Violence rooted in political elite arrogance
What you need to know:
- Being Luo, Kikuyu or Kamba is not wrong since one’s actions are not a result of his community. However, ethnocentrism leads to a superiority complex resulting from unjust domination of others, which leads to oppression.
- Education has failed to unify people, and the educated are part of the problem; those viciously fighting on social media are educated people.
On April 12, 1999, Elie Wiesel made a speech titled "The Perils of Indifference", about the Nazi regime and how the superpowers of the day watched as Jews were exterminated by the Nazis.
He was among the few rescued by American soldiers in 1945.
We can, likewise, talk of the perils of hatred in Kenya today, one of whose causes is ethnocentricity.
While love for one’s culture and traditions is a positive attribute — in excess it becomes ethnocentrism — love for one’s culture and hatred of other people’s culture due to particularism arising from pride, jealousy, greed and selfishness.
Prejudice and stereotyping breed contempt and disdain. In Kenya, it is manifest in the negative ethnicity that has shaped our politics since independence.
Being Luo, Kikuyu or Kamba is not wrong since one’s actions are not a result of his community. However, ethnocentrism leads to a superiority complex resulting from unjust domination of others, which leads to oppression.
It is the cause of intermittent violence of which the tribal clashes of 1992, 1997 and the post-election violence of 2007/2008 are cases in point.
The boundaries created by colonial powers are a source of conflict in many African countries, Kenya included.
The divide-and-rule policy of the British in East Africa and the assimilation policy of the French in West Africa favoured a few Africans who, to-date, see others as lesser mortals and objects of political and economic domination just like the colonialists did.
RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM
The political elite manipulate ethnocentrism to gain and retain power, creating in the oppressed an inability to forgive and forget.
Poverty drives people to seek their livelihood by any means, fair or foul, and frequent mobilisation of the masses, mostly from the sprawling urban slums, to participate in demonstrations called by the main political parties, are a case in point.
Poverty enslaves and its eradication will lead to social stability.
A third cause of hatred among Kenya communities is denial of their God-given and inalienable rights through rigging of elections and political assassinations.
Education has failed to unify people, and the educated are part of the problem; those viciously fighting on social media are educated people.
Exceptionalism is another cause of hatred. The United States, after it emerged from the revolution, became what Seymour Martin Lipset called ‘the first new nation’. It developed a uniquely American ideology, based on liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, republicanism, populism and a laissez-faire attitude and practice often referred to as “American exceptionalism”, which, although, it does not mean superiority, has been promoted as such by some conservatives.
Kenya’s highly ethnicised politics has people who consider themselves exceptional.
The worst form of hatred is based on religious extremism, whose practitioners believe theirs is the only ‘right’ faith and force those practising ‘lesser’ religions to convert on pain of death.
A wise man said that praiseworthy are those who, while human enough to enjoy power, nevertheless pay more attention to justice than they are compelled to do. Sadly, Kenya currently lacks such a person, hence hatred that is evident in rampant violence.
Mr Momanyi is an administrator at Strathmore University.
