyatta years when artists, students and lecturers where killed, tortured and detained for ideas which the regime did not like.

However, my perspective began to switch a few years later, in a collaboration with Elizabeth Cooper and Erdmute Alber in a project called “The Education Alibi.” In my chapter in our forthcoming edited book, I contemplated the Sessional Paper No. 10 of 1965, and specifically the preface of Jomo Kenyatta, in which he declared an end to “debates on theories and doubts about the aims of our society.” Years later, famous Kenyan historian ES Atieno Odhiambo would write that that 1965 policy paper marked the end of debate in Kenya. From then on, the state resorted to detentions and assassinations to stifle public debate. It was then clear to me, as I said in an interview this year, that the Western school system is committed to ensuring knowledge does not thrive, despite claims to the contrary. 

My perspective shifted even more significantly a few days ago, in a conversation with the writer Mwende Kyalo, when she said that Kenyans suffer from undereducation. Kenyans know so little about the history of things they do and that affect us, or what Yvonne Owuor called “historical intelligence.” We approach life as if nothing has a history, because there is an infrastructure that blocks us from thinking by denying us information and opportunities for conversation. 

And the obstruction of information, I would argue, is five centuries old and fundamentally racist. Africa’s loss of her people to slavery was also a suppression of knowledge, because slave traders used trickery, lies and corruption to entice or coerce African leaders into participating in the trade. The Western academy also told lies about Africa, often suggested that knowledge was not accessible to Africans because their brains did not develop enough to think. Since knowledge requires interaction, Africa’s relationship to the outside world could not lead to growth of knowledge, since that relationship was already violent and hostile. Worse, by extracting African labor that was also skilled, a major brain drain was committed with the slave trade. Nanjala’s wonderful book Travelling while black, restriction of travel by Africans is paralleled with ignorance of Africans about each other, both within their own countries and even across the oceans.

The advent of colonialism only worsened this problem. As I’ve already noted, Africans were frozen in rigid ethnicities by European missionaries, colonial administrators or settlers, often acting as amateur anthropologists. Furthermore, the colonial government confined these ethnic groups to reserves and blocked political collaboration between them. Collaborations are an essential element of education, so when travel and collaboration are denied, the contained communities do not grow in knowledge.

The Mau Mau concentration camps are one example of how the British contained and physically tortured people in an effort to contain knowledge. In these camps, the British engaged in horrifying torture and murder in the name of “retraining” the detainees out of their commitment to the Mau Mau. That retraining IS an education issue, because it was about trying to re-engineer the mind and prevent the Mau Mau from gaining solidarity with the rest of Africans in Kenya. And to crown it all, when the British were leaving, they destroyed a good part of the archives of that period under a program dubbed “Operation Legacy,” indicating that their intent was to perpetuate ignorance in Kenya about its own history. To this day, public memory of the Mau Mau resistance restricts the movement to an ethnic narrative devoid of political, social or military analysis, which politicians exploit for maintaining ethnic blocks that polarize elections. 

And because Kenyans are not allowed to think beyond identity, some get angry with me and refuse to even consider my argument that these ethnic blocks are not about diversity or cultural decolonization, but about capitalist imperialism. This intellectual inflexibility is cultivated by the school system and the state’s management of knowledge at large. Meanwhile, as Ojwang says, Kenyan academics have failed to fundamentally interrogate ethnic foundations of knowledge, and yet “communities that constitute it are not set in stone, but entities that ought to be subjected to debate.” 

The narrative of Kenyan exceptionalism that has been so carefully built in Kenya, the US and the UK, with the help of public relations, academic research, and journalism. But contrary to that narrative, Kenya is not any different from other African countries, as its elites like to believe. Kenya is an African country at war, but not because we are African. There is a specific historical and political context to explain the violence. The Kenyan state has used assassinations, abductions and massacres, covered up the evidence with supplies of body bags from the United States in the name of “election materials,” and largely remained outside of the glare of Western international media that has preferred to shed the light on more theatrical leaders of the continent. 

But Kenyan politicians are no less stupid or theatrical than the extraordinary cases in the continent that have been more notorious. Indeed, over the last few months, Kenyans have joked that politicians are competing with artists because politicians’ actions are closer to fiction than a Kenyan artist would have imagined. It is no wonder that the state has fought against arts education and education as a whole. It prefers the crudeness of empty rhetoric and violence to the beauty of imagination, the music of justice, and the dance of revolution. And so the political class, the bureaucrats of the state, and their collaborators in the school system keep Kenyans undereducated and ignorant. But even then, these Kenyan elites are simply foot soldiers in the larger war of ignorance that has been waged by empire on the people of Africa for the last five centuries.

