So next month, Mavuno church is doing a series on manhood with the insightful Pastor Mbevi. After the disaster that was the "Future of men" panel at Storymoja festival, I'm nervous about this one. 

You see, just like at Storymoja, women will probably be more in the congregation. Most of us will be sitting there, wanting to hear why our men are not like what Pastor Mbevi will be talking about, while others of us will be praying to get a man at all, or to raise a man like that. It's a terrible space to be in as a woman, and probably that's why the Storymoja session degenerated into a shouting match. 

My feeling is that men should have this discussion among themselves, without us women there. We all know that men don't talk - really talk - with each other when they're together. They show off about how virile they are, but never talk about the cost, which is usually stealing from the public, breaking their wives' hearts while exploiting other women, and basically leaving a trail of pain in the lives of the women and children who love them. Or if the men are Christians, they'll just praise the Lord and say everything's ok. No struggles, no real issues, no accountability, no soul. 

Kudos to the organizers of the just concluded Storymoja festival for keeping arts practitioners and art lovers engaged for five glorious days! It was an intellectual and artistic feast, and many of us were spoiled for choice on which session to attend.

The festival also gave me the opportunity to reflect about how gender interacts with our Kenyan identity and social consciousness.

On Sunday, the last day, there was a session entitled “The future of men” which promised to be a session to discuss the changing role and expectations of men. Frankly, I thought that it would be a time to hear men being honest with each other, and I naively hoped that we would finally get some conversation about overthrowing the current situation in which the dominant model of Kenyan manhood is politicized noise, corruption and exploitation of the Kenyan people through stealing from public coffers and turning us against each other in the name of tribe. Or hear about how many men are schizophrenic, having a mistress for the hanky panky, a wife for meeting the parents and bearing the kids, and an office fling for intellectual and professional engagement, as if human beings' sexuality, social roles, work and mental activities are disconnected from each other.

I  also thought I would be in the minority in the audience.

How I was wrong. 

Perhaps one of the most tragic things about academic study and publishing in Kenya is our underestimation of how important they are to our nation’s and continent’s historical consciousness and psyche. Most of the time you hear Kenyans talk about academic work, they see it in terms of degrees and access to jobs, or they dismiss academic work as largely irrelevant, or as too “theoretical” for practical use. Even university administrations treat research and publishing as outside the core “business” of education.

Yet, our limited scholarly output ends up costing the continent, both in terms of cultural baggage, and also in shillings and cents. And lives.

The best example that I always quote, is that of Rwanda. When the genocide against the Tutsi broke out in 1994, the world had literally no template from which to understand what was going on. There had been very little publication on the country, and the most authoritative documents were the anthropological pieces that provided the very historical framework on which the genocide was based, together some quaint writings by travelers and journalists. There’s an interesting book by Adam Lebor, Complicity with evil: The United Nations in the age of genocide, in which he reveals that some of the decisions by the UN to abandon countries in crisis are largely caused by the shallow intellectual engagement on the countries affected. 

I have been diagnosed with a deadly disease once in my life. It was breast cancer. Even though my body seems to have been cleared of it now, I’ve been told that I had an aggressive strain that is known to return in more patients than others. So I kind of have a clue about what it means to look at death in the face. On the other hand, when I read the sad story of the panic, riots and misinformation that have plagued particularly Liberia and Sierra Leone following the Ebola outbreak, I know that mine is a totally different experience.

Ever since I was told that I needed to be tested for cancer, and as I waited for biopsy results, I thought through what confirmation of having the disease would mean. Two major questions were on my mind: