America Re-invents Herself:

History has shown America as a nation that re-invents herself with the changing times. It is in American where possibilities can and do become reality. In each of her passing generations there has been a defining moment for the nation and the world, for better or worse. This characteristic was witnessed after the September 11th when the wounded nation rallied together for a common cause. Their strength could not be found in the American military might and wealth, but in the willingness to believe in the true greatness of a nation, its own people. The world rallied behind the Americans until the out-going president started acting unilaterally and trashing the goodwill offered by the rest of the world. Yet even at such a time, the resolve and will of the American people never abated.

It is from this group of people joined together by a common destiny that four years ago a young man emerged. Coming from the shadows, he described himself as a “skinny” man with a “funny” name. He audaciously declared a daring hope and a belief in the Americans’ power to recreate and reinvent. Under the towering statue of Abraham Lincoln, this man with a middle name “Hussein” declared his candidacy for the president of the United States. It was a long shot, to say the least, but he dared to believe America could and would reinvent herself. He refused to be defined by the black community from which he was coming and rejected isolationism as well. Nativism and provincialism have no place in the modern world. Therefore, he was not bringing to the table a black agenda. Neither was he willing to be cowed by the overwhelming power of the white majority. From the start he pointed towards the direction he was to follow for the next twenty one months and beyond; building bridges along the way.

With a clarion call to change and a slogan “Yes, We Can!” Barack Obama began his journey that would lead him to the ultimate prize. He had observed, experienced and studied the American politics. He had as well looked at his people and saw the same thing that the founding fathers of this great nation saw, resolve and will to reinvent. He believed in the American dream because he had lived it. He as well believed in the American people. He knew that America was not a nation of “whiners” neither was it a place where people stuck to “guns and religion”. There was something deeper and greater about the American people. Though the beginnings were rough, the American people listened to him, they started connecting with his beliefs and values, and they started re-membering.

So, last night as I eagerly waited for the release of the US presidential election results, my emotions ran high, with anxiety and expectation building up. In bated breath I waited to watch the one who has inspired millions across the world make history. I shuddered at the thought that I was to be part of those witnessing such a momentous hour in history. To imagine that the “skinny” guy with his charming smile and a “funny” name would be sitting on the most powerful seat on earth, was in itself overwhelming - almost unbelievable. I prayed and tossed in bed unable to catch sleep. For a moment, a gloomy cloud of doubt hanged precariously in my mind. What if I was just about to witness the greatest disappointment in modern history? What if Barack the son of Obama loses? I tried to push the thought away as much as I could. I rejected the possibility with all of my might. Cold sweat of anxiety broke at the very moment. If something like that happened, I told myself, it would be the cruelest reality of modern history. I even fancied with the idea of rebuking God (why not? St. Peter did it) if God was to let it happen. But I still knew within myself that the possibility lay hidden somewhere in my sub-conscience like a leopard patiently lying waiting to pounce on its victim. I could only pray and hope for the best.

As I restlessly tossed and ranted within my inner being, something else reminded me that Barack Hussein Obama is the son of modern Kenyan elite Obama Senior. I hated the idea of associating Barack with the elites for he has proven to be a true son of the ghetto. Years, ago he let a career slip away so that he could organize folks from one of the many poor neighborhoods of affluent American society, Southside Chicago. But even as I thanked the almighty for such a noble young fellow who dared to hope, the thought of his origins still nagged me. In Kenya, the elite class is wrecking havoc to many millions like Barack Obama who dare hope. Poor folks in rural Kenya have found their dreams crashed and casted into the bottomless pit of fate. That class believes that nothing rules but itself. That class tramps the barefooted sons of the soil and march on over the empty stomachs of daughters of the soil. That class declares that Kenya has no hope or future unless it stays in power. So as I waited and watched results trickle in, I was anxious that Kenya (my country), while it may share the joy of an Obama’s presidency, it still had to grapple with the problems of destitution and poverty that the current class of the elite oversees. I felt really sad, and this almost stole my joy until the first news house predicted an Obama’s victory. I forgot my worries, as I witnessed, in elation and hope history unfolding.

After voting the Americans quietly gathered at their social places, homes, churches, mosques, and Public Square to await the outcome of their votes. They had exercised their democratic and God-given right. Their choice changed history. They reminded the world that there is something American worthy emulating; something noble and honorable, something loftier than a thousand bulls that Kibaki or Raila can offer for an Obama’s victory. In the world finest moment in history the Americans declared that the world had not heard nor had it seen the last of America. They elected Barack Obama; one raised by a single mother and his white grandparents; one who had lived a part of his life in Asia; a son of a Kenyan father; and one whose middle name is Hussein. Nothing can be more representative and inspiring than Barack Obama. He dared to hope and the Americans dared to believe in this man. I believe Barack Obama will make a great president and the Americans will never regret their resilience and power to reinvent. God bless America.

