​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. 

 So this weekend, Kenyans are being treated to the carnival of the newly formed Jubilee Party. By God's grace, I have been overwhelmed this week by other matters, and so I didn't have the presence of mind to follow the news and share in the lethargy with which Kenyans are processing the splash of power and money. Many Kenyans feel that the 2017 elections are a done deal, and I think that that is partly the point of the Kasarani carnival - to overwhelm us into thinking that we really don't have a choice. 

So this morning, I remembered that I felt the same way during the TNA carnival four years ago when I wrote this post. If you didn't know that I wrote it in 2012, you would think I wrote it yesterday. But the only difference is, this time, is that I'm not that excited about voting. Since the IEBC demonstrations by CORD, my sense is that politicians decide how to share power and resources, and the citizens are simply there to give the charade some numbers. Our voice does not really count.

My gratitude goes to Chifu wa Malindi for preserving the post. Thank you for being a griot. A historian.

Posted May 21st, 2012 

I don't want to vote in the upcoming Kenya general elections. And I'm angry because I think that it's hardly a coincidence that I don't want to vote.

A few days ago, the Standard Newspaper posted what was supposed to be a harmless article about Ruth Odinga, Deputy Governor of Kisumu County, bedridden with a leg fracture in a hospital in London. The article focused on her patriotism to her ODM party, because she requested an orange-colored cast, which was supposed to be a consolation for not being with her family at Christmas. And just to give the story some political flavor, the writer kicked in some lines about her concern that not many women were running for the seat of Governor. That she was a politician, responsible for her county’s healthcare services, getting treatment abroad, was not an issue. That was supposed to be normal.

I read, with sadness, an article by Dr. Simon Gicharu calling for the integration in higher education among East African Community. He argues that integration would tap the best brains in the region and would encourage competition in university education – which is necessarily good.
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From my experience as a lecturer, that promise, which has been pushed in Kenya for last eight or so years, has never materialized. Instead, regional integration of higher education has overburdened lecturers with more management processes and paperwork, leaving them little time to have better impact in the classrooms and research centers, where education and knowledge production actually take place. 

Yesterday evening, I was in a meeting with students discussing their research topics. Each of them wants to study different conflicts in the Kenyan professional and political landscape. Until yesterday, we had been able to avoid talking about politicians and expressing any kind of anger towards them.

Any Kenyan who works in a multi-ethnic space like Nairobi can figure out why every day, one has to play this dance of pretending not to have a political opinion. Kenyan Mpigs have successfully poisoned the environment, so that it has become difficult to talk about the incompetence of the president without the conversation degenerating into ethnic mudslinging. 

Once again, I find myself doing the lonely thing of expressing my concern that Africa is going to come out humiliated by the Obama administration after the Global Entrepreneurship Summit. 
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The Kenyan media is going gaga about Obama finally visiting his fatherland Kenya, reducing Obama’s visit to a homecoming rather than questioning the interests of the US being served by the visit. We saw this in August last year during the US-Africa Summit which left Africa with egg on her face.

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: