Ethnic radio stations are fuelling a culture of intolerance in this country
Mahatma Gandhi was not circumcised. Nor was Winston Churchill. And I am willing to bet my last shilling that India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has not experienced “the cut”.
Nor has British Premier David Cameron. Yet I have never heard a Kenyan refer to these men as “boys” who are unfit to lead.
Of course, it would be very different if these men were Kenyan. Then they would have been dismissed as juveniles.
And ethnic radio stations might have even castigated them for not being man enough to take on the job of president.
Kenyans might be surprised to learn that an estimated 70 per cent of males around the globe are not circumcised and that in some African countries, such as Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Swaziland, male circumcision is prevalent in less than 20 per cent of the population.
Circumcision is most rare in Europe and Latin America but is most prevalent in the Muslim world, parts of South-East Asia, the United States, the Philippines, Israel and South Korea.
I am not trying to advocate against male circumcision; I am just trying to highlight the double standards of Kenyans. I actually believe that male circumcision is a good thing.
Various medical studies have shown that circumcised males experience fewer health problems than those who are not circumcised. In Kenya, even Luo men have started to get circumcised because circumcision has shown to reduce the chances of HIV infection.
The recent cases of hate speech related to songs about male circumcision and the ones that were rampant prior to the 2007 election should be a wake-up call for the government, which, in its haste to liberalise the airwaves, failed to enforce a code of conduct on radio stations, and failed to bring to book those stations that violated people’s rights and dignity.
The bigger question, I believe, is what level of responsibility individual musicians and radio stations should take for songs aired. Is the radio station that plays a hateful song as guilty of hate speech as the person who sang it? I should think so.
One of the unintended consequences of the liberalisation of the airwaves and the proliferation of vernacular FM stations is that that the notion of “nationhood” has evaporated and negative ethnicity has become even more entrenched.
One might argue that vernacular stations promote cohesion within ethnic communities and impart important information about these communities’ culture and history.
But what if the radio station is used to undermine equal opportunities and impose a kind of apartheid in society?
For instance, a popular Hindi-language radio station regularly airs classified ads for jobs that require that the applicant be fluent in Gujarati. Now Gujarati is one of several hundred languages of the Indian sub-continent and is neither a national language in India nor in Kenya.
Going by this requirement, neither I nor the majority of my fellow Kenyans are eligible to apply for these jobs. It is clear to anyone listening to these commercials that the intention of the potential employers/advertisers is to hire someone from their own “tribe” (i.e. someone whose origins are in the state of Gujarat in India).
This excludes Punjabi speakers like myself and the rest of Kenya’s more than 40 ethnic groups. These ads are not only racist, they are exclusive – they deny equal opportunities to Kenyans of all races and ethnic groups.
The other thing that irritates me about these so-called Asian FM stations is that their point of reference is almost always India or Pakistan, not Kenya.
The hosts will spend a lot of time talking about Bollywood gossip, and the goings-on in India, but hardly ever refer to events taking place in this country.
It is highly patronising – and short-sighted – for the hosts and owners of these stations to assume that their audiences have no interest in local affairs.
Moreover, instead of fostering greater understanding and tolerance between races, these stations are fostering ethnic cocoons.
I have yet to hear a Kiswahili or Kikuyu song played on these stations or a host who is not of Indian or Pakistani origin. This is a scenario that should no longer be tolerated.
