My dear Kenyans, monuments do not make a nation

Diogenes of Sinope, also known as Diogenes the Cynic, was a Greek philosopher in the 4th Century BC. He founded the Cynicism school of philosophy.

Cynics believed that a good life was lived virtuously and in harmony with nature. They lived simply, defied social etiquette and were intellectually ferocious, which made them to be likened to dogs. The word cynic was derived from the ancient greek name for dog.

Diogenes is famed for his sharp moralistic wit. Asked why he carried a lamp in the daytime, he retorted that he was looking for an honest man.

Why did he alone applaud a bad musician? “Because he played the harp and did not steal.”

The story goes that Diogenes snubbed Alexander the Great, which challenged Alexander to come to where Diogenes was basking and offer to grant him any request. His request? “Stand out of my light”, upon which Alexander is said to have declared that “had I not been Alexander, I should have liked to be Diogenes”.

Asked where he was from, Diogenes famously declared himself cosmopolitan: “I am a citizen of the world.”

At the height of the 2007/2008 post-election violence, a document issued as the first epistle of the Thagicu Renaissance Movement (or some such name) featured 26 “Kikuyu traitors”, listed in order of “seniority and notoriety”, that were to be eliminated. My name was 15th, agreeably sandwiched between Macharia Gaitho and Njeri Kabebeeri.

Mercifully, they promised to protect our families as they were deemed not party to our foolishness. Standing up for Kenya is not for the fainthearted. More importantly, the episode encapsulates the intellectual problem of nationalism, and why Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined community” is so arresting.

In the rejoinder to my previous column written for Mutava Musyimi, the authors asserted that I misrepresented Anderson. They have either not read the work or it went over their heads:

“My point of departure is that nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word’s multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind. I will be trying to argue that the creation of these artefacts towards the end of the 18th century was the spontaneous distillation of a complex ‘crossing’ of discrete historical forces; but that, once created, they became ‘modular’, capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations… I believe that the beginnings of an answer lies in the cultural roots of nationalism.”(my emphasis).

The key forces he refers to are convergence of the reformation and enlightenment, on one hand, and on the other, the advent of what he calls print-capitalism (following the invention of the printing press), which codified hitherto fluid languages —English, French and German, among others – unleashing mass vernacular literature. Hitherto, books were only published in Latin and read by elites.

Reformation and enlightenment ideas undermined theocratic authority, and cheap book printing coalesced the hitherto fluid ethnolinguistic groups around their “print languages”. Ethno-national consciousness filled the void of belonging and belief occasioned by erosion of theocratic certainty.

HISTORIAL ACCIDENT

In short, nationalism is a historical accident that went viral. Its European origins begin to look very much like the narratives we have about the origins of tribalism in Africa. So far, as we can tell, pre-colonial Africa had existed as a fluid ethno-linguistic landscape with diverse forms of political organisation for millennia. Then came the Europeans wearing their ethno-national lenses, cataloguing tribes, codifying languages, translating the Bible and fixing borders.

One of the intellectual problems of nationalism is what Anderson called “philosophical poverty”—lack of profound ideas with which to fight its corner. He writes: “Unlike most other ‘isms’, nationalism has never produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbeses, Tocquevilles, Marxes, or Webers.

This ‘emptiness’ easily gives rise, among cosmopolitan and polylingual intellectuals, to a certain condescension.” A famous example is Albert Einstein’s characterisation of nationalism as “an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.”

It should not surprise then that some of my interlocutors have succumbed to their baser natures and resorted to ad hominem drivel and empty patriotic fervour. It is not entirely their fault. It is the philosophical poverty of nationalism at work. They are very low on intellectual ammunition.

The contention that Kenya’s fundamental political problem is class, and tribalism is only a handmaiden to class conflict, is a recurring assertion in several rejoinders. Proponents of this view have missed an important tenet of Anderson’s thesis: “Regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.” The key words here are “regardless of inequality and exploitation”. Let me illustrate.

I was out and about in my Ruaka neighbourhood following the 2013 presidential election results when I bumped into local drunks chanting “uthamaki ni witu, thamaki ni ciao” (We rule, they fish). Most of these young men belong to the ancestral landowning families, who have sold their inheritance to wealthy (mostly fellow Kikuyu) speculators and developers for a song, proceeding to drink themselves to early graves.

Why do these people identify with those the Left would call their exploiters? The reason is because the Kikuyu communion (or Somali or French for that matter) is not material. It is existential, about belonging and believing, as opposed to having or not having. It is why the Kikuyu supremacists were enraged enough to want to kill us— in their spiritualistic ethnic nationalism, we are apostates. It is the same existential angst propelling young people to leave material comfort in western countries for religious wars in the Middle East.

