Category Archives: Socail and Cultural Issues

Kenya Elections 2022: Mzee Kenyatta’s Curse Continues to Dog Kenya

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Mzee Kenyatta vs. Jaramogi Odinga

In his fight with Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Mzee Kenyatta resorted to demanding an oath of allegiance that the “Flag of Kenya Shall Not Leave the House of Mumbi”. Mumbi is the mythical ancestor of the Kikuyu clans. Mzee Kenyatta went further than that in his reference to the Luo people as “kihii”—a term that is equivalent to “juvenile”, applied to an uncircumcised youth. Traditionally while the Kikuyu’s rites of passage required circumcision, Luo practiced the procedure of knocking six lower front teeth to mark the transition to adulthood. The Luo people stopped this practice years ago. In fact a disproportionate number of Kenyan doctors today is made up of Luo physicians and they know better than anyone the African cultural “idiocy” of many of these practices, including “female circumcision” that many African tribes of Kenya practice.

Mzee Kenyatta used the brilliant Luo son of the soil Tom Mboya to marginalize and eliminate what he considered as the “menace” of Jaramogi Odinga in Kenyan politics. He succeeded in doing that. After that, many expected Tom Mboya to assume the mantle of leadership after Mzee Kenyatta’s reign. But Tom Mboya was shot to death in broad daylight on a busy street in Nairobi.

In the course of time, Mzee Kenyatta formed a strong alliance with Daniel arap Moi who had the allegiance of the huge voting block of the Kalenjin in the Rift Valley.

After Kenyatta’s demise, Moi took over and promised to follow the footsteps of Mzee Kenyatta. He coined the term of “Nyayo” to legitimize his trajectory to power. Moi was ruthless. He left the suppression of dissidents to henchmen like Amos Biwott, the most feared man in Kenya for many years. During the reign of Moi, another prominent Luo leader, Robert Ouko, the Foreign Minister in Moi’s government, was brutally murdered in a most gruesome manner.

Kenya became a “one party” repressive state until the advent of multi-parties born out of the struggle by prominent Kenyans across the tribal divide. The current era of multi-parties has seen the recreation of the voting block of “Mount” Kenya tribes and Kalenjin tribes—a two tribes political formation that simply co-opted the support of other major tribes, particularly the Luhya and Kamba. The long time nemesis of the “two headed political monster” in Kenya has always been the Luo! That was so during Mzee Kenyatta’s time and remains so, today after what we have seen in this election: 2022.

Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga and the Handshake

To the credit of these two “political youngsters”, they tried to break the “curse” laid by Uhuru’s father by bridging the political divide through a symbolic gesture of a handshake that became known as the “Bridging of the Bridges Initiative”.

The “Bridging of the Bridges Initiative” was never received well by Kikuyu and Kalenjin leaders and king makers. It threatened to rupture the “two-tribe hegemony” of the Kikuyu (Mt. Kenya) and the Kalenjin.

The Kenya General Elections of 2022 was a critical test of whether the country would move beyond the “traditional fault line” of a “two horse monopoly” of power represented by Ruto, one side, and the group that represented the new era of politics in Kenya: Raila Odinga and Martha Karua. The naming of William Ruto as the winner means that Kenya has sunk once again into the putrid politics of the past. There are many people in the Kikuyu/Mount Kenya communities who defied their “own” Uhuru Kenyatta and voted for Ruto. Even in Kiambu, the domicile of Kikuyu “royalty” saw the abandonment of Uhuru Kenyatta and support for William Ruto.

It is pointless to litigate the process of vote tallying, because the elephant in the room is the “primitive” political process that is used by ruthless leaders to capture state power and protecting the corrupt and looting government coffers.

MONKEYPOX AND AFRICA

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When I woke up this morning I was reflecting upon the announcement by the World Health Organization about the outbreak of “monkeypox”. Like HIV/AIDS and Ebola, the infectious disease is once again being attributed to African countries, now labeled as “ENDEMIC COUNTRIES”.

Just consider this:

From Center for Disease Control (CDC)

“Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is defined as illness caused by a novel coronavirus called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2; formerly called 2019-nCoV), which was first identified amid an outbreak of respiratory illness cases in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China.”

