What An African Woman Thinks

THE CHOICES OF OUR LIVES

2012-02-05T16:05:00.001+03:00

Patricia Volk, writing a book review for the O Magazine, puts it succinctly (if a little drearily): “whatever you opt for, something gets cheated. That’s what’s known as the human condition.”

There’s a place, on everyone’s graph, where life’s indifference curve intersects with life’s budget constraints. For practical reasons. Like, I cannot be in two places at once. Or, I have only 24 hours in my day. Or even, I don’t have all the money in the world. I would like to, but I don’t. And, while we’re at it, I can only pack in this much emotional energy into my humanness. I’m limited that way.

My friend C said it to me some time ago, elsehow. She remarked that, whereas I was focused on healing the present anxiety, once I had found a solution, I would find that I was only choosing to take on the other. Choosing one anxiety or challenge over another. Or some such. It was very thought-provoking and all that.

So much pressure, these days, to multitask infinitely with our lives. To be and have it all. Which is probably why I intuitively recoil from the quotable quote given prominent place on Michael Hyatt’s Blog that proclaims, unabashedly, that multitasking is dead, while all the while hovering anxiously over it, casting a wary eye at it every time I’m in that neighbourhood.

Now, the verdict is out. John Medina has inserted his book, Brain Rules, into the conversation, perhaps driving the last nail into that coffin.

Multi-tasking is so 20th Century. Yawn.

(Not that it’ll die, just because it’s dead. If you know what I mean.)

But, back to where I wandered from into this.

I’m beginning to come to terms with the choices I’m making. And to be pragmatic. And to consider that, while I’m at work, wistfully thinking about that pile of books that I’d love to bury myself under (unliterally, thank you much), that what makes it possible for me to buy those books in the first place is this daily slog.

Another thing, another angle. I was lying on my couch one day recently, revelling in the space, the silence, the solitude, and drinking in life and thanking God for where I am and what I have. Then the very next day, I was longing for a life partner, a co-conspirator in life, someone to share the moments with. I looked at the evidence and realised that I couldn’t have it all all the time. If I always want space, silence and solitude, then the partner thing can get pretty hard to pull off. And if I want to seriously commit to him, then I’m going to sacrifice some of that space and solitude.

Byaggh.

I have to choose. Life means that you choose, and in choosing, you write your own nuanced story which is as much about what and who you left behind and why, as about where you are and how you got here.

Choices choices choices.

Women wondering if it’s worthwhile cheating promising careers to dedicate themselves to bringing up their children. Women feeling as though they are cheating their children in order to pursue promising careers. I have vocally opinionated friends on both ends of this continuum, and many more who people the middle ground.

African-American women, standing at an historic intersection: if they prefer Barack Obama, does that mean that they betray all that is woman in them? If they lean Hillary-ward, are they being unforgivably disloyal to the epic African-American struggle?

It is possible to torture ourselves endlessly with the thought that we won’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone. And then it’ll be too late. (It is song lyrics, you will notice, that come to haunt me in my night.) But in the end, so what? So what if I’m cheating this in order to be faithful to that other thing. Well then, I’d better make sure that other thing is worth it. And I’d better make sure I give it all I have and make it count for something.

Opportunity cost and all that.

What's Wrong With God Anyway?

2012-02-05T16:00:00.000+03:00

I think I'm finally able to articulate to myself what is wrong with God:

He loves everybody, not just me.

So, if He's throwing grace and mercy around, I'm not the only one who's going to catch a break now, am I?

Byaggh.

I want a God who belongs exclusively to me.

Or, at least, who has me at the very top of His list of priorities.

Me and only me.

Ok, if you insist, me and all my beloved.

But He can't be spending all His time trying to balance what's good for me with what's good for the universe and everything and everyone in it.

I bet my saying that made you gasp.

Oh Well.

(Didn't you ever feel that way?)

ENOUGH: NAVIGATING PAST BALI TO JAMAICA (Or, the Souls Travels and Travails)

2012-02-05T15:52:00.001+03:00

Last I heard, there were tens of millions of Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Eat Pray and Love in print. I for one will not argue with that particular use of ink by the barrel.

It took me through a dark tunnel recently, and while I did not immediately emerge into the light at the reading of it, it provided welcome flashes of artificial light, and some genuine holler-out-loud, make-them-think-you’re-crazy, moments into the bargain.

We hold fairly divergent views on things spiritual, Elizabeth and I, (just so you know) but I could not help but admire her courage and her insight. And as often is the case in these things, I found that there were also a swath of convergence and there was much to learn from her particular experience.

One thing that stayed with me and struck a chord was a particular sombre description of Bali.

She describes the expatriate society in Bali as very high calibre people whose lives once embodied great promise but who have “been so ill-treated and badly worn by life that they’ve dropped the whole struggle and decide to camp out in Bali indefinitely” so that what unites them now is the way that they have “completely and forever” abandoned ambition.

Sobering thought, this.

Figuratively-speaking, I always believed that, if and when I lost my groove, all I would need to do was to travel to Jamaica, where grooves go to repose I’m reliably informed, and get it back. If Stella could do it, so could I. It was as simple as that.

But now Elizabeth Gilbert has complicated things by introducing the notion of a Bali.

Jamaica is a temporary place where you go to recover your groove. Bali is a place where you go to give up because your groove left you and went to Jamaica and you have no intention of getting it back either because you can’t, or because you won’t.

Jamaica is where people go to recuperate. Bali is where they go to give up.

If I sighed and mumbled beneath my breath the thing that was resonating so deeply inside of me in that hour of darkness: “Life is hard”, walls of humanity would have absorbed it and tossed back crescendoeing echoes of it. “Life is hard, Life is hard, Life is hard.”

Because it can be. Hard.

Sometimes, we just want it to stop for a moment: we want to step away from the fray, to get away from it all. We want to scamper away to the private place and lick our wounds. We want freedom and the space to rail against the unfairness of it all. Sometimes, it’s what we need.

The trick is in knowing how long to allow ourselves to wallow and in having the discipline to tell ourselves: Enough.

By me, Enough is one of the most meaningful words in the English dictionary. It cuts off too little from too much, moderating between glut and dearth to restore balance to life as we know it. I like the word Enough. Enough is a word we should use more often.

Sometimes, we’re in our right to allow ourselves to wallow, but we must bracket that wallowing with a resounding Enough. We can allow ourselves to go to our emotional Jamaica, but not to detour to Bali, build a house and buy a cow.

Here’s to bypassing Bali and going to Jamaica. Figuratively-speaking only, of course. And not just because there’s the very real possibility of someday maybe perhaps bumping into Usain Bolt. Although of course that would be a bonus.

I Want to Be An Unreasonable Woman

2012-02-05T15:22:00.001+03:00

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw

Voice of the Digital Class, Voice of the People

2012-02-02T15:43:00.001+03:00

So, about the Iranian election aftermath and the role of social media:

I (may) have said before in this space that one of the challenges of assembling a balanced view of any country, especially a developing one, based on non-traditional media such as blogs, twitter, youtube, etc, is that the more powerful/sophisticated tools for gathering and disseminating information are still largely concentrated in the hands of a particular class of people whose views are legitimate, certainly, but are not necessarily representative of all views, and may not even be the majority view.

In Iran and in Kenya, an urban technosavvy middle class with reasonable access to diverse online tools makes full use of these tools. This is a good thing, a great thing even. Bully for us. I do not mean to suggest in any way shape or form that the views we express are not heartfelt or legitimate. I do however deign to suggest that they are oftentimes only a small part of the picture, like looking at a portrait and staring fixedly at the nose while determinedly (and a little curiously) ignoring the rest of the face.

The fact that any one person is in possession of, or has access to a microphone or other amplifying device doesn’t make his or her view more legitimate than that of the next citizen. I say this as one who has the platform that is this blog and who has been known to differ significantly on matters political et al with her equally opinionated rural cousin of a proximate age. If he and I were to lock horns in this space it would make for a very lively exchange, trust me. You do not know him. He does not blog. He does not twitter. He is not on facebook. All these technological ‘shortcomings’ notwithstanding, his opinion is no less legitimate than mine.

In this scenario, traditional media sources must continue to play a pivotal role in amplifying the voices of those who do not have their own platforms/microphones to reach the rest of the world. They must play a role in distilling fact from fantasy and rumour from reporting, and in making the best attempt they can to serve up a balanced news diet.

Yes, they’re imperfect and our antennae should always be up, always alert to bias, but we must acknowledge that often times they have the resources, the contacts and the operational capacity to dig deeper and go further in sourcing and verifying the news and that they are bound to some extent by professional rules of practice and conduct and our high expectations. (Even though they constantly fall short, at least we hope they aim.)

They cannot afford to sulk and walk away in the face of the emergence of new media sources. Never has it been more crucial for them to penetrate the places where ordinary folk do not yet have the resources at their disposal to make themselves heard and to enable those people have their say.

It never ceases to amaze me how easy it is to slip into an ‘either or’ view of things on a wide range of subjects when a ‘both and’ perspective makes so much more sense.

In the case of the Iran election, it was useful to hear from individual Iranians on the ground about what was going on inside the country and to watch them leverage social media so effectively to rally the world to their cause. At the same time, it took a great deal of time and effort to filter the signal from the sheer volume of noise. This is why I really appreciated the reporting on Iran of such Middle East veterans as Robert Fisk.

Speaking of keeping our antennae up and being alert to bias, I really appreciate this post by Hamid Tehrani, journalist, blogger and Global Voices Iran Editor. While appreciating the pivotal role social media such as
Facebook and twitter have played, he also points out that

“Twitter is both a source of information and mis-information”

and that

“Most Iranians who tweet are activists supporting the protest movement and promoting a cause. Their information should be double-checked and not be accepted at face value, or as an eyewitness observation.”

I wholeheartedly agree. I believe the onus is on the prolific user of social media to take personal responsibility for proactively assessing/evaluating what information comes her way before passing it on. In the absence of a paid/dedicated gatekeeper, Craig Kanalley over at Twitter Journalism is right in suggesting that we are all gatekeepers. We all must be the social media equivalent of ‘active listeners’, interacting rationally with what we’re receiving, triangulating the information with other sources and making the best judgment we can of the value of what we receive based on what we already know, who the information is from and whether is corroborating evidence.

Likely, even with the best of intentions, we will get it wrong some of the time, but if we are alert, we are more likely to be right than wrong.

Aid to Africa: Aiding or Abetting?

2012-02-02T15:39:00.000+03:00

There have been some interesting contributions to the debate about Aid to Africa these past couple of weeks.

On AppAfrica, Jonathan Gosier used a well-known tale to make a point. He suggested that people look at Africa like it’s the land from the Wonderful Wizard of Oz:

“It’s a strange land, in some far away place; far away from Auntie Em’s farm in Kansas. There are many oppressed people, people who need a brain (an metaphor for better education), people who need courage and confidence, and people who need a little love. There’s plenty of evil witches to slay in Africa (pick your poison, actually) and often plenty of ‘men behind the curtain’ (The Wizards) who dictate what the politics of the continent really are.”

Into this land, enter Dorothy, the well-meaning but naïve Dorothy. She lands in Oz, catalyzes what appear to be positive changes, and then flies away, back to whence she came. When she returns, it turns out it’s not holding together very well and her actions/collaborations have had unforeseen consequences. But, Dorothy doesn’t live in Oz. She whizzes in and out of there and it’s the Munchkins, the little people, the inhabitants of Oz whom she so wants to help, who have to deal with the consequences.

According to Gosier, there are “Too many Dorothys in Africa’s Oz’."

His advice:

“Just remember, nothing happens in a vacuum and we should be careful of where we drop our houses.”

But that’s just the beginning. In comes a Financial Times interview with Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist who’s about to release a new book titled “Dead Aid.”

Sample the assessment of her point of view by FT columnist William Wallis:

"…she is starting from the premise that aid not only doesn’t work but is a large part of the problem: it crowds out private investment, fosters corruption, fuels conflict and undermines the rule of law. If that’s where you begin, then the fact that some donor countries are already squeezing their aid budgets and shelving lofty commitments to poverty eradication should prove a healthy wake-up call for African policymakers."

And for dessert:

"In fact, Moyo proposes far more radical treatment: a telephone call from every donor nation to every aid-dependent government in Africa, warning that in five years the taps will turn off. This, she believes, would trigger the search for alternative financing on a commercial basis, and force governments to create conditions in which business would thrive."

“In my world of no aid, it is easier for citizens to hold governments

accountable,” she insists.

(I love the idea of that five-year warning. Fair but firm.)

Speaking of citizens holding governments accountable is a perfect way to usher in Iqbal Quadir. In his learned opinion as reported in the Wall Street Journal:

"…governments should be sustained by citizens taxes" so that it is clear who they serve and to whom they owe their loyalty.

(Which of course, makes perfect sense when you look at the way some donor funded governments behave sometimes.)

According to Iqbal, aid short circuits accountability structures, weakening citizens’ hold over

government.

(Because he who pays the piper calls the tune and all that).

Aid, he argues, "empowers bureaucracies, promotes statism, and weakens government incentives to boost tax revenues through growth. Economic assets are often kept in the hands of the state, leading to monopolies, stagnation and extortion."

Therefore he urges that America (and might I add, every donor country) to:

"stop pouring billions into bureaucracies to buy short-term alliances and focus its efforts on bottom-up entrepreneurship."

So much good stuff said.

edit: my manners went awol. I neglected to tip the hat to David Ker for pointing me to the FT article.

Book Review: It's Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong

2012-02-02T15:28:00.000+03:00

A New Beginning?

Kibaki’s inaugural declaration: “corruption will now cease to be a way of life in Kenya” made to roaring applause one hot December day at the tail end of a dramatic election year back in 2002 now reads like a line of pure comedy penned by a cynical scribe scripting the great African leadership farce. If they replayed that clip on television today, you would likely choke on a chortle for how far the present reality is from that lofty ideal to which we attached our national hopes.

This was not always so.

Once upon a time, we were true believers, high to delirious on hope.

Michela Wrong begins by reminding us of that time, a time when we polled as the most optimistic people in the world.

I remember the time. I remember the feeling. There’s a word for it: euphoric. We were euphoric.

Enter into this euphoria a relatively young man, a couple of years shy of his 40th birthday, invited to be a part of shaping the new Kenya by taking up the position of anti corruption tsar. His name: John Githongo.

It was a momentous task to be sure, but in the end, there were a number of reasons that compelled him to take the job. One, he was an idealist, understandably seduced by the opportunity to be the change he hoped to see. Two, his acquiescence was practically taken for granted by the men who nominated him, his father’s contemporaries, men he held in high regard, men he trusted. Three, we were in a state of euphoria, remember?

So he took the job.

It was an auspicious beginning.

During his confirmation interview with President Kibaki, Githongo had been forthright with his future boss:

“Sir,” he had said, “we can set up all the anti-corruption authorities we want, spend all the money we want, pass all the laws on anticorruption, but it all depends on you. If people believe the president is ‘eating’, the battle is lost. If you are steady on this thing, if the leadership is there, we will succeed.”

He was certain he had been heard.

Same Old, Same Old

There was every suggestion of 180-degree change in direction in those early days. As Permanent Secretary in charge of combating corruption, his office was located within State House, down the corridor from the president’s office giving him unprecedented access to the president and making him extremely powerful in the scheme of things. He formed his team, drawn for the most part from civil society rather than from the ranks of the civil service. He said ‘thanks but no thanks’ to the dark-blue BMW assigned to him as an official car. He set to work enthusiastically, participating in the new government’s effort “to carry out a detailed public tally of Kenya’s corruption problem.”

He immersed himself into the system and applied himself wholeheartedly to the task as he envisioned it. He grew fond of his new boss, President Kibaki, might have been star-struck even.

Alas the honeymoon was doomed to be shortlived.