Materialist discourse, liberal or Marxist, is out of its depth here. Right wing reactionaries like Musyimi’s scribes infantilise the poor as incapable of moral agency — people who can only be acted upon by external forces, never conscious actors in their own right.

Those coming from the left like Patrick Gathara and Prof Wainaina deny the salience of identity politics and promptly revert to type — yearning for revolution. Structuralists like my good friends Sam Mwale and Kamotho Waiganjo bury their heads in the mechanics of statecraft — give the Constitution time, it will fix everything.

It is not entirely their fault either. It is nationalism’s philosophical poverty. If they read Anderson, they all missed valuable advice: “It would, I think, make things easier if one treated (nationalism) as if it belonged with ‘kinship’ and ‘religion’, rather than with ‘liberalism’ or ‘fascism’.”

The political, as opposed to intellectual, problem of nationalism should be readily apparent. Ethnic nationalism carries within it seeds of xenophobia and aggression. The big question is: how do societies develop benign nationalism? How do you “defang” ethnic nationalism?

Benign, non-xenophobic nationalism is postulated as consisting of two types, namely civic and cultural. Civic nationalism is defined as one where the political legitimacy of the State derives from the “will” of the people.

It is nationalism as imagined by the liberal philosophers, who conceived the idea of of the State as a “social contract”. It privileges individual freedom, rights and civil liberties over collective values and norms, and is in this regard seen as the polar opposite of ethnic nationalism.

Cultural nationalism is a half-way house between ethnic and civic nationalism. A cultural nation is built on a shared culture by people of different ethnicities. It is an “out of many, one” kind of nationalism.

SURVIVED WORLD WARS

Switzerland is the prototype civic nation. The Swiss are ethnically and culturally French, German, Italian and Romansh. Swiss nationalism is “be and let be “ nationalism. Its pillars are strong federalism and international neutrality. Strong federalism and the weak rotational presidency precludes ethnic dominance—their centre has no power that one group can capture and use to dominate the others.

Neutrality precludes the Swiss Germans, French and Italians from aligning with their kindred spirits next door. Without it, Switzerland would not have survived the World Wars.

The US is widely regarded as the prototype cultural nation. Many people will be familiar with the “melting pot” metaphor, or the less popular, but equally vivid “salad bowl” metaphor. A child who grows up hearing these metaphors, and on that obligatory visit to the Statue of Liberty reads those evocative words: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free,” does not need to digest The Federalist Papers to understand what his or her nation is about.

South Africans had to confront how to re-imagine their horrible skin colour narrative. They conjured a most inspired metaphor “Rainbow Nation” that turns the ugliness of the colour divide on its head. As for Tanzanian nationalism, one word: Ujamaa. It is a kinship. Socialism is dead but Ujamaa lives on: Ndugu naomba tafadhali… (My brother, kindly please…). That is what imagining a nation is all about.

On his recent visit, Ngugi wa Thiong’o recounted an event he covered as a young reporter in the early sixties. Gatundu people had invited Jaramogi to hand over donations for flood victims somewhere in Nyanza.

That was the spark of Kenyan nationalism, the “deep horizontal fraternity” that Anderson talks about. It was quickly extinguished. The founding fathers quarrelled over whether to grow rich first and share later, or to share first and grow rich later.

They had lost the plot. There is no nation, ethnic, civic or cultural, that is founded on materialism, or sustained by it. Nyerere was very conscious of this:

“Development, which is not development of the people may be of interest to historians in the year 3000: It is irrelevant to the kind of future that is created. Thus, for example, the Pyramids of Egypt and the Roman roads to Europe were material developments which still excite our amazement. But because they were only buildings, and the people were not developed, the empires and the cultures they were part of have long ago collapsed.”

I should add that the Greek nation, whose ancients privileged mind over matter, is still going 3,000 years on. Did Alexander the Great not declare that if he were not Alexander, he would be Diogenes? We still don’t get it. Wealth is not social glue. But the more divided, alienated and morally disoriented we become, the more grandiose and frenzied our statist elite’s materialistic development obsession also becomes. This is what I mean by failure of imagination.

Back in the mid-90s, when a small group of intellectuals began to think seriously about constitutional reform, we occasionally posed the question whether a new constitution should be prefaced as “We the people of Kenya” or “We the nations” (or “peoples”) of Kenya”. The debate did not germinate into a national conversation. It should have.

As for #ArrestNdii, #IStandWithDiogenes. I am a citizen of the world.

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