Nation: When did you last eat your tribe?
Post
When did you last eat your tribe?, Lucy Oriang' - the Nation's managing editor in charge of magazines., 2/24/2006
Professor George Saitoti is a man of few words. When he found himself between a rock and a hard place in 2002 at the stadium known more for kisirani than sport, he stepped down with the now-famous "there come a time" speech.
He was at it again the other week, in the wake of the Goldenberg backlash. This time he said he would be concentrating on working with his constituents in a campaign against tribalism.
I hate to rain on your parade, professor, but that’s going to be a rather hard nut to crack, even for a man with a background in mathematics.
In your profession, there’s a formula to ensure everything adds up. In politics, we whip up ethnic chauvinism to defend the indefensible and die for criminals who should be dispatched to the next world.
The question of ethnicity may have been reduced in this country to what my one-time boss Hilary Ng’weno used to call tribal arithmetics (for voting purposes), but it is so complex that it defies any attempt to lock it into any one description.
Bear with me as I tell you a very personal story on this vexed question. Back in 1999 to 2001, I lived with the youngest of my three sisters. She was terminally ill and required a lot of hospital visits at the oddest hours.
It was not always possible for me to keep up with her appointments and emergencies because they sometimes clashed with my deadlines at work. And so we struck a deal with the local taxi guys, who would drop her off and pick her again whenever necessary.
Ferrying her to and fro became a community effort. It didn’t matter that the taxi drivers were all Kikuyu and my family was all Luo. We were bound together by compassion for someone suffering so much.
My sister was a lovely person, inside and outside, and the taxi drivers-turned-friends were heartbroken when she died. They nominated a member of the team to accompany us to her burial.
It was the first time the young man had ever travelled beyond Nakuru, so it would be an adventure in many ways. He carried it off with dignity and said goodbye to his friend in style.
The next scene is set just before the December 2002 General Election. The National Alliance (Party) of Kenya and the Liberal Democratic Party had just agreed an election pact that would see them take on Kanu as one.
With Mwai Kibaki and Michael Wamalwa of NAK indisposed, Raila Odinga was doing much of the legwork urging Kenyans to vote three-piece for the National Rainbow Coalition.
On the eve of the election, the same young man approached us for political advice. He was deeply troubled by the fact that he wanted to vote for Narc but, he confided, he just couldn’t bring himself to vote for a Luo – in this case Odinga himself.
Would it be okay if he just ticked the presidential and councillor boxes and left the MP slot blank? The innocence with which he stated his dilemma was even more confounding than the question.
It is easy to see where Prof Saitoti is coming from. He has a leg each in his ethnic Kikuyu community and among the Maasai, whom he has chosen to identify with. Yet he has to confront this dichotomy with each election.
We are all Kenyans, all human beings, much of the time – and then politics gets into the mix and we are suddenly sharpening our knives to finish off the same neighbour we grew up with.
I fear for the professor. He has an uphill task ahead and there’s little comfort to fall back on as he makes this journey.
This is Africa unmasked, and it is horrendously ugly. It will take a Herculean effort to uproot the tribe from our hearts when it has been tended and fanned into a flame by none other than the victims themselves – even when they are chopping each other to pieces in refugee camps or starving to death.
It would be funny if it didn’t cost us so much to keep up the delusion of ethnic supremacy as an excuse to lie, steal and kill.
We might argue that segregating people into tribes and races is a legacy of the divide-and-rule policy used so effectively by the colonial powers. But no one put a gun to our heads and forced us to pick up where they left off. The Tanzanians chose not to go that way and they've created a nation, not a loose collection of tribes hemmed in by artificial boundaries.
A guy gets elected to the top job here and the first thing he does is surround himself with advisers and praise singers from his own ethnic group. In the quiet of their shacks, his people worry about the need to protect "our" government.
Those not in government are herded into holding pens, awaiting instruction from their own tribal chieftains on which way to vote to ensure their "survival" as a community. You want a job? Easy, all you need is to belong to the right tribe. The tribe has become a bargaining chip or a handicap, depending on where your chieftain stands.
We have become so paranoid that we are constantly looking over our shoulders and dissecting the words of the "enemy" as defined not so much by what we know for a fact as by an accident of birth.
I can just see the wheels turning in your mind right now trying to dig out the hidden agenda that I am fronting. It’s all in the shade of my skin or my thick lips – even my presumably big behind or stick legs. Perhaps you should monitor my calls and establish when I last spoke with the Odingas.
I hear that John Githongo’s ethnic origins are being questioned in some quarters. He’s rather too dark and too huge for a Kikuyu, you see, and there just might well be some Nilotic blood somewhere in the family tree. How else do you explain his ratting on his own people’s government?
Tribal elders travel hundreds of kilometres to the city centre to perform war dances down the hill from State House, just so the occupant on high understands what will happen if he so much as touches one hair on their most famous son’s head, let alone sack him.
And let's not forget the "homecoming" parties when our man gets a Cabinet appointment. Manna will rain down from heaven henceforth. You wish! He'll be keeping all the stupendous allowances, thank you.
I can understand where the powerbrokers are coming from when they sponsor tribal parties with the sole agenda of containing the tribal influence of their bitterest tribal rivals. It’s just fighting fire with fire, and the word tribalist only ever applies to the other side – never to you the accuser. Just remember this when you next point a finger at someone: the other four are pointing at you!