Soon, he became painfully aware of an ethnic polarisation taking place around the seat of power. Whereas Kibaki had won his handy election victory surrounded and supported by people from diverse parts of Kenya, slowly his inner circle distilled into one constituting mainly fellow Kikuyu and their allied tribes. The State House became increasingly mono-ethnic. Although Githongo was a Kikuyu, he was young and urban-bred, his ethnicity was far from his primary identity and this scenario discomfited him greatly.

Further, it dismayed no end that this new grouping was almost singlehandedly responsible for delaying the process of drafting a new constitution, despite a clear election promise to deliver a new constitution to Kenyans.

Then, persistent rumours of “new graft, of dodgy procurement contracts and lavish spending by members of the NARC administration,” began to waft his way, corroborated by a sophisticated network of informants he had cultivated. It turned out that the high level operatives within the NARC government were responsible for the signing or approval of 18 procurement contracts which would cost the taxpayers three quarters of a billion dollars, easily outstripping aid to Kenya in that year which was pinned at circa half a billion dollars.

Valiantly he tried to do his job—to identify the culprits and help bring them to book. Miserably he failed. Sensing resistance from his boss and fearing for his life, he fled.

Anti Corruption Tsar Turned International Fugitive

On 6th February, 2005, he showed up at Michela Wrong’s doorstep in Camden Town, London, lagging a load of luggage, come to stay a while. The anti-corruption tsar had turned international fugitive.

He had determined to resign. His life, he felt, was in danger. He had with him a secret arsenal of documents, diaries and recordings meticulously accumulated in the course of duty. They were highly damaging to the government in general and to specific highly-placed individuals in particular. They were also his reputation insurance policy. If he had attempted to make the claims he made about what he had seen and heard without this indisputable evidence, he would have been dismissed a madman.

This book, “It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower” turns on these somewhat dramatic events, hovering over them broodingly, occasionally darting backward a generation or two in an attempt to gain perspective and forward a few years to show context and consequences.

All the while it forces us to retread painfully familiar, garbled territory: the “unbridled greed” that comes accompanied by an irrational sense of personal entitlement at the expense of all others and what it has wrought in Africa and why it has wrought it in Africa. The central theme as suggested in the book’s title, then, is the politics of consumption. To hold the reins of power in Kenya is to be custodian to the key to the national pantry. (I wonder whether Amartya Sen meant a double entrendre with his assertion that “no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy,” or that’s just the way the chips happened to fall.)

In the end, in this book, tribalism and corruption stand together as two vices that hover ominously over Kenya’s future, threatening her wellbeing, indeed shaking her very foundations. We always knew that these were our most pressing problems, but what Wrong has succeeded in illustrating is the way in which they are inextricably intertwined. If we create a system in which equitable access to national resources is guaranteed regardless of any form of affiliation, then people will no longer feel the need to fall back on these affiliations either defensively or offensively and political leaders who then seek to exploit our differences for their own ends will find themselves without followers. If the system is fundamentally flawed, malevolent, then people will be forced to look for crutches to help them navigate its turbulent waters. One such crutch is tribal patronage.

The Man Behind the Drama

I had always wondered what made Githongo tick, why he chose to do what he did in exactly the way he did it. This book attempts to provide answers to these questions.

The Githongo depicted here is hardly all saint and no sinner. He may be the hero, the protagonist, but he is humanised by his flaws. For prominent example, he has the irritating knack of overpromising himself and then under-delivering—he is well-known for standing people up. So much so that in his circles, the synonym for being stood up is being Githongoed. He is also, per Wrong’s description of him, an “inveterate conspiracy theorist intrigued by tales of plots and subterfuge.”

Wycliffe Muga, a journalist, disparages him a coconut, black on the outside, white on the inside, while, David Ndii, prominent in the Kenyan civil society, muses in retrospect that, he was patently unsuitable for the role to which he was assigned by dint of his personality: “he probably didn’t have the right character for the job,” and “he went in with a lot more idealism that I thought warranted.”

Opinions abound about how Githongo should have responded to the circumstances in which he found himself. Perhaps he should have persevered, been more pragmatic—African politics are what they are. How did his dramatic exit serve, in the end?

On the other hand stand those who wonder at how long it took Githongo to catch on to the fact that he was being used.

It is on this side that Wrong appears to stand. At the outset, the portrait of Githongo that she paints gives off more than a whiff of the naïve. We read a barely concealed incredulity in the subtext:

“Tracking John’s itinerary, there’s something mystifying about the sheer time it took him to recognise the obvious. The dossier he eventually produced can read like a log of a year-long refusal to face the truth. How many times did John Githongo, a man of no mean intelligence, need to be told that his closest colleagues had hatched Anglo Leasing on the pretext of election fundraising before he believed it?”

This bent is particularly striking because not more than six months before Githongo showed up at her doorstep, Wrong had written an article for the New Statesman brimming with her own enthusiasm, celebrating a new Kenya. The ugliness that came to blight the NARC administration was already bubbling to the surface, and while she acknowledged these flaws, her tone was determinedly optimistic. She too had embraced this notion of ‘a new wind blowing.’

I mention this to lead into the fact that I too was duped, in the beginning. Many of us were. And perhaps on account of the high hopes that we held, we were frozen in a particular place of disbelief for a moment too long.

Like Githongo, as things fell apart at the beginning, I too was reluctant to lay the blame squarely at Kibaki’s feet. He was not himself, following the accident and the stroke, I rationalised. In my mind, therefore, someone else was taking advantage of his weakened state, to wreak havoc on the country. Wait till he got better, I told myself, reminiscent of my adolescent days when the do-gooder’s last resort was always, “wait till daddy comes home.”

So I read with a sense of resignation Githongo’s damning indictment made in retrospect: as he (Kibaki) got better, things got worse.

Soon enough, Githongo had to bow to a different wisdom:

“If a leader is surrounded by shifty, money-grabbing aides and family members, it’s because he likes it that way. These are the people he feels at ease with, whose working methods he respects. Far from being an aberration, the entourage is a faithful expression of the autocrat’s own proclivities.”

I reach back in memory and have to concede that certainly things did not get better.

So, again, why did it take him so long to jump ship when at last it dawned on him beyond reasonable doubt that the government for which he worked was hopelessly dirty? The answer, we find, is twofold:

One, it is about the circumstances he was in.

He “had been too close.” As Wrong paints it, once he was in his job, he became a prisoner to it. He could not do his job, but he could not easily quit it. So the option available to him was to stay as token, “a pet monkey performing tricks to reassure the regime’s critics,” or to flee as he did.

Two, it is about who he was.

In this instance, character proved to be destiny. “When John trusted someone, he did it completely. And when he was disappointed, he flipped completely.”

And then when he finally admitted to himself that something was horrible wrong, he procrastinated, but then again, “John was always ready to admit that procrastination, which follows on from the need to control events as night follows day, was one of his character flaws.

The Swing of the Pendulum

Once, however, a certain bridge had been crossed, there could have been no doubt that he was going to leave. David Ndii describes Githongo as having a “conviction” type of personality, one prone to “emotional volatility” and prone to the “melodramatic.”

Githongo’s style, it appears, harkens unto Obama. He confessed of himself: ‘I try and dot all the “i”s and cross all the “t”s. I do this excessively, it’s been my style throughout. And then, when I move – BOOM!’

His initial inaction could be attributed to a propensity to over-examine. Mwalimu Mati, another civil society luminary in his own right explains it with: “No mistakes are tolerable to him, and that accounts for the inaction.”

But when at last the pendulum swung the opposite direction, it was a dramatic and complete swing. He burned his bridges as he advanced. There was no going back.

No matter if you think it took inordinately long or he was too quick to judgment, there can be no diminishing the significance of what he did:

“I thought for a bit, but couldn’t recall a single occasion in which a government official of John’s stature had blown the whistle on an African administration,” Gitau, Githongo’s brother remarks to Wrong. Wrong agrees. Not that she can think of, there isn’t.

In my experience, earth has no torment like an idealist disillusioned.

Wrong puts it this way:

There is such a thing as “the fury of frustrated zeal,” and unscrupulous persons seeking to misuse the idealist to achieve their own ends ought to be very wary of its manifestations. When at last he was done with the NARC government and all its cheating ways, he was done with it, he was furious at it and he was bitter.

Judging the Book by More than Its Cover

The story itself is definitely worth telling, and Wrong has proved a worthy custodian.

I approached the book with a defensive scepticism, antennae up, mind braced, expecting a predictable caricature of an African nation in broad strokes of pitch black and sparkling white. She makes no sweeping indictments in the tradition of Kapuscinski and Naipaul before her. Where she feels a need to cluster, and a number of times she does, she goes to reasonable extents to corroborate, to defend, to illustrate. I do not always agree with her, but I recognise the effort she makes to deliver nuance, and applaud her effort. Except that one time when she ruefully remarks: “Working in Africa, I’d grown accustomed to compromised friendships, relationships premised on wilful ignorance on my part and an absence of full disclosure on my friends’.” But I chose to forgive her that.

This does not mean that I did not find much that was wince-worthy. It’s hard to read about all the different ways in which a thing that you cherish is broken. Even when you know full well that it is broken. To think that Kenya, in the early days of the NARC government, was the first country to ratify the UN Convention against Corruption. Irony of the highest order. Irony that ought really to be feted and knighted. Maybe even crowned.

Sometimes, I bristled. As against her contention that tribe and tribal affiliations define the Kenyan landscape and predominate. But I concede that she is justified and that in light of recent of events, it is hard to argue now: we as a nation do suffer from “an acute ethnic self-awareness”.

In the end, Kenya’s recent political history can be summarised thus:

The ethnically-based white settler tribe was kicked out (or reluctantly relinquished power, depending on who’s writing the history) to be replaced by a Kikuyu president who inherited a system and abused it to serve his own people, and then when he died, was replaced by a Kalenjin president who promptly followed in the footsteps of his predecessors and so on and so forth. What saddens is that everyone plays this as a zero sum game in the name of “restoring balance” by overcorrecting past partisanship.

While she’s at it, Wrong finds the time (and space) to insert her voice into the aid debate, appearing to side with Dambisa when she notes that “Western donor governments, their media and their expatriates, had become the ultimate, trusted arbiters of Kenyan reality.” By this she means that aid was a stick that western governments had and they could use it and that their money bought them the right to an opinion that could be heard whereas “ordinary Kenyans, thinking the same thing, with a hundred times more intensity, could do nothing about it, and there lay their ultimate emasculation.”

Wrong also contends that aid is self-serving. Realpolitik. It is not free. There are reasons that funds flow to certain coffers. But then she turns the corner, perhaps in a quest for balance, and suggests that there was also the case of the gaze trained brutally on the long term, because instititutions, checks and balances, civil society, etc, take time to build.

There are other questions that arise around aid in this particular story that should give us pause. For example, how, even after Githongo’s damning dossier had been made public, the aid for the most part, kept flowing:

“Demonstrating a truly remarkable sense of timing, the World Bank chose to announce $145 million in new loans to Kenya – the first credits approved by the executive board for fifteen months – just three days after the leaking of John’s dossier, signalling that, as far as this institution was concerned, a $750-million procurement scandal was no grounds for querying the wisdom of re-engaging with the Kenyan government. The same emollient message came from DfID, which had announced a £58-million grant a few days before John’s leak, and saw no reason to reconsider.”

I sent a text message to one of the people I do life with who also happens to work with a World Bank affiliated institution asking her what she thought of how the World Bank had been portrayed in Wrong’s book. She responded by conceding that oftentimes, they murk up implementation and they end up botching things seriously, but nonetheless, the people she works with are some of the most idealistic people she knows, and they are honestly committed to make our world a better place.

(Which echoes a rising sentiment in me: it’s not the heart that is in the wrong place, it is the hand that is responding in the wrong way. In this respect, aid idealists and aid sceptics ought really to dialogue as on the same side, wanting the same thing, giving benefit of doubt, assuming goodwill unless proven absent. But that is another article, for another day.)

As for the writing: on occasion she gets mired in descriptive terrain but most times, she moves the narrative along at a brisk lyrical pace, drawing you into the vortex of the story. Her language is elegant and her imagery vivid, as when she writes that “centralised systems of power are like onions: each layer faithfully mimics the core,” or when she describes those who “belong to an international elite that automatically turns left on entering a plane.”

To her credit, she is astute at sending subtle signals that are bound to alert the Kenyan reader as to her intimacy with the context. She sprinkles her book with familiar anecdotes: I relate immediately to her description of how we Nairobians drive at nervous speed past the woodland on Ngong Road on our way to Karen for fear of carjackers. I smile as she remembers to me the first escalator in Nairobi, at Yaya Centre, in the eighties. (I remember taking two buses to get there to ride it.)

If these particular signals do not resonate, the book is replete with others, I am confident you will find ones that do. This is the detail, but it speaks volumes, as I’m sure she knew it would. (I was amused that she baptised South C as scruffy as against the more pristine parts of Nairobi, of course, Muthaiga and Runda for example). The message is clear: she is foreigner, but she is not stranger. She has reported on Kenya for a dozen years. She worked, once, at the Standard Newspaper.

Is There Only Elijah Left As A Prophet in Israel?

You will have to judge for yourselves, on the reading, whether indeed the forces shaping John Githongo were “calculated to produce the perfect whistleblower” as is Wrong’s contention. I for one am uncomfortable with the notion that some among us were predestined to blow the whistle, that there is a specialness, a set-apartness, a one in every ten million-ness about Githongo.

It carries a faint echo of Elijah’s episode of self-pity in the desert, cast as sole crusader in a world where Jezebel’s tentacles reach wide and deep and she had sworn to kill him.

For those not familiar with the story it goes like this:

Elijah had long been standing up against King Ahab for all his injustices against the people of Israel and finally Queen Jezebel, had had enough. She swore by all that she knew that she would kill him if it was the last thing she did. Elijah fled to the desert, with a death threat from no less than the King’s wife hanging over his head and in the days that followed, he became increasingly depressed. When God came by and asked him what the matter was, he was quick to grouse. He was being zealous for God, doing what God wanted him to do and everybody else had either abandoned the task or been killed on account of it but here he was, sticking with it, and now look, he too was in danger of being killed. God gives him a long answer, but the part of that answer that interests me is the “hey look, you’re actually not the only one left, there are seven thousand others out there.”

Talk about putting things in perspective.

The point I make is not that Githongo does not deserve our admiration, respect and applause. He does. I mean, he really does. He stood up against a formidable system that tried to bring him to heel. He chose to do what was right when there was tremendous pressure to do otherwise. In a country, indeed a continent, that suffers a dearth of political heroes, he stands out, and for good reason.

The point I make, though, is that we need to make every effort to identify Kenya’s seven thousand, to encourage them to continue to be strong and not to give up the good fight and to empower them to rise up and make their difference. That in the end should be the skew of this story at the re-telling. If there is an Elijah there must be seven thousand. The country that raised Githongo could not have raised Githongo alone. Ergo, there is hope.

Tomorrow Has Come

What has become of John Githongo? Well, these events have changed him. Life has happened to him. He has developed the cynicism of a jaded idealist. Words such as calculating and ruthlessness and self-serving pop up in Wrong’s description of the latter day Githongo, and indeed, are implied in his own evaluation of who he has become. Perhaps it is a good thing, a necessary thing.

But the idealist in him continues to lurk just beneath the surface. He has been back to Kenya for a visit since. He is considering relocating back to Kenya, to live in Mathare, to interact with the young people who are the country’s future and maybe to run for political office.

In the meantime, he has become the global courier of a sobering missive: “systemic corruption, is the most efficient poverty factor on the continent.” Like it or not, if they do not pay it heed, it is a message that threatens to ground the ship that ferries Bob, Bono and Blair’s determinedly sanguine Make Poverty History campaign, not because their hearts are not in the right place, but because they fail to diagnose the underlying condition correctly.

UPDATE: You can now buy a copy of the book at The Kenya Shop

Picture of gloom, Pattern of discontent

2012-02-02T15:18:00.001+03:00

They call themselves Boko Haram. Literally, 'the latin alphabet is forbidden'. Symbolically, down with western education and all of that. (Because in the end, what has it brought us but exclusion?)

