(Presented at the AIC Jericho Men's fellowship on March 24, 2013)

Once again, it is a great honor for me to speak to my fathers and brothers about this journey called manhood. By inviting a woman to speak, you are proving the African proverb says “if you want to walk fast, walk alone; if you want to walk far, walk with others.” Great manhood is the one walked with others – with God, with our wives and families, and with society.

But we all know that since we were last together, we Kenyans have voted to walk alone as tribes. We decided that what mattered are our personal interests, or the interests of our ethnic group; not the interests of our children, our neighbors, our workmates, or of future generations. We did not vote for the dream that Muoki Mbunga so beautifully expressed not only for his children, but also for his neighbor's children. We did not vote as fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers of everyone - as our African culture tells us to - we voted as family of a few.

But I would like to believe that Kenyans did not vote out of malice. We voted with great love for our country. We queued in the hot sun for hours, and we have all decided that peace in Kenya is more important than anything else. So how can there be such a contradiction? How come that love did not translate into our choice of leaders?

(Presented at the Men’s Fellowship at AIC Jericho, 24th February 2013)

I am so honored to be a Kenyan woman who is invited to speak to Kenyan men. I am a daughter to Kenyan men and a sister to Kenyan men. Men and women have always shared common ties, and that’s why we greet each other as “dadangu,” or “ndugu yangu,” or in my community, all men my father’s or my son’s age greet me “wakia maitu” (my mother) and I reply “wakia awa” (my son).

If we refer to one another as sisters, brothers and parents, even if we are not blood relatives, how do we explain the violence, hatred and selfishness that have divided Kenyan women and men? We hear news reports about men killing their wives and children before committing suicide. In the current campaigns, few women are running for seats other than for those of women representatives. Women are still own less than 2% of the property in Kenya, even though they produce more than half the country’s wealth. Even though we see many unfortunate women struggle to raise children alone, we also hear women like Margaret Wanjiru publicly insulting the fathers of their own children, and hear women despair on men and deliberately choose to have children without getting married, and improve themselves economically, rather than be heartbroken and exploited.

When Kenyans discuss these problems, the most common response is that the men have become useless because women are now getting educated and earning money, unlike long ago when African women stayed at home while men brought home the food. But did that era really exist?

Address at Kwibuka20 commemoration
Mount Kenya University, Thika
14th March 2014

Your Excellency, Yamina Karitanyi, the Rwandan High Commissioner to Kenya,

Hon. Ezekiel Mutua, Ministry of Information
Your Excellencies, High Commissioners, Ambassadors and Representatives of Countries represented here,


Students and teachers, and our generous host, Prof Stanley Waudo, Vice-Chancellor of Mount Kenya University,

Fellow East Africans,

I am always humbled to talk about the horror that visited our Rwandan brothers and sisters in April 1994, when families were tortured and wiped out because of the ethnic tag “Tutsi.” No matter how much I read and listen to the testimony of victims of the genocide against the Tutsi, I can never imagine even half the horror they must have felt to see their fellow Rwandans, emptied of their humanity, turn against their neighbors, friends and relatives and deny the humanity of others.

We must honor the memory of the victims. We must pray for the survivors who lived through the horror, and pledge to support them and Rwandans in their recovery, in whatever small way we can. And what is our support?
We in the universities may have no millions stashed away to open a school for people who need education. We may have no medical training to heal those still traumatized. All we have is our intellectual training. Frantz Fanon, the writer of the classic The Wretched of the Earth, when speaking of the anti-colonial wars in Africa in the 1950s, said that while the contribution of politicians is on the military battlefield, the contribution of intellectuals to the war for freedom is on the battleground of history. So my remarks here today are my small contribution to the journey of Rwandans as they “Remember, unite and renew.”

But while this commemoration is about Rwandans, I must address the reality that right here and now, I am speaking mostly to Kenyans. And standing here, I am requesting Kenyans, boundaries away from Rwanda, though in the same East African community, to remember what happened in Rwanda, to unite with Rwandans, and to walk with Rwandans as they renew their commitment to humanity, to living together in peace and dignity, and to prosperity.

