This week, Americans and people around the world celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous I have a dream speech.
In thinking about MLK and Kenya at this time, two thoughts come to mind, seeing as we are also inching closer to our own national birthday.
First, is the need to develop a compelling moral vision for Kenya, beyond the glowing text on national values, integrity and leadership in most of our foundational documents.
In several published and recorded remarks, Dr. King would often say that Jesus Christ had given him the ethics, and Mahatma Gandhi the tools he needed to process the issues of his time.
Questions would subsequently emerge on his moral probity and academic integrity, but few would disagree that in Dr. King could be found a mind in which it was always clear that the moral arc of the universe bends long, but always towards justice.
Tibetans have the Dalai Lama and South Africans – in the words of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe – “that little angry man” – retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu; two people who could easily pass for the moral compasses of their nations.
We laughed off Bildad Kaggia for defying the primitive accumulation of wealth in his age, and would not wrap our minds around the fact that Bishop Alexander Muge and Professor Wangari Maathai found no traction with their powerful tribesmen, whenever pressing issues of their time called for a response.
Little wonder, then, that we feel good about our place as the region’s economic hub, without assessing the impact of our decisions and actions in some of the protracted conflicts in our neighborhood; foreign, social, economic and political policy cannot possibly be run on the Ten Commandments, appears to be our undeclared but guiding philosophy.
Two, consecutively disputed General Elections; unresolved transitional justice issues; emerging hydrocarbon wealth; an entrenched security-commercial complex; and a national leadership that still has some “personal” challenges to process makes for some interesting days in our times.
An ethic, Christian or otherwise, that is either silent or ambivalent on the foregoing is likely to spawn a Kenya that is strange to the good we often say we want to either be or do.
Archbishop Oscar Romero it is who once posed: “A Church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn’t touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed – what gospel is that?”
The second take-away from Dr. King’s story should be the manner in which our leaders are formed, enter and – perhaps - exit from the public square.
At the MLK Center, a visitor is confronted by the overarching idea that Providence gifted us with Martin, yes, but that Morehouse College – where he got his first degree – as well as Daddy and Mommy King, never kept their eye off the ball.
In her autobiography, Coretta – Martin’s wife – also details how the elder Kings maintained interest in their lives and ministry to the very end.
In a sense, therefore, Dr. King’s vision for communities and community organizing could have emerged from the manner in which he was socialized by the forces that, at various times, intervened in his holistic formation.
In our case, the State, but much more precisely, schools and parents need to review the manner in which they are raising the nation’s future leaders.
Established economies are now asking questions about their pupils’ performance in math and the sciences while published research in recent times suggests that our children can barely read, or count.
Established economies are also big on think-tanks, institutes and research foundations, at which students compete to not just work, but – critically – intern; is the proposed nanny-like National Graduates Unemployment Scheme (NGUS) our idea of doing just this?
Perhaps we need to heed preacher Charles Spurgeon’s counsel: “What a teacher does to a student’s mind is as profound as what a neurosurgeon does to a patient’s brain.”
As for exits, we sure know how to tolerate opposing views.
The writer is a communications consultant (www.jesse-masai.com).
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