In the press, they go by various religious and criminal stereotypes. Islamic extremists. Violent terrorists. It is true, their actions can be poured into these well-stacked boxes. But, they also pour out.

They will not fit tidily. They will not, they cannot.

I stare at the images splashed across newspaper pages. It startles me how closely they resemble Kenya's own Mungiki. The same hardened faces, the same hopeless stares.

If Africa's young people are her future, then her future has no hope. We continue to 'manufacture' them by the million, but once they are all grown up and ready to do life, such as we have taught them they must do, we do not know what to do with them.

Our frail economies are creaking under the bulging weight of them. We find that we cannot admit them into core of our economic life; there simply isn't enough for everyone, you see. Unemployment is soaring. They find themselves abandoned at the fringes of society, struggling to survive, grasping for what straw will come.

Enter cause célèbres.

Kenya's Mungiki. Nigeria's Boko Haram. Somalia's shockingly youthful pirates. South Africa's township union protests.

All of them can reliably trace their roots to a rising discontent among Africa's youth, a growing rage at their marginalisation.

I think back to when I came of age. There were stirrings of discontent back then, certainly. A mild resentment, even. My country was headed in a direction that did not inspire confidence. Our future was looking increasingly dim.

But it was nothing then like what it is now.

Perhaps back then we still had a memory of a better time to keep us hoping that it would come around again, sometime.

I could still reasonably dream of becoming whoever I wanted to be. The playing field was already becoming overgrown, certainly, but I still had the sense that it was, for the most part, level.

One generation down the line and there's no living memory in our youth of a better time. It is what it always was and it's getting worse. Nothing to live for, perhaps even, something worth killing for.

I do not condone criminal behaviour of any kind, whoever perpetrates it, wherever they perpetrate it, you understand.

But I do think Africa needs to think long and hard about her youth, her future. We must come up with a plan, and fast, to restore a future and a hope to our young people. That's a thing we can unite around, surely. That is something that should galvanise us all. Before it is too late.

Else.

Out of Season

2011-11-22T16:29:00.001+03:00

oh this wonderful place! I have such wonderful memories of coming here, finding a platform, exploring a voice, expressing an opinion, and meeting so many people from so many different places, some of whom have gone on to become fast friends. who woulda thunk this about al gore's internets back in my day?

i certainly didn't.

but now, life has happened. i don't come here so often any more. it was hard to come to terms with that, because it's a place I remember fondly, and one that I am reluctant to sever ties with completely. but, I feel I must. at least for a while.

maybe someday I'll be back.

Why I Blog About Africa

2011-02-01T15:46:00.000+03:00

Mwangi made me think. And think and think and think.

He wants to know why I blog about Africa.

I really did try to come up with something intelligent and profound.

But, the truth trumps it all. In the end.

It’s, plain and simple, a congenital condition. Hardly terminal, but not curable.

Africa is under my skin. Africa is the voices in my head. Africa is the itch on my back that I can’t quite reach.

Africa is my “I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me.” She’s all over me like wet on water.

When one day I began to experiment with blogging, naturally she tagged along and so here we are.

She’s beautiful and she’s strong and she’s got so much to give, she inspires me and I love her truly madly deeply.

She’s battered and bruised and sometimes broken and I love her even more.

She’s always on my mind and in my heart.

It’s not so much, then, that I choose to blog about Africa. It’s that I can’t not.

I really wish the world would see in her all that I see in her.

That’s another reason why I blog about Africa: To make this wish come true.

Here are a range of bloggers whose thoughts on the subject I think would be interesting (and varied) to read:

J.K. whom I’ve only just discovered

Ben Byerly (although I’m suitably sheepish about tagging him because I owe him a meme, I know, which I’m still working on, I promise).

Sokari

Africa Expat Wife

To Blog a Referendum

2010-07-31T10:59:00.000+03:00

Here’s the drill:

Most people seem to agree that this proposed new constitution has some merits and that it represents considerable progress for us as a nation in many ways and on many fronts.

However, there’s no getting away from the fact that there are two camps, ‘No’ and ‘Yes’ standing diametrically opposed to each other.

Pastor M recently offered two refreshingly eloquent analogies to explain the positions of the two opposing camps.

MAYBE YES

Folk in the ‘Yes’ camp consider Kenyans as people on a journey.

They need to get to a particular destination. Let’s call that destination Z. Z is faraway. Far, faraway. They’ve been waiting for the bus that’ll get them to this far faraway destination for a long time. Maybe they’re even beginning to despair. And then along comes a bus.

The bus will get them to point M. That’s just far, not far faraway. It’s not where they were aiming to go, exactly, but it’s much closer to Z than they are right now. And when they get to M, they know they’ll be able to find another bus that’ll enable them connect to Z.

So they say, you know what, let’s hop on this bus. It’ll take us closer to where we want to go. They understand that that the constitution is not perfect. Yes, they say, the document has some issues, but on the whole, it represents progress. Let’s take it. Let’s deal with its issues up ahead. Let’s get on board this bus and get to point M.

MAYBE NO

Folk in the ‘No’ camp take a different tack:

In their view, the new constitution is like a sumptuous meal, painstakingly prepared and beautifully laid out… then served with just a touch of poison. What does one do with that? Do you ignore the poison and eat it? Would you eat it?

The important thing to underscore is that many naysayers too acknowledge the proposed new constitution is progressive in many aspects. The point is they feel it contains some deal breakers and they want those resolved before the big vote.

So what separates the two sides of the debate is how to deal with that which is contentious. When we choose this as our starting point for interaction and exchange with regard to the proposed new constitution, whether we consequently trend towards a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’, we are less likely to allow ourselves to be drawn to the fringes, where the tone is alarmingly divisive and rumour mongering and hate mongering abound.

As a friend asked solemnly on facebook: what’s the point of your side winning in the referendum if the whole country loses as a result?

YES IS WHERE MY VOTE IS

As for me: I'll be casting a 'Yes' vote.
It is a 'Yes' anchored in my vision for a country where a respect for our diversity as a people is embedded into our collective consciousness, and where we live harmoniously together in a prosperous and just nation built on a foundation of the rule of law and meaningful participation of the people in shaping the destiny of the nation.

To quote Yash Pal Ghai, the constitutional lawyer who's been involved in the process one way or the other for a long time,

"The long struggle for a new Constitution for Kenya has not merely been for a new document, but for a new society."

Ode to the World Cup version 2010

2010-06-28T07:34:00.004+03:00

I'm not a rabid football fan, but I am a World Cup enthusiast.

That is to say that between World Cups, I keep an eye on what's going on in the football world in a general able-to-make-a-decent-contribution-to-conversations sort of way. I have a foreign team or two whose fortunes I follow closely. (One of which has a very dusty trophy cabinet, I am sad to say.) And I have begun to follow, from a respectable distance, the stirrings taking place in Kenyan football.

But during the world cup, I become a sort of amateur fanatic. I let go and let myself get caught up in the highs and the lows and the wows and the arghs. The whole shebang. I immerse myself in the beautiful game and let myself get carried away by the tide of the times.

It's a very conscious, very self-aware participation in a ritual.

All the while, I wonder what sets the World Cup apart from club football. Sometimes I tell myself that perhaps it is because here, national pride holds sway over personal fortunes. But I'm not certain, even of this. Maybe it is the idea of sharing this moment in time with so many disparate people from diverse political, social and economic backgrounds in a space where all our differences appear to shrink and what we have in common is amplified. I confess that I can be a romantic that way.

And, think about it: whereas there may be other sports that boast deeper degrees of fanaticism in certain pockets of the world, there's none that draws enthusiastic devotees from all over the world quite the way football does. That should count for something.

Whatever the reason, every time the World Cup comes around, I take off my shoes, lift my skirts and wade in with both feet, jumping and screaming and groaning with the best of them.

I let myself be fascinated by the sheer breadth and depth of skill, grit and determination on display. I watch with wonder as personal brilliance intertwines seamlessly with meticulous team work to manufacture historic moment after historic moment. I am in awe of the will and discipline that it must take to keep going, to keep pushing forward, to not give up when your team is two, three, four goals down. And I am reminded that sometimes, you can win a much more highly ranked opponent simply because you are hungrier, you want it more.

(This is a lesson that I want to carry with me through life. To keep hungry in order to keep winning.)

Lesser instincts are on display as well, of course. Like nations that turn viciously on their own, mauling them and devouring them in full view of public for not living up to their expectations, unrealistic or otherwise. And players who expend more energy feigning injury and putting on a show than on playing. Or when a fit of temper grips a player so that he forgets how far he's come, what obstacles he and his team have had to overcome to get there, and in an inexplicable moment of gross self-involvement, he does something that sends the fate of his entire team spiralling downwards.

Then there's yet a handsome helping of human error to toss into that mix, to deliver just the right amount of tension. Like referees and linesmen who make calls that bring the groan up from the deep. And what. And not.

There's so much more. Club football played at the highest level is ruled ruthlessly by the bottom-line. Big football is big business. At a certain level, FIFA notwithstanding, the World Cup provides momentary respite. It allows a legitimate retreat into the more primal sphere of national identity and the re-emergence of intricate subtexts in the football story. There is the potential for a clash of civilisations for example, when North Korea plays its way into the finals. Or there is the opportunity to settle scores, old and recently spilled over when Iran encounters the USA for highly-charged example. There are encounters that recall to us the biblical tale of goliath and David: the minnow takes on the political or economic giant on the playing field, and triumphs. An economic, political and even cultural consciousness scrolls just below many games. We watch, and read, transfixed.

All this and more is the World Cup.

When it is over, many will face disappointment where once they had dared hope and a precious few will achieve to their wildest dreams and beyond. And then July 11^th will come and July 11^th will go. We will mourn and we will celebrate, as the case may be. (Africa will be particularly proud of South Africa for its resounding success in hosting the World Cup.)

And then we will get back to the daily grind of our lives and look forward to Brazil, 2014.

*this post is dedicated to the friend who thinks football is about nothing but hot air wrapped in polished skin.

Citizen Journalist: Some called him a hero, others called him a heel

2010-03-22T15:06:00.012+03:00

Citizen journalism got a fair bit of mention during last week’s Pan African Media Conference, I understand.

I look forward to seeing how that attention translates into concrete actions and policies within traditional media houses and whether it changes how they go about harnessing new media channels as they source, curate and distribute news.

Not being a big fan of the either or debate around the question of traditional media and citizen journalism, I read with a quirked eyebrow Lee Mwiti of the Nation Media Group quoting the newspaper group’s former editorial director and veteran journalist, Wangethi Mwangi, as saying that “It all boils down to the quality of information and on this, traditional media is still ahead.”

Disclaimer: I was not at the conference so I may be suffering from a lack of context.

But. If that is what was said in defense of traditional journalism, it strikes me as an oddly sweeping indictment that begs qualification on multiple fronts.

A question of quality

For example, what was his working definition of quality and what is the nature of the information whose quality is in question? Are we talking language/grammar or accuracy or ethical considerations and therefore trustworthiness? Are we talking all blogs, most blogs, some blogs? What about citizen journalism channels such as Kenyaimagine.com and Maneno: were they top of mind or not in question?

What if a blogger is sitting at her window watching a mob wreak havoc, burn things, throw stones, and she blogs about this as she sees it, as it happens? What if another blogger attends a highly publicised tech event and records his firsthand experience, peppered with anecdotes that situate the story within the wider, larger narrative of tech in Africa and because he belongs in the story and knows the actors better than a journalist, his account is richer than the story that appears in the newspaper that week. What then?

Having worked briefly in a media house, I understand what is meant by editorial standards and editorial policies. Still, I suggest that it is more a matter of the nature of information rather than the quality when you’re comparing the best of traditional journalistic fare with the best of citizen media.

Ultimately, the breaking news orientation of today’s fast-paced environment have completely altered the role of print media in the scheme of things.

Now, by the time the morning paper gets to you, you know what the stories are going to be because you received a text message when the news was still steaming hot, you checked the story online and you watched it’s rendition on primetime news. If it is a hot item, you have been watching snippets every half hour packaged as ‘breaking news.’ You can pause for breathe in perfect rhythm with the TV journalist.

Naturally then, if you’re going to buy a newspaper, you want more. You want indepth analysis. You want the backstory. You want context. You want every link you can get that threads that story into a wider narrative. This is why major news is hardly ever served raw in the paper any more—it is heavily editorialised to justify its existence.

To the extent that traditional media houses have the people and financial resources to commit to chasing the story deeper and further than the individual blogger on his own might be able to, they have an important role to play in the scheme of things.

Who's not indispensable now?

Yet even here, traditional media need not delude itself that it is indispensable. One blogger on her own might not be able to tell the whole story, but many bloggers each one working on their own little piece of the puzzle might yet build that picture to high degree of accuracy.

A caveat: this will become increasingly the case as the tools that enable citizens to gather and disseminate information become widely available because as long as these tools remain only in the hands of a privileged digital class, the picture will remain unwhole even if not untrue. Which goes some way to explain my current infatuation with the mobile phone and the possibilities it delivers far and wide and deep in my native Kenya and in Africa as a whole.

But in the meantime traditional media have a vital role in leveraging their resource advantage to ensure that those who do not have yet have a tech-assisted ‘microphone’ of their own have the opportunity to be heard. (which mind you, is not the same as speaking for them).

In the meantime, the rise of citizen journalism itself surfaces myriad questions. Questions such as: what is news to who anyway; when do common definitions matter and; when don’t they matter?

Because citizen journalism is as much about the stories people choose to cover and why they cover them as about the fact that those who participate do so outside of the traditional media structure.

Not every bit of news that a traditional media house gathers is published. Some of it is edited out for perfectly good reasons, key among them, that it cannot be verified. And this is as it should be.

In bed with the news

But some of it is censored out for other reasons not so pure and noble. Censored for example because the media owners or the media managers are in bed with the subjects of the news either politically or economically and there’s political capital or advertising to be lost in telling the truth such as it is.

It is when the latter reasons prevent traditional media from publishing what ought in fact to be published, what the people have the right to know, that citizen journalists are best placed to make the difference, to be the difference. Especially when they are less invested in and indebted to the system in general and to specific stories in particular.

Because let’s face it: if you own or run one of the biggest media properties in the country and also happen to own a significant stake in a corporation that is suddenly hit by a crisis which, if it becomes widely known, will cause great damage to your personal bottomline, you’re not going to be fence sitting.

It is in these instances that citizen journalists play their most crucial role in advancing freedom of information. Which is not to say that there are no bloggers out there who are rush and biased and judgemental and of fluid morality posing as bona fide citizen journalists. There are citizen journalists with special interests all over the place, I’m certain.

But, by virtue of the law of averages, not all citizen journalists share the same special interests all the time so, eventually different stories are bound to find their way into the public domain through different routes.

I hail the advent and rise of citizen journalism. As Niti Bhan so eloquently put it: “Only local voices, consistently heard can share the story of a location.” I would only qualify that statement by noting that location no longer has only a geographical dimension. Location can be physical but it can also be social, economic, demographic, cultural or demographic.

In the end, citizen journalism is about people telling the stories of their location. And of finally having a say in what stories get told about their location.

Why Must Obama's Cousin Bribe for a Job?

2010-03-02T10:13:00.000+03:00

It's very curious to me the way everyone who's a fan of Obama (such as I am), tends to behave as though they're about to fall off the earth's edge when suddenly they find that they disagree with him on a thing.

Just because we admire someone doesn't mean we will automatically agree with them. (I most certainly hope.) I for one reserve the right to criticise Obama as and when I feel it is necessary, even while I continue to admire him and consider him a great man and leader on the whole.

That said, once Mutuma Mathiu gets past the puzzling “I disagree with the man so the sky is probably going to fall on my head” introduction to his Sunday column, he makes some valid points about nuance and back story.

The contentious issue is what Obama, whom I count among the precious few public figures able to apprehend and communicate nuance on the global stage, said in Italy about his cousin in Kenya not being able to get a job without paying a bribe.

