Vitriol in cyberspace
Dear All, Could we comment on the presentation that Brian (a Kenyan) made at the IGF currently taking place in Hyderabad. It was an excellent presentation on access befitting the theme of the forum: "Internet for all" and he has done us proud. It is also great to have quite a large Kenyan delegation at this India IGF contributing Kenyan specific IG issues. The IGF is a process/event/forum that had not received enough attention both at the national and regional level. --------- I will also take this opportunity to remind listers of some of the KICTAnet mailing list rules: * Please mind your manners: * Be polite - virtual members are real not a cyberspace borg with no feelings. * Watch your words. Kick the bad language - People are listening. * Laws are laws - Whats real in the real world are the same in cyberspace. * Dont send rude or offensive e-mails or postings. * Be ethical in your posting. Don't lie, plagiarize, defame, or deliberately do harm to another KICTANet forum user. If you are not able to respect these simple rules...the KICTANet administrator will have no choice but to suspend you! best alice Binaifer Nowrojee wrote:
For those who have not read this opinion piece, I would urge you to do
so and reflect on it. Why do we need to bring down Brian Longwe on the basis of his nationality? Why not celebrate his success? Why assume that a non-Kenyan will not positively contribute to Kenya?
Best
Binaifer Nowrojee
Barack Obama and the graveyard of hope
Wambui Mwangi (2008-08-11)
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50078
Printer friendly version
There are 2 comments on this article.
I am finding it very difficult to join in the jubilation about Senator
Barack Obama. Not that I want to deny the man his victory, but my impulse to celebrate keeps deflating on the idea that the best thing that happened to little Barack was not growing up in Kenya.
I have been imagining alternative trajectories for him if he had come to
know the world through the eyes of a Kenyan citizen, if his mother and grandparents had not rescued him from our chaos and contradictions and brought him up somewhere his intellect and talent could grow.
If he had grown up here, and had he somehow managed to retain most
elements of his current self, he would have been another outstanding, intelligent and competent Luo man in our midst: and he would have been killed.
Yes, we would have assassinated a Barack Obama if he had remained ours,
with us, one of us here in this schizophrenic cauldron we call home. This is not going to stretch the imagination of any Kenyan - after all, when we had that incredibly good-looking and charismatic home-grown hero, Tom Mboya, we shot him to death.
And when that austerely intellectual and elegant leader, Robert Ouko,
threatened to look overly intelligent to the world, we killed him too. We killed Pio Gama Pinto and we killed JM Kariuki. There is no reason to suppose that Barack Obama, whose integrity of purpose and stringent sense of ethics even his enemies concede, would have survived his Kenyan roots.
He is much too intelligent, too charged with the promise of history, too
bold in his claim to a shining destiny, too full of the audacity of hope, for us to have let him survive. Kenya would have killed Barack Obama, or at least his dream, as we inevitably destroy, in one way or another, the best and the boldest of us. Goldenberg whistle blower David Munyakei's challenge to his country to be bigger than our greed was met with a whimper, and then with rapid abandonment. We did not deserve him, either.
As for John Githongo, he should have known better than to take the idea
of public ethics seriously - this is Kenya, after all. Let him enlighten people at Oxford instead; such considerations are too virtuous for us, too sensible, too conducive to a promising future. We do not even remark on the haunting wastage of all this shining accomplishment - Micere Mugo sings her lyrical poetry for Americans, and we do not even know enough to mourn the loss.
And yet we are all enchanted with the power of the idea of Barack Obama,
the hope of him, the beauty of his life's trajectory, the universe of possibilities and probabilities that it conjures for the least of the rest of us. If someone's cousin's friend's neighbour makes it to the United States... then we all have a chance. We have a strange predilection for schizophrenic loves and loyalties; we let geography dictate our alliances and imaginary lines decide our friends. It is as if our social contract states that here, at home, we are obliged to behave like fighting rats to each other but when abroad, when released from the shackles of kin and clan and conclave, we can fly and soar and master the sky.
When Wangari Maathai is abroad, we feel that her Nobel Prize is partly
represented in each of our Kenyan living rooms; when she comes home, she is just another Kikuyu politico. We preen about our athletes winning yet another international competition to anybody who will give us half a chance, but when they are at home we turn them into more fodder for militias.
Caine Prize winners are Kenyan by automatic assent, but Binyavanga
Wainaina is a Kikuyu writer when at home and Yvonne Owuor is indelibly a Luo - we shrink them to fit the midget-sized visions we have of ourselves.
It is clear to all of us, and the evidence continues to accrue, that we
have, collectively, a certain global competence, as Kenyans, that we produce individuals of substance and historical purpose.
Being Kenyan, however, we prefer to drown in the pettiness of our
parochial quarrels when at home, and if one of us threatens to be too hopeful, too ambitious, too intelligent, too creative or too inspirational to fit into our trivial little categories of hatred and suspicion, we kill them, or exile them from our societies, or we just cause them to run away inside, hiding from us and from themselves the grandeur of their souls, the splendid landscapes of their imagined tomorrows.
Nothing but the worst for us, at home. We recognise each other by our
most rancid rhetoric. We insist upon it, we cultivate it, we elevate it to an art form: Kenyan, and quarrelsome.
Kenyan, and clannish. Kenyan, and counter-productive. Kenyan, and
self-destructive. Kenyan, and consistently heart-breaking. Genius everywhere, and not a thought to be had. Promise and potential everywhere, and not an opportunity to be had. Money everywhere, and not an honest penny to be earned. Helicopters aplenty, but no help for the needy. A land awash in Cabinet ministers and poverty.
I have been watching Kenyans getting high on Obamamania, and I am
wondering what we are so happy about? It is perhaps that we are beginning to acknowledge what we should always have known - given a half a chance, an ever so slightly conducive context, Kenyans are more likely to over-achieve than not. At the faintest provocation, Kenyans will leap past expectations without breaking their stride or breaking a sweat, especially if they happen to have escaped the imprisoning edifice we call home and found foreign contexts to flourish in, no matter how alien.
I went to a town in the Canadian Arctic once, in the far north, where in
summer the sun shines even at midnight and in the winter the world is an endless landscape of ice and snow. Here, far, far away from home, where nothing was familiar except the gentleness of elderly Inuit women and the comforting weirdness of the white residents, I was told that the local dentist had, for many years, been a Kenyan. Everybody said he had been an excellent dentist, out there in the desert of the cold. I was unsurprised.
We are an adventurous people, we Kenyans, and we take to the world
outside our home as if born to a conquistador culture - we are brave and brash and bold, out there. We buy and sell things, and make money at it, out there. We go to school and excel and cover ourselves with accreditations, out there. We win things, out there. We get prizes, out there. We are at our best, out there.
However, at home, for some reason we refuse to either acknowledge or
examine - we have chosen simply to set aside this capacity. Here, at home, nothing but the very lowest common denominator will do; nothing but the basest and most brutal aspects of our selves are to be presented to each other; nothing but the most cynical manipulation is the basis of our political space. We prefer to be ruled by individuals whose mediocrity is matched only by their mendacity, here at home.
We prefer to abdicate our adult responsibilities and capacity for reason
to "leaders" whose lack of virtue is as legendary as our attractively exotic pastoralists. We do not only waste talent, here at home - we go out of our way to suppress and repress it. We do not only deny dreams, here in Kenya - we devour them, and ask each other, "Who do you think you are?" As if the success of another is an affront.
In Kenya, grand vision and soaring imagination is illegitimate; here,
they just call you naive. Out there, you stand a chance of becoming a hero; at home, you will have nothing but the taste of ashes in your mouth. Mothers, take your children abroad.
Barack Obama has written two books, in which he discusses ideas. Ideas.
This is a man with vision and conviction, and enough good ideas that even those who do not like the pigmentally-advantaged are listening, and changing their minds.
Even those who think that his name sounds suspiciously like a
terrorist's are reading his books and listening to his speeches, and changing their minds. This is a man with interesting and inspiring things to say - which disqualifies him from any Kenyan-ness we would have liked to claim.
Americans like the image of them that Barack Obama has painted in words;
which Kenyan leader would dare to build dreams bigger than his roots? Which Kenyan leader would ever be so foolish as to attempt inspiration instead of instigation?
Barack Obama has seduced the world by the power of his persuasiveness,
and while Kenyans raise another glass to the accomplishments of "one of our own," it seems clear to me that we gave up our rights to him when we gave up our hopes for ourselves. When we settled for incompetence, and corruption, and callousness, we defined ourselves out of his universe, and out of his dreams.
We rejected Barack Obama-ness when we allowed those pangas to slash our
dreams, when we watched our hopes spiral away in smoke. We allowed the ones who had done this to become the only mirrors of ourselves, and then squelched our disgraced selves back to the mire of our despondency.
Barack Obama cannot be a Kenyan, and Kenyans cannot grasp Barack Obama's
dream. We have already despaired of it, and of ourselves. His dream would have died with ours, here at home, here in the graveyard of hope.
But oh, how we yearn to see ourselves reflected in his eyes...
*Wambui Mwangi is an assitant professor of Political Science at the
University of Toronto, Canada. This article first appeared inThe East African, June 15 2008.
*Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at
_______________________________________________ kictanet mailing list kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/listinfo/kictanet
This message was sent to: alice@apc.org Unsubscribe or change your options at
http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/options/kictanet/alice%40apc.org
Alice, Might I suggest that you add a guiding principle to the mailing list rules, along the lines of.. 'Contributors should seek to improve or benefit the understanding and knowledge of others as well as their own.' You could then urge contributors to gauge their own statements according to such a principle before forwarding to the group. Hopefully that way, the rest of us seeking to practice the above principle are not subject to the kind of deluge of inane chatter seen last week. -----Original Message----- From: kictanet-bounces+pgitau=githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke [mailto:kictanet-bounces+pgitau=githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke] On Behalf Of alice@apc.org Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2008 8:45 AM To: pgitau@githongo.com Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions Subject: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace Dear All, Could we comment on the presentation that Brian (a Kenyan) made at the IGF currently taking place in Hyderabad. It was an excellent presentation on access befitting the theme of the forum: "Internet for all" and he has done us proud. It is also great to have quite a large Kenyan delegation at this India IGF contributing Kenyan specific IG issues. The IGF is a process/event/forum that had not received enough attention both at the national and regional level. --------- I will also take this opportunity to remind listers of some of the KICTAnet mailing list rules: * Please mind your manners: * Be polite - virtual members are real not a cyberspace borg with no feelings. * Watch your words. Kick the bad language - People are listening. * Laws are laws - What's real in the real world are the same in cyberspace. * Don't send rude or offensive e-mails or postings. * Be ethical in your posting. Don't lie, plagiarize, defame, or deliberately do harm to another KICTANet forum user. If you are not able to respect these simple rules...the KICTANet administrator will have no choice but to suspend you! best alice Binaifer Nowrojee wrote:
For those who have not read this opinion piece, I would urge you to do
so and reflect on it. Why do we need to bring down Brian Longwe on the basis of his nationality? Why not celebrate his success? Why assume that a non-Kenyan will not positively contribute to Kenya?
Best
Binaifer Nowrojee
Barack Obama and the graveyard of hope
Wambui Mwangi (2008-08-11)
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50078
Printer friendly version
There are 2 comments on this article.
I am finding it very difficult to join in the jubilation about Senator
Barack Obama. Not that I want to deny the man his victory, but my impulse to celebrate keeps deflating on the idea that the best thing that happened to little Barack was not growing up in Kenya.
I have been imagining alternative trajectories for him if he had come to
know the world through the eyes of a Kenyan citizen, if his mother and grandparents had not rescued him from our chaos and contradictions and brought him up somewhere his intellect and talent could grow.
If he had grown up here, and had he somehow managed to retain most
elements of his current self, he would have been another outstanding, intelligent and competent Luo man in our midst: and he would have been killed.
Yes, we would have assassinated a Barack Obama if he had remained ours,
with us, one of us here in this schizophrenic cauldron we call home. This is not going to stretch the imagination of any Kenyan - after all, when we had that incredibly good-looking and charismatic home-grown hero, Tom Mboya, we shot him to death.
And when that austerely intellectual and elegant leader, Robert Ouko,
threatened to look overly intelligent to the world, we killed him too. We killed Pio Gama Pinto and we killed JM Kariuki. There is no reason to suppose that Barack Obama, whose integrity of purpose and stringent sense of ethics even his enemies concede, would have survived his Kenyan roots.
He is much too intelligent, too charged with the promise of history, too
bold in his claim to a shining destiny, too full of the audacity of hope, for us to have let him survive. Kenya would have killed Barack Obama, or at least his dream, as we inevitably destroy, in one way or another, the best and the boldest of us. Goldenberg whistle blower David Munyakei's challenge to his country to be bigger than our greed was met with a whimper, and then with rapid abandonment. We did not deserve him, either.
As for John Githongo, he should have known better than to take the idea
of public ethics seriously - this is Kenya, after all. Let him enlighten people at Oxford instead; such considerations are too virtuous for us, too sensible, too conducive to a promising future. We do not even remark on the haunting wastage of all this shining accomplishment - Micere Mugo sings her lyrical poetry for Americans, and we do not even know enough to mourn the loss.
And yet we are all enchanted with the power of the idea of Barack Obama,
the hope of him, the beauty of his life's trajectory, the universe of possibilities and probabilities that it conjures for the least of the rest of us. If someone's cousin's friend's neighbour makes it to the United States... then we all have a chance. We have a strange predilection for schizophrenic loves and loyalties; we let geography dictate our alliances and imaginary lines decide our friends. It is as if our social contract states that here, at home, we are obliged to behave like fighting rats to each other but when abroad, when released from the shackles of kin and clan and conclave, we can fly and soar and master the sky.
When Wangari Maathai is abroad, we feel that her Nobel Prize is partly
represented in each of our Kenyan living rooms; when she comes home, she is just another Kikuyu politico. We preen about our athletes winning yet another international competition to anybody who will give us half a chance, but when they are at home we turn them into more fodder for militias.
Caine Prize winners are Kenyan by automatic assent, but Binyavanga
Wainaina is a Kikuyu writer when at home and Yvonne Owuor is indelibly a Luo - we shrink them to fit the midget-sized visions we have of ourselves.
It is clear to all of us, and the evidence continues to accrue, that we
have, collectively, a certain global competence, as Kenyans, that we produce individuals of substance and historical purpose.
Being Kenyan, however, we prefer to drown in the pettiness of our
parochial quarrels when at home, and if one of us threatens to be too hopeful, too ambitious, too intelligent, too creative or too inspirational to fit into our trivial little categories of hatred and suspicion, we kill them, or exile them from our societies, or we just cause them to run away inside, hiding from us and from themselves the grandeur of their souls, the splendid landscapes of their imagined tomorrows.
Nothing but the worst for us, at home. We recognise each other by our
most rancid rhetoric. We insist upon it, we cultivate it, we elevate it to an art form: Kenyan, and quarrelsome.
