Thread by @wmnjoya

In African mythologies, there is always a story of a ritual against the powerful. The Kikuyu, for example, have a folktale about how there was a drought, and the rainmaker told the community that the the most girl in the village had to be swallowed by the earth for rain to fall.

This instinct is called the tragic instinct. The rich and favored must bear the burden of resetting society. In other cultures, it is done through humiliation if the rich and powerful. In the Bible there is the figure of the scapegoat.

The origin of the scapegoat is the animal on which society would place its sins and then send the animal out of the community to wander away, symbolically taking away the sins of the people.

In the theatre of Ancient Greece, the tragic plays were performed at a festival.

The tragic theater is always a well known story that results in the death of a hero through a sincere mistake. The performance of the play results in this expelling of evil, or social tension, and restores society through catharsis or end of mystery (eg drought).

(I'm getting to a point about ritual, evil and trauma in today's political economy system).

Another example is Lwanda Magere, the story of a stong and victorious warrior who dies when the secret of his strength is betrayed to the Kipsigis by the girl who was his wife.

The story works by the audience listening or watching the performance knowing from the start what will happen to the hero. Because of that, a tension builds up as they listen or watch Lwanda Magere inch closer to his fate. And then the tension is expelled when he falls in battle.

But because Lwanda Magere is a hero, his strength must keep being praised and his fate performed over and over again. This is for the spiritual health of the community.

So now, about today's eurocentric and globalized political economy....

The Eurocentric capitalist system committed an evil for which the world has not been able to make them repent.

Europe, and especially the English, have killed the tragic instinct of society. They have made the rich good and blamed the poor for suffering.

I'm sure that many scholars have traced the historical roots of this travesty against the gods by Europe. But in summary, I would say that it can be traced to the beginning of capitalism when the state and the church centralized control of knowledge, faith and power.

The church and the state crushed all alternative forms of knowledge, ritual and skill. They turned medicine into a centralized, patriarchal and scientific discipline. They declared kings as appointed by God.

So when the rich and powerful became good, what happened to the weak?

The tragic ritual was transferred to the weak and vulnerable. Theater and ritual were replaced by lynchings of real and innocent people.

For example, Europe massacred women who were knowledgeable and were local midwives and herbalists by branding them witches.

The theology of the beatitudes, of God biased towards the poor and against the rich, was replaced by a theology that said that poverty was the fault of the poor for being lazy and not "working hard."

This theology justified the rich not working and the poor working for them.

That paved the way for slavery, capitalism and torture of the human body for the purpose of work to enrich a few. Even before enslaving Africans, Europe was dispossessing people of land and forcing them to work. Some vagrancy laws punished lack of employment with death.

So this brings us to what Europe did to African and other non-European peoples.

Europe erected the white male as the sole human being, and turned everyone else into their scapegoats, including European women and other European minority groups.

When the voracious greed of the European nobility could no longer be satisfied in Europe, European nobility raided other lands and turned non-European people into their scapegoats through slavery, lynching and condemnation of non-European knowledges.

They erected Europe as the "benchmark" or the standard of "quality" for education and all other forms of knowledge.

Because European nobility crushed the tragic principle, they turned themselves into gods, they sacrifice us. And the planet.

So the lynching of black people by cops are a ritual for European nobility and American super-wealthy to experience a catharsis. The wealth Euro-Americans have become vampires who cannot distinguish between reality and fiction.

While normal societies perform the tragic principle in legends, stories or theater, Euro-Americans lynch real flesh and blood people. Us. And even their own children. Look at where pedophilia happens. In the mansions and churches of the Eurocentric power.

African poverty, misery and death is necessary for these vampires. They need us to suffer. But because we fight back, they use philanthropy to pacify us. They send us manicured white hands to touch black suffering to give themselves redemption.

Now, this brings us to Kenya.

That's the evil governing us. State House is occupied by rich people afraid of the tragic principle. They are corrupt, they kill us, but never go to jail. They blame us for our poverty by calling us indisciplined, un-entrepenerial and criminal.

Now the president has gone full out in capturing everything like he's driven by spirits. Land isn't enough for them. Money isn't enough. And then he puts us into debt and eats the future of our youth. This governmment is consumed by cannibalism.
theelephant.info/reflections/20…

Every election they win is won through blood. They won 2013 on the blood spilled in 2007-8. They won 2017 was won on the blood of Msando, Baby Pendo and the people of Kisumu.

And the first family knows that what they are doing is evil.

Before the 2017 elections, Ichaweri got Kikuyu elders to perform a ritual at Ichaweri that was a bastardization of the Jewish scapegoat. They tortured a sheep and set it to die an excruciating death. It was reported in the local dailies.

At the heart of this blood bath is the refusal of the tragic principle that the rich and powerful must suffer through ritual for the health of society. The church, through nonsense like calling African rituals "witchcraft" keeps the lie that the first family must be seen as good.

We will not atone for injustice in Kenya until we return to the principle that the rich MUST suffer. They must. We have to humiliate them and condemn them. We must refuse the Eurocentric Christian nonsense that the rich are equal to the poor and cannot be judged or called evil.

Watch Ousmane Sembene's film Xala and see this ritual humiliation of the rich who steal from the poor. And let us consult our stories, myths and oracles to see how to atone for this Eurocentric evil that lives in State House. Otherwise it will continue to kill us.

I am now considering boycotting the vote. There is something truly evil about Kenyan elections, if blood can be spilled each time and then we return to the ballot like nothing happened. And the vote still doesn't respect the will of the people. I can't do that any more.

We have to end the Eurocentric evil, embodied in exempting the rich from pain and condemnation. And our African myths and stories teach us how.

END