I agree with Mathiu that we’ve been standing at this corner for way too long and we need to move this conversation along already.

According to ABC News, Obama told African leaders who attended the latter part of the G8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy that, "his cousin in Kenya can’t find a job without paying a bribe, and that’s not the fault of the G-8. And when companies can’t operate without paying, in some parts of Africa, without paying the 25 per cent fee off the top in bribes, that’s not colonialism."

Mutuma argues that whereas the anecdote is open to the (stereo)typical interpretation that Africa is steeped in corruption and that this is the explanation most western commentators (well-meaning or otherwise) will arrive at, there are other more accessible explanations.

"Why must young Africans pay a bribe to get a job? One possible explanation is that Africans are bad, corrupt people who cannot rule themselves. That is the subtext of international discourse on "governance" in Africa.

The more accessible explanation is that families pay bribes simply because there are too many people and too few opportunities. The reason for that is that our economies simply aren't growing. And, yes, part of the cause of that is corruption and stupid leaders."

He then goes on to say that:

“If you reduce the competition for jobs by creating more opportunities, you reduce corruption exponentially, and you can take that to the bank.”

I even take to heart his indignation with

“these Kenyan generalisations of how corrupt and tribal we are,” and ask alongside him, “what about me who has never taken a bribe, who puts in many hours every day, loves my country and desperately wants to fix it? What about the many Kenyans who are like me, are not in it just for money but because we want to build a country we can take pride in?”

I’m not asking that we as Africans (or our leaders) be allowed to abdicate our responsibility, you understand. I’m just engaging in some wishful thinking here, I suppose.

I wish that when the world tells Africa’s story, rather than confine it to the briefs where complex issues are simplified into attention-grabbing anecdotes, it would assign it adequate column space, so that there would not need to merely be a squeaky clean Ghana and a murky messy Kenya, but there would be room to discuss the range of nuance, to grapple with the back story and the complexity of it all.

With the Saturday speech in Ghana, I was pleased, for the most part. Maybe I’ll get around to blogging about that, but not today.

I dream of Africa

2010-02-07T17:50:00.000+03:00

Ben Byerly forwarded me an article titled the Joshua Generation: Race and the Campaign of Barack Obama, by David Remnick sometime ago. (David Remnick is one of my absolute favourite writers for how thoughtful and incisive he is and how lyrically he writes.)

This particular piece set me off on a particular train of thought and I haven't been able to get off it since.

Fiction conceived of the first black president long before Barack Obama even considered running for president. So much so that the prospect of a black president in film or on small screen became “an incidental plot, a casting choice,” rather than an overt political statement.

Popular culture conceived of the idea of a credible black president, long before there was one. Idealists and writers, the hollywood among us, the dreamers, the creatives are the ones who midwifed this moment in history.

Reading this, it hit me like the sting of slap that I have not once seen a movie, or read a book that portray’s any African country as a credibly first world, stable country, where poverty and disease are reasonably out of range, where there's a flourishing middle class, a thriving economy, and an accountable government.

Maybe these books, these films, these stories are being told somewhere out there (tell me where), but they are not mainstreamed. We've failed to even dream up an ideal that we can strive toward.

This is not good. This does not augur well for us.

Calling on our idealists and our dreamers. Give us something to dream about.

Same Kind of Different As Me

2010-01-16T19:53:00.004+03:00

Did you hear the one about the two-eyed man who was born and raised and lived in the land of the three-eyed people believing there was something wrong with him and was so conscious of it that he stuck a patch on his forehead so that if you didn’t look really closely at it, it did look like a third eye, and he didn’t look so bad because a patch was better than nothing?

Well,one day he met another two-eyed man and he was amazed, absolutely amazed, dropped-jaw knocked-back senseless amazed when the two-eyed man told him all about this other land, not so far away, where everybody had two eyes and it was the three-eyed folk who were all of odd.

So of course he went there to see for himself and what did he find but that he was just like everybody else and what an eye-opener it was.

Guilty As Charged

2010-01-05T17:09:00.000+03:00

Consider this a disclaimer which has been a long time coming: I speak as an African but I do not speak for all of Africa.

Hear this, understand this. My opinions may be strong and my voice may be loud but I do not claim to represent anyone but myself.

(How can I? Who am I?)

I know what I know, I think what I think and I feel what I feel and you’re guaranteed to bump into some or all of that when you wander into this part of the cloud. And then maybe you choose to stay a while or you choose to wander off somewhere else.

Just remember, mine is one small facet of the range and depth of the African experience. I have the right to express myself, but so do hundreds of millions of others across the length and width of this continent.

I have access to this particular means and platform of expression but that does not make me special, it makes me privileged.

Think of it this way:Africa's an elephant. I'm a little flea on her back. I cannot begin to appreciate all that she is, even though she is where I belong, she is my place to call home and she is where I graze my goat (who, come to think of it has not graced these pages for a long time). Africa is, I have come to believe, my particular strain of madness. (Because everyone has their own.)

If you have been thinking it, I will say it out loud for you, just to get it out of the way: whether about aid, or about faith, or about being a woman or indeed about any topic under the sun, you are sure to find millions of Africans who think differently than I do. And, should you have trouble finding them, I can help you.

In this space, however, for better for worse, I do not make a particular effort to be representative. I’m intent, only, on being me.

So there you have it. I am the flea. Africa is an elephant. What do I know except what I know?

I’ve run out of ways to say this. I’ve probably said it enough.

I speak here, in this blog, as an African, but I do not speak for Africa.

Living With History

2010-01-01T15:37:00.000+03:00

I know what Christmas is supposed to be about.

It is about that for me.

But, it’s about other things as well.

It is when I get to spend extended time with family, talking and laughing and fighting and making up and just generally doing family.

I love to hang out with the Mother—we call her MotherNice. (And with the Father too-we call him DaddyCool.)

MotherNice is such the story-teller.

She regaled us, once again, with stories of her colourful, event-crammed childhood.

How when she young she was practically the village urchin, her mother having passed away soon after her birth and her father being in politically-motivated detention.

(Mau Mau. Emergency. You. Join. The. dots.)

How when she passed her Common Entrance exams and was offered a place at Embu Girls, an agricultural officer, (so and so’s grandfather, you know so and so), tried to cheat her out of her place by arm twisting the headmaster of the local primary school she had attended to replace her name with his daughter’s because who was there to pay her school fees for her, really, her father was in detention and her family was poor, so who?

How my Aunt Tabitha used to go to so and so’s grandfather’s house, you know so and so, and taunt him and tell him whether he liked it or not MotherNice was going to Embu Girls and she was going to learn to eat with a fork and knife, so there!

How MotherNice did not have two clues to rub together about what boarding school was because, really, how could she, she was so young and all she knew to do was to follow the older kids around the village and wreak havoc.

How Aunt Tabitha’s husband, Uncle Josphat gave her a ride to school all the way to Embu on the back of his bicycle because they couldn’t afford the fare but she was going to go to school, she was, because aunt Tabitha said so, and you should meet Aunt Tabitha.

How she soon became a force to reckon with because she could and would beat up just about anyone, even the head girl, what with her particular upbringing, rough and tumble and all.

How Miss Dunford, the headmistress, loved her anyway and was absolutely blind to any wrong she did because when she wanted to, she could turn on the charm, MotherNice could.

How she made herself loads of money in school weaving mats and baskets for the teachers so she always went home with presents for everyone.

How they used to sing “God Save the Queen”, so that she would continue “long to reign over us”. (And then she and my Uncle laughed. And my Uncle remarked that he couldn’t believe he’d sang that song just twelve days before Kenya gained her independence.)

How they used to recite, for exam purposes, all the advantages British rule had brought to Kenya. Among them:

i. Christianity.
ii. An end to tribal wars
iii. Health
iv. Education
v. Civilization

How on December 10th, two days before Kenya gained her independence, Miss Dunford packed her bags and hightailed it out of the country and back to her beloved England because she couldn’t imagine what would come of blacks ruling themselves.

I love sitting at the feet of MotherNice.

Such the Living History.

I think everyone over 50 should write a brief history of their lives for their family's consumption.

Up in Arms: Some Follow-up Thoughts on the Arms Trade Treaty

2009-10-20T18:04:00.013+03:00

I spent a decent chunk of last week skirting around, hovering above and peering into the subject of calculated self-interest. While I was at it, and, perhaps because my antennae were up, I stumbled upon two articles that considered how that very idea may play out on the global stage.

The one was an article about world hunger in which the argument was advanced, with qualification, that it is ultimately in the self-interest of the developed world to combat world hunger and that this is the case that should increasingly be made to the citizens of the more developed nations because framing the fight against hunger as a social justice issue has failed, in large part, to galvanise them. I’ll leave you to make of that what you will.

The other was a critical piece in Time magazine about why this was so not the year to award Obama a nobel prize. I borrow a line from that article in Time magazine by Nancy Gibbs to lead you to where I’m standing:

“peacemaking is more about ingenuity than inspiration, about reading other nations' selfish interests and cynically, strategically exploiting them for the common good.”

Calculated national self-interest then, is at the heart of every negotiation on the global stage. In diplomatic circles, it may well be considered coarse to call it what it is, but that doesn’t alter its essence.

Right.

Now that we’re here, where I’ve been standing these past few, let’s usher the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) into the room, shall we?

At the risk of grossly oversimplifying that which stubbornly defies simplification, I see three major trans-national groupings based on standing in the arms trade which then cluster somewhat differently based on their current stance toward the ATT.

Based on standing in the arms trade, those major groupings are:

• those a control arms report refers to as “the big five arms exporting countries” namely Russia, the UK, the US, France and Germany, which, per 2005 data, accounted for 82 per cent of global sales in conventional weapons;

• the emerging players in the arms export market including countries such as Turkey, Pakistan, India, South Korea, Israel, China, Brazil, Singapore and South Africa, each competing to secure a slice of the conventional arms export market and;

• the rest of the world. (Of course, in the space marked ‘the rest of the world’ it bears noting that there are currently some 92 countries producing some component or other for the small arms and light weapons industry, including my native Kenya. But the major players in the export market, which is the domain which the ATT is seeking to influence, are those outlined above.)

Clustering based on stance towards an ATT as demonstrated in how nations voted on the 2006 UN General Assembly resolution to work “toward an Arms Trade Treaty” yields a slightly different map, although most places where the boundaries fall are familiar.

There was one outright nay. There is no prize for guessing that it came from the US.

An overwhelming majority of 153 states voted in favour of the resolution, including three of the big five conventional arms exporters, namely Germany, the UK and France (indeed all of Europe excepting Russia voted in favour of the resolution), a number of the emerging exporters including South Africa, Singapore, Brazil, plus sub-Saharan Africa, South America and the Caribbean, in the main.

Those who abstained included most of the middle east, some of north Africa, the Indian sub continent and Russia. Plus a few other countries whose abstention rings contrarian more than anything else, like Zimbabwe and Venezuela.

Complexity unveiled

This is where it gets interesting. (Read: complex).

Three of the major small arms and light weapons exporters namely France, Germany and the UK stood right along some of the countries worst hit by the proliferation of illicit weapons, many of them in sub Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America in calling for work to begin towards an Arms Trade Treaty.

In fact, the UK, along with six other nations, last week presented a draft resolution to the First Committee calling for negotiations on the ATT to begin forthwith and be completed by 2012. Emerging exporters such as South Africa, Singapore and Brazil also voted in favour of the resolution.

I’m going to go out on that shaky limb and reiterate, here, that everyone brings self-interest to the table.

Everyone.

I’m not student of diplomacy or international relations, but as I’ve observed it, positions at the international stage are arrived at based on a sophisticated template developed and improved over time for calculating national self-interest. Nations choose from a long list of available components the exact mix of factors to combine in order to arrive at a position on either side of the aisle or to decide to sit, once in the odd while, stark in the middle.

Strategic national interests such as self-defense or the desire to position themselves as a force to reckon with may be a strong consideration. Political survival may come into play for some and not for others, and may incline some strongly one way and others strongly in the opposite direction. The national bottomline is almost always a consideration. And where there is little or no impact on it, then a nation’s self-interest may be swayed by a desire to support a key ally in the clear if unspoken expectation that when the time comes (and the time always comes), the support will be reciprocated in kind.

This is the raging whirlpool into which the ATT will be flung, the one side cheering it on, the other willing it drown and die a quick death so that life might return to an acceptable kind of normal.

So we’re at the negotiating table. We’ve acknowledged that nations bring diverse interests to the table. It’s the way of the world. How does this play out in the ATT context?

As far as I can see, the interests at the table fall in three broad categories that are complicated by an age old twist.

First up are the ‘big five’ traditional exporters of conventional weapons who still control a big chunk of the global trade in arms and come from contexts where the rules of the trade have been tightened significantly in a bid to minimise the sale of weapons to groups who would use them to violate the rights of others, such as guerilla groups and terrorist groups.

These high standards that have been imposed either nationally or regionally have had the effect of leashing the companies operating within their borders to a standard, which has had a direct impact on these companies’ bottomlines.

At the same time as they have been subject to these internal restraints, they have watched as emerging arms exporters roam about relatively free, supplying the demand for conventional arms in the ever expanding war zones of the world with seemingly little or no thought at all as to the consequences thereof.

Highly profitable industry

Naturally, then, the arms industries in these countries where strict rules now apply want the same stringent requirements to apply to the rest of the world so that balance may once again restored to the trade. (Read: so that they can once again secure their leading position in the highly profitable industry.)

Second are the newly emerging arms exporters. As you can imagine, new players in the export of arms would, all things being equal, be inclined to recoil against an ATT. If you view it through your pragmatic lenses, you can very well see why. The present scenario plays clearly in their favour.

As I’ve come to understand it, manufacturing weapons is an expensive undertaking, requiring significant investment. Nations who nurture the industry for strategic national defense and security reasons, and because, in order to be a force to reckon with on the global stage you have to be a player in the war industry, soon find that, in order for such a venture to be financially feasible in the long term, they need to grow their market beyond their borders, to become arms exporters.

This leads us to the space where the arms trade debate converges with the climate change debate. The newly emerging players could well accuse the traditional players of bringing rules to the table at this specific time in history simply to rein in the emerging competition, to keep it in check.

They might argue also, that by virtue of their geography and history as well as diverse political and economic considerations, the new markets into which they can sell their arms are likely to attract more suspicion on the global stage than the more established nations into which the big five would sell their arms and that therefore they would be the bigger losers in a new stringent global ATT environment. And they might have a point.

Into these muddy the waters, toss in another twist in the form of longstanding distrust and other issues long simmering, yet unresolved. Between the west and the bulk of the middle east for example. In doing so, you may begin to despair about an ATT ever being able to swim to shore while retaining a decent amount of robustness.

Illicit trade, devastated communities and nations

But, let’s set all that aside for a minute and consider the third interest cluster comprising Africa, the Caribbean and parts of Latin American where the impact of the illicit trade in conventional weapons has been, in a word, devastating.

Long debilitating wars across the African continent from Sierra Leone to Liberia, DRC to Sudan, have been fed by a steady, unrelenting supply of illicit weapons to rebels who have wrought havoc on entire populations. The loss to lives in the past decade alone is counted in the tens of millions. And then there are those who have been wounded, those who have been bereaved, those who have been raped and otherwise violated, and those who have been brutally robbed of their livelihoods.

The internal discord and intercommunity tensions that flare up into open conflict in these war zones are often home grown, but easy access to weapons prolongs them unnecessarily and aggravates their effect multiple-fold. I need not paint a picture. You have glimpsed it over and over again.

Take the DRC for prime example, where in the last decade, 5.4 million people have lost their. Consider what havoc small arms and light weapons have wreaked there, in the brutal hands of unscrupulous gangs and militia who have little regard for human life and are only concerned with selfish personal gain.