In loving memory: A tribute to Maitũ Milkah Wanjirũ Kĩnyua

Mwendwo nĩ-irĩ Maitũ Wanjirũ mwarĩ wa Kĩriakũ na Wairimũ Aanjirũ a mbarĩ ya Karũe. Mũtumia wa mũtiga-irĩ Kĩnyua mũrũ wa Mũhoro na Wanjikũ Aagathigia a mbarĩ ya Gakuũ.

Twenty four odd years have passed since you crossed over to the land where they say people never grow old, eternity. Dear mother your sudden departure caught us so unprepared, so young yet not so innocent. Flashes of uncertainty and destitution blurred the horizon. Everything lost meaning, but only for a moment.

Maitũ, in life you lived like a candle in the wind but your strength and resilience surpassed the Mũgumo tree. Nothing could take away your beauty, your wisdom and integrity. You remained steadfast till death. Even as your health deteriorated, you never let your children go hungry. One day in the market and another spent in our small acre. It was small, infertile yet invaluable. The Acre’s worth could not be measured. It fed us. In it you grew pumpkins, bananas, maize, sweet potatoes, sukuma wiki, yams, and sugarcanes. The macadamia and avocadoes trees graced the small acre, God’s acre - a true inheritance. With your never ending energy, you prodded us to take care of the coffee trees, though not a lovable chore.

Through sheer hard work and entrepreneurship you made sure that we remained in school. When dismissed from school due to lack of fees, you walked us back to plead for our case with a promise that money owed would be paid, somehow. Though you never had the opportunity to pursue a career, you made our success your single most desire. You reminded us of our responsibilities in life and in the world. In words and action you taught us the value of hard work, honesty and kindness. You wanted us to excel. When we seemed to forget our purpose in life, your mũtathi whip was ready to remind everyone that none of us was going to become a brat or a vagabond under your watch. Many are the days we disappointed you but you never casted us aside.

Your wealth did not go beyond the small acre, a few pigs and our adorable Kanini (the cow that gave us milk and manure for gardening), yet your hospitality knew no bounds. You made our home a refugee for the poor and hungry. Unemployed men, single mothers, orphans, old women, even the outcasts of the village found a good neighbour in you. You always had a comforting word for them and a meal to sheer them up.

Your radiance and peace came from the joy of knowing a saviour, Jesus Christ. You talked about him to anyone willing to lend an ear to you. You sung about his love and his providence. With the vigour of a true revivalist you shed his love abroad. Even when the Church rejected you because of the abounding joy of meeting this saviour, you loved them anyhow. As I watched you laid in the casket that took you away, the disarming smile was still there. I could not help smiling back, even though in tears and sorrow.

Standing together in our small Acre and joined together by your love we sung “In the Sweet By and By” as we bade you kwaheri. In that solemn moment, I saw you smile - again. I have carried this smile with me dear maitũ to this day. The smile is always there to comfort and to remind me of your love for us and for humanity. Your unforgettable smile reminds me also to count my days for they are numbered just as yours were. I must make haste to love, to serve, to honour, and to respect humanity. I miss you so much maitũ witũ.

Rest in Peace Mwendwo nĩ-irĩ na irĩri Maitũ Wanjirũ.

Forgive, in whose name?

After the Waki report laid the buck right at the desks of Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Raila, the next thing we hear is that Kenyans, need to pray and forgive murderers in the name of God, national unity and security. I mean, who is fooling who? This is nothing else but an elitist class struggle for survival against hapless and helpless mwanchi. It has nothing to do with national cohesion or peace. It is trickery of the worst kind that makes mockery of justice, peace, love and unity. It is a cover-up!

People burned their midnight candles scheming and planning evil. Before we invoke the name of God, we must ask ourselves whether, we invited him in the first place at our cabinet meetings, churches, mosques or at political rallies to bear witness as we ignited fire of fear, anger and hatred. It is mere short-sightedness and lack of human feelings to call for blanket amnesty. Who is qualified to ask for forgiveness? Where are the victims of such orgy and murder in this equation? Who should speak on behalf of those blessed ones who perished in infernos of hell while others helplessly watched and mourned as their loved ones begged for mercy from hideous marauders ran amok? Who shall defend the cause of the young women and men who were shot at, maimed and killed in the streets of our cities? I mean the government and politicians cannot run away from their responsibility. It is a moral obligation to bring to justice all those responsible of the atrocities suffered in the land of Kenya.