Kenyan, and clannish. Kenyan, and counter-productive. Kenyan, and
self-destructive. Kenyan, and consistently heart-breaking. Genius everywhere, and not a thought to be had. Promise and potential everywhere, and not an opportunity to be had. Money everywhere, and not an honest penny to be earned. Helicopters aplenty, but no help for the needy. A land awash in Cabinet ministers and poverty.
I have been watching Kenyans getting high on Obamamania, and I am
wondering what we are so happy about? It is perhaps that we are beginning to acknowledge what we should always have known - given a half a chance, an ever so slightly conducive context, Kenyans are more likely to over-achieve than not. At the faintest provocation, Kenyans will leap past expectations without breaking their stride or breaking a sweat, especially if they happen to have escaped the imprisoning edifice we call home and found foreign contexts to flourish in, no matter how alien.
I went to a town in the Canadian Arctic once, in the far north, where in
summer the sun shines even at midnight and in the winter the world is an endless landscape of ice and snow. Here, far, far away from home, where nothing was familiar except the gentleness of elderly Inuit women and the comforting weirdness of the white residents, I was told that the local dentist had, for many years, been a Kenyan. Everybody said he had been an excellent dentist, out there in the desert of the cold. I was unsurprised.
We are an adventurous people, we Kenyans, and we take to the world
outside our home as if born to a conquistador culture - we are brave and brash and bold, out there. We buy and sell things, and make money at it, out there. We go to school and excel and cover ourselves with accreditations, out there. We win things, out there. We get prizes, out there. We are at our best, out there.
However, at home, for some reason we refuse to either acknowledge or
examine - we have chosen simply to set aside this capacity. Here, at home, nothing but the very lowest common denominator will do; nothing but the basest and most brutal aspects of our selves are to be presented to each other; nothing but the most cynical manipulation is the basis of our political space. We prefer to be ruled by individuals whose mediocrity is matched only by their mendacity, here at home.
We prefer to abdicate our adult responsibilities and capacity for reason
to "leaders" whose lack of virtue is as legendary as our attractively exotic pastoralists. We do not only waste talent, here at home - we go out of our way to suppress and repress it. We do not only deny dreams, here in Kenya - we devour them, and ask each other, "Who do you think you are?" As if the success of another is an affront.
In Kenya, grand vision and soaring imagination is illegitimate; here,
they just call you naive. Out there, you stand a chance of becoming a hero; at home, you will have nothing but the taste of ashes in your mouth. Mothers, take your children abroad.
Barack Obama has written two books, in which he discusses ideas. Ideas.
This is a man with vision and conviction, and enough good ideas that even those who do not like the pigmentally-advantaged are listening, and changing their minds.
Even those who think that his name sounds suspiciously like a
terrorist's are reading his books and listening to his speeches, and changing their minds. This is a man with interesting and inspiring things to say - which disqualifies him from any Kenyan-ness we would have liked to claim.
Americans like the image of them that Barack Obama has painted in words;
which Kenyan leader would dare to build dreams bigger than his roots? Which Kenyan leader would ever be so foolish as to attempt inspiration instead of instigation?
Barack Obama has seduced the world by the power of his persuasiveness,
and while Kenyans raise another glass to the accomplishments of "one of our own," it seems clear to me that we gave up our rights to him when we gave up our hopes for ourselves. When we settled for incompetence, and corruption, and callousness, we defined ourselves out of his universe, and out of his dreams.
We rejected Barack Obama-ness when we allowed those pangas to slash our
dreams, when we watched our hopes spiral away in smoke. We allowed the ones who had done this to become the only mirrors of ourselves, and then squelched our disgraced selves back to the mire of our despondency.
Barack Obama cannot be a Kenyan, and Kenyans cannot grasp Barack Obama's
dream. We have already despaired of it, and of ourselves. His dream would have died with ours, here at home, here in the graveyard of hope.
But oh, how we yearn to see ourselves reflected in his eyes...
*Wambui Mwangi is an assitant professor of Political Science at the
University of Toronto, Canada. This article first appeared inThe East African, June 15 2008.
*Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at
_______________________________________________ kictanet mailing list kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/listinfo/kictanet
This message was sent to: alice@apc.org Unsubscribe or change your options at
http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/options/kictanet/alice%40apc.org _______________________________________________ kictanet mailing list kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/listinfo/kictanet This message was sent to: pgitau@githongo.com Unsubscribe or change your options at http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/options/kictanet/pgitau%40githongo.com
Walu Is inane chatter not an abuse? Or are there some who are allowed to abuse the people on this mailing list? What do people gain in defending the corrupt? Why do we fear to hear the people who are incorrigibly corrupt being rebuked? JM ________________________________ From: P Gitau Githongo <pgitau@githongo.com> To: j.maina@ymail.com Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> Sent: Monday, December 8, 2008 3:14:06 PM Subject: Re: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace Alice, Might I suggest that you add a guiding principle to the mailing list rules, along the lines of.. 'Contributors should seek to improve or benefit the understanding and knowledge of others as well as their own.' You could then urge contributors to gauge their own statements according to such a principle before forwarding to the group. Hopefully that way, the rest of us seeking to practice the above principle are not subject to the kind of deluge of inane chatter seen last week. -----Original Message----- From: kictanet-bounces+pgitau=githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke [mailto:kictanet-bounces+pgitau=githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke] On Behalf Of alice@apc.org Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2008 8:45 AM To: pgitau@githongo.com Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions Subject: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace Dear All, Could we comment on the presentation that Brian (a Kenyan) made at the IGF currently taking place in Hyderabad. It was an excellent presentation on access befitting the theme of the forum: "Internet for all" and he has done us proud. It is also great to have quite a large Kenyan delegation at this India IGF contributing Kenyan specific IG issues. The IGF is a process/event/forum that had not received enough attention both at the national and regional level. --------- I will also take this opportunity to remind listers of some of the KICTAnet mailing list rules: * Please mind your manners: * Be polite - virtual members are real not a cyberspace borg with no feelings. * Watch your words. Kick the bad language - People are listening. * Laws are laws - What's real in the real world are the same in cyberspace. * Don't send rude or offensive e-mails or postings. * Be ethical in your posting. Don't lie, plagiarize, defame, or deliberately do harm to another KICTANet forum user. If you are not able to respect these simple rules...the KICTANet administrator will have no choice but to suspend you! best alice Binaifer Nowrojee wrote:
For those who have not read this opinion piece, I would urge you to do
so and reflect on it. Why do we need to bring down Brian Longwe on the basis of his nationality? Why not celebrate his success? Why assume that a non-Kenyan will not positively contribute to Kenya?
Best
Binaifer Nowrojee
Barack Obama and the graveyard of hope
Wambui Mwangi (2008-08-11)
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50078
Printer friendly version
There are 2 comments on this article.
I am finding it very difficult to join in the jubilation about Senator
Barack Obama. Not that I want to deny the man his victory, but my impulse to celebrate keeps deflating on the idea that the best thing that happened to little Barack was not growing up in Kenya.
I have been imagining alternative trajectories for him if he had come to
know the world through the eyes of a Kenyan citizen, if his mother and grandparents had not rescued him from our chaos and contradictions and brought him up somewhere his intellect and talent could grow.
If he had grown up here, and had he somehow managed to retain most
elements of his current self, he would have been another outstanding, intelligent and competent Luo man in our midst: and he would have been killed.
Yes, we would have assassinated a Barack Obama if he had remained ours,
with us, one of us here in this schizophrenic cauldron we call home. This is not going to stretch the imagination of any Kenyan - after all, when we had that incredibly good-looking and charismatic home-grown hero, Tom Mboya, we shot him to death.
And when that austerely intellectual and elegant leader, Robert Ouko,
threatened to look overly intelligent to the world, we killed him too. We killed Pio Gama Pinto and we killed JM Kariuki. There is no reason to suppose that Barack Obama, whose integrity of purpose and stringent sense of ethics even his enemies concede, would have survived his Kenyan roots.
He is much too intelligent, too charged with the promise of history, too
bold in his claim to a shining destiny, too full of the audacity of hope, for us to have let him survive. Kenya would have killed Barack Obama, or at least his dream, as we inevitably destroy, in one way or another, the best and the boldest of us. Goldenberg whistle blower David Munyakei's challenge to his country to be bigger than our greed was met with a whimper, and then with rapid abandonment. We did not deserve him, either.
As for John Githongo, he should have known better than to take the idea
of public ethics seriously - this is Kenya, after all. Let him enlighten people at Oxford instead; such considerations are too virtuous for us, too sensible, too conducive to a promising future. We do not even remark on the haunting wastage of all this shining accomplishment - Micere Mugo sings her lyrical poetry for Americans, and we do not even know enough to mourn the loss.
And yet we are all enchanted with the power of the idea of Barack Obama,
the hope of him, the beauty of his life's trajectory, the universe of possibilities and probabilities that it conjures for the least of the rest of us. If someone's cousin's friend's neighbour makes it to the United States... then we all have a chance. We have a strange predilection for schizophrenic loves and loyalties; we let geography dictate our alliances and imaginary lines decide our friends. It is as if our social contract states that here, at home, we are obliged to behave like fighting rats to each other but when abroad, when released from the shackles of kin and clan and conclave, we can fly and soar and master the sky.
When Wangari Maathai is abroad, we feel that her Nobel Prize is partly
represented in each of our Kenyan living rooms; when she comes home, she is just another Kikuyu politico. We preen about our athletes winning yet another international competition to anybody who will give us half a chance, but when they are at home we turn them into more fodder for militias.
Caine Prize winners are Kenyan by automatic assent, but Binyavanga
Wainaina is a Kikuyu writer when at home and Yvonne Owuor is indelibly a Luo - we shrink them to fit the midget-sized visions we have of ourselves.
It is clear to all of us, and the evidence continues to accrue, that we
have, collectively, a certain global competence, as Kenyans, that we produce individuals of substance and historical purpose.
Being Kenyan, however, we prefer to drown in the pettiness of our
parochial quarrels when at home, and if one of us threatens to be too hopeful, too ambitious, too intelligent, too creative or too inspirational to fit into our trivial little categories of hatred and suspicion, we kill them, or exile them from our societies, or we just cause them to run away inside, hiding from us and from themselves the grandeur of their souls, the splendid landscapes of their imagined tomorrows.
Nothing but the worst for us, at home. We recognise each other by our
most rancid rhetoric. We insist upon it, we cultivate it, we elevate it to an art form: Kenyan, and quarrelsome.
Kenyan, and clannish. Kenyan, and counter-productive. Kenyan, and
self-destructive. Kenyan, and consistently heart-breaking. Genius everywhere, and not a thought to be had. Promise and potential everywhere, and not an opportunity to be had. Money everywhere, and not an honest penny to be earned. Helicopters aplenty, but no help for the needy. A land awash in Cabinet ministers and poverty.
I have been watching Kenyans getting high on Obamamania, and I am
wondering what we are so happy about? It is perhaps that we are beginning to acknowledge what we should always have known - given a half a chance, an ever so slightly conducive context, Kenyans are more likely to over-achieve than not. At the faintest provocation, Kenyans will leap past expectations without breaking their stride or breaking a sweat, especially if they happen to have escaped the imprisoning edifice we call home and found foreign contexts to flourish in, no matter how alien.
I went to a town in the Canadian Arctic once, in the far north, where in
summer the sun shines even at midnight and in the winter the world is an endless landscape of ice and snow. Here, far, far away from home, where nothing was familiar except the gentleness of elderly Inuit women and the comforting weirdness of the white residents, I was told that the local dentist had, for many years, been a Kenyan. Everybody said he had been an excellent dentist, out there in the desert of the cold. I was unsurprised.
We are an adventurous people, we Kenyans, and we take to the world
outside our home as if born to a conquistador culture - we are brave and brash and bold, out there. We buy and sell things, and make money at it, out there. We go to school and excel and cover ourselves with accreditations, out there. We win things, out there. We get prizes, out there. We are at our best, out there.
However, at home, for some reason we refuse to either acknowledge or
examine - we have chosen simply to set aside this capacity. Here, at home, nothing but the very lowest common denominator will do; nothing but the basest and most brutal aspects of our selves are to be presented to each other; nothing but the most cynical manipulation is the basis of our political space. We prefer to be ruled by individuals whose mediocrity is matched only by their mendacity, here at home.
We prefer to abdicate our adult responsibilities and capacity for reason
to "leaders" whose lack of virtue is as legendary as our attractively exotic pastoralists. We do not only waste talent, here at home - we go out of our way to suppress and repress it. We do not only deny dreams, here in Kenya - we devour them, and ask each other, "Who do you think you are?" As if the success of another is an affront.
In Kenya, grand vision and soaring imagination is illegitimate; here,
they just call you naive. Out there, you stand a chance of becoming a hero; at home, you will have nothing but the taste of ashes in your mouth. Mothers, take your children abroad.
Barack Obama has written two books, in which he discusses ideas. Ideas.
This is a man with vision and conviction, and enough good ideas that even those who do not like the pigmentally-advantaged are listening, and changing their minds.
Even those who think that his name sounds suspiciously like a
terrorist's are reading his books and listening to his speeches, and changing their minds. This is a man with interesting and inspiring things to say - which disqualifies him from any Kenyan-ness we would have liked to claim.
Americans like the image of them that Barack Obama has painted in words;
which Kenyan leader would dare to build dreams bigger than his roots? Which Kenyan leader would ever be so foolish as to attempt inspiration instead of instigation?
Barack Obama has seduced the world by the power of his persuasiveness,
and while Kenyans raise another glass to the accomplishments of "one of our own," it seems clear to me that we gave up our rights to him when we gave up our hopes for ourselves. When we settled for incompetence, and corruption, and callousness, we defined ourselves out of his universe, and out of his dreams.
We rejected Barack Obama-ness when we allowed those pangas to slash our
dreams, when we watched our hopes spiral away in smoke. We allowed the ones who had done this to become the only mirrors of ourselves, and then squelched our disgraced selves back to the mire of our despondency.
Barack Obama cannot be a Kenyan, and Kenyans cannot grasp Barack Obama's
dream. We have already despaired of it, and of ourselves. His dream would have died with ours, here at home, here in the graveyard of hope.
But oh, how we yearn to see ourselves reflected in his eyes...
*Wambui Mwangi is an assitant professor of Political Science at the
University of Toronto, Canada. This article first appeared inThe East African, June 15 2008.
*Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at
_______________________________________________ kictanet mailing list kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/listinfo/kictanet
This message was sent to: alice@apc.org Unsubscribe or change your options at
http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/options/kictanet/alice%40apc.org _______________________________________________ kictanet mailing list kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/listinfo/kictanet This message was sent to: pgitau@githongo.com Unsubscribe or change your options at http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/options/kictanet/pgitau%40githongo.com _______________________________________________ kictanet mailing list kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/listinfo/kictanet This message was sent to: j.maina@ymail.com Unsubscribe or change your options at http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/options/kictanet/j.maina%40ymail.com
JM, I agree. I just checked the dictionary and the word 'inane' is indeed quite abusive. Githongo therefore becomes the 1st victim to go onto "moderated-mode" as we speak. As for the so called 'corrupt' (whoever they maybe), the position remains that the list is really neither equipped nor designed to burst corrupt agents. But that said, it all depends on the angle one decides to take concerning (ICT) corruption. Specifically, general guidelines regarding libel or character assassination must prevail otherwise things get reduced very fast to shouting marches - at the expense of progressive ICT development. walu. --- On Mon, 12/8/08, John Maina <j.maina@ymail.com> wrote:
From: John Maina <j.maina@ymail.com> Subject: Re: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace To: "P Gitau Githongo" <pgitau@githongo.com>, "John Walubengo" <jwalu@yahoo.com>, odhiambo@gmail.com Cc: "KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions" <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> Date: Monday, December 8, 2008, 4:27 PM Walu
Is inane chatter not an abuse? Or are there some who are allowed to abuse the people on this mailing list?
What do people gain in defending the corrupt? Why do we fear to hear the people who are incorrigibly corrupt being rebuked?
JM
________________________________ From: P Gitau Githongo <pgitau@githongo.com> To: j.maina@ymail.com Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> Sent: Monday, December 8, 2008 3:14:06 PM Subject: Re: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace
Alice,
Might I suggest that you add a guiding principle to the mailing list rules, along the lines of..
'Contributors should seek to improve or benefit the understanding and knowledge of others as well as their own.'
You could then urge contributors to gauge their own statements according to such a principle before forwarding to the group.
Hopefully that way, the rest of us seeking to practice the above principle are not subject to the kind of deluge of inane chatter seen last week.
-----Original Message----- From: kictanet-bounces+pgitau=githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke [mailto:kictanet-bounces+pgitau=githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke] On Behalf Of alice@apc.org Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2008 8:45 AM To: pgitau@githongo.com Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions Subject: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace
Dear All,
Could we comment on the presentation that Brian (a Kenyan) made at the IGF currently taking place in Hyderabad. It was an excellent presentation on access befitting the theme of the forum: "Internet for all" and he has done us proud.
It is also great to have quite a large Kenyan delegation at this India IGF contributing Kenyan specific IG issues. The IGF is a process/event/forum that had not received enough attention both at the national and regional level. ---------
I will also take this opportunity to remind listers of some of the KICTAnet mailing list rules:
* Please mind your manners: * Be polite - virtual members are real not a cyberspace borg with no feelings. * Watch your words. Kick the bad language - People are listening. * Laws are laws - What's real in the real world are the same in cyberspace. * Don't send rude or offensive e-mails or postings. * Be ethical in your posting. Don't lie, plagiarize, defame, or deliberately do harm to another KICTANet forum user.
If you are not able to respect these simple rules...the KICTANet administrator will have no choice but to suspend you!
best alice
Binaifer Nowrojee wrote:
For those who have not read this opinion piece, I
would urge you to do so and reflect on it. Why do we need to bring down Brian Longwe on the basis of his nationality? Why not celebrate his success? Why assume that a non-Kenyan will not positively contribute to Kenya?
Best
Binaifer Nowrojee
Barack Obama and the graveyard of hope
Wambui Mwangi (2008-08-11)
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50078
Printer friendly version
There are 2 comments on this article.
I am finding it very difficult to join in the
jubilation about Senator Barack Obama. Not that I want to deny the man his victory, but my impulse to celebrate keeps deflating on the idea that the best thing that happened to little Barack was not growing up in Kenya.
I have been imagining alternative trajectories for him
if he had come to know the world through the eyes of a Kenyan citizen, if his mother and grandparents had not rescued him from our chaos and contradictions and brought him up somewhere his intellect and talent could grow.
If he had grown up here, and had he somehow managed to
retain most elements of his current self, he would have been another outstanding, intelligent and competent Luo man in our midst: and he would have been killed.
Yes, we would have assassinated a Barack Obama if he
had remained ours, with us, one of us here in this schizophrenic cauldron we call home. This is not going to stretch the imagination of any Kenyan - after all, when we had that incredibly good-looking and charismatic home-grown hero, Tom Mboya, we shot him to death.
And when that austerely intellectual and elegant
leader, Robert Ouko, threatened to look overly intelligent to the world, we killed him too. We killed Pio Gama Pinto and we killed JM Kariuki. There is no reason to suppose that Barack Obama, whose integrity of purpose and stringent sense of ethics even his enemies concede, would have survived his Kenyan roots.
He is much too intelligent, too charged with the
promise of history, too bold in his claim to a shining destiny, too full of the audacity of hope, for us to have let him survive. Kenya would have killed Barack Obama, or at least his dream, as we inevitably destroy, in one way or another, the best and the boldest of us. Goldenberg whistle blower David Munyakei's challenge to his country to be bigger than our greed was met with a whimper, and then with rapid abandonment. We did not deserve him, either.
As for John Githongo, he should have known better than
to take the idea of public ethics seriously - this is Kenya, after all. Let him enlighten people at Oxford instead; such considerations are too virtuous for us, too sensible, too conducive to a promising future. We do not even remark on the haunting wastage of all this shining accomplishment - Micere Mugo sings her lyrical poetry for Americans, and we do not even know enough to mourn the loss.
And yet we are all enchanted with the power of the
idea of Barack Obama, the hope of him, the beauty of his life's trajectory, the universe of possibilities and probabilities that it conjures for the least of the rest of us. If someone's cousin's friend's neighbour makes it to the United States... then we all have a chance. We have a strange predilection for schizophrenic loves and loyalties; we let geography dictate our alliances and imaginary lines decide our friends. It is as if our social contract states that here, at home, we are obliged to behave like fighting rats to each other but when abroad, when released from the shackles of kin and clan and conclave, we can fly and soar and master the sky.
When Wangari Maathai is abroad, we feel that her Nobel
Prize is partly represented in each of our Kenyan living rooms; when she comes home, she is just another Kikuyu politico. We preen about our athletes winning yet another international competition to anybody who will give us half a chance, but when they are at home we turn them into more fodder for militias.
Caine Prize winners are Kenyan by automatic assent,
but Binyavanga Wainaina is a Kikuyu writer when at home and Yvonne Owuor is indelibly a Luo - we shrink them to fit the midget-sized visions we have of ourselves.
It is clear to all of us, and the evidence continues
to accrue, that we have, collectively, a certain global competence, as Kenyans, that we produce individuals of substance and historical purpose.
Being Kenyan, however, we prefer to drown in the
pettiness of our parochial quarrels when at home, and if one of us threatens to be too hopeful, too ambitious, too intelligent, too creative or too inspirational to fit into our trivial little categories of hatred and suspicion, we kill them, or exile them from our societies, or we just cause them to run away inside, hiding from us and from themselves the grandeur of their souls, the splendid landscapes of their imagined tomorrows.
Nothing but the worst for us, at home. We recognise
each other by our most rancid rhetoric. We insist upon it, we cultivate it, we elevate it to an art form: Kenyan, and quarrelsome.
Kenyan, and clannish. Kenyan, and counter-productive.
Kenyan, and self-destructive. Kenyan, and consistently heart-breaking. Genius everywhere, and not a thought to be had. Promise and potential everywhere, and not an opportunity to be had. Money everywhere, and not an honest penny to be earned. Helicopters aplenty, but no help for the needy. A land awash in Cabinet ministers and poverty.
I have been watching Kenyans getting high on
Obamamania, and I am wondering what we are so happy about? It is perhaps that we are beginning to acknowledge what we should always have known - given a half a chance, an ever so slightly conducive context, Kenyans are more likely to over-achieve than not. At the faintest provocation, Kenyans will leap past expectations without breaking their stride or breaking a sweat, especially if they happen to have escaped the imprisoning edifice we call home and found foreign contexts to flourish in, no matter how alien.
I went to a town in the Canadian Arctic once, in the
far north, where in summer the sun shines even at midnight and in the winter the world is an endless landscape of ice and snow. Here, far, far away from home, where nothing was familiar except the gentleness of elderly Inuit women and the comforting weirdness of the white residents, I was told that the local dentist had, for many years, been a Kenyan. Everybody said he had been an excellent dentist, out there in the desert of the cold. I was unsurprised.
We are an adventurous people, we Kenyans, and we take
to the world outside our home as if born to a conquistador culture - we are brave and brash and bold, out there. We buy and sell things, and make money at it, out there. We go to school and excel and cover ourselves with accreditations, out there. We win things, out there. We get prizes, out there. We are at our best, out there.
However, at home, for some reason we refuse to either
acknowledge or examine - we have chosen simply to set aside this capacity. Here, at home, nothing but the very lowest common denominator will do; nothing but the basest and most brutal aspects of our selves are to be presented to each other; nothing but the most cynical manipulation is the basis of our political space. We prefer to be ruled by individuals whose mediocrity is matched only by their mendacity, here at home.
We prefer to abdicate our adult responsibilities and
capacity for reason to "leaders" whose lack of virtue is as legendary as our attractively exotic pastoralists. We do not only waste talent, here at home - we go out of our way to suppress and repress it. We do not only deny dreams, here in Kenya - we devour them, and ask each other, "Who do you think you are?" As if the success of another is an affront.
In Kenya, grand vision and soaring imagination is
illegitimate; here, they just call you naive. Out there, you stand a chance of becoming a hero; at home, you will have nothing but the taste of ashes in your mouth. Mothers, take your children abroad.
Barack Obama has written two books, in which he
discusses ideas. Ideas. This is a man with vision and conviction, and enough good ideas that even those who do not like the pigmentally-advantaged are listening, and changing their minds.
Even those who think that his name sounds suspiciously
like a terrorist's are reading his books and listening to his speeches, and changing their minds. This is a man with interesting and inspiring things to say - which disqualifies him from any Kenyan-ness we would have liked to claim.
Americans like the image of them that Barack Obama has
painted in words; which Kenyan leader would dare to build dreams bigger than his roots? Which Kenyan leader would ever be so foolish as to attempt inspiration instead of instigation?
Barack Obama has seduced the world by the power of his
persuasiveness, and while Kenyans raise another glass to the accomplishments of "one of our own," it seems clear to me that we gave up our rights to him when we gave up our hopes for ourselves. When we settled for incompetence, and corruption, and callousness, we defined ourselves out of his universe, and out of his dreams.
We rejected Barack Obama-ness when we allowed those
pangas to slash our dreams, when we watched our hopes spiral away in smoke. We allowed the ones who had done this to become the only mirrors of ourselves, and then squelched our disgraced selves back to the mire of our despondency.
Barack Obama cannot be a Kenyan, and Kenyans cannot
grasp Barack Obama's dream. We have already despaired of it, and of ourselves. His dream would have died with ours, here at home, here in the graveyard of hope.
But oh, how we yearn to see ourselves reflected in his
eyes...
*Wambui Mwangi is an assitant professor of Political
Science at the University of Toronto, Canada. This article first appeared inThe East African, June 15 2008.
*Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or
comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
_______________________________________________ kictanet mailing list kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/listinfo/kictanet
This message was sent to: alice@apc.org Unsubscribe or change your options at
http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/options/kictanet/alice%40apc.org
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This message was sent to: pgitau@githongo.com Unsubscribe or change your options at http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/options/kictanet/pgitau%40githongo.com
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Hi Walu, I'm sorry but I beg to differ. Githongo's comment was perfectly in order. The tirade witnessed last week was definitely "inane" i.e. having little sense or importance - refer below. Kwani what dictionary do you use? in·ane adj 1. having little sense or importance 2. empty, insubstantial, or void n great emptiness, especially the perceived emptiness of outer space (archaic) Encarta(R) World English Dictionary (c) 1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Developed for Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 6:26 PM, John Walubengo <jwalu@yahoo.com> wrote:
JM,
I agree. I just checked the dictionary and the word 'inane' is indeed quite abusive. Githongo therefore becomes the 1st victim to go onto "moderated-mode" as we speak.
As for the so called 'corrupt' (whoever they maybe), the position remains that the list is really neither equipped nor designed to burst corrupt agents. But that said, it all depends on the angle one decides to take concerning (ICT) corruption. Specifically, general guidelines regarding libel or character assassination must prevail otherwise things get reduced very fast to shouting marches - at the expense of progressive ICT development.
walu. --- On Mon, 12/8/08, John Maina <j.maina@ymail.com> wrote:
From: John Maina <j.maina@ymail.com> Subject: Re: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace To: "P Gitau Githongo" <pgitau@githongo.com>, "John Walubengo" < jwalu@yahoo.com>, odhiambo@gmail.com Cc: "KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions" <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> Date: Monday, December 8, 2008, 4:27 PM Walu
Is inane chatter not an abuse? Or are there some who are allowed to abuse the people on this mailing list?
What do people gain in defending the corrupt? Why do we fear to hear the people who are incorrigibly corrupt being rebuked?
JM
________________________________ From: P Gitau Githongo <pgitau@githongo.com> To: j.maina@ymail.com Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> Sent: Monday, December 8, 2008 3:14:06 PM Subject: Re: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace
Alice,
Might I suggest that you add a guiding principle to the mailing list rules, along the lines of..
'Contributors should seek to improve or benefit the understanding and knowledge of others as well as their own.'
You could then urge contributors to gauge their own statements according to such a principle before forwarding to the group.
Hopefully that way, the rest of us seeking to practice the above principle are not subject to the kind of deluge of inane chatter seen last week.
-----Original Message----- From: kictanet-bounces+pgitau=githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke [mailto:kictanet-bounces+pgitau <kictanet-bounces%2Bpgitau>=githongo.com @lists.kictanet.or.ke] On Behalf Of alice@apc.org Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2008 8:45 AM To: pgitau@githongo.com Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions Subject: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace
Dear All,
Could we comment on the presentation that Brian (a Kenyan) made at the IGF currently taking place in Hyderabad. It was an excellent presentation on access befitting the theme of the forum: "Internet for all" and he has done us proud.
It is also great to have quite a large Kenyan delegation at this India IGF contributing Kenyan specific IG issues. The IGF is a process/event/forum that had not received enough attention both at the national and regional level. ---------
I will also take this opportunity to remind listers of some of the KICTAnet mailing list rules:
* Please mind your manners: * Be polite - virtual members are real not a cyberspace borg with no feelings. * Watch your words. Kick the bad language - People are listening. * Laws are laws - What's real in the real world are the same in cyberspace. * Don't send rude or offensive e-mails or postings. * Be ethical in your posting. Don't lie, plagiarize, defame, or deliberately do harm to another KICTANet forum user.
If you are not able to respect these simple rules...the KICTANet administrator will have no choice but to suspend you!
best alice
Binaifer Nowrojee wrote:
For those who have not read this opinion piece, I
would urge you to do so and reflect on it. Why do we need to bring down Brian Longwe on the basis of his nationality? Why not celebrate his success? Why assume that a non-Kenyan will not positively contribute to Kenya?