Take Jamaica, across the world from Africa, for slightly different example, whose murder rate is 61 per 100,000. The police are fighting a losing battle there to restore the peace against heavily armed gangs who are holding the country at ransom with illicit weapons. Its proximity to the politically unstable Haiti, from whence a good proportion of its guns come, according to Novelette Grant, is the bane of its existence. But its gun trade is intricately tied also, with its drug trade, the one feeding off the other, and vice versa.

Take also my own country Kenya. According to a recent report by the BBC, rival communities in Kenya’s Rift Valley province, the epicentre of the post election violence that nigh brought the country to its knees in 2008, are rearming.

Except the word rearming doesn’t tell it quite as ominously as it is. In fact, what they’re doing, per the report, is upgrading their weapons.

Last year, the crimes were in large part committed with crude weapons: bow and arrow and machetes. This year, machine guns are all the rave.

As one man is reported to have told the BBC’s Wanyama wa Chebusiri:

"Before we were using bows and arrows to fight the enemy but changed to guns following the post-election experience because we realised, compared to guns, the arrows were child's play."

Supply is high, the article says, and the price is low.

In his brief address at the launch of Oxfam’s Dying for Action report just over a week ago, Mutuku Nguli, CEO of Peacenet, a Kenyan grassroots organisation, tagged the price of an AK-47 in the Rift Valley at a very accessible $230.

Why is supply high?

Partly because Kenya’s borders are porous and controls are weak. If people with criminal intent want to smuggle weapons into our country, they likely can and they likely will.

Partly, also, because neighbouring states such as Somalia are unstable. Weapons are getting from there into Kenya even though there’s a UN embargo on all deliveries of weapons and military equipment to various warlords and warring clans in Somalia.

To hear it from the horse's mouth, in this case Florella Hazelely, an activist with the Sierra Leone Action Network in Small arms, as she is quoted in the Control Arms report, Arms Without Borders,

“We don’t manufacture these guns, yet they end up in our country, erode our security and have terrible consequences for our development.”

Human imperative

This is nothing short of a gross injustice on a global scale. It will not do.

But, before I climb onto my soapbox, allow me to make a comment about the US position.

Per intelligence I’ve gathered, the US’ reluctance to wholly embrace an ATT is not so much driven by economic considerations as by strategic ones. US arms sales have historically been closely aligned with its national strategic interests and its foreign policy objectives. Consider for example how it recently supplied 40 tons of weapons to the fragile Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in Somalia in a noble bid to strengthen it against increasing attacks from militia groups in the country.

Now, you’ve probably read that there’s a brisk arms trade in Somalia, complete with a specialised market where guns can be bought off the shelf or ordered in bulk. It’s a lucrative business, is what it is, and if you’ve got money in your pocket, it’s as good as a gun in your hand.

I read, also, that some of the weapons supplied by the US to the Somalia TFG found their way to this market through unscrupulous means. It is not inconceivable, then, that some of the weapons on sale in Kenya’s rift valley may be these very weapons, supplied by the US to a legitimate government in Somalia.

In its brief address to the First Committee, week before last, the US insisted that no nation had done more than it had done to stem illicit trade in weapons. I have no reason to dispute this. But, by the brief illustration above I mean to advance the argument that more is needed than a unilateral effort—a comprehensive global standard is necessary.

Which is what brings me full circle, to that thing I was going on about, about the world really needing an Arms Trade Treaty. (Or hadn’t I gotten to that already?)

Well then, climbing atop my soapbox now, thanks much.

As the negotiations for an Arms Trade Treaty begin, it is clear, nay inevitable, that there will be posturing.

The stakes, after all, are extremely high. There are national strategic interests on the line. And national bottomlines as well. There’s prestige, also. And ego. Not to mention old scores yet unsettled.

But over and well above all this, there are human lives at stake, and human lives are the highest stake of all.

There is, as Debbie Hiller of Oxfam International so compellingly put it, “a humanitarian imperative,” and that red card, legitimately pulled out of whatever back pocket, silences all other considerations except those equal to it.

So if the way you calculate your self-interest yields a negative value in the event that an ATT comes into force, while I sympathise with you, I urge you to consider the humanitarian imperative. For those who had rather say no and who, in glancing across the aisle, have just cause to call into question the underlying motives of some of the aye-sayers, I should like to sympathise, but I’m compelled by a humanitarian imperative.

Oxfam International and the Control Arms coalition have put a number tag on that humanitarian imperative: 2,000 people. Every day. Meet their death through small arms and light weapons. 2,000 people.

It will not, it cannot, it must not do that in some lofty political somewhere, old bulls and new bulls lock horns in a power struggle while 2,000 innocent people lose their lives every day.

Do we need a global, legally binding treaty to minimize the extent to which small arms and light weapons are used to fuel conflict and human rights abuses?

YES. WE. DO.

Who Wants A Definition?

2009-10-04T15:23:00.000+03:00

I got a definition today and it’s making me feel trapped. Which doesn’t make any sense because it’s neither new to me, nor is it a bad definition at all.

It’s just, sitting around a table all afternoon and having six different people boil me down to almost the same thing made me feel so predictable and one-dimensional.

Immediately I wanted to shrug it off and be something else—something surprising and different and other.

So this is what it boils down to: I jumped into a box and was happy to be in it until other people began to remark how good I looked in it and then suddenly I’m all spooked and suffocating and squirming and all I can think of is I have to get out of this box.

I’m strange and all types of crazy at the same time in the same place, I know.

Defining Where My Goat Wants To Graze

2009-09-28T16:09:00.000+03:00

So, finally, I've discovered, unravelled, bumped into, discerned (insert your choice of terminology here) the junction where my bliss resides.

To explain:

I've been poised to leave my current gig, but I haven't been able to define what I want my next gig to be. It's a very 'wandering aimlessly in no man's land' sort of feeling. Most of the time it's been relegated to the background by a lot of other urgent stuff that's been happening around me and to me. But it's been there.

I've been lucky: I've had an offer on the table for a while from a group of people I love and who have been absolutely patient with me. And I've attended a couple of job interviews besides. But I've just had the sense that none of these opportunities are right for me. And, over the years, I've learned to trust my instincts.

Except whereas I've had a very strong sense of where I don't want to go and what I don't want to do next, I haven't had a good sense at all of what I want, what the right step to take from here is. Which has been frustrating me no end and making sound like a rudderless bungling idiot to me. Just so you know, I don't much like to sound like a rudderless, bungling idiot, especially to myself.

Then yesterday: Aha moment.

Driving home, turning it over in my head for the umpteenth time, I was able to boil down to a list of four my musthaves for the next gig. And to explain to myself, clearly and concisely, why. With examples and illustrations where necessary, thank you very much.

And I have Nairobi's notorious traffic congestion to thank for it.

Four roads bringing traffic from different aspects of my experience, inclination, personal style and preference, and worldview. And me standing right there at the intersection, at the point where these roads meet.

(If you don't see it, maybe you just had to have been there.)

Sigh. Progress. There's hope for R, yet.

It's taken me only eight and a half months.

The Dialogue on Development: Heart, Mind, Hand

2009-05-20T09:10:00.010+03:00

If you manage to read all the way through my long (loong) review of Michela Wrong’s book, “It’s Our Turn To Eat”, somewhere near the end, you’ll find this statement tucked in:

“it’s not the heart that is in the wrong place, it is the hand that is responding in the wrong way. In this respect, aid idealists and aid sceptics ought really to dialogue as on the same side, wanting the same thing, giving benefit of doubt, assuming goodwill unless proven absent. But that is another article, for another day.”

I inserted it in there to compel myself come back to the subject because sometimes I mean to come back to a thing and then I get distracted and I don’t. So now I’m coming back to it. Sort of.

At the weekend, while thinking about how best to approach the subject, I thought back to that opinion piece by Paul Kagame published in the Financial Times week before last in which he argues that Africa has to find its own way to prosperity. If you still haven’t read it, you should read it. It’s encouraging to see an African president engage proactively in the aid debate.

What I want to zero in on for my purposes here is this statement he made early on:

“We who live in, and lead, the world’s poorest nations are convinced that the leaders of the rich world and multilateral institutions have a heart for the poor. But they also need to have a mind for the poor.”

While I read this, I had in mind what I had written earlier about the hand responding in the wrong way.

It occurred to me that we’re both agreed on the fact that the hearts of donors, aid and development agencies/workers are in the right place, for the most part. Or, if they’re lost, they’re not terribly so—it would not take a long haul flight, a train and a bus to get their heart to the right place. (Yes, I know everywhere there are bound to be exceptions, but I speak in the main.)

However, there was also an interesting difference in our diagnosis of where the problem might lie. I suggested that there was a lack of forward integration—that whereas the heart is in the right place, it is not moving the hand to do the right thing. Kagame for his part called donors and aid/development agencies on their lack of “a mind for the poor”.

This difference interested me and gave me pause. I was intrigued specifically by the phrasing:

A mind for the poor.

Naturally then, I googled it, interested to track its most recent usage.

Google led me to some interesting places: the NextBillion.net blog, on a review of the book “In the River They Swim” which features essays about poverty reduction, sustainable development and entrepreneurship by influential people around the world, including President Kagame of Rwanda; a commentary by Michael Miller, Director of Programs at the Acton Institute which made reference to the dichotomy between “good intentions” and “good solutions” published early last year that quotes an official of a Rwandan agency promoting investment in that country calling for more business investors and less philanthropist and; a FastCompany article on Rwanda.

Interesting: what all these sources have in common with the FT.com article, apart from the phrase “a mind for the poor” is Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda.

(Note to self, must buy, must read: In the River They Swim: Essays from around the world on Enterprise Solutions to Poverty. Does anybody else know of another genesis of this specific phrasing, another context where the term “a mind for the poor” is used widely? Do share.)

In the opinion piece published in the Financial Times, President Kagame makes a valid point about the place of mind that fills the lack in mine when I argue that it is the hand that gets it wrong.

In fact, the essence of the Make Poverty History Campaign is to compel the heart to move the hand in what Kagame describes as believing that we can solve the problem of poverty with sentimentality.

To be fair, to be deeply moved to do something, to do anything, to do what we can, when we encounter human suffering is natural, and in this respect Bono and Bob and Blair are not acting out of sync with their humanity.

What is harder is to develop the discipline to route the things that the heart feels compelled to do through the mind, to subject them to scrutiny for all the assumptions that they make about what it is fitting and right to do and how best to go about doing what needs to be done.

It takes discipline to put a long enough pause on impulse in order to engage broadly and meaningfully with those to whom the hand will eventually be extended but in doing so you give yourself the opportunity to grapple with difficult questions such as: how do the poor see themselves and how is this different from or similar to the way we see them; why does poverty exist such as it does in that particular place and; how will the action that we are taking today serve to empower or emasculate in the short, medium and long term.

But. (Yes, there is a but): I’m betting my bottom dollar that all the thinking that leading development agencies have done on poverty and development and aid since their inception can fill multiple terrabytes of electronic space. Further, this thinking is done by some of the world’s best minds, whether motivated by the opportunity to do good and make a difference in the world, or lured by, among other perks, business class travel.

Yet we have not got it convincingly or steadily right.

Which is why that phrase that Kagame et al employ intrigues me:

A mind for the poor.

Definitely worth investigating further.

Second Chances

2009-03-15T22:26:00.001+03:00

So I’ve been thinking lately about second chances.

They don’t come served on a silver platter. There are no drum rolls, there is no music.

You can’t wait around for them at the bus stop.

If you want them badly enough, you have to go out and grab them, no matter what anybody else says or thinks.

The thing about second chances is that although most people say that everybody deserves one, few people are willing to give them.

Out of my way people, I see my second chance and I’m chasing it down to the ends of the earth. I can live with failing but I refuse to live without trying.

Who’s anybody to tell me what I can or cannot do, who I can or cannot be, where I can or cannot go?

There’s nothing as personal as a second chance.

Pecha Kucha Night Comes to Nairobi

2009-01-27T23:08:00.000+03:00

Pecha Kucha Night debuted in Nairobi tonight at the new RaMoMa Gallery digs on 2nd Parklands Avenue and I do not exaggerate when I say it left me all warm and fuzzy inside.

But I get ahead of myself. First things where they belong:

Pecha Kucha Night demystified: a night for creative visual artists to showcase their work or tell the stories of who they are, or what they do, or share any part of themselves they choose, if they choose.

The highly structured format is what gives the night its unique flavour: twenty images shown for twenty seconds each for a grand total of 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame per artist. And, not more than 14 artists an evening.

Pecha Kucha is Japanese for chatter, onomatopoeically-speaking. As in, Yada Yada. In Kenyan, it’s a gesture. If you meet me and you talk and talk and talk, eventually, for kindness sake, I will be forced to demonstrate it to you. (The alternative would be commit a crime, and I’m a law abiding citizen, thank you much).

I like the artist types, I do. They’re my best friends, they take me as I am (me and Wyclef Jean are really big on that), they drag me along to all these neat, off-the-beaten path events, and they dress different. What’s not to like, really?

(In Nairobi, you know you’re in the company of the artists by examining the top of the head. There’ll be a much higher concentration of dreadlocks across the gender divide than in the general population, and a generous sprinkling of other unconventional hairdos into the bargain. If there isn’t, you’re in the wrong place. I. Kid. You. Not.)

(Big shout out to the number one visual artist in my life—you know who you are.(which is usually the safe thing to say when there’s more than one and you don’t want to offend anyone but really, in this case, YOU do KNOW who you are. BIG. AWKWARD. WINK.)

Back to that warm and fuzzy feeling. It’s not the wine, I’m a teetotaller. It’s not even that we were a little shy of 100 people crammed into an improvised space at RaMoMa. That was actually kinda neat in its own way.

And it's my fault really, that I refused to move to the front when Mumbi Kaigwa counselled it and so I ended up spending much of my time craning my neck behind this really tall somebody who came and sat right in front of me. Seriously, nobody's fault but my own.

The warm and the fuzz comes from all the creativity I drank in this evening from advertising professionals, and graffiti artists and architects and illustrators and sculptors and mixed media artists and designers. It went all the way to my toes and made them tingle.

This is a gig you don’t want to miss if, to borrow words right out of the programme “you enjoy a live situation, with atmosphere, energy and real human interaction.”

As it is, you’ve missed this particular opportunity to see what magic Point Blank has wrought with a simple ballpoint pen. And to hear how once upon a time Richard Kariuki was a little boy who wanted to be many things and how that little boy is all grown up and who that grown up is becoming. And even to sit silently under the direction of Naweed Awan as vibrant motion-themed photographs of Lamu by night whiz by, 20 seconds at a time. Or to see that stunning wood curving of a baby brought to life from coffee tree by Gakunju Kaigwa.

Everyone was brilliant, they really were, Timla Tieng, Joseph Barasa, Kamal Shah, Stephanie Gichau and Bank Slave too.

The work of each of these artists was outstanding, that was the primary reason why it was an honour to be there. But, there were also the questions that they asked and the stories that they told and the way they told the stories and the things they left unsaid and even their sometimes awkwardness combined with an intense connection with their subject and their work that gave you an insight into who the artist is and the way all that all came together to make for a truly memorable evening.

I am gushing. I do not do gush. End of gush, already.

I had a lovely evening. 'nuff said.

Next up, February, 2009. Seriously, you don't want to miss this and have to hear about it.

Kudos to Marta Anna Gloserova and the Kenya Buzz team for making this happen. May next time be even better.

UPDATE: ohmygod, I go to the corner and hang my head in shame. How could I leave out the name of the only woman on the programme? Stephanie Gichau, thanks much for that charming guided tour through the world of advertising. Nobody corrected me, I remembered you to me all by my lonesome. Does that earn me redemption marks?

I Don’t Believe in God, but, They Need God Over in Africa

2009-01-07T09:04:00.007+03:00

As usual, we the Africans, and our problems, which are many, I concede it at the outset, are the subject of someone else’s diagnostic discourse.

Matthew Parris doesn’t believe in God but that doesn’t stop him from arguing that Africa needs God to get it past “the crashing passivity of its people’s mindset.”

