If your actions are primitive don’t blame racial bias

Even in the most liberal country, political competition means sabre-rattling. During elections, hideous words are exchanged not only between individuals but also between parties, especially in Australia, Japan, North America and Western Europe, as was once reflected in the chill called Cold War.

It is thus redeeming whenever Kenyans find in their leading newspaper a picture of the main contenders for the top political office, all hugging one another as cordially as if they had never hurled even a single hostile adjectival missile at one another. We saw a good picture of it on page one of the Daily Nation on Friday.

Thanks to candid camera, such a conduct may remind the reader of a kindergarten merry-go-round, where — throughout the world — children daily exhibit the relationship which characterises what allegedly is the “adult” stage of modern human social relations. In truth, however, active hostility continues to define whatever passes as civilisation in the human world. 

Whichever nation claims it, civilisation is that stage of society’s material and mental development in which the society concerned not only acquires certain techniques for producing and reproducing its material and mental wherewithal but also — as we recently saw in Hitler’s Germany — may arrive at a level of appallingly hideous social arrogance.

ETHNIC GROUPS

That is why, if any of Kenya’s ethnic groups still actively thinks as if another ethnic group is, ipso facto, its enemy, it just shows how primitively most Kenyans continue to think. No, the word primitively need not offend you. primitive is but another  adjective for prime and simply means “belonging to the first in time” or “belonging to the first occasion”.

Quite surely, seen against humanity’s modern techniques, all the things which belonged to the first time were backward. But, first, that is true of all human societies, including the ones that are today super-developed, like Sino-Japan, North America and Western Europe. Secondly, this fact always emerges all over the world even through such a term of respect as “prime minister”.

Nevertheless, even in that context, the adjective prime is etymologically related to the adjective primitive. For both words simply refer to first or the first. In Kenya, ever since the new constitution was published a few years ago, if the President appointed a Prime Minister, she or he would have served as the first among all of the President’s political aides.

The adjective prime is, nevertheless, etymologically related to the adjective primitive. Both imply first in origin, which is the true meaning of the adjective primitive. Yet, socially, you are truly primitive if, in the 21st century, you still use production techniques and still deploy corresponding ideas which other societies discarded in the days of Harun al Rashid.

PRIMITIVE CONDITIONS

Yet you remain primitive if you depend on techniques and ideas once occasioned by primitive conditions and are being perpetuated only through the masterminds of human ethnicities’ tendency to deify “traditional” things.  But the only reason many African societies object to the European intelligentsia’s arrogant characterisation of everything African as “primitive” is that the Caucasians who glibly deploy that adjective themselves reveal deep ignorance of its real meaning.

In other words, the usual culprits exhibit appalling primitivity in their own knowledge of the roots of their own words. Yet it is African communities that the Caucasian elite seeks to identify with the adjective primitive. However, primitivity is never a racial category. It has nothing to do with your tribe either.

ADVANCED HUMAN SOCIETIES

Primitivity always refers only to the fact that, socially, you still deploy ideo-techniques which have long ago been discarded by all advanced human societies.

You are still very powerfully guided by ideas and techniques long gone extinct among most other human societies. It is thus that your continued use of such techniques condemns the thoughts and activities of your society to modes which should have gone extinct in Harun’s ancient days.

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