RIGHT TO REPLY
As a law-abiding member of the one of the Mount Kenya communities and life member of a perfectly legal association, GEMA, I was thoroughly appalled by the hateful bigotry viciously foaming from lawyer Pheroze Nowrojee’s column that appeared on Wednesday March 28th in the Star headlined ‘GEMA Negates Our New Constitution.’
Nowrojee opened his anti-GEMA spiel with a blatant lie of fascist-like malice and proportions. He alleged that GEMA’s main objective is the exclusion of other Kenyans.
In an article abounding with pompous posturing and moralizing, Nowrojee came dangerously close to inciting violent bigotry against the people of the Mt. Kenya region and everything they are and stand for.
The dangers inherent in demonizing an entire people and region always include the fact that the only way to proceed is hate thought, speech and action. With his sententious article and its thoroughly bogus invocation of the new Constitution angled to literally outlaw GEMA, Nowrojee either gave no thought whatever to the damage he was trying to do the people of Central Kenya or is perfectly aware of what disquiet he intends to achieve. This is truly chilling, for it makes him a cold-blooded ideologist of the genocidal mindset.
Let me explain: if GEMA is so embarrassing, wrongheaded, exclusionary, power-obsessed and generally a formation to be feared and loathed by the rest of Kenya, what does that make its members and the region it has been associated with for four decades? And what could possibly justify such a view?
GEMA is no such thing, of course, and the Mt. Kenyans are not congenitally mad, bad and dangerous to know, and I speak authoritatively from within both the region and the Association and as a professional Kenyan of Nowrojee’s generation who has friends in all communities, including on the six other continents.
Nowrojee and a number of other critics of GEMA and Mt. Kenya in the wake of the Limuru II Conference of March 23 that endorsed Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta as the political figurehead of the Central Kenya region are, however, guilty as hell of applying Nazi-like black propaganda tactics against the Mt. Kenyans that constitute incitement to hate thought. No recent event in our history has elicited such virulently reckless media commentary as the Limuru II Conference.
In North America and Europe, Nowrojee’s preposterous portrayal of GEMA is the equivalent of a rabid right-wing attack on the Jewish community. It profiles and targets the one Kenyan community that has been most vulnerable to ethnic profiling and massive displacement over the past 100 years, trying to show that its oldest association is a deluded, malicious, power-hungry and prejudice-driven organization.
Incidentally, the closest equivalence of GEMA on the Equator and on African soil is the B’Nai B’rith International, or the “Sons of the Covenant”, which is the oldest Jewish welfare organization in the world. From authoritative accounts B’nai B’rith’s “mission is to unite persons of the Jewish faith and to enhance Jewish identity through strengthening Jewish family life; broad-based services for the benefit of senior citizens; and advocacy and action on behalf of Jews throughout the world”.
Having suffered centuries of persecutions and pogroms, culminating in the Holocaust during World War II, the Jews have organized themselves in several genocide-prevention organizations that exercise a great deal of power and influence in the Western democracies.
In the face of attacks such as Nowrojee’s, GEMA needs to urgently borrow another leaf from the Jews – the establishment of an international anti-defamation league. The Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which celebrates its centenary next year, is feared and respected by the most ardent enemies of the Jews in every country. Its corporate slogan is “To stop the defamation of the Jewish people . . . to secure justice and fair treatment to all”.
The ADL ensures that no hate thought, speech or action aimed at the Jews and disseminated through mass media goes unreported and unchallenged, including in the opinion pages of the West’s most venerable newspapers and magazines.
Having suffered a century of mass displacements and detentions (the State of Emergency period) and still suffering the effects of as recent an event as the post-election violence (PEV), of which the majority of victims are from the region, the last thing the people of Central Kenya need are figures like Nowrojee, articulate members of minority communities that live in cultural and economic cocoons which exclude the rest of Kenyan society, pointing fingers at us and telling the rest of the country, “There goes those devilishly exclusivist Kikuyus!”
What Nowrojee did was defaming and actively endangering an entire community. An effective and far-flung anti-defamation league should be put in place by GEMA and other Mt. Kenya entities to prevent the clear and present dangers posed by bigoted critics of the Nowrojee persuasion. With his unwarranted attack on GEMA, Pheroze Nowrojee, one of the big names in our corridors of Justice, has abased himself to a level of negative stereotyping that I never imagined he would ever stop to. What a pity!
A. R. Namumis the secretary general of the GEMA Cultural Association
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