No one labeled China as an “endemic” country. So why does “endemic” and “non-endemic” labels being applied to some African countries?

“Endemic” in English language implies: indigenous to, original to, natural to, etc, you get the meaning.

The stench of RACISM IN MEDICINE is inescapable here. If you have credible evidence to attribute the origin of “monkeypox” to some African countries, simply focus your interventions on those countries without the additional baggage of introducing the “mark of the beast”, or the “original sin” of Biblical stories!

We know that in a number of African countries labeled as “endemic”–Nigeria, Cameroon, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, several communities eat monkey and baboon meat. These “meats” are referred to as “bush meat”. Could the origin of “monkeypox” be traced to handling and consumption of such “meats”?

The Search For the Original Sin

At the height of the HIV/AIDS, monkeys that were infected were said to be the disease vectors (transmission mechanisms) that became the “bridge” to human infections with the deadly disease. This is the same logic that is being applied to “monkeypox”.

What the negative labels do is to complicate public health disease interventions by rendering millions of people as “suspects” in the infection of the “world at large”–Europe, in particular, where people from “endemic countries” will be subjected to intense scrutiny. Beyond what they are carrying in their luggage, WHAT ARE THEY CARRYING IN THEIR BODIES?

Remembering Prof. Ali Mazrui

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In a private message someone once asked me whether I knew Prof. Ali Mazrui, and I responded by saying: yes, he was my elder brother. The person actually believed me, but I corrected him by narrating the following brief story.

In the 1960s, some of us undergraduate political hot heads in Canadian universities were quite exasperated when we read “controversial” articles in the magazine “Transition” published in Uganda under the editorship of none other than Prof. Mazrui. Two articles authored by Prof. Mazrui: “Kwame Nkrumah: The Leninist Czar” and “Tanzaphilia”, touched off a storm of controversy among African intellectuals across the globe.

During this period, I was deeply involved in both student politics at the University of Waterloo, and the left student movements of the 1960s. I graduated from Waterloo in 1966 and proceeded to Northwestern University to pursue graduate studies. It was at Northwestern University in 1968 where I met Prof. Mazrui personally in a world conference on “violence” as a means of effecting change in society. Prof. Mazrui was one of the scholars who delivered major papers that set the stage for discussions. I played a small role as a student discussant for a paper which I cannot even remember now. At the time, I was preparing to travel to Kenya to conduct my PhD thesis research on “Ethnic Relations and National Integration”.

After graduating from Northwestern University in 1971, I became an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, in 1972. During my promotion from “assistant” to “associate” professor in 1978, Prof. Mazrui, who was a Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, wrote a powerful letter of endorsement for my “promotion with tenure”. These letters of support carry a heavy weight in the deliberations of the “Executive Committees” of each department in the United States academic system. In effect, your intellectual peers stake out their academic reputations and accomplishments in extending letters of support to you.

My next encounter with Prof. Mazrui was in 1979 in the “Fifth Congress of Pan African Studies” in the then Zaire. Prof. Mazrui was one of the “special rapporteurs” of the conference proceedings that were published in Paris, France. My contribution was the following paper: “Dependent Development and Urbanization in Kenya.” In V.Y. Mudimbe, ed. Africa’s Dependence and the Remedies. Paris, France: Berger-Levrault, 1980. Pp. 168-183.

In the 1980s, Prof. Mazrui was invited from time to time at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, to give special lectures on development and African politics. During these occasions, I engaged in private discussions with Prof. Mazrui on a variety of topics ranging from his own work to his personal experiences with African leaders and scholars. This is when I came to appreciate even more the depth of Prof. Mazrui’s intimate knowledge of African politics and his analytical savvy in laying bare the logic at work in the thinking of African leaders. Beyond this, we shared some lighter moments of jokes about “Pwani” (Kenya Coast), and our own unique roots in Muslim culture and the Coast.

We all miss you Professor Mazrui, and we shall try even harder to follow your giant footsteps in the march towards the dawn of a new day in Africa.

Mwalimu Edari