Africans need Christianity because belief in and communion with a personal God supplants an outdated belief system, enhances our engagement with the world, and encourages a positive individuality in stark contrast to a suppressive collective superstitious belief system.

As it happens, I do believe that active engagement with a personal God can and does have a transforming effect on the individual life. He could have made an argument about fatalism and ideas having consequences that would have left me a tad uncomfortable but more resigned and less apt to argue with him.

But he didn’t. He went and cast his nets overboard and fished out collectivism and went on to ascribe to it failings not necessarily its own.

Which is why I now feel obliged to call him out on three false assumptions he makes stroke odd misconceptions he holds on his convoluted path to being patronising.

First, I do not see a doctrinal foundation for the claim about Christianity’s ability (and or propensity) to transform a collective culture into an individualistic one. I could, however, quite easily make a biblically-based argument for movement in the reverse, from individualism to collectivism.

Before we even get there, however, why have we drawn a double yellow line between individualistic cultures on one lane going one way and collective cultures on the other lane going the other way and awarded all the pluses to the one side and all the minuses to the other side and ne’er the twain shall meet? How does he make the tenuous jump from collective culture to superstitious people cowed into passivity? Is he saying, and are his commenters agreeing, for the most part, that there is nothing good to be found collective cultures and nothing whatsoever bad about individualistic cultures? Really? As in it’s all black and white?

Second he implies that hailing from an individualistic (and therefore by Parris’ implication a proactive) culture inspired Edmund Hillary to climb a mountain simply because it was there. On the other hand, hailing from a collective culture, which is elsehow known as a passive culture, makes the "faceless, nameless, all of us because he is one of us African" not climb the mountain because first it is just there, and second of all, because nobody’s ever done it before.

Here’s the thing I’ve always wondered: why does everybody assume that no African had ever climbed the mountain before the adventurous foreigner came along and did it, and taught him how? (For porter’s sake, of course.) Who’s to say, definitively and conclusively? So the lion hasn't published his memoirs, is that ample basis on which to conclude that the hunter was always the victor?

Third, I’m puzzled by the way in which he clearly links the advancement of the Christianity in Africa to foreign missionaries in the present time. When he speaks of the catalyst for spiritual transformation in Africa, he clearly has foreign missionaries in mind. The Africans are changed, certainly, but they are changed in large part by their interaction with missionaries and their being objects of missionary activity.

Case in point: when he recalls how he travelled through Africa when younger, he remarks that the people who had changed were the people they encountered when they ‘entered a territory worked by missionaries.’ I come to the conclusion that these missionaries are foreign because African Christians don’t live in secluded missions unless they’re working for or with foreign missionaries, (all the more to impress Matthew Parris). What African missionaries there are in Africa typically live among the people they are ministering to, blending into the crowd, whether it be in city, town or village.

This underlying assumption on the part of Matthew Parris is puzzling especially as Christianity is growing so fast in Africa that the tide of mission should be returning to whence it came, with the African church sending envoys to strengthen the dwindling pulpits and pews of the very Churches that sent the first missionaries of the modern era to her, beginning about a century and a half ago.

It raises the question of what value he places on second third and even fourth generation Christianity made in Africa, by the Africans for the Africans. Will this kind of Christianity yield the same value for the Africans as the Christianity brought by the foreign missionaries? Or is theirs a generic low cost version which creates a perpetual need for the foreign premium product?

(And this I say not to disparage every modern day missionary to the continent. Hardly. I’m determined not to do stereotypes, (even though Mwangi wants me to seriously consider them)).

How Committed Are They Really?

2008-12-17T13:10:00.003+03:00

I just came across an interesting initiative at the Centre for Global Development.

They measure how 22 of the world's richest countries help poor countries on an annual basis and compile a Commitment to Development Index.

What I like most about it is that aid is not the only measure of overt commitment to development. The index also measures trade, investment, environment, security, technology and, yes, migration policies.

When all these factors are combined, you'll be surprised how the cookie crumbles. Or maybe you won't, but I was.

* Incidentally, congratulations are in order. This is the first time I've ever uploaded anything resembling an image on this blog. I'm trying to expand my boundaries. I didn't know how to get the legend for this particular chart to cooperate though. Which is probably a good thing because you get to go to the page yourself and learn more.

The Kenyan Way: External Locus of Control

2008-12-05T15:51:00.000+03:00

It’s that time of the year again-exam time.

So, of course I've been busy distracting myself from reading by thinking about all sorts of things.

One of those things is that if there’s one trait that the majority of Kenyans share, it is an external locus of control. Whatever happens is always someone else’s fault. Some Other is always the cause of my problem.

It was World AIDS day. I was watching Sunrise news on KTN. They were interviewing Kenyans intermittently about the fact that AIDS prevalence is up.

Kenyan after Kenyan came up with a host of Other-centred excuses.

One guy said that although there were some NGOs distributing condoms door to door, those condoms weren’t the best quality. That was the problem.

Another guy said the problem was that some NGOs that had received funds for grassroots work had squandered the funds.

On and on it went. Festival of finger pointing.

It got so bad I wanted to join in the fun and point a finger down my throat.

I got so tired of it I started to yell at the people of the tube all by my lonesome.

(Never mind the neighbours, they already think I’m some kind of odd.)

That thing they say about us getting the leaders we deserve: they’re onto something.

The Worst of Nairobi, The Best of Nairobi

2008-11-12T21:30:00.000+03:00

I visited with a friend who runs a food outlet in Nairobi today. I listened to horror stories of regular harassment by bully city council employees who descend like vultures on her business soliciting bribes on threat of arrest for violation of obscure city bylaws she knows nothing about. I left really angry at all the roadblocks that stand in the way of small businesses in Nairobi, as if it isn’t hard enough to survive without the system tripping you up all over the place. I was frustrated in particular, because I wanted so badly to do something about it but I couldn’t think of anything I could do that would make a difference.

Then, as I was leaving, I found someone had double parked behind me and gone off to I-don’t-know-where. I had to manoeuvre my way out through this really narrow space between a big-bodied car on the one side and an intimidating protruding cement structure on the other side.

As I braced myself to attempt the feat, passers-by, seeing my predicament, gathered around me and without my soliciting their help, began to guide me. Through the rear view mirror, I saw a young woman approach my car and paused to give her way. She declined to pass, offering to be my eyes instead, to help me steer through the narrow space.

It was an intense five minutes or so, with much wincing and many sharp intakes of breathe. But, I made it. Eight or so Kenyans, strangers to me all, stood around, smiled their relief, cheered, and then went their merry way on to their business.

Nairobi makes me so mad sometimes I could throttle it with my bare hands. And then again, I love love love Nairobi.

R.I.P Mama Africa

2008-11-10T20:03:00.001+03:00

Miriam Makeba passed away last night.

It's the definitive end of an era for those of us who grew up listening to the haunting, soulful sound of her music as she gave voice to the struggle of black men and women during South Africa's apartheid era.

I still recall, wistfully, how she and Winnie Mandela occupied the same lofty space in my young impressionable mind, revered as strong women, freedom fighters, voices of the struggle, valiantly taking their place at the battlefront, fighting for the soul of South Africa.

She lived a full life, she made her mark, she leaves a rich legacy.

Africa salutes you, Miriam Makeba.

Rest in peace.

History, And Those Who Make It

2008-11-05T15:53:00.000+03:00

His paternal grandfather was a Luo elder, a farmer and a medicine man. His father grew up tending goats. On November 4th, he overcame overwhelming odds to rise to the most powerful political office in the world.

This is the stuff of fiction, and even there, it might risk coming off at somewhat outlandish, a tad overdone. I know I for one quirked an incredulous eyebrow at the wishful thinking inherent in the character of President Palmer on 24. And wondered just how far in the future the TV programme was set. Sometimes, it was easier to believe that Jack Bauer was a god than to believe that, in my time, the United States of America would elect an African American as President.

* * * * *

President-elect Barack Obama.

I watch him sometimes, and it seems to me nigh impossible that this could be the same man who drove around Nairobi in Auma’s mechanically challenged baby-blue Volkswagen Beetle and visited his Aunt who lived in Kariokor. Because these are such typical Nairobi things to do. And he describes them so casually, so matter of factly. Then, the next thing you know, he’s President-elect of the United States of America. And it sort of takes your breathe away. As well it should.

It sends a very particular resounding message from the American people, reverberating not just through the United States of America, but right across the world: If you determine it, you can be whoever you want to be. At such a time as this, you’ve got to pay homage to the American Dream, because the American Dream is ultimately the winner of this election, perched squarely on the shoulders of an unlikely candidate with an unfamiliar name and an unusual story.

But, while I am as devoted a fan of Barack Obama as there can be, I am not of a mind with Thomas Carlyle, a strong proponent of the Great Man theory who once said that: "The history of the world is but the biography of great men."

To see it that way would be to grossly misrepresent the events as I saw them unfold in the United States of America these past few months. Instead, I stand amazed at the volunteer army of millions of ordinary Americans who worked tirelessly, gave generously and fought this battle valiantly.

They believed in it, and so they went to work and made it happen. There can be nothing more profound than that.

I salute them.

I salute also Barack Obama for his steadfastness in framing himself in context and his realisation that his story is part of a wider narrative that far transcends him in importance. That’s what I read in his retelling of the anecdote about the 106-year old African-American woman from Atlanta, Anne Nixon Cooper, who once upon a time lived when neither blacks nor women could vote, and lived to cast a vote for the first African American President.

As the President-elect said, with muted eloquence: “our stories are singular, but, our destinies are shared.”

This is one page in our shared history we are destined to return to, time and again, to marvel together at what men and women can achieve, when they set their minds to it.

* * * * *

To end on a decidedly apolitical note: Barack and Michelle Obama have such chemistry. It sizzles. That he loves a strong and feisty woman and has in turn earned her devotion and respect is yet another reason to admire the man.

The Mobile Phone Revolution

2008-11-03T22:01:00.002+03:00

Someone shared an interesting anecdote with us the other day.

A researcher, in way of experiment, gave some University of Nairobi students Ksh 1000 to spend however they chose to. All they needed to do was keep track of how they spent their money and report this information to the researcher.

To a (wo)man, the first thing every single one of them did was to buy prepaid mobile phone airtime worth Ksh 250. To put it another way, all of them spent 25% of their allocated spending funds on prepaid mobile airtime. That’s equivalent to anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes of talking time in the Kenyan dialect of mobilese. Or,because these are university students, and are presumably young, this is the equivalent of 125 text messages.

Definitely a point to ponder.

It's been interesting to watch the meteoric rise of prepaid credit to become one of the most highly valued commodities in Kenya today. Safaricom really hit the rock where the water gushes with the introduction of the Sambaza service way back when. For those of you reading this from otherlands, Sambaza is a service that allows one person to load their own phone with prepaid credit and then send a portion or all of it to another person. The Sambaza service has in general received less attention than M-Pesa, which is a service that facilitates the transfer of funds via mobile telephony, but it is no less ingenious, perhaps even more so.

I heard the story, some time ago, about the politician who went to visit his people upcountry and wanted to buy 'his people' soft drinks and they declined and said they preferred that he give them prepaid credit. I still haven't been able to establish whether this actually took place or is merely urban legend. Still, the fact that it's out there says something, no?

No wonder Safaricom, Kenya’s largest mobile services provider, paid taxes in the region of 300 million dollars last year, more than any other company in the country.

I can’t wait to see how this industry evolves and matures.

PS

2008-10-26T22:22:00.001+03:00

So apparently I got named on a list with a pretty impressive title: Top 45 Female African Bloggers.

And all because of YOU.

YOU are such the girl's best friend. Or something like it.

Anyhoo, thanks.

Seriously. THANKS.

When Friend Becomes Foe

2008-10-17T13:02:00.002+03:00

Dreams are funny.

They're exciting to be around at first, but then after a while, when you don't make the effort to make them come true, they begin to feel neglected, and then they turn around and begin to haunt you.

NO LONGER ADRIFT

2008-10-14T15:59:00.000+03:00

Sometimes, I think this is what happens:

You're standing at a bus stop, trying to figure out where you want to go, and a bus comes along, and so you hop on, not because you want to go where it's going but because you want to get away from where you are.

And then, because you're on the bus, you let it take over your journey. It's just easier that way, and anyway, your mind's in a muddle, what do you know about what your want?

So you find yourself going where the bus is going, even though that's not necessarily where you want to go. But frankly, you don't exactly, well, care.

And then it's ten years later and suddenly you realise that you're far far away from anything remotely resembling where you'd like to be and what you'd like to be doing.

And you catch a fright.

A terrible fright.

ohmygod.

So you frantically beg the driver to stop, right there, right then, and let you off the bus: you need to get off.

NOW.

He stops the bus.

You hop off the bus.

You watch the bus slowly fade into the distance.

You look around you and realise you're far far away from where you should be.

Tears flow freely.

You're crying because you're afraid you'll never be able to get from here to where you want to go.

But you're also crying because you did it, you got off the bus, you're your own hero, you leave you breathless.

That's the Short of the Long.

A couple of weeks ago and then some, a relative stranger and I examined my life, and concluded that I was adrift.

Now I see that we were wrong.

I'm not adrift. I'm recovering from being adrift, and I'm afraid.

Here's to finding my way home. And the adventures along the way.

Miscellaneous at the Olympics

2008-08-18T16:01:00.000+03:00

What about Usain Bolt, eh? Man or marvel or what? The New York Times thinks this is the time of Michael Phelps. Michael Phelps was awesome, but I think this is the age of Usain Bolt. He's the one who's going to be pushing the limits of what a man can do. Usain Bolt is the space to watch.

And then a Jamaican clean sweep of the Women's 100m final.

Jamaica is definitely where the party is at right now. (I want to join the party!)

And, yes, seriously, Mike Phelps. But, bravo to our very own Jason Dunford. Good stuff. Great stuff actually.

So. Apparently, Kenya has not yet found an answer to the the Ethiopian question. Especially when said question begins with Bekele or Gebrselassie?

Bekele. Now there's another athlete who is going to have his name scribbled boldly on the page of this era. He's definitely to the future what Gebrselassie is to the past.

Sigh. Bring on the 3000m steeplechase. Gold for Kenya or die.

PS, if you're bored, pick up yesterday's Sunday Nation and do some copy editing on the sports pages.

Somebody forgot to.

Say It Like It Is...

2008-07-04T16:33:00.000+03:00

The eternal God is your dwelling place. Underneath are the everlasting arms.

Mugabe's Madness. And, What's That Headline Again?

2008-07-01T17:26:00.002+03:00

But really, Mugabe. Eish.

One has to wonder what's going on in that head of his. What can he be gaining from clinging to power to this ridiculous, insane, mindboggling extent?

And what does he see when he looks at the broken and battered and bruised and ailing Zimbabwe that is and compares it with the promising Zimbabwe that was some fifteen odd years ago?

How can he hold his head high when he's leader of a country where a loaf of bread costs 3 billion dollars, an individual can withdraw a maximum of 25 billion dollars a day, and in order to do so, she has to queue for upto 3 hours?

On the offchance that Mugabe allows someone who's reading this blog an exclusive interview with him some time soon (you never know, be prepared, and all that other jazz), here are some questions I'd like you to ask him, on my behalf:

Ask him about the people he says he's standing up for against the imperialist white man and what his 'standing up' is costing them and whether he's asked them lately whether they want him to stand up for them and what they said.

Ask him whether, when he closes his eyes and thinks about all that Zimbabwe is capable of becoming and then he opens them and takes a close hard look at what Zimbabwe is today, his heart swells with pride.

Ask him whether he is absocomplelutely mad. Or, scratch that. I know the answer to that one.

(Seriously, Go Hang? Is that it?)

* * * *

I was surfing the net just now, looking for the latest news on how the African Union is dealing with the Mugabe question when I came across a most amusing title to a story on Mugabe. The International Herald Tribune has an article titled: "Mugabe Rejects Calls For His Ouster" Well, oh, ok. As opposed to that other thing that Mugabe might have done which is gleefully welcome his ouster?