If history is the mother of all lessons, then we need to pick up some ABC lessons from the dusty shelves of our existence as a nation. Ugly lessons of history mock the very word “forgiveness”. What a déjà vu! Remember the old adage that meaningless “sorry” led to the loss of entire Whiteman’s chinaware? We have seen it before; heard it repeated over the years of our existence. It started with the “founding father” of the nation. After colluding with imperialists, he declared that we must “forgive” and “not forget”. This was right after millions of Kenyans had been utterly dehumanised through villaginisation, mass detention and mass murder. Yes, we heard it said “forgive” when Kungu Karumba disappeared, When Tom Mboya, J. M Kariũki, Robert Ouko, and Bishop Alexander Muge were all brutally murdered. Then came the 1992 massacre and now, forgive? To use an uncouth analogy, one does not sit and watch his feet get pulped by jiggers that keep multiply and sucking the very blood he survives on. It takes courage to sit with all known tools of trade to deal with the menace once and for all. Painful? Sure! But singular attention and resolve bring the nasty blood-suckers to an end. We must not be blind to the facts of history. Once people learn, sharpen and perfect the art of murder, the beast grows. It even mutates to an uncontrollable monster. I am talking about real, pure Evil – ugly and nasty, that is what it is. The only solution is to stand up and face it. It will be a painful and even scary process. When we resolve to face the beast, the animal will summon all of its bestial powers of evil. As it seeks to survive, the beast will retaliate with vengeance. But we must be relentless in our resolve and be not intimidated.

Sentimentalism, which is only an emotional bash in the name of love cannot and must not replace redemptive and creative goodwill. Real people got killed and others lost their livelihood. Mothers, fathers, youth and children were equally affected. Our own flesh and blood, not abstract amorphous beings out there, bore the blunt power of evil. Victims of violence need no pity, no forgiveness but justice. Lives lost, property destroyed, livelihood dashed against hard walls of anarchy, and grand scale land grabbing, economic inequalities will not be resolved by mere sentimentalism. We must squarely look in the face of our wounded personhood and reclaim it through the rule of law. Yes, there are some ignorant unemployed young men who blindly followed schemers, perhaps those we can forgive but not the perpetrators of violence.

If the Kenyan legal system is too compromised to handle this, then international jurisprudence must take over. Justice must not be assumed to happen, it must be done. I write in the strongest terms to protest and denounce all those who are calling for blanket amnesty.

Debunking Cultural Myths:

Something very interesting happened two weeks ago. It all started with Raila Odinga – a true man of the people and a true son of the soil (one who has proven beyond any shadow of doubt that he is ready to take the mantle of leadership come 2012 and unless something very dramatic happens – he is the man to watch). Anyway, this gentleman, decided to take the bull by its horns. He traveled to the Lakeside country and dropped a cultural bomb declaring that "research has now proved circumcised men are safer from the scourge compared to those who are not." Raila continued, "I am taking the challenge of calling upon elders in the Teso, Luo and Turkana communities to ensure people embrace circumcision of boys, although it has not been part of their culture."[1]

For obvious reasons, Raila’s challenge was heavily condemned while others openly commended him for his courage. Some questioned the validity of the claim that male circumcision reduces the risk of infection with AIDS. I am not proposing to debate with any of these sides. We all know, and I am sure Raila is not ignorant of the fact that, circumcision is not the panacea for HIV/AIDS. However, underlying Raila’s bold stand is the fact that culture is not static and there is no such thing as “no-go” area in matters cultural. Ironically, as we argue about whether men of the lake should get the cut or not, men in Kenya are still sending their daughters to bush doctors to make them real “women” and “fit ins”.

What then do we mean by culture? When men declare that Raila is wrong on this since it is “my culture” and nobody should mess with it, what do they exactly mean? Culture ought to be understood in three levels. First, it refers to the systems or frameworks of meaning within which interpretation of the world is carried out as well as guidance on how to live in such a world. Culture embodies beliefs, values, attitudes and rules of behaviour. Secondly, culture can be understood in terms of rituals in which the community embodies and re-enacts their history and values. Finally, culture is understood to include the artefacts and symbolisation that become sources of identity.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o one of our best interpreters of culture summarises culture as an embodiment of a people’s “values, those aesthetic and moral qualities that people consider basic and important in their contact and interaction with one another and the universe.”[2] This means that culture includes completely the social realities (present and past) of a community such as economic relations, political structures, and language among others. Through culture, a community develops education, law, religion, literature and art, moral and ideological forces in which the social relations operate. In essence, culture conditions people’s understanding of reality at a particular time and place in history.