Best
Binaifer Nowrojee
Barack Obama and the graveyard of hope
Wambui Mwangi (2008-08-11)
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50078
Printer friendly version
There are 2 comments on this article.
I am finding it very difficult to join in the
jubilation about Senator Barack Obama. Not that I want to deny the man his victory, but my impulse to celebrate keeps deflating on the idea that the best thing that happened to little Barack was not growing up in Kenya.
I have been imagining alternative trajectories for him
if he had come to know the world through the eyes of a Kenyan citizen, if his mother and grandparents had not rescued him from our chaos and contradictions and brought him up somewhere his intellect and talent could grow.
If he had grown up here, and had he somehow managed to
retain most elements of his current self, he would have been another outstanding, intelligent and competent Luo man in our midst: and he would have been killed.
Yes, we would have assassinated a Barack Obama if he
had remained ours, with us, one of us here in this schizophrenic cauldron we call home. This is not going to stretch the imagination of any Kenyan - after all, when we had that incredibly good-looking and charismatic home-grown hero, Tom Mboya, we shot him to death.
And when that austerely intellectual and elegant
leader, Robert Ouko, threatened to look overly intelligent to the world, we killed him too. We killed Pio Gama Pinto and we killed JM Kariuki. There is no reason to suppose that Barack Obama, whose integrity of purpose and stringent sense of ethics even his enemies concede, would have survived his Kenyan roots.
He is much too intelligent, too charged with the
promise of history, too bold in his claim to a shining destiny, too full of the audacity of hope, for us to have let him survive. Kenya would have killed Barack Obama, or at least his dream, as we inevitably destroy, in one way or another, the best and the boldest of us. Goldenberg whistle blower David Munyakei's challenge to his country to be bigger than our greed was met with a whimper, and then with rapid abandonment. We did not deserve him, either.
As for John Githongo, he should have known better than
to take the idea of public ethics seriously - this is Kenya, after all. Let him enlighten people at Oxford instead; such considerations are too virtuous for us, too sensible, too conducive to a promising future. We do not even remark on the haunting wastage of all this shining accomplishment - Micere Mugo sings her lyrical poetry for Americans, and we do not even know enough to mourn the loss.
And yet we are all enchanted with the power of the
idea of Barack Obama, the hope of him, the beauty of his life's trajectory, the universe of possibilities and probabilities that it conjures for the least of the rest of us. If someone's cousin's friend's neighbour makes it to the United States... then we all have a chance. We have a strange predilection for schizophrenic loves and loyalties; we let geography dictate our alliances and imaginary lines decide our friends. It is as if our social contract states that here, at home, we are obliged to behave like fighting rats to each other but when abroad, when released from the shackles of kin and clan and conclave, we can fly and soar and master the sky.
When Wangari Maathai is abroad, we feel that her Nobel
Prize is partly represented in each of our Kenyan living rooms; when she comes home, she is just another Kikuyu politico. We preen about our athletes winning yet another international competition to anybody who will give us half a chance, but when they are at home we turn them into more fodder for militias.
Caine Prize winners are Kenyan by automatic assent,
but Binyavanga Wainaina is a Kikuyu writer when at home and Yvonne Owuor is indelibly a Luo - we shrink them to fit the midget-sized visions we have of ourselves.
It is clear to all of us, and the evidence continues
to accrue, that we have, collectively, a certain global competence, as Kenyans, that we produce individuals of substance and historical purpose.
Being Kenyan, however, we prefer to drown in the
pettiness of our parochial quarrels when at home, and if one of us threatens to be too hopeful, too ambitious, too intelligent, too creative or too inspirational to fit into our trivial little categories of hatred and suspicion, we kill them, or exile them from our societies, or we just cause them to run away inside, hiding from us and from themselves the grandeur of their souls, the splendid landscapes of their imagined tomorrows.
Nothing but the worst for us, at home. We recognise
each other by our most rancid rhetoric. We insist upon it, we cultivate it, we elevate it to an art form: Kenyan, and quarrelsome.
Kenyan, and clannish. Kenyan, and counter-productive.
Kenyan, and self-destructive. Kenyan, and consistently heart-breaking. Genius everywhere, and not a thought to be had. Promise and potential everywhere, and not an opportunity to be had. Money everywhere, and not an honest penny to be earned. Helicopters aplenty, but no help for the needy. A land awash in Cabinet ministers and poverty.
I have been watching Kenyans getting high on
Obamamania, and I am wondering what we are so happy about? It is perhaps that we are beginning to acknowledge what we should always have known - given a half a chance, an ever so slightly conducive context, Kenyans are more likely to over-achieve than not. At the faintest provocation, Kenyans will leap past expectations without breaking their stride or breaking a sweat, especially if they happen to have escaped the imprisoning edifice we call home and found foreign contexts to flourish in, no matter how alien.
I went to a town in the Canadian Arctic once, in the
far north, where in summer the sun shines even at midnight and in the winter the world is an endless landscape of ice and snow. Here, far, far away from home, where nothing was familiar except the gentleness of elderly Inuit women and the comforting weirdness of the white residents, I was told that the local dentist had, for many years, been a Kenyan. Everybody said he had been an excellent dentist, out there in the desert of the cold. I was unsurprised.
We are an adventurous people, we Kenyans, and we take
to the world outside our home as if born to a conquistador culture - we are brave and brash and bold, out there. We buy and sell things, and make money at it, out there. We go to school and excel and cover ourselves with accreditations, out there. We win things, out there. We get prizes, out there. We are at our best, out there.
However, at home, for some reason we refuse to either
acknowledge or examine - we have chosen simply to set aside this capacity. Here, at home, nothing but the very lowest common denominator will do; nothing but the basest and most brutal aspects of our selves are to be presented to each other; nothing but the most cynical manipulation is the basis of our political space. We prefer to be ruled by individuals whose mediocrity is matched only by their mendacity, here at home.
We prefer to abdicate our adult responsibilities and
capacity for reason to "leaders" whose lack of virtue is as legendary as our attractively exotic pastoralists. We do not only waste talent, here at home - we go out of our way to suppress and repress it. We do not only deny dreams, here in Kenya - we devour them, and ask each other, "Who do you think you are?" As if the success of another is an affront.
In Kenya, grand vision and soaring imagination is
illegitimate; here, they just call you naive. Out there, you stand a chance of becoming a hero; at home, you will have nothing but the taste of ashes in your mouth. Mothers, take your children abroad.
Barack Obama has written two books, in which he
discusses ideas. Ideas. This is a man with vision and conviction, and enough good ideas that even those who do not like the pigmentally-advantaged are listening, and changing their minds.
Even those who think that his name sounds suspiciously
like a terrorist's are reading his books and listening to his speeches, and changing their minds. This is a man with interesting and inspiring things to say - which disqualifies him from any Kenyan-ness we would have liked to claim.
Americans like the image of them that Barack Obama has
painted in words; which Kenyan leader would dare to build dreams bigger than his roots? Which Kenyan leader would ever be so foolish as to attempt inspiration instead of instigation?
Barack Obama has seduced the world by the power of his
persuasiveness, and while Kenyans raise another glass to the accomplishments of "one of our own," it seems clear to me that we gave up our rights to him when we gave up our hopes for ourselves. When we settled for incompetence, and corruption, and callousness, we defined ourselves out of his universe, and out of his dreams.
We rejected Barack Obama-ness when we allowed those
pangas to slash our dreams, when we watched our hopes spiral away in smoke. We allowed the ones who had done this to become the only mirrors of ourselves, and then squelched our disgraced selves back to the mire of our despondency.
Barack Obama cannot be a Kenyan, and Kenyans cannot
grasp Barack Obama's dream. We have already despaired of it, and of ourselves. His dream would have died with ours, here at home, here in the graveyard of hope.
But oh, how we yearn to see ourselves reflected in his
eyes...
*Wambui Mwangi is an assitant professor of Political
Science at the University of Toronto, Canada. This article first appeared inThe East African, June 15 2008.
*Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or
comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
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-- Brian Munyao Longwe e-mail: blongwe@gmail.com cell: + 254 722 518 744 blog : http://zinjlog.blogspot.com meta-blog: http://mashilingi.blogspot.com
Brian I also beg to differ with you. Neither you nor Githongo has the capacity to determine inanity of anybody. We should have a committee which has that capacity but it can not rest on an individual. Otherwise I will say that your submission in india was inane? Would you agree. Its an abuse as long as you use the word wrongly. *Abuse **tr.v.* *a·bused*, *a·bus·ing*, *a·bus·es* *1. * To use wrongly or improperly; misuse: abuse alcohol; abuse a privilege. *2. * To hurt or injure by maltreatment; ill-use. *3. * To force sexual activity on; rape or molest. *4. * To assail with contemptuous, coarse, or insulting words; revile. *5. * *Obsolete* To deceive or trick. Alai On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 9:01 AM, Brian Longwe <blongwe@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Walu,
I'm sorry but I beg to differ. Githongo's comment was perfectly in order. The tirade witnessed last week was definitely "inane" i.e. having little sense or importance - refer below. Kwani what dictionary do you use?
in·ane adj 1. having little sense or importance 2. empty, insubstantial, or void
n great emptiness, especially the perceived emptiness of outer space (archaic)
Encarta(R) World English Dictionary (c) 1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Developed for Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 6:26 PM, John Walubengo <jwalu@yahoo.com> wrote:
JM,
I agree. I just checked the dictionary and the word 'inane' is indeed quite abusive. Githongo therefore becomes the 1st victim to go onto "moderated-mode" as we speak.
As for the so called 'corrupt' (whoever they maybe), the position remains that the list is really neither equipped nor designed to burst corrupt agents. But that said, it all depends on the angle one decides to take concerning (ICT) corruption. Specifically, general guidelines regarding libel or character assassination must prevail otherwise things get reduced very fast to shouting marches - at the expense of progressive ICT development.
walu. --- On Mon, 12/8/08, John Maina <j.maina@ymail.com> wrote:
From: John Maina <j.maina@ymail.com> Subject: Re: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace To: "P Gitau Githongo" <pgitau@githongo.com>, "John Walubengo" < jwalu@yahoo.com>, odhiambo@gmail.com Cc: "KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions" <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> Date: Monday, December 8, 2008, 4:27 PM Walu
Is inane chatter not an abuse? Or are there some who are allowed to abuse the people on this mailing list?
What do people gain in defending the corrupt? Why do we fear to hear the people who are incorrigibly corrupt being rebuked?
JM
________________________________ From: P Gitau Githongo <pgitau@githongo.com> To: j.maina@ymail.com Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> Sent: Monday, December 8, 2008 3:14:06 PM Subject: Re: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace
Alice,
Might I suggest that you add a guiding principle to the mailing list rules, along the lines of..
'Contributors should seek to improve or benefit the understanding and knowledge of others as well as their own.'
You could then urge contributors to gauge their own statements according to such a principle before forwarding to the group.
Hopefully that way, the rest of us seeking to practice the above principle are not subject to the kind of deluge of inane chatter seen last week.
-----Original Message----- From: kictanet-bounces+pgitau=githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke [mailto:kictanet-bounces+pgitau <kictanet-bounces%2Bpgitau>= githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke] On Behalf Of alice@apc.org Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2008 8:45 AM To: pgitau@githongo.com Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions Subject: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace
Dear All,
Could we comment on the presentation that Brian (a Kenyan) made at the IGF currently taking place in Hyderabad. It was an excellent presentation on access befitting the theme of the forum: "Internet for all" and he has done us proud.
It is also great to have quite a large Kenyan delegation at this India IGF contributing Kenyan specific IG issues. The IGF is a process/event/forum that had not received enough attention both at the national and regional level. ---------
I will also take this opportunity to remind listers of some of the KICTAnet mailing list rules:
* Please mind your manners: * Be polite - virtual members are real not a cyberspace borg with no feelings. * Watch your words. Kick the bad language - People are listening. * Laws are laws - What's real in the real world are the same in cyberspace. * Don't send rude or offensive e-mails or postings. * Be ethical in your posting. Don't lie, plagiarize, defame, or deliberately do harm to another KICTANet forum user.
If you are not able to respect these simple rules...the KICTANet administrator will have no choice but to suspend you!
best alice
Binaifer Nowrojee wrote:
For those who have not read this opinion piece, I
would urge you to do so and reflect on it. Why do we need to bring down Brian Longwe on the basis of his nationality? Why not celebrate his success? Why assume that a non-Kenyan will not positively contribute to Kenya?
Best
Binaifer Nowrojee
Barack Obama and the graveyard of hope
Wambui Mwangi (2008-08-11)
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50078
Printer friendly version
There are 2 comments on this article.
I am finding it very difficult to join in the
jubilation about Senator Barack Obama. Not that I want to deny the man his victory, but my impulse to celebrate keeps deflating on the idea that the best thing that happened to little Barack was not growing up in Kenya.
I have been imagining alternative trajectories for him
if he had come to know the world through the eyes of a Kenyan citizen, if his mother and grandparents had not rescued him from our chaos and contradictions and brought him up somewhere his intellect and talent could grow.
If he had grown up here, and had he somehow managed to
retain most elements of his current self, he would have been another outstanding, intelligent and competent Luo man in our midst: and he would have been killed.
Yes, we would have assassinated a Barack Obama if he
had remained ours, with us, one of us here in this schizophrenic cauldron we call home. This is not going to stretch the imagination of any Kenyan - after all, when we had that incredibly good-looking and charismatic home-grown hero, Tom Mboya, we shot him to death.
And when that austerely intellectual and elegant
leader, Robert Ouko, threatened to look overly intelligent to the world, we killed him too. We killed Pio Gama Pinto and we killed JM Kariuki. There is no reason to suppose that Barack Obama, whose integrity of purpose and stringent sense of ethics even his enemies concede, would have survived his Kenyan roots.
He is much too intelligent, too charged with the
promise of history, too bold in his claim to a shining destiny, too full of the audacity of hope, for us to have let him survive. Kenya would have killed Barack Obama, or at least his dream, as we inevitably destroy, in one way or another, the best and the boldest of us. Goldenberg whistle blower David Munyakei's challenge to his country to be bigger than our greed was met with a whimper, and then with rapid abandonment. We did not deserve him, either.
As for John Githongo, he should have known better than
to take the idea of public ethics seriously - this is Kenya, after all. Let him enlighten people at Oxford instead; such considerations are too virtuous for us, too sensible, too conducive to a promising future. We do not even remark on the haunting wastage of all this shining accomplishment - Micere Mugo sings her lyrical poetry for Americans, and we do not even know enough to mourn the loss.
And yet we are all enchanted with the power of the
idea of Barack Obama, the hope of him, the beauty of his life's trajectory, the universe of possibilities and probabilities that it conjures for the least of the rest of us. If someone's cousin's friend's neighbour makes it to the United States... then we all have a chance. We have a strange predilection for schizophrenic loves and loyalties; we let geography dictate our alliances and imaginary lines decide our friends. It is as if our social contract states that here, at home, we are obliged to behave like fighting rats to each other but when abroad, when released from the shackles of kin and clan and conclave, we can fly and soar and master the sky.