But why must Kenyans remember the genocide against the Tutsi?

The Value of Conviction: Reflections on motivating students and marketing courses 

Presented at
Daystar University’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) 
March 19 and 21, 2014

Wow. I’m honored to have been invited to the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning because at the beginning of this year, I wasn’t sure I could handle any more disappointment regarding our department. I asked God to please give us at least some recognition for all we’ve done over the past six years, and I take this invitation as one of the many answers to my prayers. Looking back over the last few years, I now see that despite the difficult journey, God has done exceedingly more than we asked for. And although we remain uncertain, we the faculty are convinced that what we are doing is right, and that because it is right, God shall fight for us, and has been fighting for us. The battle belongs to the Lord.

The details about our session today indicated that I was supposed to address what to do when students think our courses are “ho-hum, boring and lackluster.” Actually, the attitude towards the courses offered by our department has been worse than that. Students have been thinking that our courses have no relevance to the working world. But they do not think that on their own initiative. Rather, they are echoing the message they have been hearing from others both within and outside the university. Besides hearing faulty advice on what is “marketable,” students also live in an environment where politicians, both in Kenya and worldwide, have attacked the arts as a waste of resources of higher education.

I'm a saved woman (or so I think), but I am also a person who gives the devil his due, otherwise I will go insane. So my love for Sauti Sol fufils the quota for my decadent side. I have bought their last three albums, and I generally tolerate when they're risque (although I'm not sure pastor Muriithi would approve). 

So when I heard about "Nishike," I was willing to give it a shot. But I couldn't get even halfway through the video.

And it's not that I'm holy or that I find it dirty. It's that I thought to myself - what is this doing to me, and what will remain in my mind when I've finished watching? What is it saying about sex, love, womanhood and manhood?

Alot of people have decried the hypocrisy in condemning Sauti Sol while they watch raunchy telenovellas or music videos by mainly US musians. I agree that we shouldn't apply different standards to local and international artists. So whatever I say about "Nishike" applies to foreign movies as well.

I generally avoid watching explicit content, though I'm not very religious about it. I'm not going to not watch say, Monster's Ball or 12 years a slave because I want to avoid the steamy scenes. Besides, if I'm watching it on DVD, there's a button on the remote  called "forward." And generally, I avoid watching TV because I don't have the luxury to skip the sections I don't want to watch. So if I'm not sure about a movie, I'll wait for the version on youtube or DVD.

And when I do watch those scenes, I am conscious that they are violent against my dignity as a black, female child of God, and I will say as much. For instance, I dislike the two said movies, but not just for the contentious scenes, but for the larger story as well. For example, I really dislike the role for which Lupita won the Oscar. While I do celebrate her personal success, especially because she acted so well, I find the award a humiliation to black women, and a mockery of black men. Surely, black women have played greater and more uplifting roles in movies for which they should have gotten Oscars. And what message has Hollywood sent us, and to our girls, if the only African American woman to win the Best Actress Oscar, and the first African woman to win an Oscar, won the awards for characters that were so degraded?  In fact, the worst scene for me wasn't Patsey being raped or being flogged when naked; it was when Northrup walked away and left her in slavery. He had no choice, but that's precisely the point. The essence of slavery is to deny people their choices. In this case, slavery also denied Northrup his manhood; he was absent when his children grew up and married. He was forced to flog a black woman. And then he left that woman in slavery. That's what the real slavery is - it goes beyond the plantation to the heart of what it means to be a black woman or a black man. Slavery humiliates black women and prevents black men from having a positive impact on the people they love and who love them. 

So back to "Nishike." My problem is the story beyond the mere pictures of semi-nude women and men. And beyond the tacky lyrics (really, Sauti Sol?). My problem is the story of Kenya. We're a country whose exploitative ideology rules even our emotions and our sexual interactions. Just like our politics exploits ethnicity to distort our minds and set us against each other, our values about masculinity, femininity, love and sex distort the way we think and the way we treat each other. Yet sex, sensuality and intimacy are supposed to be a celebration and a metaphor of who we are as women, as men and as children of God. Curtis Reed gave us a great breakdown of what that means when he took Ajenda Afrika through the Soul of Sex workshop.