What this entails is that culture is not static. In Kenya, for example, culture has changed tremendously within the last forty years. Through globalisation and the development of new emphases and sensibilities, cultural changes have evolved so that old ways of looking at and explaining the significance of the world have become extinct and are no longer credible. Bishop Okullu having seen the potential of misrepresentation of culture cautioned that interpretation of culture does not mean engaging in cultural excavation to resuscitate the Africa of years past. African culture is what we are today and tomorrow.[3] Ngũgĩ amplifies this further when he writes that the past is only useful to us “only as a living lesson to the present… not preserved as a museum: rather we must study it critically without illusions, and see what lesson we can draw from it in today’s battlefield of the future and present.” We must not worship it. It is not possible, as Ngũgĩ asserts, to return to the previous state of innocence but we can do something about our present circumstances.

As such we use culture as a tool with which to understand and interpret one’s reality. In doing so we have to take seriously our experiences and connect them with other realities – that is exactly what Raila did in his recent take on male circumcision in Luo land in light of the HIV/AIDS scourge. We can as well appropriate culture as a tool of liberation, in which we identify positive aspects of culture and promote them while discarding those that are not helpful to human progress and experience. By putting these two aspects of culture in practise, we safeguard ourselves against any form of cultural relativism or/and provincialism. The aforementioned cultural parameters remind us of our commitment to wholeness and enhancement of life.

As such we should commend Raila for empowering us to think and talk about cultural things that for long have been considered “no-go” area. Talk about Cultural Revolution! Kudos Amolo!

[1] The East African Standard, August 18 2008.
[2] Ngugi wa Thiongo, Writers in Politics, 6.
[3] Henry Okullu, Quest for Justice (Kisumu: Shalom, 1997), 54.

Questions of Meaning and Existence

For centuries, humanity has wrestled with the questions of meaning and existence. The need to answer these questions is acute today than it was a century ago. With technological evolution of our time, news of death of a young child brutally murdered travel fast and wide. We receive instantaneous news through television and the internet of calamities such as the Tsunami in Asia, Katrina or Ike in America or Famine in parts of Africa leaving families and nations totally devastated. Our confidence in capitalism is put into question when we watch as years of hard work and savings disappear before our very eyes because of individual or corporate greed such as recently witnessed on Wall Street. Faith in protection of basic human rights is as well shaken when we witness such atrocities happening as in Rwanda and Darfur without any meaningful intervention. Such events do not only reveal our vulnerability but have also left many to live in anguish and hopelessness. "What for? what is it worth?", so we ask. Are some people destined to flourish while others perennially suffer? Or is the “graph” already drawn, as one of the gifted Gĩkũyũ writers of Gĩchandĩ and Marebeta once sung? Are there such things as blessings and curses, so that some will forever journey on the highway of blessings and happiness, while others trod on the hard and stony foot path of curses and drudgery?

These questions are not idle or empty. The disciples of Jesus struggled with the same kind of questions. In John 9 we have an example of the disciples raising a similar question when they came across a man who had been born blind. They asked Jesus “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus’ answer satisfies, at least for a spiritual moment. But why would God delight in someone’s suffering in order to make a pedagogical point? Preachers of the so-called prosperity gospel are quick (of course quoting from scriptures, and I cannot argue with that – I mean, who can argue with God’s Book) to show that there is a way of life that can either lead to blessings and happiness or to curses and suffering. According to this group of preachers, we can make God bless us through some magical manipulations. My pragmatic Presbyterian on the other side will scrap his intellect to gather some philosophical sayings that God calls us to faithfulness and not to success or blessings. Whether my Pentecostal or Presbyterian friend is right, I cannot tell. Perhaps I should not even be raising any of these questions? May be I should resign to Fate as the Greeks or Africans did. Pretend that all is well and that experience of suffering and death is nothing else but the conditioning of the mind. As a matter of fact, who is even qualified to talk about these issues, the victim, the pastor, the “objective” philosopher, or the religious? Or is it the triumphalist, the positivists, the defeatists, the cynic or the centrists? Some days to come, I might have a revelation and adequately give an answer. But as of now, I will keep seeking.