When Wangari Maathai is abroad, we feel that her Nobel
Prize is partly represented in each of our Kenyan living rooms; when she comes home, she is just another Kikuyu politico. We preen about our athletes winning yet another international competition to anybody who will give us half a chance, but when they are at home we turn them into more fodder for militias.
Caine Prize winners are Kenyan by automatic assent,
but Binyavanga Wainaina is a Kikuyu writer when at home and Yvonne Owuor is indelibly a Luo - we shrink them to fit the midget-sized visions we have of ourselves.
It is clear to all of us, and the evidence continues
to accrue, that we have, collectively, a certain global competence, as Kenyans, that we produce individuals of substance and historical purpose.
Being Kenyan, however, we prefer to drown in the
pettiness of our parochial quarrels when at home, and if one of us threatens to be too hopeful, too ambitious, too intelligent, too creative or too inspirational to fit into our trivial little categories of hatred and suspicion, we kill them, or exile them from our societies, or we just cause them to run away inside, hiding from us and from themselves the grandeur of their souls, the splendid landscapes of their imagined tomorrows.
Nothing but the worst for us, at home. We recognise
each other by our most rancid rhetoric. We insist upon it, we cultivate it, we elevate it to an art form: Kenyan, and quarrelsome.
Kenyan, and clannish. Kenyan, and counter-productive.
Kenyan, and self-destructive. Kenyan, and consistently heart-breaking. Genius everywhere, and not a thought to be had. Promise and potential everywhere, and not an opportunity to be had. Money everywhere, and not an honest penny to be earned. Helicopters aplenty, but no help for the needy. A land awash in Cabinet ministers and poverty.
I have been watching Kenyans getting high on
Obamamania, and I am wondering what we are so happy about? It is perhaps that we are beginning to acknowledge what we should always have known - given a half a chance, an ever so slightly conducive context, Kenyans are more likely to over-achieve than not. At the faintest provocation, Kenyans will leap past expectations without breaking their stride or breaking a sweat, especially if they happen to have escaped the imprisoning edifice we call home and found foreign contexts to flourish in, no matter how alien.
I went to a town in the Canadian Arctic once, in the
far north, where in summer the sun shines even at midnight and in the winter the world is an endless landscape of ice and snow. Here, far, far away from home, where nothing was familiar except the gentleness of elderly Inuit women and the comforting weirdness of the white residents, I was told that the local dentist had, for many years, been a Kenyan. Everybody said he had been an excellent dentist, out there in the desert of the cold. I was unsurprised.
We are an adventurous people, we Kenyans, and we take
to the world outside our home as if born to a conquistador culture - we are brave and brash and bold, out there. We buy and sell things, and make money at it, out there. We go to school and excel and cover ourselves with accreditations, out there. We win things, out there. We get prizes, out there. We are at our best, out there.
However, at home, for some reason we refuse to either
acknowledge or examine - we have chosen simply to set aside this capacity. Here, at home, nothing but the very lowest common denominator will do; nothing but the basest and most brutal aspects of our selves are to be presented to each other; nothing but the most cynical manipulation is the basis of our political space. We prefer to be ruled by individuals whose mediocrity is matched only by their mendacity, here at home.
We prefer to abdicate our adult responsibilities and
capacity for reason to "leaders" whose lack of virtue is as legendary as our attractively exotic pastoralists. We do not only waste talent, here at home - we go out of our way to suppress and repress it. We do not only deny dreams, here in Kenya - we devour them, and ask each other, "Who do you think you are?" As if the success of another is an affront.
In Kenya, grand vision and soaring imagination is
illegitimate; here, they just call you naive. Out there, you stand a chance of becoming a hero; at home, you will have nothing but the taste of ashes in your mouth. Mothers, take your children abroad.
Barack Obama has written two books, in which he
discusses ideas. Ideas. This is a man with vision and conviction, and enough good ideas that even those who do not like the pigmentally-advantaged are listening, and changing their minds.
Even those who think that his name sounds suspiciously
like a terrorist's are reading his books and listening to his speeches, and changing their minds. This is a man with interesting and inspiring things to say - which disqualifies him from any Kenyan-ness we would have liked to claim.
Americans like the image of them that Barack Obama has
painted in words; which Kenyan leader would dare to build dreams bigger than his roots? Which Kenyan leader would ever be so foolish as to attempt inspiration instead of instigation?
Barack Obama has seduced the world by the power of his
persuasiveness, and while Kenyans raise another glass to the accomplishments of "one of our own," it seems clear to me that we gave up our rights to him when we gave up our hopes for ourselves. When we settled for incompetence, and corruption, and callousness, we defined ourselves out of his universe, and out of his dreams.
We rejected Barack Obama-ness when we allowed those
pangas to slash our dreams, when we watched our hopes spiral away in smoke. We allowed the ones who had done this to become the only mirrors of ourselves, and then squelched our disgraced selves back to the mire of our despondency.
Barack Obama cannot be a Kenyan, and Kenyans cannot
grasp Barack Obama's dream. We have already despaired of it, and of ourselves. His dream would have died with ours, here at home, here in the graveyard of hope.
But oh, how we yearn to see ourselves reflected in his
eyes...
*Wambui Mwangi is an assitant professor of Political
Science at the University of Toronto, Canada. This article first appeared inThe East African, June 15 2008.
*Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or
comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
_______________________________________________ kictanet mailing list kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/listinfo/kictanet
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-- Brian Munyao Longwe e-mail: blongwe@gmail.com cell: + 254 722 518 744 blog : http://zinjlog.blogspot.com meta-blog: http://mashilingi.blogspot.com
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OK. This is interesting, please point any single item or point in my Hydrrabad presentation that was either wrong, empty or abusive. I and others have already pointed out what was wrong, empty and abusive in both your and Maina's submissions last week. And please stick to the point, and focus your response? B Sent from my iPhone On 10 Dec 2008, at 9:08 AM, "Robert Alai" <alai.robert@gmail.com> wrote:
Brian
I also beg to differ with you. Neither you nor Githongo has the capacity to determine inanity of anybody. We should have a committee which has that capacity but it can not rest on an individual. Otherwise I will say that your submission in india was inane? Would you agree. Its an abuse as long as you use the word wrongly.
Abuse tr.v. a·bused, a·bus·ing, a·bus·es 1. To use wrongly or improperly; misuse: abuse alcohol; abuse a privilege. 2. To hurt or injure by maltreatment; ill-use. 3. To force sexual activity on; rape or molest. 4. To assail with contemptuous, coarse, or insulting words; revile. 5. Obsolete To deceive or trick.
Alai
On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 9:01 AM, Brian Longwe <blongwe@gmail.com> wrote: Hi Walu,
I'm sorry but I beg to differ. Githongo's comment was perfectly in order. The tirade witnessed last week was definitely "inane" i.e. having little sense or importance - refer below. Kwani what dictionary do you use?
in·ane adj 1. having little sense or importance 2. empty, insubstantial, or void
n great emptiness, especially the perceived emptiness of outer space (archaic)
Encarta® World English Dictionary © 1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Developed for Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 6:26 PM, John Walubengo <jwalu@yahoo.com> wrote: JM,
I agree. I just checked the dictionary and the word 'inane' is indeed quite abusive. Githongo therefore becomes the 1st victim to go onto "moderated-mode" as we speak.
As for the so called 'corrupt' (whoever they maybe), the position remains that the list is really neither equipped nor designed to burst corrupt agents. But that said, it all depends on the angle one decides to take concerning (ICT) corruption. Specifically, general guidelines regarding libel or character assassination must prevail otherwise things get reduced very fast to shouting marches - at the expense of progressive ICT development.
walu. --- On Mon, 12/8/08, John Maina <j.maina@ymail.com> wrote:
From: John Maina <j.maina@ymail.com> Subject: Re: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace To: "P Gitau Githongo" <pgitau@githongo.com>, "John Walubengo" <jwalu@yahoo.com , odhiambo@gmail.com Cc: "KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions" <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> Date: Monday, December 8, 2008, 4:27 PM Walu
Is inane chatter not an abuse? Or are there some who are allowed to abuse the people on this mailing list?
What do people gain in defending the corrupt? Why do we fear to hear the people who are incorrigibly corrupt being rebuked?
JM
________________________________ From: P Gitau Githongo <pgitau@githongo.com> To: j.maina@ymail.com Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> Sent: Monday, December 8, 2008 3:14:06 PM Subject: Re: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace
Alice,
Might I suggest that you add a guiding principle to the mailing list rules, along the lines of..
'Contributors should seek to improve or benefit the understanding and knowledge of others as well as their own.'
You could then urge contributors to gauge their own statements according to such a principle before forwarding to the group.
Hopefully that way, the rest of us seeking to practice the above principle are not subject to the kind of deluge of inane chatter seen last week.
-----Original Message----- From: kictanet-bounces+pgitau=githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke [mailto:kictanet-bounces+pgitau=githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke] On Behalf Of alice@apc.org Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2008 8:45 AM To: pgitau@githongo.com Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions Subject: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace
Dear All,
Could we comment on the presentation that Brian (a Kenyan) made at the IGF currently taking place in Hyderabad. It was an excellent presentation on access befitting the theme of the forum: "Internet for all" and he has done us proud.
It is also great to have quite a large Kenyan delegation at this India IGF contributing Kenyan specific IG issues. The IGF is a process/event/forum that had not received enough attention both at the national and regional level. ---------
I will also take this opportunity to remind listers of some of the KICTAnet mailing list rules:
* Please mind your manners: * Be polite - virtual members are real not a cyberspace borg with no feelings. * Watch your words. Kick the bad language - People are listening. * Laws are laws - What's real in the real world are the same in cyberspace. * Don't send rude or offensive e-mails or postings. * Be ethical in your posting. Don't lie, plagiarize, defame, or deliberately do harm to another KICTANet forum user.
If you are not able to respect these simple rules...the KICTANet administrator will have no choice but to suspend you!
best alice
Binaifer Nowrojee wrote:
For those who have not read this opinion piece, I
would urge you to do so and reflect on it. Why do we need to bring down Brian Longwe on the basis of his nationality? Why not celebrate his success? Why assume that a non-Kenyan will not positively contribute to Kenya?
Best
Binaifer Nowrojee
Barack Obama and the graveyard of hope
Wambui Mwangi (2008-08-11)
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50078
Printer friendly version
There are 2 comments on this article.
I am finding it very difficult to join in the
jubilation about Senator Barack Obama. Not that I want to deny the man his victory, but my impulse to celebrate keeps deflating on the idea that the best thing that happened to little Barack was not growing up in Kenya.
I have been imagining alternative trajectories for him
if he had come to know the world through the eyes of a Kenyan citizen, if his mother and grandparents had not rescued him from our chaos and contradictions and brought him up somewhere his intellect and talent could grow.
If he had grown up here, and had he somehow managed to
retain most elements of his current self, he would have been another outstanding, intelligent and competent Luo man in our midst: and he would have been killed.
Yes, we would have assassinated a Barack Obama if he
had remained ours, with us, one of us here in this schizophrenic cauldron we call home. This is not going to stretch the imagination of any Kenyan - after all, when we had that incredibly good-looking and charismatic home-grown hero, Tom Mboya, we shot him to death.
And when that austerely intellectual and elegant
leader, Robert Ouko, threatened to look overly intelligent to the world, we killed him too. We killed Pio Gama Pinto and we killed JM Kariuki. There is no reason to suppose that Barack Obama, whose integrity of purpose and stringent sense of ethics even his enemies concede, would have survived his Kenyan roots.
He is much too intelligent, too charged with the
promise of history, too bold in his claim to a shining destiny, too full of the audacity of hope, for us to have let him survive. Kenya would have killed Barack Obama, or at least his dream, as we inevitably destroy, in one way or another, the best and the boldest of us. Goldenberg whistle blower David Munyakei's challenge to his country to be bigger than our greed was met with a whimper, and then with rapid abandonment. We did not deserve him, either.
As for John Githongo, he should have known better than
to take the idea of public ethics seriously - this is Kenya, after all. Let him enlighten people at Oxford instead; such considerations are too virtuous for us, too sensible, too conducive to a promising future. We do not even remark on the haunting wastage of all this shining accomplishment - Micere Mugo sings her lyrical poetry for Americans, and we do not even know enough to mourn the loss.
And yet we are all enchanted with the power of the
idea of Barack Obama, the hope of him, the beauty of his life's trajectory, the universe of possibilities and probabilities that it conjures for the least of the rest of us. If someone's cousin's friend's neighbour makes it to the United States... then we all have a chance. We have a strange predilection for schizophrenic loves and loyalties; we let geography dictate our alliances and imaginary lines decide our friends. It is as if our social contract states that here, at home, we are obliged to behave like fighting rats to each other but when abroad, when released from the shackles of kin and clan and conclave, we can fly and soar and master the sky.
When Wangari Maathai is abroad, we feel that her Nobel
Prize is partly represented in each of our Kenyan living rooms; when she comes home, she is just another Kikuyu politico. We preen about our athletes winning yet another international competition to anybody who will give us half a chance, but when they are at home we turn them into more fodder for militias.
Caine Prize winners are Kenyan by automatic assent,
but Binyavanga Wainaina is a Kikuyu writer when at home and Yvonne Owuor is indelibly a Luo - we shrink them to fit the midget-sized visions we have of ourselves.
It is clear to all of us, and the evidence continues
to accrue, that we have, collectively, a certain global competence, as Kenyans, that we produce individuals of substance and historical purpose.
Being Kenyan, however, we prefer to drown in the
pettiness of our parochial quarrels when at home, and if one of us threatens to be too hopeful, too ambitious, too intelligent, too creative or too inspirational to fit into our trivial little categories of hatred and suspicion, we kill them, or exile them from our societies, or we just cause them to run away inside, hiding from us and from themselves the grandeur of their souls, the splendid landscapes of their imagined tomorrows.
Nothing but the worst for us, at home. We recognise
each other by our most rancid rhetoric. We insist upon it, we cultivate it, we elevate it to an art form: Kenyan, and quarrelsome.
Kenyan, and clannish. Kenyan, and counter-productive.
Kenyan, and self-destructive. Kenyan, and consistently heart-breaking. Genius everywhere, and not a thought to be had. Promise and potential everywhere, and not an opportunity to be had. Money everywhere, and not an honest penny to be earned. Helicopters aplenty, but no help for the needy. A land awash in Cabinet ministers and poverty.
I have been watching Kenyans getting high on
Obamamania, and I am wondering what we are so happy about? It is perhaps that we are beginning to acknowledge what we should always have known - given a half a chance, an ever so slightly conducive context, Kenyans are more likely to over-achieve than not. At the faintest provocation, Kenyans will leap past expectations without breaking their stride or breaking a sweat, especially if they happen to have escaped the imprisoning edifice we call home and found foreign contexts to flourish in, no matter how alien.