Scrapping Dignity From The Bottom of the Barrel (Or, Rant)

2008-06-10T10:19:00.005+03:00

...the sane edition

Sometimes, you know you need to jump, but you don't.

You can't, you won't or you simply don't.

Then life comes and pushes you over the edge.

And everything else is free fall.

Jump, woman, jump.

Watch. This. Space.

(PS, is there somewhere they sell karma by the bottle? Where? How much?)

Poverty and Politics in Africa

2008-05-22T17:13:00.001+03:00

Gallup conducted a survey across sub Saharan Africa between 2006 and early 2008 on hunger and nutrition. According to the findings, only 36% of Kenyans said they or their family members had never had to go without ‘enough to eat.’

That percentage is lower than in sixteen countries across sub Saharan Africa. At the other end of the scale, 36 % of Kenyans reported that they or their families had had to go without ‘enough to eat’ several times or more, which percentage is higher than 15 other countries across sub Saharan Africa.

We’re in 2008, and 36 % of our people are still languishing at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy. That’s as stinging an indictment on our claim to nationhood as I’ve come across lately.

And it takes me right to the doorstep of something I’ve come to understand only recently: you cannot build political stability on empty stomachs. No ifs no buts. It is as it is.

Which would explain why Africa is what it is today.

There have been food riots in diverse countries across Africa lately, from Ivory Coast to Madagascar to Somalia. But even where the chaos has not overtly been about food, hunger and poverty have been the underlying themes.

The chaos in Kenya at the beginning of this year was catalysed by botched elections, yes, but at its heart was the deep grievance of those who felt that others were feasting at the table of a ‘growing economy’ while they held no hope of receiving even the crumbs from that table.

The xenophobic attacks in South Africa have the same genesis: poor disenfranchised people are channelling their frustration and anger at the innocents within their reach, but their real grievance is that they are poor and disenfranchised and they can see no means to secure their livelihoods.

This is not a revelation to many, I know. But it’s hit home for me as never before this year. And it’s changing the way I read the headlines as they trickle in from around the world.

Sometimes when I’m busy making my judgments from my place of relative comfort, I stop and ask myself what I really know about quashed aspirations, about eking out a miserable living from bleak to day to bleaker day and about real hunger and what it can drive a person to do.

How stable a country can you boast, really, when 36% of the people have to go without ‘enough to eat several times or more?’

For more on that gallup survey, follow this link.

PS, there's an African Union Food and Nutrition Security Conference scheduled to take place in South Africa next week. I wonder what will come out of that.

Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika

2008-05-20T16:00:00.003+03:00

Ndumiso Ngcobo can become the kind of habit that’s very difficult to break.

Just, the way he puts things.

Anyway, about the xenophobic attacks in South Africa and the media’s treatment of the same he has this to gripe:

When our “leaders” do not condemn stuff, we get really upset. Our president could take two minutes between the 17th and 18th holes of his golf game to condemn the burning of innocent people and do bugger-all about it and we’ll all let out a collective sigh of relief. “Phew! Well, he condemned it in the strongest possible terms.” These re the great analytical angles emanating from our newsrooms; compiling a Great Condemners’ list.

There’s been a great deal of talk about 'condemning' in the world press lately, no?

I’ve wondered too.

Condemn and then? Talk is so ‘dime a dozen.’ Where’s the walk?

Talking about talk: there’s been a great deal of it going on in Kenya’s political circles lately. Not much walking, far as I can tell, but a whole lot of talking.

Still, I should be grateful: better people talking than people fighting.

Which takes me back to what is happening in South Africa: it's difficult to think what to say except,

Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. Because really, I worry.

So, About Hillary Clinton

2008-05-08T16:11:00.000+03:00

I’ve been pro-Obama in the US presidential race. I will continue to be overwhelmingly pro-Obama. Not that it matters, of course, because I do not have the right to vote in the upcoming elections, being a Kenyan citizen, resident in Kenya. Still an opinion is an opinion and I have one.

But I have to say that I’ve developed a healthy respect for Hillary Clinton. She is a very intelligent, very formidable woman. Such grit. It is not easy to be her right now but she’s doing it with courage and dignity. I cannot remain unmoved when I watch her stand wearing her best smile before a crowd on whose faces she can read a sense of resignation, of futility. Here, where the clichéd rubber meets the road, this woman has substance, is substance.

Hillary Clinton is an incredibly gifted woman, and no one can take that away from her.

Besides, I cannot 'do a moving hope speech to galvanise a generation in the tradition of Obama' to save my life, not to mention the lives of my (yet unborn) children. In the public space, I would come off, in many ways, a lot like Clinton. I see me in her. I cannot help but empathise. (I also see my challenges of identity in Obama’s struggles, but that is not here.)

It’s been hard for me to distil the thought processes and feelings of African American women during this prolonged nomination process. Because they’re the point of intersection between Clinton and Obama. I think there’s been a lot of churning going on in the private place that hasn’t poured out into the public space. Or perhaps I just haven’t known where to look.

It’s been interesting to see African American women who are “women’s women” like Oprah Winfrey and Toni Morrison throw their weight behind Barack Obama. What does this mean? Is anybody talking about why it is and what it means? You get the strong sense, (especially in Oprah’s dipped ratings), that there’s a sense of betrayal in some quarters. Is this being tackled squarely or is it being sheepishly swept under the carpet?

I can't wait for this stretch to be over, and for women (especially African American women) to begin to narrate their stories retrospectively, as they slowly come to terms with what this historic race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton has taught them about themselves.

And I agree with the Clinton supporter who said the nomination race is "a marathon and she should be allowed to finish." Even if she isn't going to be the first to cross the finishing line. Let her finish. That's the kind of woman that she is, and I admire and respect that. Because that's the kind of woman I'd like to be.

Space, people. Let the woman do this on her own terms.

Dirty Little Secret (Or, Money Money Money)

2008-05-08T16:06:00.000+03:00

I’m ashamed to admit that I have an unhealthy relationship with money.

I really should know better.

Scratch that—I do know better, but I do not do as I know.

(Judge me if you must. I’ve beaten you to it.)

I’m clingy with money. I do not trust money enough to let it out of my sight. I fret about money not spending enough time with me. I worry that one day, money will grow tired of me, pack its bags and slip away in the middle of the night to idontknowhere. Then who will I be, what will I do, where will I go?

It’s become this goat sitting on my head weighing heavily on me and preventing me from doing what I really want to do, what I should be doing.

How do I get from here to a safe place?

Anybody?

And please understand that I'm a worrier about all things money, not a hoarder. Which is not a judgment on which is better or worse but rather a qualification of which I am and which I am not.

Update: An anonymous reader pointed me to this performance by Poetri. It's all about money. Great stuff. (thanks anon).

PS, I tried to upload the youtube video here and my blog just froze in shock at being asked to do anything but plain old words. I give up. This link will have to do. For a less technophobic blog, see Mama Shady

Of Old Roads, New Paths and the People Who Take Them

2008-05-08T10:07:00.004+03:00

I found this article in the New York Times very eye-opening.

Especially this:

"...don’t bother trying to kill off old habits; once those ruts of procedure are worn into the hippocampus, they’re there to stay. Instead, the new habits we deliberately ingrain into ourselves create parallel pathways that can bypass those old roads..."

That definitely catalysed an Oprah Aha! moment for me. It made me realise that I'd been focusing precious change energy in the wrong direction.

Instead of trying (with limited success), to block off "the old roads", I ought rather to be concentrating on building "new parallel pathways". Instead of concentrating my efforts on not doing things the old way, I should in fact be expending my energy imagining, inventing and learning new ways of doing things.

And then there's also the bit about the three zones of existence: comfort, stretch and stress:

"...Comfort is the realm of existing habit. Stress occurs when a challenge is so far beyond current experience as to be overwhelming. It’s that stretch zone in the middle — activities that feel a bit awkward and unfamiliar — where true change occurs ... Getting into the stretch zone is good for you ... it helps keep your brain healthy. It turns out that unless we continue to learn new things, which challenges our brains to create new pathways, they literally begin to atrophy..."

We live, We learn.

(I so love that we get to do that.)

Vanity Fare

2008-05-05T16:13:00.000+03:00

So, I've a confession to make:

All this blogging business is really about expressing my wannabe novelist-ness. Well, OK, not all of it, but at least some of it is.

If my high school had a yearbook in my day, under my photo (in which I would have been smiling, I have a great smile and don't I know it), would have been the caption:

"most likely to write a novel someday."

Seriously. Back then, yours truly and (almost) everybody I knew thought I had a novel buried in me. It now turns out that the treasure was buried far deeper than anyone could have imagined.

Sigh.

Maybe I peaked in high school. Maybe I raised expectations a tad too high and the last decade or so has been a subconscious effort to lower the bar. Maybe.

Or maybe the novel will come to me in my seventies. There are people who have written their first novel in their seventies, you know. And it's turned out splendidly for them, I think. So why not me?

I bumped into Binyavanga some time ago. He doesn't know this is me, just so you know. He gave me this sage advice:

"You know what you need to do if you want to be a writer? Write."

Oh bummer. No way around that then? Because I find writing in a particular direction in a sustained way so ... tedious. I tend instead to follow my goat as she grazes and sort of bump into things to write about. Or write about things that have bumped into me. I'm very opportunistic that way.

Besides, all I want is a hefty advance, to be sort of famous, and to do a book tour or two.

Oh, and to have people crease their brow when they pass me on the street because they think they recognise me from somewhere but they can't quite tell where. That tickles me, it really does.

Do I need to write a whole book for that, or will a few chapters do?

Excerpts From A Speech I Hope to Make Someday

2008-05-03T12:06:00.000+03:00

We were so unabashedly ambitious that it made some people wince. From the very beginning, we were not afraid to say that we wanted to be the best, and to say, also, that we believed we had it in us to be the best.

We learned not to feel the shame of being small and wanting to be big, of being behind and wanting to forge ahead. We refused to let others tell us who we were, but instead, boldly declared what we knew we were in the process of becoming.

And O' look what we have become.

Yellow Stick-It Note

2008-04-17T16:10:00.000+03:00

It's ten after midnight.

I'm still at my desk, at the office.

I've just finished working on a project that has a deadline of tomorrow, noon.

I had ample time, really, but I procrastinated. Like fourteen weeks of ample time. I hear that gasp and I raise you a sharp intake of breath.

This will not do.

I'm hungry and tired. And my eyes are red from staring at the screen.

I'm posting this stick-it note here to remind myself how I feel right now.

And to remind myself also, how faint I felt when I tried to convert the final document into a PDF half an hour ago and Word said it couldn't open it. Twice.

And how all this needn't have happened this way. Really. Really, really.

I know better. I'm annoyed with myself mostly. And disappointed.

Get my act together already.

Warts, Quirks, Skeletons, Baggage and All

2008-04-09T18:17:00.003+03:00

Ian Jack of the Guardian (UK), appears somewhat disconcerted by some of the revelations in the authorized biography of VS Naipaul by Patrick French.

Describing the “uninhibited disclosure” as “bewildering,” he wonders what would motivate Naipaul to allow such a revelatory biography to be published in his life time. French, the biographer, calls it “at once an act of narcissism and humility” but adds that it might also be motivated by a desire to have his life dissected in the present so that readers curiosity can be sated and they can then “return to the importance of his work.”

At the end of his column, Jack strikes a philosophical note:

“Be grateful, if you must remember his shuddersome life, that so much selfishness has given us such great books.”

Time ago I had a conversation with some people I do life with. I expressed the opinion that is unreasonable to expect someone of my age not to have a skeleton or thirteen in her closet. Really. (If I stand on the tip of my toes and stretch out my hand as far as I possibly can without detaching my arm, I can brush the big 4 0 with the tip of my middle finger.)

The nature of my particular pile of skeletons is not up for discussion. Suffice it sing ‘oh to grace how great a debtor, daily I’m constrained to be.’ Because we’re human, we’re all going around collecting skeletons and shoving them into our closets. You, me, and yes, Mother Teresa.

But that’s not where I was going with this.

I was going to say that I wonder if there might be something else there, for V S Naipaul. I wonder if sometimes he looks at the V S Naipaul that is the figment of other peoples’ imagination and feels that deep, unparalleled loneliness of not being known. I’ve been down this road before, I know. I know. It is a subject that preoccupies me, the craving to be known, quirks and all, the desire to be known yet loved.

I think most of us carry around some degree of fear that people only love us and accept us because they don’t know all of who we are and all that there is to be known about us. Doubtless some at the extreme end live with the dread, every waking hour and sometimes in their nightmares, that when their beloved discover some of what they are and all of what they’ve been, they’ll suffer rejection.

And, if you ask me, the fear of rejection is no less painful than rejection itself.

I think this is the fundamental reason why I am a Christian. I struggle with different aspects of my faith in countless ways all the time. Ironically perhaps, now more than ever.

But one thing remains true: when this African woman stands alone before God, she knows herself to be utterly and completely known, and totally and unconditionally loved. It’s impossible to trump that. And, it’s impossible to walk away from that. Known, yet loved is the safest place I know.

I’m incubated right now in a context where I’m rubbing shoulders with an acquaintance regularly, whereas previously, our contact and interaction had been very limited. That is to say, I’m interacting on a regular basis with someone who I previously only knew as a friend of a friend. Recently, she made a very flattering observation about me to our mutual friend.

In the beginning, I was quite flattered. But soon, I started to do that thing that I do so well: fret. What she said wasn’t all of how I saw myself. I could see how she could come to that conclusion, because, certainly, I can be that way. But only half the time. Just as often, I’m almost the exact opposite.

So off I went to navel-gaze before one of the beloved who serve me as a mirror.

So and so said such and such, I said. Is this the way she saw me, I asked. She said yes. Really, I asked. And then I said, but you also know this other side of me, what about that? She said, yes, but you seem to have learned to go away and be the ‘other person’ in the private place, so more and more these days, the person people interact with is this (flattering) side of you.

I said, ‘oh.’ I got it, I think, although it still niggles an itsy little bit. Because it made me wonder whether those with only this perspective of me really know me. (You can see once again that I can drive myself crazy, but better me than you, right?)

For those of you who are working your active imaginations overtime, I don’t exactly have an illustrious past. But, like I said, I’m skipping along happily toward 40. I’ve lived. I've got baggage. There are things that I would do differently, given the chance to do them all over again. And who I am is as much about all the things I’ve gotten wrong, as about all the times I've gotten it right.

So I can sort of, maybe, perhaps, understand V S Naipaul. And Mary J Blige. And... you get my drift.

Where Have All The Bloggers Gone

2008-03-20T10:09:00.001+03:00

No, I haven't rolled over and died. I keep meaning to come back here and say something, but then I find that I have nothing to say. Or, perhaps, I don't know how to say what I really want to say.

I'm trying to go back to the blogger I was before the "Sixty Days in Kenya" happened, but I find that I can't. Not yet, anyway.

True, the dark cloud that was hanging ominously over my head is gone and the tight knot in my stomach has loosened somewhat. I'm getting a decent amount of sleep at night. Well, ok, it may not be decent but at least it's not undecent.

Oh the things we take for granted. I cannot tell it all.

For the most part I'm pleased at the efforts being made by both Raila and Kibaki. I'm privileged and proud to be a part of a proactive church community. And at least I have the hope of a Kenyan identity to cling to again.

So things are unbad.

But every time I'm tempted to rest on my laurels, I hear something that reminds me that there's still much to be done. What about the internally displaced people? What about the relatively high level of tension in certain parts of the country? What about the land issue? What about the new constitution? I can whatabout myself into a state on any day of the week and three days in between.

I know I really ought to let go of all of it and quit fretting. What, after all, can this one african woman do?

Still, I fret. I will not be comforted.

But, I will be distracted.

I came out of my two-month long daze to find that life had been hurtling along at its usual breakneck speed.

