BUKENYA: I was excited by the Indian ladies and the 43rd ‘tribe’

Ishani Patel and Dhrovi Patel of Kisumu Senior Academy pose for a photo during the Kisumu region interschool talent event. Asians were recognised as Kenya's 44th tribe. FILE PHOTO | ANGELA OKETCH | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • That brings us back to the ladies cricket final. The excitement and enthusiasm at Lord’s was striking because, as most of us know, cricket is commonly assumed to be a boys’ sport.
  • When young women break through these gender barriers, as they are increasingly doing today, those of us who believe in our daughters’ and sisters’ ability to excel at any skill or activity they want cannot help rejoicing.
  • But I think there is always a noticeable enrichment when the ladies move into these “new” fields.

A recent week of keen action and ardent competition seemed to have all the right ingredients to turn me on. Imagine a bevy of plucky young women, all brimming with good health and professional athleticism, in a truly international setting, and a sport that claims to be the acme of elegance! Are you playing?

India’s Ladies Cricket Team fascinated me when they took to the pitch at Lord’s in London, in a World Cup final. As Kenya-born, Banda School-educated Chris Froome celebrated his fourth win of the greatest cycling race in the world, the Tour de France, the Indian ladies took on the mighty English Ladies’ team.

The crowd at Lords, the world’s premier cricket venue, was full to capacity and the event was billed as the real ‘arrival’ of women’s cricket. I do not know how much you know about this quintessentially ‘English’ sport. If it is as much as I do, then it must be very little. My Namilyango College was a cricket-playing school, though not quite as well-known as Rubadiri and Njonjo’s Kings’ College. But I never bowled, batted, fielded or kept wicket.

Do you remember the time Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, threatened her opponents, saying she would “hit them for six”? That is a cricket image, but I still do not know to this day what exactly she meant by it. In any case, she was the one who got hit in the end and thrown down from her prime ministerial perch.

That brings us back to the ladies cricket final. The excitement and enthusiasm at Lord’s was striking because, as most of us know, cricket is commonly assumed to be a boys’ sport. When young women break through these gender barriers, as they are increasingly doing today, those of us who believe in our daughters’ and sisters’ ability to excel at any skill or activity they want cannot help rejoicing. But I think there is always a noticeable enrichment when the ladies move into these “new” fields.

I do not think I had ever seen any other cricketers wield a bat the way captain Mithali Raj’s batswomen did at that final at Lord’s. In the end the English Ladies team narrowly but deservedly won the finals. But that did nothing to dim the splendid achievement of the Indian ladies. They were even all the more impressive when one realised the odds against which they had had to struggle to start playing the game at all.

Curiously, too, I could not help wondering how closely those ladies resembled many of our sisters and daughters right here in Nairobi and elsewhere in East Africa. You might say I am indulging in the obvious, since it is well-known that many of us have roots in both the Asian and the African continents.

Many prominent East African writers, like Ugandan Peter Nazareth and Jagjit Singh, Kenyan Bahadur Tejani and Kenyan-Tanzanian Moyez Vassanji, as well as several Swahili authors, highlight and underline this bi-continental richness in our culture. You will probably note that the names I mention above are those of some of the many who were either my schoolmates, college contemporaries or young colleagues before relocating across the globe.

There were many others with whom I grew up. I told you of J. Ruparel, my fellow Kennedy Scholar at Dar es Salaam, who turned out to be my landlord when, in 1982, I relocated from the Kenyatta campus to Westlands. Another colleague I remember at Dar is my sister and compatriot Lakhani, one of whose short stories I published in our literary journal, Darlite (later Umma). She said then, in 1966, that she wanted to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, some day.

Anyway, in the light of all these markers of our common heritage, the recent recognition of Kenya’s 43rd ‘tribe’ should surprise us only because it has taken us this long to effect. My other beef with the momentous event, as you can guess, is that ‘tribe’ thingummy. I do not know what exactly is written in the ‘Charter’ given to our ‘Kenyasian’ community. But if the charter identifies them as a ‘tribe’, we can only assume it is a legal designation acknowledged in our laws.

Legal language is, however, famously conservative, and we educators must persist patiently in the struggle to change the mentality and attitudes of our people towards themselves and their compatriots. As we sadly know, the ‘tribe’ mentality imprisons us in ‘primitiveness’ and inclines us towards one of the most horrendous diseases in our society, tribalism.

My fallen comrade, Makerere historian Samwiri Karugire, spelt out the bile in ‘tribe.’ He says the term was applied to our communities by colonial predators and anthropologists, partly to degrade the status of our communities and partly to divide and rule us. A tribe, according to some definitions, is “a collection of semi-primitive people ruled over by a chief”. We can only elaborate on this by citing some of the other demeaning epithets those rogues slapped on us: savage, native, backward, kaffir.

The two most unacceptable aspects of these terms are that we should continue to identify ourselves by some of them, like ‘tribe’, and that we should use the labels to cause divisions and havoc in our nations. I believe our far-sighted educationists were targeting these shortcomings when, back in the 1980s, they rightly taught our children to avoid terms, like ‘tribe’.

Our youngsters learnt to say they belonged to ‘communities’, and, at most, they would just ask, “What language are you?” If you were Swahili, English, Luhya or Gujarati, that was that, no hang-ups about the matter. Unfortunately, the march is not always forward, especially, with that ‘ism’ stuff. So long as we ‘tribalise’ ourselves, we risk the contamination of tribalism.

Anyway, I am considering the possibility of obtaining a charter for another deserving community that is quite sizeable, has been here for ‘forever’ and contributing with dedication and devotion to our national development.

You surely must know about the ‘Kenugandans’!

 

Prof Bukenya is one of the leading scholars of English and Literature in East Africa. [email protected]