I went to a town in the Canadian Arctic once, in the
far north, where in summer the sun shines even at midnight and in the winter the world is an endless landscape of ice and snow. Here, far, far away from home, where nothing was familiar except the gentleness of elderly Inuit women and the comforting weirdness of the white residents, I was told that the local dentist had, for many years, been a Kenyan. Everybody said he had been an excellent dentist, out there in the desert of the cold. I was unsurprised.
We are an adventurous people, we Kenyans, and we take
to the world outside our home as if born to a conquistador culture - we are brave and brash and bold, out there. We buy and sell things, and make money at it, out there. We go to school and excel and cover ourselves with accreditations, out there. We win things, out there. We get prizes, out there. We are at our best, out there.
However, at home, for some reason we refuse to either
acknowledge or examine - we have chosen simply to set aside this capacity. Here, at home, nothing but the very lowest common denominator will do; nothing but the basest and most brutal aspects of our selves are to be presented to each other; nothing but the most cynical manipulation is the basis of our political space. We prefer to be ruled by individuals whose mediocrity is matched only by their mendacity, here at home.
We prefer to abdicate our adult responsibilities and
capacity for reason to "leaders" whose lack of virtue is as legendary as our attractively exotic pastoralists. We do not only waste talent, here at home - we go out of our way to suppress and repress it. We do not only deny dreams, here in Kenya - we devour them, and ask each other, "Who do you think you are?" As if the success of another is an affront.
In Kenya, grand vision and soaring imagination is
illegitimate; here, they just call you naive. Out there, you stand a chance of becoming a hero; at home, you will have nothing but the taste of ashes in your mouth. Mothers, take your children abroad.
Barack Obama has written two books, in which he
discusses ideas. Ideas. This is a man with vision and conviction, and enough good ideas that even those who do not like the pigmentally-advantaged are listening, and changing their minds.
Even those who think that his name sounds suspiciously
like a terrorist's are reading his books and listening to his speeches, and changing their minds. This is a man with interesting and inspiring things to say - which disqualifies him from any Kenyan-ness we would have liked to claim.
Americans like the image of them that Barack Obama has
painted in words; which Kenyan leader would dare to build dreams bigger than his roots? Which Kenyan leader would ever be so foolish as to attempt inspiration instead of instigation?
Barack Obama has seduced the world by the power of his
persuasiveness, and while Kenyans raise another glass to the accomplishments of "one of our own," it seems clear to me that we gave up our rights to him when we gave up our hopes for ourselves. When we settled for incompetence, and corruption, and callousness, we defined ourselves out of his universe, and out of his dreams.
We rejected Barack Obama-ness when we allowed those
pangas to slash our dreams, when we watched our hopes spiral away in smoke. We allowed the ones who had done this to become the only mirrors of ourselves, and then squelched our disgraced selves back to the mire of our despondency.
Barack Obama cannot be a Kenyan, and Kenyans cannot
grasp Barack Obama's dream. We have already despaired of it, and of ourselves. His dream would have died with ours, here at home, here in the graveyard of hope.
But oh, how we yearn to see ourselves reflected in his
eyes...
*Wambui Mwangi is an assitant professor of Political
Science at the University of Toronto, Canada. This article first appeared inThe East African, June 15 2008.
*Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or
comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
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-- Brian Munyao Longwe e-mail: blongwe@gmail.com cell: + 254 722 518 744 blog : http://zinjlog.blogspot.com meta-blog: http://mashilingi.blogspot.com
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Guys, why do we dig deep into what doesn't matter most? Well, to me this shows what a true Kenyan is, but can't we change for development? Regards. Loa. ________________________________ From: Brian Munyao Longwe <blongwe@gmail.com> To: jlobore@yahoo.com Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 9:40:42 AM Subject: Re: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace OK. This is interesting, please point any single item or point in my Hydrrabad presentation that was either wrong, empty or abusive.. I and others have already pointed out what was wrong, empty and abusive in both your and Maina's submissions last week. And please stick to the point, and focus your response? B Sent from my iPhone On 10 Dec 2008, at 9:08 AM, "Robert Alai" <alai.robert@gmail.com> wrote: Brian I also beg to differ with you. Neither you nor Githongo has the capacity to determine inanity of anybody. We should have a committee which has that capacity but it can not rest on an individual. Otherwise I will say that your submission in india was inane? Would you agree. Its an abuse as long as you use the word wrongly. Abuse tr.v. a·bused, a·bus·ing, a·bus·es 1. To use wrongly or improperly; misuse: abuse alcohol; abuse a privilege. 2. To hurt or injure by maltreatment; ill-use. 3. To force sexual activity on; rape or molest. 4. To assail with contemptuous, coarse, or insulting words; revile. 5. Obsolete To deceive or trick. Alai On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 9:01 AM, Brian Longwe <blongwe@gmail.com> wrote: Hi Walu, I'm sorry but I beg to differ. Githongo's comment was perfectly in order. The tirade witnessed last week was definitely "inane" i.e. having little sense or importance - refer below. Kwani what dictionary do you use? in·ane adj 1. having little sense or importance 2. empty, insubstantial, or void n great emptiness, especially the perceived emptiness of outer space (archaic) Encarta® World English Dictionary © 1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Developed for Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 6:26 PM, John Walubengo <jwalu@yahoo.com> wrote: JM, I agree. I just checked the dictionary and the word 'inane' is indeed quite abusive. Githongo therefore becomes the 1st victim to go onto "moderated-mode" as we speak. As for the so called 'corrupt' (whoever they maybe), the position remains that the list is really neither equipped nor designed to burst corrupt agents. But that said, it all depends on the angle one decides to take concerning (ICT) corruption. Specifically, general guidelines regarding libel or character assassination must prevail otherwise things get reduced very fast to shouting marches - at the expense of progressive ICT development. walu. --- On Mon, 12/8/08, John Maina <j.maina@ymail.com> wrote:
From: John Maina <j.maina@ymail.com>
Subject: Re: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace To: "P Gitau Githongo" <pgitau@githongo.com>, "John Walubengo" <jwalu@yahoo.com>, odhiambo@gmail.com
Cc: "KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions" <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> Date: Monday, December 8, 2008, 4:27 PM
Walu
Is inane chatter not an abuse? Or are there some who are allowed to abuse the people on this mailing list?
What do people gain in defending the corrupt? Why do we fear to hear the people who are incorrigibly corrupt being rebuked?
JM
________________________________ From: P Gitau Githongo <pgitau@githongo.com> To: j.maina@ymail.com Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> Sent: Monday, December 8, 2008 3:14:06 PM Subject: Re: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace
Alice,
Might I suggest that you add a guiding principle to the mailing list rules, along the lines of..
'Contributors should seek to improve or benefit the understanding and knowledge of others as well as their own.'
You could then urge contributors to gauge their own statements according to such a principle before forwarding to the group.
Hopefully that way, the rest of us seeking to practice the above principle are not subject to the kind of deluge of inane chatter seen last week.
-----Original Message----- From: kictanet-bounces+pgitau=githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke [mailto:kictanet-bounces+pgitau=githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke] On Behalf Of alice@apc.org Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2008 8:45 AM To: pgitau@githongo.com Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions Subject: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace
Dear All,
Could we comment on the presentation that Brian (a Kenyan) made at the IGF currently taking place in Hyderabad. It was an excellent presentation on access befitting the theme of the forum: "Internet for all" and he has done us proud.
It is also great to have quite a large Kenyan delegation at this India IGF contributing Kenyan specific IG issues. The IGF is a process/event/forum that had not received enough attention both at the national and regional level. ---------
I will also take this opportunity to remind listers of some of the KICTAnet mailing list rules:
* Please mind your manners: * Be polite - virtual members are real not a cyberspace borg with no feelings. * Watch your words. Kick the bad language - People are listening. * Laws are laws - What's real in the real world are the same in cyberspace. * Don't send rude or offensive e-mails or postings. * Be ethical in your posting. Don't lie, plagiarize, defame, or deliberately do harm to another KICTANet forum user.
If you are not able to respect these simple rules...the KICTANet administrator will have no choice but to suspend you!
best alice
Binaifer Nowrojee wrote:
For those who have not read this opinion piece, I
would urge you to do so and reflect on it. Why do we need to bring down Brian Longwe on the basis of his nationality? Why not celebrate his success? Why assume that a non-Kenyan will not positively contribute to Kenya?
Best
Binaifer Nowrojee
Barack Obama and the graveyard of hope
Wambui Mwangi (2008-08-11)
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50078
Printer friendly version
There are 2 comments on this article.
I am finding it very difficult to join in the
jubilation about Senator Barack Obama. Not that I want to deny the man his victory, but my impulse to celebrate keeps deflating on the idea that the best thing that happened to little Barack was not growing up in Kenya.
I have been imagining alternative trajectories for him
if he had come to know the world through the eyes of a Kenyan citizen, if his mother and grandparents had not rescued him from our chaos and contradictions and brought him up somewhere his intellect and talent could grow.
If he had grown up here, and had he somehow managed to
retain most elements of his current self, he would have been another outstanding, intelligent and competent Luo man in our midst: and he would have been killed.
Yes, we would have assassinated a Barack Obama if he
had remained ours, with us, one of us here in this schizophrenic cauldron we call home. This is not going to stretch the imagination of any Kenyan - after all, when we had that incredibly good-looking and charismatic home-grown hero, Tom Mboya, we shot him to death.
And when that austerely intellectual and elegant
leader, Robert Ouko, threatened to look overly intelligent to the world, we killed him too. We killed Pio Gama Pinto and we killed JM Kariuki. There is no reason to suppose that Barack Obama, whose integrity of purpose and stringent sense of ethics even his enemies concede, would have survived his Kenyan roots.
He is much too intelligent, too charged with the
promise of history, too bold in his claim to a shining destiny, too full of the audacity of hope, for us to have let him survive. Kenya would have killed Barack Obama, or at least his dream, as we inevitably destroy, in one way or another, the best and the boldest of us. Goldenberg whistle blower David Munyakei's challenge to his country to be bigger than our greed was met with a whimper, and then with rapid abandonment. We did not deserve him, either.
As for John Githongo, he should have known better than
to take the idea of public ethics seriously - this is Kenya, after all. Let him enlighten people at Oxford instead; such considerations are too virtuous for us, too sensible, too conducive to a promising future. We do not even remark on the haunting wastage of all this shining accomplishment - Micere Mugo sings her lyrical poetry for Americans, and we do not even know enough to mourn the loss.
And yet we are all enchanted with the power of the
idea of Barack Obama, the hope of him, the beauty of his life's trajectory, the universe of possibilities and probabilities that it conjures for the least of the rest of us. If someone's cousin's friend's neighbour makes it to the United States... then we all have a chance. We have a strange predilection for schizophrenic loves and loyalties; we let geography dictate our alliances and imaginary lines decide our friends. It is as if our social contract states that here, at home, we are obliged to behave like fighting rats to each other but when abroad, when released from the shackles of kin and clan and conclave, we can fly and soar and master the sky.
When Wangari Maathai is abroad, we feel that her Nobel
Prize is partly represented in each of our Kenyan living rooms; when she comes home, she is just another Kikuyu politico. We preen about our athletes winning yet another international competition to anybody who will give us half a chance, but when they are at home we turn them into more fodder for militias.
Caine Prize winners are Kenyan by automatic assent,
but Binyavanga Wainaina is a Kikuyu writer when at home and Yvonne Owuor is indelibly a Luo - we shrink them to fit the midget-sized visions we have of ourselves.
It is clear to all of us, and the evidence continues
to accrue, that we have, collectively, a certain global competence, as Kenyans, that we produce individuals of substance and historical purpose.
Being Kenyan, however, we prefer to drown in the
pettiness of our parochial quarrels when at home, and if one of us threatens to be too hopeful, too ambitious, too intelligent, too creative or too inspirational to fit into our trivial little categories of hatred and suspicion, we kill them, or exile them from our societies, or we just cause them to run away inside, hiding from us and from themselves the grandeur of their souls, the splendid landscapes of their imagined tomorrows.
Nothing but the worst for us, at home. We recognise
each other by our most rancid rhetoric. We insist upon it, we cultivate it, we elevate it to an art form: Kenyan, and quarrelsome.
Kenyan, and clannish. Kenyan, and counter-productive.
Kenyan, and self-destructive. Kenyan, and consistently heart-breaking. Genius everywhere, and not a thought to be had. Promise and potential everywhere, and not an opportunity to be had. Money everywhere, and not an honest penny to be earned. Helicopters aplenty, but no help for the needy. A land awash in Cabinet ministers and poverty.
I have been watching Kenyans getting high on
Obamamania, and I am wondering what we are so happy about? It is perhaps that we are beginning to acknowledge what we should always have known - given a half a chance, an ever so slightly conducive context, Kenyans are more likely to over-achieve than not. At the faintest provocation, Kenyans will leap past expectations without breaking their stride or breaking a sweat, especially if they happen to have escaped the imprisoning edifice we call home and found foreign contexts to flourish in, no matter how alien.
I went to a town in the Canadian Arctic once, in the
far north, where in summer the sun shines even at midnight and in the winter the world is an endless landscape of ice and snow. Here, far, far away from home, where nothing was familiar except the gentleness of elderly Inuit women and the comforting weirdness of the white residents, I was told that the local dentist had, for many years, been a Kenyan. Everybody said he had been an excellent dentist, out there in the desert of the cold. I was unsurprised.
We are an adventurous people, we Kenyans, and we take
to the world outside our home as if born to a conquistador culture - we are brave and brash and bold, out there. We buy and sell things, and make money at it, out there. We go to school and excel and cover ourselves with accreditations, out there. We win things, out there. We get prizes, out there. We are at our best, out there.
However, at home, for some reason we refuse to either
acknowledge or examine - we have chosen simply to set aside this capacity. Here, at home, nothing but the very lowest common denominator will do; nothing but the basest and most brutal aspects of our selves are to be presented to each other; nothing but the most cynical manipulation is the basis of our political space. We prefer to be ruled by individuals whose mediocrity is matched only by their mendacity, here at home.
We prefer to abdicate our adult responsibilities and
capacity for reason to "leaders" whose lack of virtue is as legendary as our attractively exotic pastoralists. We do not only waste talent, here at home - we go out of our way to suppress and repress it. We do not only deny dreams, here in Kenya - we devour them, and ask each other, "Who do you think you are?" As if the success of another is an affront.
In Kenya, grand vision and soaring imagination is
illegitimate; here, they just call you naive. Out there, you stand a chance of becoming a hero; at home, you will have nothing but the taste of ashes in your mouth. Mothers, take your children abroad.
Barack Obama has written two books, in which he
discusses ideas. Ideas. This is a man with vision and conviction, and enough good ideas that even those who do not like the pigmentally-advantaged are listening, and changing their minds.
Even those who think that his name sounds suspiciously
like a terrorist's are reading his books and listening to his speeches, and changing their minds. This is a man with interesting and inspiring things to say - which disqualifies him from any Kenyan-ness we would have liked to claim.
