Tribalism and gender prejudices should have no place in our society

President Uhuru Kenyatta addresses the press at State House on October 17, 2017. Mr Kenyatta might do well to fund a thorough national study and pinpoint all the areas in which we can release the energy that tribalism condemns into lying fallow. PHOTO | JEFF ANGOTE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • If we thus divided Kenya, for how long would, for instance, the Ogiek and Maasai republics thus created survive?
  • Everywhere in the human world, narrow-minded ethnic, racial and religious upbringing and prejudices are so profound that they continue to be overwhelmingly the most powerful guides to human action.
  • These external influences remain deep in the minds of all members of Kenya’s own educated and ruling class.

The Kenya our founders dreamed of is one. All true Kenyans feel so strongly about it that they wouldn’t allow you to dream of dividing it into two republics.

They would fight with all weapons to thwart anybody who actively tries it.

That is why any talk of secession immediately meets with sharp and powerful condemnations by all ethnic, gender, party and even racial and religious groupings.

The question that arises, then, is: Even if it became absolutely necessary to divide Kenya, on what basis would you do it?

TRIBE

Even objectively, what we call tribe is the only possible answer to that question.

But how small-minded can you get? If we thus divided Kenya, for how long would, for instance, the Ogiek and Maasai republics thus created survive?

Taken separately, even the Kamba, Kikuyu, Luhya, Luo and Mijikenda republics would find it extremely hard just to breathe in the extremely constricting econo-political atmosphere that Western Europe’s imperialist greed has recently imposed on our planet and country.

As I see it, the only choice that a former colony like ours has is to devise a method – a politically effective instrument – about which all the ethnic, racial and religious communities are so proud as to contribute all their experiences, ingenuities, talents and skills happily, enthusiastically and effectively to the whole entity called Kenya.

PREJUDICES

It is, of course, much easier said than done.

Everywhere in the human world, narrow-minded ethnic, racial and religious upbringing and prejudices are so profound that they continue to be overwhelmingly the most powerful guides to human action.

These external influences remain deep in the minds of all members of Kenya’s own educated and ruling class.

It will take an inspired ruling party an imaginatively bold step to deal effectively with what our own Koigi wa Wamwere used to condemn as “Negative Tribalism” and what – taking the queue from him – we might call “negative racism” – the latter a term which implies the possibility of its positive counterpart, namely, collectively useful ethnic and racial action.

EDUCATION

In the coming century or two, a chief task of school and university education will be to produce human beings all over the world who are not in any way so belittled and down-degraded in the brain as to behave in any manner that belittles other human beings just because the latter belong to another gender and to other races, religions and ethnic groups.

In the coming centuries, a major international responsibility of the school and university classroom will be to liberate the human brain from contemplating and the human hand from perpetrating anything negative, inhuman and dehumanising against other human individuals, genders, races, religions and tribal groups.

But every human individual with a sprinkle of brain in his or her head should already, even now, recognise the completely unnecessary injuries that we, human beings, have perpetrated and continue to perpetrate against one another just because of gender prejudices and such specifically inessential and objectively harmless differences as tribe and race.

As an employer, you can gain exactly nothing for your company and for your nation by denying anybody a job for which he or she is eminently qualified just because he or she belongs to another tribe, gender or race.

RESULT

And, thereby, you give your own species, your own ethnic group and your own race an extremely bad name.

One result of our tribalism, racism, “genderism” and sectarianism is our horrifying misplacement of highly educated and well trained personnel.

The practice is so widespread that Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta might do well to fund a thorough national study and pinpoint all the areas in which we can release the energy that tribalism condemns into lying fallow, and thus accelerate our national development overnight.