Professor George Saitoti is a man of few words. When he found himself between a rock and a hard place in 2002 at the stadium known more for kisirani than sport, he stepped down with the now-famous "there come a time" speech.
He was at it again the other week, in the wake of the Goldenberg backlash. This time he said he would be concentrating on working with his constituents in a campaign against tribalism.
I hate to rain on your parade, professor, but that’s going to be a rather hard nut to crack, even for a man with a background in mathematics.
In your profession, there’s a formula to ensure everything adds up. In politics, we whip up ethnic chauvinism to defend the indefensible and die for criminals who should be dispatched to the next world.
The question of ethnicity may have been reduced in this country to what my one-time boss Hilary Ng’weno used to call tribal arithmetics (for voting purposes), but it is so complex that it defies any attempt to lock it into any one description.
Bear with me as I tell you a very personal story on this vexed question. Back in 1999 to 2001, I lived with the youngest of my three sisters. She was terminally ill and required a lot of hospital visits at the oddest hours.
It was not always possible for me to keep up with her appointments and emergencies because they sometimes clashed with my deadlines at work. And so we struck a deal with the local taxi guys, who would drop her off and pick her again whenever necessary.
Ferrying her to and fro became a community effort. It didn’t matter that the taxi drivers were all Kikuyu and my family was all Luo. We were bound together by compassion for someone suffering so much.
My sister was a lovely person, inside and outside, and the taxi drivers-turned-friends were heartbroken when she died. They nominated a member of the team to accompany us to her burial.
It was the first time the young man had ever travelled beyond Nakuru, so it would be an adventure in many ways. He carried it off with dignity and said goodbye to his friend in style.
The next scene is set just before the December 2002 General Election. The National Alliance (Party) of Kenya and the Liberal Democratic Party had just agreed an election pact that would see them take on Kanu as one.
With Mwai Kibaki and Michael Wamalwa of NAK indisposed, Raila Odinga was doing much of the legwork urging Kenyans to vote three-piece for the National Rainbow Coalition.
On the eve of the election, the same young man approached us for political advice. He was deeply troubled by the fact that he wanted to vote for Narc but, he confided, he just couldn’t bring himself to vote for a Luo – in this case Odinga himself.
Would it be okay if he just ticked the presidential and councillor boxes and left the MP slot blank? The innocence with which he stated his dilemma was even more confounding than the question.
It is easy to see where Prof Saitoti is coming from. He has a leg each in his ethnic Kikuyu community and among the Maasai, whom he has chosen to identify with. Yet he has to confront this dichotomy with each election.
We are all Kenyans, all human beings, much of the time – and then politics gets into the mix and we are suddenly sharpening our knives to finish off the same neighbour we grew up with.
I fear for the professor. He has an uphill task ahead and there’s little comfort to fall back on as he makes this journey.
This is Africa unmasked, and it is horrendously ugly. It will take a Herculean effort to uproot the tribe from our hearts when it has been tended and fanned into a flame by none other than the victims themselves – even when they are chopping each other to pieces in refugee camps or starving to death.
It would be funny if it didn’t cost us so much to keep up the delusion of ethnic supremacy as an excuse to lie, steal and kill.
We might argue that segregating people into tribes and races is a legacy of the divide-and-rule policy used so effectively by the colonial powers. But no one put a gun to our heads and forced us to pick up where they left off. The Tanzanians chose not to go that way and they've created a nation, not a loose collection of tribes hemmed in by artificial boundaries.
A guy gets elected to the top job here and the first thing he does is surround himself with advisers and praise singers from his own ethnic group. In the quiet of their shacks, his people worry about the need to protect "our" government.
Those not in government are herded into holding pens, awaiting instruction from their own tribal chieftains on which way to vote to ensure their "survival" as a community. You want a job? Easy, all you need is to belong to the right tribe. The tribe has become a bargaining chip or a handicap, depending on where your chieftain stands.
We have become so paranoid that we are constantly looking over our shoulders and dissecting the words of the "enemy" as defined not so much by what we know for a fact as by an accident of birth.
I can just see the wheels turning in your mind right now trying to dig out the hidden agenda that I am fronting. It’s all in the shade of my skin or my thick lips – even my presumably big behind or stick legs. Perhaps you should monitor my calls and establish when I last spoke with the Odingas.
I hear that John Githongo’s ethnic origins are being questioned in some quarters. He’s rather too dark and too huge for a Kikuyu, you see, and there just might well be some Nilotic blood somewhere in the family tree. How else do you explain his ratting on his own people’s government?
Tribal elders travel hundreds of kilometres to the city centre to perform war dances down the hill from State House, just so the occupant on high understands what will happen if he so much as touches one hair on their most famous son’s head, let alone sack him.
And let's not forget the "homecoming" parties when our man gets a Cabinet appointment. Manna will rain down from heaven henceforth. You wish! He'll be keeping all the stupendous allowances, thank you.
I can understand where the powerbrokers are coming from when they sponsor tribal parties with the sole agenda of containing the tribal influence of their bitterest tribal rivals. It’s just fighting fire with fire, and the word tribalist only ever applies to the other side – never to you the accuser. Just remember this when you next point a finger at someone: the other four are pointing at you!
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