Americans like the image of them that Barack Obama has
painted in words; which Kenyan leader would dare to build dreams bigger than his roots? Which Kenyan leader would ever be so foolish as to attempt inspiration instead of instigation?
Barack Obama has seduced the world by the power of his
persuasiveness, and while Kenyans raise another glass to the accomplishments of "one of our own," it seems clear to me that we gave up our rights to him when we gave up our hopes for ourselves. When we settled for incompetence, and corruption, and callousness, we defined ourselves out of his universe, and out of his dreams.
We rejected Barack Obama-ness when we allowed those
pangas to slash our dreams, when we watched our hopes spiral away in smoke. We allowed the ones who had done this to become the only mirrors of ourselves, and then squelched our disgraced selves back to the mire of our despondency.
Barack Obama cannot be a Kenyan, and Kenyans cannot
grasp Barack Obama's dream. We have already despaired of it, and of ourselves. His dream would have died with ours, here at home, here in the graveyard of hope.
But oh, how we yearn to see ourselves reflected in his
eyes...
*Wambui Mwangi is an assitant professor of Political
Science at the University of Toronto, Canada. This article first appeared inThe East African, June 15 2008.
*Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or
comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
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_______________________________________________ kictanet mailing list kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/listinfo/kictanet This message was sent to: blongwe@gmail.com Unsubscribe or change your options at http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/options/kictanet/blongwe%40gmail.com -- Brian Munyao Longwe e-mail: blongwe@gmail.com cell: + 254 722 518 744 blog : http://zinjlog.blogspot.com meta-blog: http://mashilingi.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ kictanet mailing list kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/listinfo/kictanet This message was sent to: alai.robert@gmail.com Unsubscribe or change your options at http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/options/kictanet/alai.robert%40gmail.com ref="mailto:kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke">kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/listinfo/kictanet This message was sent to: alai.robert@gmail.com Unsubscribe or change your options at http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/options/kictanet/alai.robert%40gmail.com
Loa people are looking for a chance for fights here and they really feel threatened. They would have loved to not hear anything come from anybody they don't agree with. But that to us don't matter since they will just have to live with it. Thee earlier, the better Alai On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 9:48 AM, Lobore Junior <jlobore@yahoo.com> wrote:
Guys,
why do we dig deep into what doesn't matter most?
Well, to me this shows what a true Kenyan is, but can't we change for development?
Regards.
Loa.
------------------------------ *From:* Brian Munyao Longwe <blongwe@gmail.com> *To:* jlobore@yahoo.com *Cc:* KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> *Sent:* Wednesday, December 10, 2008 9:40:42 AM
*Subject:* Re: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace
OK. This is interesting, please point any single item or point in my Hydrrabad presentation that was either wrong, empty or abusive.
I and others have already pointed out what was wrong, empty and abusive in both your and Maina's submissions last week.
And please stick to the point, and focus your response?
B
Sent from my iPhone
On 10 Dec 2008, at 9:08 AM, "Robert Alai" <alai.robert@gmail.com> wrote:
Brian
I also beg to differ with you. Neither you nor Githongo has the capacity to determine inanity of anybody. We should have a committee which has that capacity but it can not rest on an individual. Otherwise I will say that your submission in india was inane? Would you agree. Its an abuse as long as you use the word wrongly.
*Abuse * *tr.v.* *a·bused*, *a·bus·ing*, *a·bus·es* *1. *To use wrongly or improperly; misuse: abuse alcohol; abuse a privilege. *2. *To hurt or injure by maltreatment; ill-use. *3. *To force sexual activity on; rape or molest. *4. *To assail with contemptuous, coarse, or insulting words; revile. *5. **Obsolete* To deceive or trick.
Alai
On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 9:01 AM, Brian Longwe < <blongwe@gmail.com> blongwe@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Walu,
I'm sorry but I beg to differ. Githongo's comment was perfectly in order. The tirade witnessed last week was definitely "inane" i.e. having little sense or importance - refer below. Kwani what dictionary do you use?
in·ane adj 1. having little sense or importance 2. empty, insubstantial, or void
n great emptiness, especially the perceived emptiness of outer space (archaic)
Encarta(R) World English Dictionary (c) 1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Developed for Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 6:26 PM, John Walubengo < <jwalu@yahoo.com> jwalu@yahoo.com> wrote:
JM,
I agree. I just checked the dictionary and the word 'inane' is indeed quite abusive. Githongo therefore becomes the 1st victim to go onto "moderated-mode" as we speak.
As for the so called 'corrupt' (whoever they maybe), the position remains that the list is really neither equipped nor designed to burst corrupt agents. But that said, it all depends on the angle one decides to take concerning (ICT) corruption. Specifically, general guidelines regarding libel or character assassination must prevail otherwise things get reduced very fast to shouting marches - at the expense of progressive ICT development.
walu. --- On Mon, 12/8/08, John Maina < <j.maina@ymail.com>j.maina@ymail.com> wrote:
From: John Maina < <j.maina@ymail.com>j.maina@ymail.com> Subject: Re: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace To: "P Gitau Githongo" < <pgitau@githongo.com>pgitau@githongo.com>, "John Walubengo" < <jwalu@yahoo.com>jwalu@yahoo.com>, <odhiambo@gmail.com>odhiambo@gmail.com Cc: "KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions" <<kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> Date: Monday, December 8, 2008, 4:27 PM Walu
Is inane chatter not an abuse? Or are there some who are allowed to abuse the people on this mailing list?
What do people gain in defending the corrupt? Why do we fear to hear the people who are incorrigibly corrupt being rebuked?
JM
________________________________ From: P Gitau Githongo < <pgitau@githongo.com>pgitau@githongo.com> To: <j.maina@ymail.com>j.maina@ymail.com Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions < <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke>kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> Sent: Monday, December 8, 2008 3:14:06 PM Subject: Re: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace
Alice,
Might I suggest that you add a guiding principle to the mailing list rules, along the lines of..
'Contributors should seek to improve or benefit the understanding and knowledge of others as well as their own.'
You could then urge contributors to gauge their own statements according to such a principle before forwarding to the group.
Hopefully that way, the rest of us seeking to practice the above principle are not subject to the kind of deluge of inane chatter seen last week.
-----Original Message----- From: kictanet-bounces+pgitau=githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke [mailto:kictanet-bounces+pgitau <kictanet-bounces%2Bpgitau>= githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke] On Behalf Of <alice@apc.org>alice@apc.org Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2008 8:45 AM To: <pgitau@githongo.com>pgitau@githongo.com Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions Subject: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace
Dear All,
Could we comment on the presentation that Brian (a Kenyan) made at the IGF currently taking place in Hyderabad. It was an excellent presentation on access befitting the theme of the forum: "Internet for all" and he has done us proud.
It is also great to have quite a large Kenyan delegation at this India IGF contributing Kenyan specific IG issues. The IGF is a process/event/forum that had not received enough attention both at the national and regional level. ---------
I will also take this opportunity to remind listers of some of the KICTAnet mailing list rules:
* Please mind your manners: * Be polite - virtual members are real not a cyberspace borg with no feelings. * Watch your words. Kick the bad language - People are listening. * Laws are laws - What's real in the real world are the same in cyberspace. * Don't send rude or offensive e-mails or postings. * Be ethical in your posting. Don't lie, plagiarize, defame, or deliberately do harm to another KICTANet forum user.
If you are not able to respect these simple rules...the KICTANet administrator will have no choice but to suspend you!
best alice
Binaifer Nowrojee wrote:
For those who have not read this opinion piece, I
would urge you to do so and reflect on it. Why do we need to bring down Brian Longwe on the basis of his nationality? Why not celebrate his success? Why assume that a non-Kenyan will not positively contribute to Kenya?
Best
Binaifer Nowrojee
Barack Obama and the graveyard of hope
Wambui Mwangi (2008-08-11)
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50078
Printer friendly version
There are 2 comments on this article.
I am finding it very difficult to join in the
jubilation about Senator Barack Obama. Not that I want to deny the man his victory, but my impulse to celebrate keeps deflating on the idea that the best thing that happened to little Barack was not growing up in Kenya.
I have been imagining alternative trajectories for him
if he had come to know the world through the eyes of a Kenyan citizen, if his mother and grandparents had not rescued him from our chaos and contradictions and brought him up somewhere his intellect and talent could grow.
If he had grown up here, and had he somehow managed to
retain most elements of his current self, he would have been another outstanding, intelligent and competent Luo man in our midst: and he would have been killed.
Yes, we would have assassinated a Barack Obama if he
had remained ours, with us, one of us here in this schizophrenic cauldron we call home. This is not going to stretch the imagination of any Kenyan - after all, when we had that incredibly good-looking and charismatic home-grown hero, Tom Mboya, we shot him to death..
And when that austerely intellectual and elegant
leader, Robert Ouko, threatened to look overly intelligent to the world, we killed him too. We killed Pio Gama Pinto and we killed JM Kariuki. There is no reason to suppose that Barack Obama, whose integrity of purpose and stringent sense of ethics even his enemies concede, would have survived his Kenyan roots.
He is much too intelligent, too charged with the
promise of history, too bold in his claim to a shining destiny, too full of the audacity of hope, for us to have let him survive. Kenya would have killed Barack Obama, or at least his dream, as we inevitably destroy, in one way or another, the best and the boldest of us. Goldenberg whistle blower David Munyakei's challenge to his country to be bigger than our greed was met with a whimper, and then with rapid abandonment. We did not deserve him, either.
As for John Githongo, he should have known better than
to take the idea of public ethics seriously - this is Kenya, after all. Let him enlighten people at Oxford instead; such considerations are too virtuous for us, too sensible, too conducive to a promising future. We do not even remark on the haunting wastage of all this shining accomplishment - Micere Mugo sings her lyrical poetry for Americans, and we do not even know enough to mourn the loss.
And yet we are all enchanted with the power of the
idea of Barack Obama, the hope of him, the beauty of his life's trajectory, the universe of possibilities and probabilities that it conjures for the least of the rest of us. If someone's cousin's friend's neighbour makes it to the United States... then we all have a chance. We have a strange predilection for schizophrenic loves and loyalties; we let geography dictate our alliances and imaginary lines decide our friends. It is as if our social contract states that here, at home, we are obliged to behave like fighting rats to each other but when abroad, when released from the shackles of kin and clan and conclave, we can fly and soar and master the sky.
When Wangari Maathai is abroad, we feel that her Nobel
Prize is partly represented in each of our Kenyan living rooms; when she comes home, she is just another Kikuyu politico. We preen about our athletes winning yet another international competition to anybody who will give us half a chance, but when they are at home we turn them into more fodder for militias.
Caine Prize winners are Kenyan by automatic assent,
but Binyavanga Wainaina is a Kikuyu writer when at home and Yvonne Owuor is indelibly a Luo - we shrink them to fit the midget-sized visions we have of ourselves.
It is clear to all of us, and the evidence continues
to accrue, that we have, collectively, a certain global competence, as Kenyans, that we produce individuals of substance and historical purpose.
Being Kenyan, however, we prefer to drown in the
pettiness of our parochial quarrels when at home, and if one of us threatens to be too hopeful, too ambitious, too intelligent, too creative or too inspirational to fit into our trivial little categories of hatred and suspicion, we kill them, or exile them from our societies, or we just cause them to run away inside, hiding from us and from themselves the grandeur of their souls, the splendid landscapes of their imagined tomorrows.
Nothing but the worst for us, at home. We recognise
each other by our most rancid rhetoric. We insist upon it, we cultivate it, we elevate it to an art form: Kenyan, and quarrelsome.
Kenyan, and clannish. Kenyan, and counter-productive.
Kenyan, and self-destructive. Kenyan, and consistently heart-breaking. Genius everywhere, and not a thought to be had. Promise and potential everywhere, and not an opportunity to be had. Money everywhere, and not an honest penny to be earned. Helicopters aplenty, but no help for the needy. A land awash in Cabinet ministers and poverty.
I have been watching Kenyans getting high on
Obamamania, and I am wondering what we are so happy about? It is perhaps that we are beginning to acknowledge what we should always have known - given a half a chance, an ever so slightly conducive context, Kenyans are more likely to over-achieve than not. At the faintest provocation, Kenyans will leap past expectations without breaking their stride or breaking a sweat, especially if they happen to have escaped the imprisoning edifice we call home and found foreign contexts to flourish in, no matter how alien.
I went to a town in the Canadian Arctic once, in the
far north, where in summer the sun shines even at midnight and in the winter the world is an endless landscape of ice and snow. Here, far, far away from home, where nothing was familiar except the gentleness of elderly Inuit women and the comforting weirdness of the white residents, I was told that the local dentist had, for many years, been a Kenyan. Everybody said he had been an excellent dentist, out there in the desert of the cold. I was unsurprised.
We are an adventurous people, we Kenyans, and we take
to the world outside our home as if born to a conquistador culture - we are brave and brash and bold, out there. We buy and sell things, and make money at it, out there. We go to school and excel and cover ourselves with accreditations, out there. We win things, out there. We get prizes, out there. We are at our best, out there.
However, at home, for some reason we refuse to either
acknowledge or examine - we have chosen simply to set aside this capacity. Here, at home, nothing but the very lowest common denominator will do; nothing but the basest and most brutal aspects of our selves are to be presented to each other; nothing but the most cynical manipulation is the basis of our political space. We prefer to be ruled by individuals whose mediocrity is matched only by their mendacity, here at home.
We prefer to abdicate our adult responsibilities and
capacity for reason to "leaders" whose lack of virtue is as legendary as our attractively exotic pastoralists. We do not only waste talent, here at home - we go out of our way to suppress and repress it. We do not only deny dreams, here in Kenya - we devour them, and ask each other, "Who do you think you are?" As if the success of another is an affront.
In Kenya, grand vision and soaring imagination is
illegitimate; here, they just call you naive. Out there, you stand a chance of becoming a hero; at home, you will have nothing but the taste of ashes in your mouth. Mothers, take your children abroad.
Barack Obama has written two books, in which he
discusses ideas. Ideas. This is a man with vision and conviction, and enough good ideas that even those who do not like the pigmentally-advantaged are listening, and changing their minds.
Even those who think that his name sounds suspiciously
like a terrorist's are reading his books and listening to his speeches, and changing their minds. This is a man with interesting and inspiring things to say - which disqualifies him from any Kenyan-ness we would have liked to claim.
Americans like the image of them that Barack Obama has
painted in words; which Kenyan leader would dare to build dreams bigger than his roots? Which Kenyan leader would ever be so foolish as to attempt inspiration instead of instigation?
Barack Obama has seduced the world by the power of his
persuasiveness, and while Kenyans raise another glass to the accomplishments of "one of our own," it seems clear to me that we gave up our rights to him when we gave up our hopes for ourselves. When we settled for incompetence, and corruption, and callousness, we defined ourselves out of his universe, and out of his dreams.
We rejected Barack Obama-ness when we allowed those
pangas to slash our dreams, when we watched our hopes spiral away in smoke. We allowed the ones who had done this to become the only mirrors of ourselves, and then squelched our disgraced selves back to the mire of our despondency.