I'm still trying to catch up and I'm breathless for the effort. Until I do, I will not be in these parts very often. So I suppose you could say this blog is on hiatus. Although, as before, I reserve the right to change my mind. Tomorrow. Or the day after. Or the day after that.

Keep well. And thanks for coming by.

Khalil Gibran For Our Time

2008-03-04T08:32:00.000+03:00

THE PLUTOCRAT

In my wanderings I once saw upon an island a man-headed iron-hoofed monster who ate of the earth and drank of the sea incessantly. And for a long while I watched him. Then I approached him and said, ‘Have you never enough; is younger hunger never satisfied and your thirst never quenced?’

And he answered saying, ‘Yes, I am satisfied, nay, I am weary of eating and drinking; but I am afraid that tomorrow there will be no more earth to eat and no more sea to drink.’

***

WAR AND THE SMALL NATIONS

Once, high above a pasture, where a sheep and a lamb were grazing, an eagle was circling and gazing hungrily down upon the lamb. And as he was about to descend and seize his prey, another eagle appeared and hovered above the sheep and her young with the same hungry intent. Then the two rivals began to fight, filling the sky with their fierce cries.

The sheep looked up and was much astonished. She turned to the lamb and said:

‘How strange, my child, that these two noble birds should attack one another. Is not the vast sky large enough for both of them? Pray, my little one, pray in your heart that God may make peace between your winged brothers.’

And the lamb prayed in his heart.

****

And, one of my absolute favourites from Khalil Gibran:

A sense of humour is a sense of proportion.

Nairobi, We Have A Deal

2008-02-29T09:43:00.004+03:00

Everybody in my parts is wishing everybody a Happy New Year.

So, Happy New Year.

Today is when 2008 begins for us.

I read from Oyunga Pala that Dr Frank Njenga, probably Kenya's most reknown pyschiatrist, had listed 'not being able to stop talking about politics' as one of the symptoms of post-election trauma in Kenya.

Well, then, Traumatised Are Us.

But now, we have a deal. Sigh.

The journey to healing can begin.

There's much to be done to resettle the displaced, to disarm militia, to rediscover or invent nationhood. Building what we've destroyed will be a long and arduous task.

I worry that we have at the helm leaders who are not up to the task. But, they're all the leaders we have for now so they'll have to do. And they deserve some credit, at least, for getting us to this place of compromise, even though it should have happened much sooner.

I worry also, about loosing the momentum. I do hope we're not deluded enough to imagine that we can now just go back to 'business as usual.' And I pray that we have the courage to resolve the issues that have boiled viciously onto the surface these past couple of months.

I don't want to ever come back to this place again, so I'm willing to spend a little more time here, this time around, poking and probing, trying to get to the bottom of the matter.

Someone reminded me the other day about a prophecy that did its rounds in the Christian circles in Kenya in the late nineties: that Kenya was destined to be a great nation in the 21st Century; that we would be amazed by where we would go and who we would be.

Everything that happened these past two months seemed to fly in the face of this prophecy. But perhaps it was about the seed dying so that an oak could grow out of it.

I'm with June Jordan, Alice Walker and Barack Obama:

We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For.

And, our time has come. Time not to celebrate, but to roll up our sleeves and get to work.

Pilgrims in Progress

2008-02-26T19:41:00.006+03:00

Speaking of prayer: I wrote a post about the response of the Church in Kenya to the unfolding political situation some many weeks ago and then didn’t post it. Can’t find it now so I’ll try a do over.

A couple of days after the chaos started, I received a text message from one of the leaders in my church community. It reported that Church leaders in Nairobi had met and had decided to take a four-pronged approach to addressing the situation that arose out of the disputed election. Four sub-committees were formed to oversee each of these approaches.

There is a Spiritual Committee that deals with rallying Christians to prayer and fast. Behind the scenes, away from view, there's a great deal of prayer going on. There are plans for overnight prayer all over Nairobi on 29th of February and a week of fasting for Christians thereafter.

Early in January, there was a praying meeting at All Saints Cathedral where Church leaders from different ethnic communities across Kenya came together repenting for the sins of their respective communities and asking forgiveness from one another on behalf of their communities. I did not make it to this prayer meeting, but some who went told me it was an extraordinary time.

There is also a Social Response Committee that deals with the emergency response and rallying Christians to show compassion to their neighbours during this crisis. Out of this has come the Msafara, the caravan of hope that will see several Pastors from various denominations traveling Kenya spreading the message of hope and providing vital supplies even as they preach peace and hope to wananchi.

Then there’s the Political Committee whose role is to try to influence leaders on either side of the political divide to act for the good of all Kenyans. You saw some of their efforts early in January as they made statements on behalf of the Church to Kibaki and Raila.

Recently, a group of church leaders appeared on television asking for forgiveness from Kenyans for not having risen above the ethnic divide in the days leading up to the election and in the early days of the post election crisis. That, I think, was exemplary. Anyone who had just even one eye groggily open could clearly see the divisions within the Church in the beginning. I think it was an act of courage to come forth and say, we've done bad, we should have known better, we will do better going forward.

And there’s the Communications Committee whose aim is to spread a positive message through the media and beyond and to influence the tenor of the media message. I’m afraid I’m less familiar with the activities of this committee than I should be.

I understand Pastor Gowi Odera is one of the people responsible for its activities. On 14th of February, he and his wife were interviewed by Julie Gichuru of NTV about what their experience has been in their interethnic marriage at a special event organized by Kenya’s Fashion Community to raise funds for those affected by the post election violence. I don't know if this was part of the strategy or was just a coincidence. Still, I think it's interesting to see that the church is determined to be proactive even in this respect.

One of the most memorable times we have had recently was at the a dinner hosted by Life Ministry for Christian leaders in Kenya at which Victor Koh from Singapore told the amazing story of Singapore’s journey to become a successful first world nation in just one generation. Those of you who’ve read “From Third World to First World: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000" by Lee Kuan Yew will be familiar with this story.

In the midst of all the doom and gloom, the excitement, the sense of possibility was palpable. The venue was filled to overflowing and makeshift arrangements had to be made to accommodate guests over and above the numbers that had been anticipated.

From a Kenyan perspective, the Singapore story does sound somewhat incredulous so along with all the excitement was an accompanying sense of “you’ve got to be kidding me, how now?” as well. And there was a great deal of debate around tables and on serving queues about where exactly Singapore went right and where we went wrong. Those were interesting discussions to listen in on and participate in.

Because once upon a time, circa 1976 or so, Kenya and Singapore were at par. And that’s hard to swallow.

Whereas the presentation by Victor Koh was thought-provoking, the ensuing discussion was the most uplifting part of the evening for me as it reminded me what brilliant thinkers we have within the Christian community in Kenya and what potential that portends.

One comment I took away with me, although I forgot the name of the gentleman who made it, was that equity is more, much more than redistribution of resources. According to him, we will know we have achieved true justice when a crime by a rich man always attracts the same penalty as the same crime committed by a poor man.

He may have been inspired in part by Victor Koh’s description of how corruption and white collar crime is dealt with in Singapore, but I suspect that he’d been ruminating on this for some time before. It stopped me in my tracks, it did, because it forced me to look at an old term in a new way.

In many ways, then, I think the story of the Church in Kenya mirrors the Christian narrative, what we might call the Pilgrim’s Progress. We’re far from perfect, and we’re painfully aware of that, but we try our best. Sometimes, oftentimes even, we stumble and fall, but when we do, we struggle to get up and determine to continue to forge ahead.

That’s all a Pilgrim can do.

Most importantly though, there are Christians all over Kenya praying fervently for this country at this time in our history. In some ways, I think that it is these prayers that have kept the bottom from giving way under us.

So if you’re one of those who’s been praying, don’t give up just yet.

For more, read what one of my favourite Pastor's has to say here. And yes, I'm an unabashed promoter of his blog.

Also see the Msafara Blog.

Kenya at a Crossroads

2008-02-26T00:58:00.001+03:00

I'm seated here, twiddling my thumbs and shuffling my feet, unable to sleep.

And praying.

My prayers continue to be remarkably inarticulate.

But flourish is not fervour and words are not always heart.

Kenneth Copeland reminded me the other day to simply pray the desired end result.

Dear God please.

Peace. Justice. Mercy. Prosperity. Healing. Reconciliation. A great nation rising out of these ashes. Opportunity for one and all.

If ever we needed a miracle as a nation, we need one now.

Panic Attack

2008-02-26T00:11:00.004+03:00

Dear Kofi Annan:

There's a rumour that you're thinking of leaving Kenya. That you're fed up with our leaders and their madness. That you're up to here and beyond with all this nonsense.

I can certainly understand why you would be sorely tempted.

But please please please don't. Leave Kenya that is.

You can't anyway. You promised, remember?

Last Friday but one you looked straight through the camera and right at me and said you weren't going to go anywhere until a comprehensive solution had been arrived at. You said that anyone who thought they could frustrate you into leaving was deluded.

Remember that?

This is where the hammer hits the nail, ouch.

Don't let them win. You can't let them win. Please don't let them win.

Because if you do, it is we the people who will loose.

Yours in the middle of the night in a bit of a panic,

Can't Beat, Will Join

2008-02-21T12:13:00.008+03:00

I’ve been advised to delete the last but one post because well, in brief, “the cracks are showing.”

Sigh.

Thing is, I can’t. Or, more accurately, I won’t.

First, I’d like to be able to look back at this blog in a year or two and remember my ups and downs and sideways at this crucial time in our country. So even if I feel differently tomorrow, I felt what I felt when I blogged what I blogged.

Second, if my cracks are showing, it’s because, well, I have cracks all over the place. Seriously. You don’t know the half of it.

I wasn’t happy with Condi’s speech. I thought her tone was disrespectful and unnecessary. She has a thing or twenty to learn from Kofi Annan who is rumoured to bang tables and do drama behind closed negotiating room doors but who, whenever he appears before the Kenyan people, addresses us with respect.

But, I recognize that she had been handed the ‘moral right’ to say what she did on a gold platter by our leaders as they seem to be incapable of sorting out this mess that they created without outside pressure.

So seriously, I’m not taking any of that back.

Just so you know.

But I will add that, beside the tough words, Condi came bearing, ahem, “gifts” or had we rather call them "incentives" in the form of promises of aid to our leaders should they finally do the thing that we elected them to do which is ‘to lead.’

Knowing Kenya’s paltry placement on the Transparency International Corruption Index, I wonder whether it was a case of if you can’t beat them, bribe them?

I wonder also, if it will it be a good thing or a bad thing for Kenya if this promise of a basketful of goodies serves to finally persuade the opposing sides to strike a comprehensive deal.

But then again, we want them to come to a reasonable understanding so that we can get our lives back, no? And sometimes, the ends justify the means, right?

Sigh. I bet you’ve gathered that I’m stark in the middle of a cynical phase here.

I don't know how I got here. I'm struggling to get to the other side. See you there. When I get there.

I need me an infusion of hope.

Barack Obama, where are you when a homeland needs you?

(Off to watch that will.i.am video on youtube again.)

We can get out of this mess, right? (YES WE CAN. BUT CAN WE REALLY?)

So, Barack Obama

2008-02-20T15:39:00.003+03:00

He got me with “Dreams From My Father.” It was hard to believe the parts about Kenya were written by someone who’d not been brought up in Kenya. So authentic. Neither raw nor overdone. Just right. I loved him then. And then, "Audacity of Hope" sealed the deal. I like.

Last June, I remember being in a car in Johannesburg, driving from point A to point B. There were four of us, from four different countries, two Africans two non-Africans. From a discussion on the global economic climate, we segued into a discussion about who could would might be the next US President. Hillary Clinton got a fair amount of airtime. We tossed pluses and minuses back and forth. Rudi Giulliani also came under scrutiny. I attempted to insert Barack Obama into the conversation. Everybody laughed. I mean, chortled. Nobody else in the car thought he was worth considering.

In the next couple of weeks, at least three of us will get together again. I can’t wait.

Also, I’m ‘up to here’ with Kenya. Enough. I’m off to bury my head in the sand. DO NOT DISTURB.

Just one more thing: ahem, has anyone else noticed that drought has checked in? Mom told me some weeks ago the harvest was very poor this year, and that set off the first warning bells for me. But of course there's plenty of news jostling for mind space so I stashed that away absentmindedly. Then yesterday, there were cattle being herded along Mbagathi Way. That's usually a sign that there's trouble in the land.

Of They That Wag Their Fingers and Berate

2008-02-19T16:27:00.009+03:00

I’m very cross with Mwai Kibaki, Raila Odinga and their respective hardline surrogates today, for putting us in this position where the “International Community” have all the excuse they need to swagger into our sovereignty and order us around.

Because Condi, Milliband, and that tall German whatsisname guy with an unkempt moustache would not be all up in our faces being patronizing if Kenya's erstwhile leaders just left their mountain-sized egos outside the negotiating room and got their acts together already. We want back our country and our pride. Give us back our country and our pride.

Seriously, today: Me. Cross. At these so called leaders of ours.

Wincing and squirming and cross.

* edited for tone

I AM NOT MY TRIBE

2008-02-12T16:29:00.000+03:00

I salute what David Kobia is trying to do with I HAVE NO TRIBE. He has catalysed a useful discussion, especially in the wake of what I hear the Mashada forums had deteriorated to.

To be Kenyan at this time and in this place is to go over your raison d’etre with a fine-tooth comb: to search your soul, deeply. We have been forced to revisit our presumptive identities, to unpack who we always thought we were, to grope for definition(s).

I for one have been unearthing childhood memories and dusting them off in an attempt to isolate the spaces that shaped me into this person that I have become.

And there have been interesting (sometimes heated) discussions about the place of socialization, values and ideas in the current crisis and about the nuanced standoff between individualistic and collective cultures as witnessed between certain ethnic communities in Kenya today. I have given as much as I have taken in these debates. There’s still much to give and as much to take.

Today, I acknowledge that I belong to a specific ethnic community and that that belonging speaks to where I come from in vital ways that I will not disregard.

But.

I AM NOT MY TRIBE.

At the top of my voice, defiantly, and somewhat breathlessly, to the tune of India Arie’s I Am Not My Hair, I am singing:

I Am Not My Tribe,

I Am Not This Name,

I Am Not Your Expectations, No.

This has become my mantra.

My ethnicity speaks to me and to you about where I have come from, not to who I am nor where I am going.

And I will not allow it to dictate my choices and my affiliations nor to set my limits for me of who I am and what I hold to be true.

I have said before, if we are to forge a Kenyan nationhood, we have to find a new way of being. We cannot pass on this fractured nation to the next generation. We’ve battered and grievously assaulted what we’re meant to be holding in trust for our children and it is unconscionable to pass it on until we have restored it and set it on a path to where it ought to be going.

And one of the most painful things that we must face up to, to a large extent, is that this is a journey that the generation before us will be neither able nor willing to take with us.

In many ways, we will have to let go of our ‘parents’ in order to take hold of the future for our ‘children’.

We were raised to hold our elders in the highest esteem, to listen to them when they spoke, to consider their words carefully, to trust their judgment. But, we cannot do so when they insist on speaking the divisions of the past as we strive to forge the bonds of tomorrow.

We must find the strength, the courage and the vision to say: “Mum, Dad, _____, _______, you know I love you to the edge of madness, but, enough.”

Enough.

We are the ones who must find common stories of nationhood to coalesce around. This is our moment, and we must seize it or be swallowed up in it.

***********

For a Christian leader's take, see Pastor M's post on the subject.

The Irresistible Man

2008-01-01T08:58:00.000+03:00

He’s got a kind heart, a lively mind and a sharp wit. He can carry his end of a conversation that winds through a widely varied topical landscape. He is emotionally available, which is not to say that he is all of mushy and a helping of tears, but that you don’t constantly need to hire expensive machinery to drill out of him what he feels/wants/means.

So, does he have a name? Where in the world does he live? What’s his number?

This came from left field, I know, and threw you for a loop. (to use a cocktail of metaphor).

Still.