After finishing a long journey of studies in language and literature, the first shock I got on returning home to start my academic career was from the concept of “practical subjects” that are “relevant to the market.” The naïve, freshly-minted PhD graduate that I was, with dreams of changing the world through the classroom, was now forced to suffer empty classes because students had been told that language and literature were not “practical” and were irrelevant to the market.

​This happened during the second Kibaki term, when Kenya had gone full throttle into neoliberalism. In universities, this was the time of an arms race in university expansion. Universities grabbed and swallowed TVET colleges by turning them into campuses, in order to avoid the work of building university colleges from scratch. The Commission for University Education sharpened its teeth and subjected universities to regulation on steroids. Faculty jobs were converted into contractual labor (popularly called “part-time teaching” or “moonlighting”), while full time faculty were subjected to the neoliberal surveillance tool of performance management. Universities had become corporations, with ISO certification, marketing departments and VCs as CEOs.

In the midst of these changes, the century-old racist propaganda of “practical subjects” for Africans received a new boost. The Commission for University Education demanded market surveys before allowing universities to roll out programs. In public universities, a perversion began to be inflicted on the humanities. Departments contorted their programs to sound more applicable to donor-funded NGOs and the FIRE sector (finance, insurance and real estate). Anthropology became tourism, philosophy and religion became human rights, and history turned into peace and conflict studies. With the multiplication of private media houses, news anchors had become literal stars, and so language and literature were subjected to sneers and required to bow to the almighty media, film and public relations. Even church-affiliated universities were shutting down their theology programs to pave way for business degrees.

The first two decades of the 21st century were a blood bath for the arts and humanities.

As if things could not get worse, the structural adjustment programs of the 1990s, with fewer public services and employment opportunities, promoted a hysteria of passing exams and choosing “practical degrees” that were “not theoretical.” Students and their parents literally ran away from traditional disciplines for fear of being “too theoretical and not practical enough.” And thus began the curious phenomenon once observed by the writer Yvonne Owuor, of architects who are not artistic, journalists who can’t write, film makers who don’t understand stories, and diplomats with no knowledge of history. The mother of the disciplines, philosophy, which was already limping from the anti-intellectualism of the Moi and Kenyatta eras, now became literally silent. This meant that Kenya was paying professors not to think, and to produce graduates who can’t think.

All in the name of being “practical.”

The ideology against theory and adoration for practical became so common sense, that few Kenyans noticed the irony of the super CS of the Uhuru Kenyatta years, Fred Matiang’i, being one of the harshest critics of arts and humanities. Matiang’i is a curious case because his PhD from the University of Nairobi was in Literature. However, when he was nominated to Uhuru’s cabinet, his credentials were described as a PhD in “Communication and ICT.” As the Cabinet Secretary of Education, he regularly complained about universities being out of touch with the country’s development needs, because 80% of students were taking arts degrees, a claim that is not confirmed by the survey conducted by the Commission of University Education. Kenyans did not notice the irony because they agreed with him.

Fast forward to 2024, the damage of that obsession with being “practical” has produced a strange pathology. 

The Fear of being Practical

In my classes, students struggle to write. Worse, they struggle to write about themselves and about what they think. For the longest time, I knew that it was hatred of the humanities that made students disrespect learning to write. But the incident that jolted me to the dysfunction we are dealing with happened when I was talking to a Masters student about her writing assignment. I had asked the class to write a reflection, and as usual, I got bland material that was copy pasted from the internet. I asked this student why she had not written a reflection as I had instructed. The reply shook me to the bone: “I thought that universities do not teach anything practical, so I did not know we were supposed to write about real issues.”

Initially, I was livid. But after calming down, I started to notice a strange relationship that students have with reality and with putting down those thoughts. Students expect to be good writers without doing the work of actually learning how to write. What matters to them is not the process of them becoming skilled human beings, but the material output which they produce. In such a scenario, a student cannot imagine that I am interested in them improving their writing. What I want is a material paper, and that’s easy to get from the internet.

