Absence of truly national party a tragedy

Onyango Oloo’s activities remind us that, even in a society notorious for primitive ethnicism, something must be said for whoever publicly leaves his tribe’s traditional party to join a party generally identified with a rivalling ethnic group.

For all our political parties are makeshift instruments by which the economic elite of an ethnic group seeks to reach the apex of national political power by exploiting the uneducated ethnic excitements of each group.

That is manifest from the fact, for instance, that – like the flora and fauna of our planet’s polar regions – all of Kenya’s political parties descend into imperturbable HIBERNATION after every national election. Party activity HIBERNATES (sleeps) – the English noun “HIBERNATION” being derived from the French word for “winter”, HIVER.

All the partisans will not be roused back into activity until the greening of the vegetation and the chirping of the birds and insects aroused from their long winter slumber. Having lived in North America and Western Europe, I know how marvellous it is to wake up one day into the glory of sudden efflorescence and tuneful chorus of birds and insects.

WILL HIBERNATE

Our world’s systems of political preferment will HIBERNATE – become and remain frozen – until we shake it up (by I-know-not what upheaval in our socio-political systems). Yet I remain optimistically interested in it. For although, to be quite sure, it is vitally important for me to be a Luo, it is equally, if not more, important for me to be also a Kenyan.

Why can I not be both simultaneously? For only a good Kenya will enable my people, the Luo, to achieve their objective life interests. Likewise, only good individuals will enable Kenyans to achieve their collective interests in life. That is why, on some occasions – whenever I feel that they are being wronged – I write articles that militantly defend the Luo.

Yet, on other occasions, whenever the Luo themselves are saying or doing things which seem to me to jeopardise the objective interests of Kenyans as a whole, I feel duty-bound to write and publish articles that militantly criticise the Luo and, especially, their leaders.

For, although Luoland and Luo people were what gave me my headstart as a student of life, it was through Kenya as a whole – through such of Kenya’s inter-ethnic establishments as the Alliance High School and the Nation Group of Newspapers – that I later became able to make my own personal interventions into the thinking and activities of all Kenyans and of mankind as a whole.

POLITICAL IDEALS

For it was through the larger community – now called Kenya – that I first formed my own political ideals and it was through it that I first gained my knowledge of the still larger community of planetary mankind. I do not see any contradiction or difference between these. For mankind is, into the bargain, a single extraordinarily large and planet-wide species.

And, as my English brothers and sisters point out, charity begins at home. I can serve mankind most effectively only by serving that section of it among whom I was born and still live and who gave me an adequate education – who gave me, that is to say, the ability to serve fellow human beings in all their planetary expanse in my own little way.

That is why, because I am a Luo, two opposite forces converge upon me whenever a Luo individual announces that he or she has quit one party and “returned home” to a party dominated by the Luo, namely, Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement.

But – as with one Italo-English poet – “…one thing learned remains to me … the woodspudge has a cup of three…” Nay, Kenya’s woodspudge has a cup of 40-plus. And, only that political party which actively recognises Kenya’s 44 ethno-racial communities will earn my unqualified approval.