Thread by @wmnjoya

Kenyan elites and professionals (especially maids and butlers in bullshit jobs like law and accounting) are a fundamentally dishonest group of people. The dangerous part of it is that they are so unaware that they are dishonest.

Since 1963, these Kenyans have tried to make Kenya work like Britain. They've never admitted it openly, but each day of their lives is spent trying to make it work.

And it doesn't work at all. As Binyavanga once said, this facade of Britain works for only 5% of us.

Binyavanga saw through Kenyan elites when he described how they sneer at other Africans because Kenya does British culture best in the continent. Kenyan elites take pride in sending kids to study in America, or whine that Ugandans, or Tanzanians or South Africans "don't work."

So the first lie is trying to be like Britain and not being aware. The second lie is in denying that it's not working.

Binya's words:

To explain why the Uncle Tom project of Kenya isn't working, elites come up with one fundamental explanation. The problem isn't that the British system doesn't work anywhere.

The problem is that we are Africans. There's something wrong with us.

The fantasy is that if Britain returned to colonize Kenya, Kenya would finally meet British standards of what a country is, and we Africans would all be happy that the country works.

That is how to explain this from a horsehair wig wearing African.

https://twitter.com/DonaldBKipkorir/status/1278226887156867072?s=19

The problem is that the British racists also have the same fantasy. They hope to resuscitate the British Empire.

In fact, I wouldn't put it past this current British government to have planted the idea of recolonisation in African minds here.
independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi…

What these colonial romantics (Johnson or Kipkorir) seem not to know is that even the British colonial government was hopelessly incompetent and corrupt. The complaint came from the white settlers themselves.

https://twitter.com/wmnjoya/status/1220103941771419648?s=19

The British elites have always been incompetent. They still are today. So anyone saying they would do a better job in Kenya is hopelessly delusional.

nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opi…

The British empire has the illusion of success is because of how easy they used such inhuman levels of violence that would put even the 3rd Reich to shame. But clearly, they are so good at covering it up if a lawyer can openly salivate for colonialism
counterpunch.org/2018/05/23/the…

And we haven't even mentioned the atrocities they committed in Kenya, basically from the get go. The Emergency was the climax. There were colonial massacres from the coast to Western and Northern Kenya.

So for an African to be nostalgic for colonial rule, under which he never lived, requires an act of intellectual violence. It requires spitting on the memory of the ancestors. But this violence, Binyavanga reminded us, happens in the schools.

Bottom line is that with our current education system, statements like Kipkorir's shouldn't surprise us. After all, we have a president who said "all lives matter," a
top civil servant who pleads on behalf of racist Chinese attacking Africans.

Expect more self-hating betrayal.