As Curtis said, our model of sensuality should come from God, from our faith, and from our consciousness of who we are and the world we live in. And I would add from great poetry, which explains why I love Nikki Giovanni's poetry that weaves revolution with black love. Like the poem "Seduction." So when we need to have explicit pictures, it's a sign that we're desperate, that we lack imagination and we've lost the words, that we've lost the plot, and that we've lost the love stories that we should be telling one another, and with which we should be building one another as free human beings.

That said, I'm still a fan of Sauti Sol and very much looking forward to the new album.

We Kenyans have a big, big problem, and education has everything to do with it. We think that we can develop by putting up buildings and setting up great projects, and hyping them up in the media, but without involving the people. Our county is buying costly equipment, getting alot of huge names behind a certain project, employing people, but the people on the ground who are the greatest resource, and for whom the project is being developed, aren't involved.

So today we tried to advice this team to get back to the "fundamentals," forget about the equipment and big names and go back to the people, but I don't think they really heard us.They say they've hired a consultant who has advised them to buy this latest tech equipment which even I, who isn't an expert, will tell you that you don't need. You see, even we educated professionals are dishonest (or at least, we're not always objective). If you tell a techie that you have funds to buy the latest equipment, he will go on a spending spree for the latest gadgets which he'd always dreamed of using but knew he couldn't afford (and could frankly do well without). And the county is paying this guy consultancy fees, while we gave our advice - that was more useful - free of charge.

And that's where your taxes and mine will go, on glory projects by well meaning government officials. But even in private institutions, the story is the same. Within educational institutions, alot of money is used hyping courses, equipment, IT, but try to get 200 bob for refreshments for students to network with guests from the industry, or pay for posters for a project, or hire a vehicle for a field trip, you're made to feel like you're pulling out teeth. I guess the idea is that if you're asked what your legacy is, its easier to talk about roads and than to talk about people. Yet Jesus left us no temples. He left us with stories, faith and lives that were changed.

But today's episode has reaffirmed for me the value of a liberal arts education, or education in the humanities. My colleague Larry Ndivo and I were able to talk to this team because our education is in the basics - language, literature and the humanities, whose focus is human beings. In fact, we were trying to suggest that probably the best way forward is to train people in story telling, writing and collecting their heritage before jumping to film making, cinematography and recording. However - and no disrespect to my counterparts in communication - Kenyans have decided that studies in language and literature, compared to communication, are not "commercial," as my friend Ngala Chome puts it, or "sexy" as I put it. So we're jumping to the cameras, makeup, costume and films before we've decided what exactly we're going to say, and about whom we're going to say it. And like I've said, universities are encouraging this warped intellectual development by supporting infrastructure more than the development of the students' minds and experience. It's really sad.

But isn't that what our national leaders are doing? The current government won by a slim majority, which meant half of Kenya still feels alienated from this country. The national priority should have been the alienated, but instead, they were told to "accept and move on," or "look at the projects we'll do, and forget how you feel." But the truth is, it's the people who matter most. We cannot be a nation based on roads and facilities - a nation is her people. Kenya must be for the people. As our Lord put it, Sabbath must be for human beings, not human beings for the Sabbath.

I'm probably one of the few HoD's who's increasingly concerned about the rising cost of higher education, because the arts and humanities gets the most accusations about being a waste of money. Yet we can think of 100 other ways in which universities are spending 100 times more on extra-curricular and managerial activities than on what the arts and humanities asks for. I've said before that Africa has the advantage of being able to learn from America's mistakes, but unfortunately the guy in charge the Education ministry is so busy issuing orders and not listening and guiding universities towards making those mistakes.

There's a controversial movie just released on the same in the United States. I hope we can get us a legit copy so that we can see it. The way we're going - with HoDs and faculty thinking of the hottest new course rather than of what students and the country needs, is not sustainable.

The movie trailer is here.