Let’s aim to be unique, but to be whole we need to borrow ideas

To be a Kenyan is to be shamefully predictable. Yet I continue to fail to see any difference between, on the one hand, the ruling coalition of Uhuru Kenyatta (Kikuyu) and William Ruto (Kalenjin) and, on the other, the opposition nexus of Raila Odinga (Luo), Kalonzo Musyoka (Kamba) and Moses Wetang’ula (Luhya).

The question poses itself every time the sun rises in the east: How many Kenyans support a political party only because they are really convinced that it expresses what are the best social policies for building a united nation? Quite honestly, how many of you do not support a political party merely because it is led by individuals from your tribe?

In this way, you thoroughly degrade yourselves in the eyes of other, much more intelligent or better educated societies the world over. No, in trying to answer that age-old question, do not allow the racial propaganda of the Caucasians of the colonial and pre-colonial epochs to be your guide.

Do not think of tribalism as a peculiarly African way of thinking and doing things. No, tribalism is a characteristic of the entire human animal. That is why, even in “highly developed” Britain, people remain conscious of themselves primarily as tribes—namely, as English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh. But—as England’s own Edward Carey Francis (my headmaster at the Alliance High School) used to warn—“Do not copy this man”. Why not? Because, in the 21st century, what we call “negative tribalism” is as degrading of the human mind as Caucasian racism has done to the natural attributes of all human beings.

No, the colonial school injunction not to copy “this man” (as an artist caricatured him in one of Carey Francis’ books) refers only to certain deeply uninformed and dangerously negative individual, clan, gender, racial, sectarian and tribal assumptions, attitudes and practices—the extreme small-mindedness of all forms of parochialism, like that of your Moses Kuria.

COPYING ONE ANOTHER

For—both materially and intellectually—human progress has always depended and will always depend vitally on copying one another, both as individuals and as nations. Where, for instance, would North America be today if it did not consciously copy Western Europe in everything, from Jacob’s Ladder in the Bible to the heaven-skyscraping structures of Chicago and New York City?

If human collectives were forbidden to copy antecedental and even contemporaneous societies, would there have been any such a thing as cultural and intellectual progress? Civilisation is possible only because human beings have brains and hands enough to imitate one another’s thoughts and works worldwide and even to improve on antecedents.

That is why, just as once upon a time, Europe never felt ashamed of copying certain Afro-Egyptian ways of doing things, so Africans should never today be ashamed of copying certain positive European ways. Your ability to copy and even to better other people’s material and cultural achievements only testifies to your humanity.

For if—as Caucasian racism used to contend—black Africans are less than human beings, it would have been impossible for black Africans to copy Euro-Caucasians. Yet today you cannot name even a single technological skill which Europeans possess that Africans, Asians and native Americans cannot perform.

The ability to copy—and even to better—one another is what makes manifest the humanity of all Africans, all Americans, all Asians, all Australasians, all Europeans. What North Americans have done with a Euro-Dutch invention called television is a good example of the human propensity for improving upon every human invention.

Whatever a human being invents represents the natural ability by all human beings. Thus a time is coming when a member of the most primitive human society will surprise the whole world by announcing a ladder to the heavens that will belittle the kind that once took a Caucasian called Neil Armstrong to the moon and back.

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