Many Kenyans will cynically reply that the students are lazy and do not want to do the work. But seeing strange cases semester after semester persuades me that the problem is deeper than laziness. It’s a pathology. The ideology which the students hear from the government and the media is that universities do not teach practical knowledge. Therefore, when the students are confronted with something they have to practically do, they experience a cognitive dissonance and choose instead to align the class assignment with the external ideology. What they know to be practical is the material result, so they down load a paper and send it as their assignment. The point is the product; not the process.

What I am getting at is that we Kenyans have a very dysfunctional idea of what "practical" is. In reality, “practical” means setting aside time to work on something. It can be anything from knitting, to masonry to playing an instrument to writing a paper. Even thinking is practical work. You have to sit, take time out, read or find out what other people think, and then purpose to either analyze it, respond to it, or create something new. 

But that's not what Kenyans mean when they talk of "practical" subjects. What they mean by "practical" is producing something that can be paid for, by an employer or better still, by Euro-Americans. So the president will show off about digital jobs in which Kenyans earn dollars from sitting at a laptop and writing, but if I am the one telling my students to sit at a laptop and write so that they learn to organize their ideas, that's not "practical." 

What's the difference? The difference is who takes the initiative to do the work, and for whom we're doing the work. If the idea of online jobs comes from our initiative, or if we're doing work that benefits us, by developing our minds and skills, that work is NOT practical. Rather, the work is practical when we are doing it for somebody else, for an institution or an employer, and most likely, for foreigners. In other words, “practical” is never about the humanity of us Africans.

In Kenya, "practical" means mimicry

This idea of “practical” is really about materialism and capitalism. It so powerful because it is dominated by politicians and NGOs, the people with the money and institutions to produce spectacular material things. I learned this when I was opposing CBC in the mainstream media. One way in which the media effectively blocked my questions was by pointing to the textbooks and teacher training being provided by the government. Even though I was talking about the practical reality of teaching and growing up intellectually, it was not “practical” compared to millions of shillings disbursed, textbooks distributed and teachers workshopped. 

The effect of this logic of “practical” is that the emphasis is on the product rather than on the process. That is why politicians see no contradiction between stealing from taxpayers and then distributing money to the same taxpayers. Politicians feel they can shoot us, and defund hospitals and schools, because they are also the ones who have the money (which they stole) to pay the hospital bills and provide bursaries and school fees.

In education, this logic means that students will not set aside the time and energy to learn a skill like writing. That process of reading and putting ideas to paper is “not practical.” What is practical is what is material, and a 10-page paper they downloaded from the internet is material, and therefore practical.

The casualty of this hatred for process is imitation. To imitate, one has to study and understand the model they are seeing in order to identify the principle, and then do their own version of it. Children are very good at imitation because they do not expect to do exactly what the adults do. It does not even occur to them that they need to.  They do what they see adults do, but do it in their own way. And we adults interpret that imitation as truth. But that skill of imitation has to be maintained in us, and we do that through the arts. But we do not value the arts, so we do not value that which improve us.

Our disrespect for imitation leads us to beat children for not producing perfect mimicry, which is enforced by examinations. By the time we become adults, we can no longer imitate. We mimic the idealist images of the West and blast Gen Z for daring to think instead of mimicking us, their elders, as we mimic the West.

The second reason why we can't imitate is linked to the linear/bureaucratic idea of education. When people learn through imitation, the work they initially produce appears flawed, but they perfect the work as they do more and more of it, and eventually develop their own style. Developing a new style is what our system is hostile to. The government insists on us reproducing what it says, which is usually what the government discovered during its latest benchmarking tour abroad, or what has been instructed to them by the “international community.”

​The worst part about mimicry is that people who mimic eventually lose sense of who they are, and start to confuse themselves with those whom they are mimicking. That is why the government of Kenya will tell us absurdities like needing to replace our IDs to do more like what France does, or needing CBC because that is what is used in Norway. If we interrogate the claims about France and Norway, or ask how the situations there compare to Kenya’s, the media and the gaslighting machine on social media tell us to stop theorizing and provide a practical way forward.

​This discussion of mimicry lays the ground for the second part of my series on the mediocrity of Kenya’s political elite and civil service. The politicians and civil servants thrive on mimicry. They can’t produce ideas of their own. They are unable to understand and analyze events, and so they resort to mimicry. In the events leading up to the protests against the Finance bill, the politicians mimicked everyone from comedians to preachers to influencers to CEOs, to the point that they had no clue what the work of politics entails, and they inevitably produced the absurdities we now see in Kenya’s political sphere.