One big cause of mental unwellness is the clash between our human instinct to care and heal, and the workplace on the other. It's called emotional labor.

Emotional labor causes so much internal pain because there is a government and PR machinery to deny that it exists.
Imagine feeling emotional and mental anguish from gaslighting at work, and then when you talk about it, the PR guy at @MOH_Kenya, who is directly responsible for the pain, denies reality and says that the problem is with you. That's mental anguish x2.
The assault of such neoliberal policies at the workplace has been called by researchers a form of "terror on the soul." It has been widely documented by researchers, but Oprah types want to tell us mental torture at work is unrelated to mental unwellness.
Psychiatry and psychology must be challenged to DECOLONIZE. As Fanon said in Black Skin, White Masks, there is no need for feel good sermons and scientific jargon when the reality that's making people unwell is staring us in the face.
The government of Kenya and the media have a very elaborate propaganda machinery of divorcing people's sorrows at work from mental health. Wahura herself talked about the role of government propaganda, and it's dishonest to honor her while suppressing what she actually said.
The fact that Wahura spoke so articulately about the problem of the healthcare system and GoK propaganda shows that SHE IS STRONG. She spoke out, and to honor her is to talk of the work she left us to do. We must fight for dignifying work.

There's no honor in feel good denials.
To mourn people with honor is not to limited to saying how nice they were. It extends to saying that their lives mattered enough for us to do something about what they told us.

We must demand work that makes people feel dignified and impactful. Work is our imprint on the world.

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More from @wmnjoya

17 Jun
There seems to be a clot in the Kenyan brain that blocks people from seperating economic problems from education. The #Somenivijana story of going to school for employment was for an exclusive to the colonial civil service and foreign companies. It was not the general economy.
The British caved in to higher education for Africans because it wanted to train a Kenyan civil service that would serve British interests after 1963. That is why uni education got attached to employment. The civil service is a parasitic enterprise. It doesn't grow the economy.
Because the civil service doesn't grow the economy, it soon ran out of employment positions. That was when they 1) said civil servants were allowed to do business and 2) started this evil propaganda of telling Kenyans "rudi mashambani" and stop seeking employment #somenivijana
Read 7 tweets
16 Jun
The problems Chimamanda talks about are not limited to social media. And they don't come from a character flaw. They are the fruit of the neoliberal hijack of social change which she also benefited from. So those who attack her, as she unwittingly admits, are her disciples.
As an arts teacher who has challenged Kenya's colonial education system, I can tell you that under this neoliberal era, we have given nothing to our young people to help them read life in its complexity. To expect otherwise is to seek to reap where we have not sown.
Every time Kenyans repeat that nonsense about arts having no "relevance," and of reducing education to job market and economic success, they are planting the seeds of the fruit Chimamanda now criticizes: entitlement, puritanical vision of life, little emotional intelligence etc.
Read 10 tweets
15 Jun
I didn't know Wahura Kanyoro. But upon reading what she wrote, I am angry, not sad. And when I read people talking about beefing up mental health treatment and discussing depression, I'm even angrier.

This is what she wrote in December 2020. ImageImageImage
There was a very clear catalyst for Wahura's sorrow. It was a country whose government has so much contempt for medical workers who get trained and work hard to help us maintain our health.

How are they treated? Wahura was very clear.
She said working in public healthcare "was slowly killing me to work as a precursor to the morgue instead of as a doctor." Put yourself in Wahura's shoes. You're trained to protect life, but you are reduced by a cruel @MOH_Kenya to be an escort for the end of life.
Read 17 tweets
18 Apr
The fundamental difference between coloniality/imperialism/patriarchy on one hand, and humanity on the other, boils to one fundamental thing.

POWER.

We are dealing with two types of power that have two different results.
Coloniality of power is about the ability to extract from others. Extract work, especially, but also emotion, morality, creativity.. and the list goes on. Coloniality of power has no capacity to be human, to be creative or to produce.
Coloniality of power is about using violence to extract from others. So you enslave or employ, so that you don't work but benefit from others' work. Or you lead a life of decadence and then seek reputation laundering from the poor or those who did the work of living a moral life.
Read 20 tweets
17 Apr
There is an epidemic in Kiambu County of intimate murders, mostly femicides, but @StandardKenya's fascination is with the murderer's car getting stuck in the mud.

There is a spiritual problem in that county. It signed a pact with the devil.
standardmedia.co.ke/central/articl…
I suspect that more of this will happen till you know who leaves office. In 2014, I said that once we allowed crimes of humanity suspects in the highest office, Kenya thirsted for more blood.

Femicide. Whole towns of male suicide. Family murders. Rape of women and children.
Kenyans eating funds for treating Kenyans with covid. It's as if Kenya has turned into a country of vampires who find cruder and cruder ways of consuming human blood.

It starts at the very top. Kenyans have given up on being human and are not even aware.
theelephant.info/reflections/20…
Read 5 tweets
15 Apr
It says a lot that @LinusKaikai is unable to engage the economic/social questions raised by the DP. There are holes in what Ruto is saying, but Linus is always taking the conversation back to the bromance with Muigai.

The media need to do their homework.
#RutoOnCitizenTV
But Linus's fear of the poor also points to the contempt of the middle class for the poor. The middle class is more afraid of the poor uprising than they are of the economy collapsing. #RutoOnCitizenTV Image
Ruto is talking of expanding the tax base and statutory contributions but jobs are no longer permanent with benefits. There are no jobs with pension contributions. This is the uber economy.

If @LinusKaikai wasn't so anti-hustler, he would have picked that. #RutoOnCitizenTV
Read 6 tweets

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