Don’t ban embraces or handshakes; nature will take care of that

This week’s headlines on handshaking reminded me that we no longer live in societies governed by symbolic speech.

The message from the religio-political leadership is so matter-of-fact — so unimaginative — that, when the Cabinet bans handshaking, it will not occur to it to attribute the ban to any god.

Yet something like that may be necessary if such a ban is to be effective. For handshaking is one of the means by which any two human beings — no matter of what race or tribe — do reassure themselves that they pose no danger to each other.

In the early 1960s, when I was a student in the Jurassic French town of Besancon, we shook hands every time we met even if we had parted only half an hour earlier.

Outside Luoland, this French custom was the closest I had ever seen of the handshake as a necessity in human relations. Most probably, however, it is more cultural than genetic.

I have been told of cultures where the handshake is not so widespread. What can be said is that, in general, the most sacred do’s and don’ts of every society are a consequence of particular events in its history.

DISEASED HERDS

Pork is a good example. As many historians have it, it was after protracted consumption of meat from diseased herds had consigned thousands to the grave throughout the region that the Semitic priesthood achieved — through extraordinarily powerful numinous sanctions — the poetry of attributing to God their ban on pork consumption.

Most of the dietary rigidities of the sacerdotal author of Leviticus — especially against consumption of meat while it is still drenched in blood — have similar roots. Blood is always aesthetically disgusting. Hence the ban among the Luo on a menstruating woman or one who has just given birth from handling any food for family consumption.

The Biblical power that makes the difference lies in its ability to couch all its prohibitions — no matter how tyrannical — in language that is both euphemistic and capable of convincing the ordinary consumer that the prohibition has come from nowhere else but “on high”. That is what a future Luo priest may have to do if he hopes to succeed.

It is the only way he can convince the Luo mass that it is God who has ordered the present increasing preoccupation with male circumcision in Luoland. For it is quite a revolutionary activity because, although it was the Nilotes who gave circumcision to the Bantu, the Nilotic Luo discarded the habit longer ago than any Luo individual can remember.

However, although the 21st-century Luo identifies circumcision with the non-Luo (whom he considers a barbarian MWA), Luo historians will, sooner or later, discover that fear of a new visitation called Aids was what was responsible for the Luo at last doffing their arrogance to return to this custom of what are now mere JOMWA.

NEW SCOURGE

That is why Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary in charge of Health may not need to budge even a foot to ban handshaking. Fear of quite another bubonic plague in our threshold is likely to take care of that for him. In Africa — the continent which gave birth to the entire human family — a new scourge called Ebola has arrived in that very threshold.

Ebola is the agent most likely to slap a ban on this white handkerchief in the human ecology. As long as humanity does not stop its sustained and deadly attacks on the environment, soon other scourges will emerge to force the species to give up even such expressions of filial and romantic love as the embrace and, especially, the kiss in the mouth.

(EDITORIAL: High alert over Ebola outbreak advisable)

Mercifully, these urges may not be genetic. But because sex is a major vector of such plagues, humanity may soon find that it must totally abstain, which is a non-choice because total abstention must logically lead to total extinction.

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