Wrong to look down on a brother

In 2004, then US President George Bush was running for re-election against Senator John Kerry. President Bush was not popular outside of the US and a lot was made of his gaffes, the so-called ‘Bushisms’, amid claims that he was autistic and other fiction. 

Mr Kerry has a patrician, almost professorial air, perhaps part of the reason he lost to the more “aw shucks” homespun Bush bonhomie. None of this is news or in any way remarkable.

What is remarkable are comments then attributed to Vice-President ‘Uncle’ Moody Awori and which threw the government of President Mwai Kibaki into a small panic. Uncle Moody merely expressed the views of most people in Nairobi, that four more years of Mr Bush’s regime was a disaster and that Senator Kerry would have been a welcome break from the drama of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the whole kit and caboodle of the alt-right and their war-mongering, Arab-baiting, oil-coveting, swash-buckling, Iraq-ending reign.

These are not views that the vice-president of a weak African country articulates about a sitting US President, however. It was a gaffe with potentially serious consequences, which the Narc government succeeded in suppressing. But it calls to mind the spot of bother that Deputy President William Ruto finds himself in over his unguarded remarks about the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

The DP’s statement is a perfect example of what our neighbours regard as “Kenyan arrogance”, which is not necessarily speaking inaccuracies about other people but being artless and insensitive about the feelings of our friends. It is not a particularly endearing quality.

Unbelievably wealthy country

It’s also amusing that DP Ruto is both right and dead wrong about his views on DRC. First, it is true that DRC is a country buggered by its elite and their foreign friends and, in some areas, poor beyond belief. It’s a spectacularly bad place to find yourself in, especially in the east among the genocidaires and brutal warlords. 

Of course, there are parts of the Congo that are prosperous, beautiful and normal in every respect. But in general, it’s an underdeveloped country where, I’m sure, you will find cattle.

It’s also true that DRC is unbelievably wealthy, a thousand times richer than Kenya and one of Africa’s superpowers in another 50 years or so. First, it has almost every mineral known to man in large quantities and top quality. And it is huge — one of the biggest countries on the continent — with a big and rapidly growing population. 

DRC will grow into a prosperous and influential nation in time and will have access to the kind of resources and wealth that Kenya cannot even dream of. To that extent, dismissing the country as a backwater of 90 million people without a single cow is somewhat not generous. The question is, how did the Congolese, in some parts, become so brutal and disorganised? And I have a theory. 

I follow a Burundian blogger who passionately documents the brutality of colonialism in Central Africa, especially DRC. The Belgians were so inhuman to the African population, so brutal that I would imagine there exists generational trauma which predisposes many people to treat others unkindly and not to construct productive relations with each other. 

The parts of Kenya which suffered during colonialism also occasionally lift the veil to reveal such brutal violence, which points to communities still healing from the castrations, humiliation, torture, confinement and racism suffered almost 60 years ago. In the townships of South Africa, you will also see this almost self-destructive behaviour of excessive partying and an easygoing attitude towards work and self-improvement.

Give their brothers a calf

How have we healed from the trauma of past and continuing racism that Africans have endured and which nobody even recognises? What does it do to a people when they are traded like cattle and put to work like beasts of burden? Or castrated en masse to create eunuchs to serve in the harems of their insecure masters?

I think Africans must be empathetic and kind to one another, help each other to claw their way out of poverty and bad government. Those who frequent golf clubs know that the older members enjoy nothing more than looking down their noses on new members who don’t know the rules. Of course, the new members don’t know the rules; only members do. 

I sat on a plane recently with a West African gentleman who was treating me like a leper. I think he thought I was a stall owner going to China to buy trinkets for his stall. He was obviously well-travelled, all his luggage was expensive and had the tags of a frequent flier while I have a torn rucksack with the corners of my laptop digging into my ribs and gleaming through the holes.

My point is, those Africans who are fortunate enough to have cows should not adopt the attitudes of the coloniser; they should give their brothers a calf so that he, too, might start a herd. And if a brother sings, it is not out of foolishness; perhaps, it is to soothe the pain in his soul. 

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