By PHILIP OCHIENG
Posted Saturday, August 13 2011 at 17:17
Posted Saturday, August 13 2011 at 17:17
Nothing embarrasses me more than to see an educated “Kenyan” — like Ms Cecily Mbarire — stand in front of television cameras to tell Kenyans that “we” have chosen so-and-so as “our” presidential candidate.
For the question immediately arises: Who are these “we” and these “our”? The answer — quite naturally — is: Kikuyu.
Let me say that even I wouldn’t stand in the way of a good candidate just because she or he is a Kikuyu. In fact, if I knew such a Kikuyu individual, I would campaign much more vigorously for her or him than for any of the Luo possibilities now known to me.
But why can’t Ms Mbarire — a person with above-average education — even pretend at the very democracy about which our leaders recite dithyrambs every day?
Even if your mind refused to get out of the narrowest ethnic cocoon, the question would remain salient: What elite arrogance is this?
When did she hold any dialogue with the Kikuyu populace — all the way from Nanyuki to Kerarapon — and agreed with them that Uhuru Kenyatta is the leader of “our community” — and its sole presidential candidate”?
Contempt for the Kikuyu mass
What democracy is it when a handful of “rump-fed ronyons” — as Shakespeare recognised our John Michukis and Robinson Githaes — simply wake up one morning to anoint a member?
Such self-nomination as your ethnic community’s paramount chief is the proof of your utter contempt for the Kikuyu mass.
It is also the proof of your utter contempt for this country’s political history since independence, namely, your refusal to learn lessons that can help your people — even as a community.
Of course, my education does not allow me to make bigoted and ignorant statements against a whole ethnic community — such as that “the Kikuyu” have looted our banks or grabbed our land or taken all the plum posts in the public service or killed JM Kariuki and Tom Mboya.
For the Kikuyu have done no such things.
But an elite of theirs has. And it has done it, not for the Kikuyu, but only for itself as an elite.
That is why that elite refuses to protect the Kikuyu mass against such false accusations. For, as long as it is the ethnic mass name that suffers, the elite can camouflage its criminal avarice in the anonymity of the mass.
Though I will not condemn the Kikuyu as a mass, if I were a Kikuyu leader, these false accusations against my people agonise me a great deal.
Why? Because — although the leaders of all other communities are now guilty of those very same crimes — the word has long been out that “the Kikuyu” are the Devil incarnate.
Dredging our fear of the Kikuyu
As an American journalist once put it, whenever Kenyans cry against “tribalism”, they are merely expressing a fear — profoundly embedded in the national subconscious — of the Kikuyu.
But it would be unfair for Kenyans to reject Mr Uhuru Kenyatta’s leadership simply because he carries a certain surname.
The fact remains, however, that a certain Kikuyu clique conducted itself in such a way, during the founding father’s presidency, that the clique gave the community a terrible name that endures.
It was thus that they caused Mzee Jomo Kenyatta’s name to permanently embody our national fear of the Kikuyu.
That is the injustice that the Mbarires are doing to young Uhuru. By trying to impose a Kenyatta on Kenyans — especially by such undemocratic methods — they are merely dredging our fear of the Kikuyu. No, Uhuru is not worse than any of our present candidates.
But he direly needs to sell himself as a Kenyan, not as a Kikuyu. It can be done. Mr Mwai Kibaki did it in 2002.
But, if you force Mr Kibaki to endorse Uhuru’s candidature as a Kikuyu, it can only boomerang on the young man — and as badly as when he served as President Moi’s “Project”.
ochiengotani@ke.nationmedia.com
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