Why stereotyping threatens Kenya’s lofty dream of nationhood

Kenyans attending a rally at Uhuru Park in Nairobi. "It is no wonder that Kenyans, rated the most optimistic people on earth in 2003, were this year ranked as among the gloomiest people," writes Rasna Warah. FILE PHOTO | JEFF ANGOTE |

What you need to know:

  • In Kenya, very many people can tell a person’s character just by the person’s name.
  • Tribalism, in particular, is why Kenya’s dream of nationhood is rapidly turning into a nightmare.

Despite his taproot in far-off Stratford-upon-Avon, William Shakespeare was able to acquire cosmopolitan Hermetic education.

Hermeticism was a worldwide struggle to rise beyond the mere impressions with which the world confronted human beings and arrive at real knowledge of that world.

Typical of Hermeticism was the knowledge — as Shakespeare expresses it in Macbeth — that “… there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face …” The dictum remains true today.

Even as we approach the 22nd century, you cannot know what another person is thinking just by looking at his or her face.

Moreover, as the Polish scientist Jacob Bronowski knew, knowledge is a destination which keeps lurching away every time you think you have come close to grasping the whole of it.

That is an astonishing thing about the human mind. It is capable of knowing its objective limitations and of expressing these with sublime humility and selflessness.

Yet humanity remains entirely capable also of the most arrogant assertions which, nevertheless — on slight analysis — also prove embarrassingly ignorant.

Kenneth Grahame’s Mister Toad never “know’d” half as much as what the spokesmen and women for Kenya’s political parties claim to know about one another.

Yet this completely useless knowledge — this absolute ignorance of what the people of Kenya are really gasping for — is uttered with the arrogance with which the musician Donovan espied the seagull when the bird rode roughshod over the Vietnamese with deafening claims that “freedom” was what he was trying to bring to them.

The millions of Indo-Chinese people who fell for it soon discovered that it had been mere make-believe.

In similar vein was a “science” known as phrenology by which an Italian Khazari called Cesare Lombroso could “accurately” establish a person’s character simply by noting the outer shape of the person’s skull.

Agatha Christie waxes typical of the simplistic mind of our time’s liberal when, in one of her most captivating whodunit tales, she produces a character who could single out a “Russian communist” just by the shape and colour of shoes one was wearing. But we needn’t travel so far afield to find such pin-headedness.

BY THE NAME

In Kenya, very many people can tell a person’s character just by the person’s name. If his name is Mwangi or hers Wanjiru, then Kenyans know exactly who robbed a bank of millions the other day and they know who was responsible for the vote theft that landed Kenya in the post-election mayhem of 2007-2008.

If his name is Omolo or hers Anyango, then Kenyans have caught their culprit in the stone-throwing and machete-wielding in which scores of Kenyans were injured or killed in the throes either of a political rally or of a football match.

It is through such examples of Lilliputianism that Kenyans earmark one another for the slaughterhouse.

In English, it is called stereotyping, and Collins defines a stereotype as “a set of characteristics or a fixed idea considered to represent a particular kind of person”.

No, sir, such fixed characteristics are often imagined also of an age-group, a gender, a nation, a race, a religion, a tribe. Yet stereotypes are practically always completely wrong-headed.

Thus, if and when you can no longer think of a Maasai except as a cattle rustler, or a Kalenjin except as a foot-runner, or a Kikuyu except as a bank robber, or a Mswahili except as a liar, or a Luo except as a braggadocio, or a Baniani except as a dukawallah, or mzungu except as a moneybag, then you have lost touch with all of them as fellow human beings.

Tribalism, in particular, is why Kenya’s dream of nationhood is rapidly turning into a nightmare. The question is: Aren’t there any more Hermetic gurus in our houses of upbringing and governance capable of returning us all to the path that our founding parents envisioned?