In his first book Black skin, white masks, the legendary Frantz Fanon complained that racist hostility and patronizing attitudes were essentially the same, despite their apparently different emotional foundations. As he put it "When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color. Either way, I am locked into the infernal cycle."
It is in a similar infernal cycle that Prof Makau Mutua, Dean and Distinguished Professor at SUNY Buffalo Law School, entrenched himself in his latest letter to the "Kalenjin Nation." This time, he responds to the event during which the articulate Dr. Kosgey, a graduate of Stanford with a prolific career in government and civil service, bowed down to worship at the feet of the one, the only, the fire breathing, William Samoei arap Ruto. It was painful to see woman of such stature stoop so low to a man who is not only her junior, but who also possesses significantly inferior credentials.
Unsurprisingly, the eloquent Dr. Kosgey is very aware of the mediocrity that underlies the Kenyan political culture in which she operates, even though she has decided to play by its rules. In a revealing statement a few weeks ago, she decried the lack of ideology in Kenyan politics, but in the same sentence declared that if such was the way the people wanted to go, she would follow the people up the hill rather than "act in isolation." So now we now what isolation means.
Given Dr. Kosgey's achievements, it is understandable that Prof. Mutua would be appalled at the latest antiques by the minister. However, he chose to read Dr. Kosgey's subservience and weak spine more as evidence of the "potent" spell that Ruto has over the Kalenjin tribe and less as the character of Kenyan politics. Granted, he does note that the tribal consolidations are found all over Kenya, but such concessions are weak when he has addressed himself to Kalenjins as people who are apparently refusing to be part of the rest of Kenya.
As some of Professor Mutua's readers have pointed out in their responses to the article, the choice to interpret Dr. Kosgey's latest defection in terms of tribal loyalties is essentially tribalist. Prof Mutua has effectively isolated the Kalenjin from the rest of Kenya and implied that "they" can only be citizens like the rest of "us" by resisting Ruto's attempts to deify himself and to equate his destiny to the community's. Secondly, as some readers have also noted, Prof. Makau assumes that all Kalenjins endorse Ruto as the embodiment of the savage, tribalist decay of Kenyan politics.
However, whether all Kalenjins agree with Ruto or not is besides the point. What is disturbing is that Prof. Mutua has adopted Ruto's very framework of isolating Kalenjins, but seeks to distinguish himself as one who is motivated by love and patriotism, presumably unlike Ruto who is driven by anger, bitterness and desperation. If we adopt Fanon's observation, we see that Makau's letter essentially boils down to the same thing: seeing Kenyans, human beings, primarily in terms of their ethnic origins.
For the same reason, responses that Kalenjin leaders are not the only ones appealing to tribal loyalty, and that Uhuru Kenyatta, Raila Odinga, Kalonzo Musyoka, Musalia Mudavadi and the other self-appointed tribal gods are playing the same game, is besides the point. Such statements simply affirm the implication of Prof. Mutua's argument, which is that Kenya can only be a nation if each tribe fights its local despot.
But fighting localized oppression does not necessarily make that struggle national, neither does it nationalize struggle. In fact, that is the quagmire in which the admirable Martha Karua finds herself. While she has struggled against the ethnic chauvinism of daddy's boy Uhuru Kenyatta and his gang of bullies, she has not managed to achieve a national profile because of the expectation that national leaders should have a solid tribal base.
We cannot fight tribalism by using the terms of reference that tribalism gives us. We can only do so by adopting ideological, theoretical and philosophical tools that help us analyze these local manifestations of political mediocrity from a national, and ultimately human outlook. The question that Dr. Kosgey's latest antics have raised is why people like her, who should know better, do not have the character to complement their education. Surely, as Prof. Mutua has mused, education may be overrated.
Another thing that an intellectual should have done is to demystify the power, rather than leave it in the realm of the fantastic by calling it a "spell," as the professor has done. As one of readers hinted by asking if Prof. Mutua has gone to the area to establish what he is talking about, the power of Ruto - and all Kenyan politicians by extension - requires a sober analysis based on solid data. For instance, it would be good to establish the economic and political networks which such leaders have established and which render self-advancement without deference to them impossible. I know, for example, of an instance last year in which a rural pastor was called for questioning by the local DO because he had invited a pastor from another region to conduct a workshop in his church. The said guest speaker was later informed by some intellectuals originally from that area, but who reside in Nairobi, that they usually visit home discreetly because the senior politician who is the area MP has people spying on them for fear that intellectuals may challenge his political base. It is subtle intimidation like this that helps politicians cast "spells" on "their" people.
Hopefully, our new constitution will help demystify power by enabling people to advance by managing their own resources, instead of expecting the local big man to bring those resources from the central government. In the meantime, intellectuals - and all Kenyans - should remain vigilant and resist the temptation to fragment the struggle for nationhood by fighting using the same terms of those who maintain us in the divisive and infernal cycle of ethnicity.
