About two kilometers from Ngong town, in a largely residential area, two recently opened commercial buildings, within the space 100 meters, host five liquor stores that double up as bars. Every evening, a number of cars are parked outside the building until late at night.

The concentration of these stores surprised me, because the frequent reports about NACADA chairman Mututho (albeit squabbling with his CEO), gave me the impression that NACADA would not allow so many liquor stores in one spot. But upon second thought, I remembered that when Mututho first began his fight against alcoholism as an MP pushing for stricter legislation, I wondered on The Zeleza Post, where I previously blogged, whether the issue was really alcohol or the Central Province angst about the lower sperm count of Kikuyu men. 

The persistent blame of girl empowerment by male intellectuals points to a crisis of maturity in Kenyan masculinity.

In the article “The problem of maturity in hip hop,” Lewis Gordon argues that the essence of maturity is a tragic consciousness. The difference between a child and an adult, says Gordon, is that a child thinks that there are no limits to what they do, that their every action has a simple cause and effect, and that their innocence always matters. An adult, however, understands that “that things are not always neat, that making decisions is complicated, and that people often make mistakes.”

At the institutional or social level, a tragic consciousness makes us aware that in instances of institutional power, the privileged and powerful must suffer, or be sacrificed, for justice to be restored. In tragedy, the innocence of the powerful  who suffer – be it Oedipus, Antigone or Lwanda Magere – is largely irrelevant. 

Recent news reports, about a girl who died after falling in a pit latrine as she escaped the embarrassment of being caught with a mobile phone in school, once again exposed how backward and rigid the Kenyan education system continues to be.

The girl’s schoolmates reported that the student was humiliated by the teacher reading her love tweets to the rest of the school. Although the media reported the girl’s death as suicide, I’m not convinced that it was suicide.