'Disinterest' and 'uninterest' don't mean the same thing

What you need to know:

  • "Disinterest" means only absence of a bias or prejudice.

One headline on page 11 of last week’s Sunday Nation ran as follows: “Disinterest in NYS in Mount Kenya worries officials”.

What could that mean? From the context, I gathered that, by disinterest, the newspaper meant “lack of interest” (in something). Clearly, what the subeditor meant was not disinterest, but uninterest.

To be quite sure, the noun "disinterest" exists in English. But be careful. For "disinterest" does not mean the same thing as absence of interest (in something or somebody). No, the noun "disinterest" means only absence of a bias or prejudice. Disinterest is what Kenya’s politicians mean whenever they demand “objectivity”.

By this, a politician always means: “Never bring my name into any story about corruption, about land grabbing, about robbery, about rape, about mal-governance: Never write about me except in the rosiest light”. Yet, as far as I know, to be disinterested is not the same thing as to lack interest in whatever the issue is.

For if, as a politician, you banished all interest in whatever it is, why would you still be talking about it? Why would a reporter be writing about it except because – as a rule – it was you (the politician) who had called the newsrooms to summon them to “the press conference” that you intended to address at one place or another?

No, to be disinterested is not lack interest in, but only to free oneself from all biases and prejudices concerning whatever it is you are talking or writing about. To be disinterested is to have shed all the absolutely nonsensical gender, national, racial, sectarian and tribal propaganda and assumptions by which all of us were forced to grow up. And objective knowledge is the only answer to all such prejudices.
The hearsay by which my people – the Luo – often dismiss the Kikuyu and the hearsay by which, for their own part, the Kikuyu frequently dismiss the Luo are just that – claims. There is no scientific truth in most of the categories by which Kenya’s tribes downgrade one another (especially in politics).

If – as a young person – you persist in this ethnic, gender, racial and sectarian bigotry, it is your own time that you are wasting.

It is your own brain and personality that you deny the chance to grow to heights from which you can fully contribute to Kenya’s national greatness and economic abundance.

That ethnic unity for all for which our nationalist forefathers and foremothers fought is what you are betraying.

What Kenya needs as desperately as a desert sapling needs rainwater is disinterest, namely, absence of gross self-interest in all your daily activities. To be disinterested is to be free of all biases in whatever you do or say.

In short, disinterest does not preclude interest but, indeed, actively subsumes it. While disinterest is interest guided by objectivity and a cool head, uninterest is absence of interest – like my uninterest in the jungle brutality that American television calls wrestling and the slaughterhouse that Kenya’s matatu owners call business.