Barack Obama cannot be a Kenyan, and Kenyans cannot
grasp Barack Obama's dream. We have already despaired of it, and of ourselves. His dream would have died with ours, here at home, here in the graveyard of hope.
But oh, how we yearn to see ourselves reflected in his
eyes...
*Wambui Mwangi is an assitant professor of Political
Science at the University of Toronto, Canada. This article first appeared inThe East African, June 15 2008.
*Please send comments to <editor@pambazuka.org>editor@pambazuka.orgor
comment online at <http://www.pambazuka.org/>http://www.pambazuka.org/
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-- Brian Munyao Longwe e-mail: <blongwe@gmail.com>blongwe@gmail.com cell: + 254 722 518 744 blog : <http://zinjlog.blogspot.com/>http://zinjlog.blogspot.com meta-blog: <http://mashilingi.blogspot.com/> http://mashilingi.blogspot.com
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Brian I am not disagreeing with you on your article. I am just pointing to you that being a nod master to Githongo's sentiments should be personal and should not be used to instruct moderators to pass judgments. I am saying that you can decide to be a yes sir and say how inane so and so was and how he should be done what but you know that I can also *DEMAND* that you bee struck off the list since you are a masquarader. I am simply saying that if you want revenge and be a boot licker to Githongo then I can also be a critic. Give us your ideas and in your mail I have not seen aanything proving that anybody is inane. Or is it that when someone points that you are Malawian then he or she will be inane? Does anyboddy wwho disagree with you qualify to be inane? Wakee up brother. The same juddgement you use on others might be used on you Alai On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 9:40 AM, Brian Munyao Longwe <blongwe@gmail.com>wrote:
OK. This is interesting, please point any single item or point in my Hydrrabad presentation that was either wrong, empty or abusive.
I and others have already pointed out what was wrong, empty and abusive in both your and Maina's submissions last week.
And please stick to the point, and focus your response?
B
Sent from my iPhone
On 10 Dec 2008, at 9:08 AM, "Robert Alai" <alai.robert@gmail.com> wrote:
Brian
I also beg to differ with you. Neither you nor Githongo has the capacity to determine inanity of anybody. We should have a committee which has that capacity but it can not rest on an individual. Otherwise I will say that your submission in india was inane? Would you agree. Its an abuse as long as you use the word wrongly.
*Abuse **tr.v.* *a·bused*, *a·bus·ing*, *a·bus·es* *1. * To use wrongly or improperly; misuse: abuse alcohol; abuse a privilege. *2. * To hurt or injure by maltreatment; ill-use. *3. * To force sexual activity on; rape or molest. *4. * To assail with contemptuous, coarse, or insulting words; revile. *5. * *Obsolete* To deceive or trick.
Alai
On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 9:01 AM, Brian Longwe < <blongwe@gmail.com> blongwe@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Walu,
I'm sorry but I beg to differ. Githongo's comment was perfectly in order. The tirade witnessed last week was definitely "inane" i.e. having little sense or importance - refer below. Kwani what dictionary do you use?
in·ane adj 1. having little sense or importance 2. empty, insubstantial, or void
n great emptiness, especially the perceived emptiness of outer space (archaic)
Encarta(R) World English Dictionary (c) 1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Developed for Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 6:26 PM, John Walubengo < <jwalu@yahoo.com> jwalu@yahoo.com> wrote:
JM,
I agree. I just checked the dictionary and the word 'inane' is indeed quite abusive. Githongo therefore becomes the 1st victim to go onto "moderated-mode" as we speak.
As for the so called 'corrupt' (whoever they maybe), the position remains that the list is really neither equipped nor designed to burst corrupt agents. But that said, it all depends on the angle one decides to take concerning (ICT) corruption. Specifically, general guidelines regarding libel or character assassination must prevail otherwise things get reduced very fast to shouting marches - at the expense of progressive ICT development.
walu. --- On Mon, 12/8/08, John Maina < <j.maina@ymail.com>j.maina@ymail.com> wrote:
From: John Maina < <j.maina@ymail.com>j.maina@ymail.com> Subject: Re: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace To: "P Gitau Githongo" < <pgitau@githongo.com>pgitau@githongo.com>, "John Walubengo" < <jwalu@yahoo.com>jwalu@yahoo.com>, <odhiambo@gmail.com>odhiambo@gmail.com Cc: "KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions" <<kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> Date: Monday, December 8, 2008, 4:27 PM Walu
Is inane chatter not an abuse? Or are there some who are allowed to abuse the people on this mailing list?
What do people gain in defending the corrupt? Why do we fear to hear the people who are incorrigibly corrupt being rebuked?
JM
________________________________ From: P Gitau Githongo < <pgitau@githongo.com>pgitau@githongo.com> To: <j.maina@ymail.com>j.maina@ymail.com Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions < <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke>kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> Sent: Monday, December 8, 2008 3:14:06 PM Subject: Re: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace
Alice,
Might I suggest that you add a guiding principle to the mailing list rules, along the lines of..
'Contributors should seek to improve or benefit the understanding and knowledge of others as well as their own.'
You could then urge contributors to gauge their own statements according to such a principle before forwarding to the group.
Hopefully that way, the rest of us seeking to practice the above principle are not subject to the kind of deluge of inane chatter seen last week.
-----Original Message----- From: kictanet-bounces+pgitau=githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke [mailto:kictanet-bounces+pgitau <kictanet-bounces%2Bpgitau>= githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke] On Behalf Of <alice@apc.org>alice@apc.org Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2008 8:45 AM To: <pgitau@githongo.com>pgitau@githongo.com Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions Subject: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace
Dear All,
Could we comment on the presentation that Brian (a Kenyan) made at the IGF currently taking place in Hyderabad. It was an excellent presentation on access befitting the theme of the forum: "Internet for all" and he has done us proud.
It is also great to have quite a large Kenyan delegation at this India IGF contributing Kenyan specific IG issues. The IGF is a process/event/forum that had not received enough attention both at the national and regional level. ---------
I will also take this opportunity to remind listers of some of the KICTAnet mailing list rules:
* Please mind your manners: * Be polite - virtual members are real not a cyberspace borg with no feelings. * Watch your words. Kick the bad language - People are listening. * Laws are laws - What's real in the real world are the same in cyberspace. * Don't send rude or offensive e-mails or postings. * Be ethical in your posting. Don't lie, plagiarize, defame, or deliberately do harm to another KICTANet forum user.
If you are not able to respect these simple rules...the KICTANet administrator will have no choice but to suspend you!
best alice
Binaifer Nowrojee wrote:
For those who have not read this opinion piece, I
would urge you to do so and reflect on it. Why do we need to bring down Brian Longwe on the basis of his nationality? Why not celebrate his success? Why assume that a non-Kenyan will not positively contribute to Kenya?
Best
Binaifer Nowrojee
Barack Obama and the graveyard of hope
Wambui Mwangi (2008-08-11)
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50078
Printer friendly version
There are 2 comments on this article.
I am finding it very difficult to join in the
jubilation about Senator Barack Obama. Not that I want to deny the man his victory, but my impulse to celebrate keeps deflating on the idea that the best thing that happened to little Barack was not growing up in Kenya.
I have been imagining alternative trajectories for him
if he had come to know the world through the eyes of a Kenyan citizen, if his mother and grandparents had not rescued him from our chaos and contradictions and brought him up somewhere his intellect and talent could grow.
If he had grown up here, and had he somehow managed to
retain most elements of his current self, he would have been another outstanding, intelligent and competent Luo man in our midst: and he would have been killed.
Yes, we would have assassinated a Barack Obama if he
had remained ours, with us, one of us here in this schizophrenic cauldron we call home. This is not going to stretch the imagination of any Kenyan - after all, when we had that incredibly good-looking and charismatic home-grown hero, Tom Mboya, we shot him to death.
And when that austerely intellectual and elegant
leader, Robert Ouko, threatened to look overly intelligent to the world, we killed him too. We killed Pio Gama Pinto and we killed JM Kariuki. There is no reason to suppose that Barack Obama, whose integrity of purpose and stringent sense of ethics even his enemies concede, would have survived his Kenyan roots.
He is much too intelligent, too charged with the
promise of history, too bold in his claim to a shining destiny, too full of the audacity of hope, for us to have let him survive. Kenya would have killed Barack Obama, or at least his dream, as we inevitably destroy, in one way or another, the best and the boldest of us. Goldenberg whistle blower David Munyakei's challenge to his country to be bigger than our greed was met with a whimper, and then with rapid abandonment. We did not deserve him, either.
As for John Githongo, he should have known better than
to take the idea of public ethics seriously - this is Kenya, after all. Let him enlighten people at Oxford instead; such considerations are too virtuous for us, too sensible, too conducive to a promising future. We do not even remark on the haunting wastage of all this shining accomplishment - Micere Mugo sings her lyrical poetry for Americans, and we do not even know enough to mourn the loss.
And yet we are all enchanted with the power of the
idea of Barack Obama, the hope of him, the beauty of his life's trajectory, the universe of possibilities and probabilities that it conjures for the least of the rest of us. If someone's cousin's friend's neighbour makes it to the United States... then we all have a chance. We have a strange predilection for schizophrenic loves and loyalties; we let geography dictate our alliances and imaginary lines decide our friends. It is as if our social contract states that here, at home, we are obliged to behave like fighting rats to each other but when abroad, when released from the shackles of kin and clan and conclave, we can fly and soar and master the sky.
When Wangari Maathai is abroad, we feel that her Nobel
Prize is partly represented in each of our Kenyan living rooms; when she comes home, she is just another Kikuyu politico. We preen about our athletes winning yet another international competition to anybody who will give us half a chance, but when they are at home we turn them into more fodder for militias.
Caine Prize winners are Kenyan by automatic assent,
but Binyavanga Wainaina is a Kikuyu writer when at home and Yvonne Owuor is indelibly a Luo - we shrink them to fit the midget-sized visions we have of ourselves.
It is clear to all of us, and the evidence continues
to accrue, that we have, collectively, a certain global competence, as Kenyans, that we produce individuals of substance and historical purpose.
Being Kenyan, however, we prefer to drown in the
pettiness of our parochial quarrels when at home, and if one of us threatens to be too hopeful, too ambitious, too intelligent, too creative or too inspirational to fit into our trivial little categories of hatred and suspicion, we kill them, or exile them from our societies, or we just cause them to run away inside, hiding from us and from themselves the grandeur of their souls, the splendid landscapes of their imagined tomorrows.
Nothing but the worst for us, at home. We recognise
each other by our most rancid rhetoric. We insist upon it, we cultivate it, we elevate it to an art form: Kenyan, and quarrelsome.
Kenyan, and clannish. Kenyan, and counter-productive.
Kenyan, and self-destructive. Kenyan, and consistently heart-breaking. Genius everywhere, and not a thought to be had. Promise and potential everywhere, and not an opportunity to be had. Money everywhere, and not an honest penny to be earned. Helicopters aplenty, but no help for the needy. A land awash in Cabinet ministers and poverty.
I have been watching Kenyans getting high on
Obamamania, and I am wondering what we are so happy about? It is perhaps that we are beginning to acknowledge what we should always have known - given a half a chance, an ever so slightly conducive context, Kenyans are more likely to over-achieve than not. At the faintest provocation, Kenyans will leap past expectations without breaking their stride or breaking a sweat, especially if they happen to have escaped the imprisoning edifice we call home and found foreign contexts to flourish in, no matter how alien.
I went to a town in the Canadian Arctic once, in the
far north, where in summer the sun shines even at midnight and in the winter the world is an endless landscape of ice and snow. Here, far, far away from home, where nothing was familiar except the gentleness of elderly Inuit women and the comforting weirdness of the white residents, I was told that the local dentist had, for many years, been a Kenyan. Everybody said he had been an excellent dentist, out there in the desert of the cold. I was unsurprised.
We are an adventurous people, we Kenyans, and we take
to the world outside our home as if born to a conquistador culture - we are brave and brash and bold, out there. We buy and sell things, and make money at it, out there. We go to school and excel and cover ourselves with accreditations, out there. We win things, out there. We get prizes, out there. We are at our best, out there.
However, at home, for some reason we refuse to either
acknowledge or examine - we have chosen simply to set aside this capacity. Here, at home, nothing but the very lowest common denominator will do; nothing but the basest and most brutal aspects of our selves are to be presented to each other; nothing but the most cynical manipulation is the basis of our political space. We prefer to be ruled by individuals whose mediocrity is matched only by their mendacity, here at home.
We prefer to abdicate our adult responsibilities and
capacity for reason to "leaders" whose lack of virtue is as legendary as our attractively exotic pastoralists. We do not only waste talent, here at home - we go out of our way to suppress and repress it. We do not only deny dreams, here in Kenya - we devour them, and ask each other, "Who do you think you are?" As if the success of another is an affront.
In Kenya, grand vision and soaring imagination is
illegitimate; here, they just call you naive. Out there, you stand a chance of becoming a hero; at home, you will have nothing but the taste of ashes in your mouth. Mothers, take your children abroad.
Barack Obama has written two books, in which he
discusses ideas. Ideas. This is a man with vision and conviction, and enough good ideas that even those who do not like the pigmentally-advantaged are listening, and changing their minds.
Even those who think that his name sounds suspiciously
like a terrorist's are reading his books and listening to his speeches, and changing their minds. This is a man with interesting and inspiring things to say - which disqualifies him from any Kenyan-ness we would have liked to claim.
Americans like the image of them that Barack Obama has
painted in words; which Kenyan leader would dare to build dreams bigger than his roots? Which Kenyan leader would ever be so foolish as to attempt inspiration instead of instigation?
Barack Obama has seduced the world by the power of his
persuasiveness, and while Kenyans raise another glass to the accomplishments of "one of our own," it seems clear to me that we gave up our rights to him when we gave up our hopes for ourselves. When we settled for incompetence, and corruption, and callousness, we defined ourselves out of his universe, and out of his dreams.
We rejected Barack Obama-ness when we allowed those
pangas to slash our dreams, when we watched our hopes spiral away in smoke. We allowed the ones who had done this to become the only mirrors of ourselves, and then squelched our disgraced selves back to the mire of our despondency.
Barack Obama cannot be a Kenyan, and Kenyans cannot
grasp Barack Obama's dream. We have already despaired of it, and of ourselves. His dream would have died with ours, here at home, here in the graveyard of hope.
But oh, how we yearn to see ourselves reflected in his
eyes...
*Wambui Mwangi is an assitant professor of Political
Science at the University of Toronto, Canada. This article first appeared inThe East African, June 15 2008.
*Please send comments to <editor@pambazuka.org>editor@pambazuka.orgor
comment online at <http://www.pambazuka.org/>http://www.pambazuka.org/
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participants (8)
-
alice＠apc.org -
Brian Longwe -
Brian Munyao Longwe
-
John Maina -
John Walubengo -
Lobore Junior -
P Gitau Githongo -
Robert Alai