Many Kenyans complain that the church has fallen silent as the people are oppressed. The implication is that the church doesn’t care. But I don’t think that’s the problem. I think the church has just become clueless. It doesn’t know what citizens are facing, but most of all, it is blind to the citizens because it is infected by the ideology of the day.

​And this lack of self-awareness of the church is not new. During colonialism, the church turned a blind eye to – and sometimes actively supported –colonial oppression of Africans, because missionaries also believed that we Africans were backward and needed to be civilized by the love of Christ. 

OPEN LETTER TO DR BEN OKITA
Chairperson, Consumptive Wildlife Taskforce

I write to you as a citizen of the world domiciled in the African Motherland, and particularly in a territory that the imperial British forces carved out and called "Kenya."

I would like to voice my loudest opposition to the proposal to introduce "wildlife consumption in Kenya.

By now, many Kenyans have been made privy to the heated debates surrounding the death of 11 rhinos in a botched translocation exercise by KWS, funded by WWF and overseen by the embattled Tourism minister Najib Balala. Now that Balala lost his cool and told  unnamed people to go to hell, Kenyans are spoiling for him to be fired.

​It appears that Balala is way out of his depth in handling this issue. But focus on his sacking still misses the crux of the debate.

July, the most difficult month of the school year, is here with us again. Students in some parts of the country are dealing with cold temperatures in dorm rooms that are crowded, and with rules against wearing extra layers to keep warm.

​July is also the month of mock exams, when students are reminded that their future, and the pride (or shame) of their communities,  all depend on the grades they score during the examination.

The drilling for exams is also accompanied by physical and psychological abuse. Young people are told that they are useless without passing the examinations, and they are aware that even for the few who do pass exams, their future is not guaranteed. Corruption is going through the roof, and unemployment is destroying the self esteem and livelihoods of young people.

​But all these stories are missing from the hegemonic narrative about the spate of school fires that have returned in this strike season. The government, mainstream media, the church and educators are all reading from the same page in turning Kenyan society against her youth.

The naming of culprits behind the recent spectacular corruption scandals like the second edition of the NYS heist, and the scandal du jour, the importation of toxic sugar, is deeply frustrating. Kenyans are being treated to spectacles of fighting against corruption, but in reality, nothing is really changing. All we Kenyans are doing is participating in a blood sport, reminiscent of the Roman Empire, where people have a space to vent their anger and violence, but return to the same oppressive state of affairs.

​The blood sports, whose visibility has been maintained in Western civilization today through Hollywood films and video games on gladiators, were a cathartic spectacle that sustained the Roman empire. Because Rome inevitably used brutal war to capture every area that it added to the empire, violence necessarily became the lifeblood of Rome.  But also, as various ethnicities, nationalities and classes were brought together, blood sports in the stadiums became one way to keep the empire united through gross displays of valor and power. Gladiators, slaves, prisoners, Christians and wild exotic animals were subjected to torture and excruciating death for the entertainment of the crowds. Scholars say that the games provided an outlet for citizens to express increasingly violent aggression while the state contained the violence within the walls of the colosseum.

I’ve told this story before, but I’ll tell it again.
 
I returned from completing my studies abroad with a crisis of confidence. I knew that Kenya was against the arts, and that I would be mocked for studying them. And I was. I got to the classroom and found no students, and was hounded that there is no “market” for our programs. 

I believed it and I did try to fix it. Every weekend I was at festivals, talks, events, trying to hear what it was that the “market” wanted from arts programs and how we could provide it. ​

Theater scholar Gĩchingiri Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ writes that in 1991, at the height of the clamour for multi-partyism, the government denied a license for the staging of a play “Drumbeats of Kirinyaga,” by Oby Obyerodhiambo.

​The reason given was that the play portrayed an ethnically diverse and politically cohesive Kenya, which contradicted the president’s argument at the time that Kenya was too ethnically divided for multi-partyism.
​
While President Moi was claiming to care for Kenyans who are too tribal, his government was ironically also suppressing any public display of Kenyans transcending their tribal identities. The government needed to encourage tribalism among Kenyans in order to give itself something to cure.