Thread by @wmnjoya

But in Kenya, what did we get?

A barbie who had been a party boy in UK and had no idea what he was doing. He exploited his advanced age to use vulgar language and a cane to make civil servants do his bidding. For him, his job was to keep the colonial state he inherited intact.

The wazungu came and took more land, but he didn't care because he grabbed some of his own. He declared a colonial state of emergency in Northern Kenya. Nothing changed.

But we got the illusion that Kenya was developing better because we had more wazungu here.

We had Nairobi where 1% could pretend that they represent everybody else. We got a greedy, immoral, cut throat elite and we cheated ourselves that all of us Kenyans are doing well. Binyavanga put it best: "To be a Kenyan is to be cursed by a system that pretends to function."

Binyavanga: "There is enough of a school system, health system, a private sector, good banks and tall buildings...What nobody tells you is that this [for] only the 5% who make it through the filters. So bodies are beaten into the right shape for the bottleneck called progress."

Exams and election violence exist to keep this lie by telling us that we're poor because we weren't intelligent enough to pass, or when we pass, we're not intelligent enough to start a business.

Or we're told we're such savages, that we oath and cut each other with pangas when Godec tries to civilize us with elections. Aka, there's something wrong with us as Africans.

The way people say "we are eating" because their tribe member is corrupt, is the same way all of us Kenyans boast "we're so hot" because Kenyans do amazing things abroad which they can't do here. Our source of pride is in things we do in countries other than Kenya.

So when you see Tekayo getting KDF to fix streets and herd cattle, then you know how desperately the lie of Kenya is falling apart, so that he now needs soldiers to bandage it up. And that was colonialism was. The use of guns to protect a project that couldn't organically work.