Religion has become an alibi for middle class madharau for the Kenyan poor. What a wonderful gift they are giving the president they supposedly hate. They are mobilizing support for him because the poor majority will eventually feel only he doesn't sneer at them.
This level of liberal stupidity should not be possible in Kenya after Trump was voted in 2016. Yet here we are. Kwani what do the middle class think made Trump win? Do they not read? Many of their donors are American. They're always hopping on planes to go there. But... nothing?
What do middle class want the Kenyans from poorer backgrounds to do? Be scientific? Where will poorer Kenyans learn science from, and the middle class didn't care that CBC was going to marginalize the poor? And worse, the middle class support evangelical family values in CBC.
Middle class don't mind evangelical values when it's parental involvement in CBC or the segregationist home schooling for homes that can afford. They say it's about "having fun with the kids."
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Emperor Tewodros II (d. 1868) collected manuscripts and commissioned innovations by Ethiopian scientists. He wrote to Queen Victoria as a fellow monarch and Christian. No reply. Then he discovered the British were supporting Egypt to invade Ethiopia britishmuseum.org/about-us/briti…
Of course he was upset. He wrote an angry letter to the British envoy in Ethiopia that he had approached them in friendship but instead they were uniting his enemies against his country.
Guess what the British did.
They persisted with their bad manners. Sent an army to Meqdalla, looted the library and went off with the manuscripts. Tewodros committed suicide rather than be captured. But they were not done.
I don't feel hopeless. I feel vindicated that for the last 5 years, my analysis about the Kenyan state was correct. This is the time to invent new ideas and dismantle old colonial logics instead of wallowing in self pity. GoK is not God.
I also dont get what about WSR makes middle class feel hopeless. The only answer I seem to arrive at is class snobbery. WSR is no different from the last 5 characters we have had in State House except in one small and important detail: he appealed to the Kikuyu poor as a class.
But surely, for 5 years some of us went over the Swynnerton plan and talked about how the British violently imposed class politics in Kikuyuland, splitting the community into the rich and poor and hoping that the cleavage would be sealed by ethnic bigotry. Why are we surprised?
It's not our mindset that makes Africa not industrialize. We Africans are creative as s*. The problem is psyops. There's a parasitic network that the West maintains in Africa to ensure Africa does not go beyond a certain glass ceiling. Thandika Mkandawire talked about it.
At least in Kenya, what happens is that there are vultures roaming our slums, SMEs and tech hubs looking for young Kenyans to overwhelm with venture funding, interviews, scholarships, trips abroad and all sorts of things that prevent our youth from developing their ideas.
They always go for the youth, because they know the youth don't have the experience, political knowledge and maturity to look at the long term implications of being a "development star" for Western brochures and Davos type meetings. Plus for our youth, it's a break from hardship.
If you did your graduate studies on a heavy dose of post colonial thinking by Africans trained or based in US universities, please be aware that the thinking of those institutions is dominaated by the European enlightenment bias. aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/…
During colonialism, schooling was also dominated by the enlightenment. Most schools were built by European missionaries fed on liberalism while American missionaries avoided providing education for the most part.
You're looking for a conversation on race? There it is.
Graduates of those schools are the ones who got scholarships to study in the US. The CIA ensured that the universities they went to did not facilitate interaction between Africans and African Americans. So the Kenyans entrenched liberal thinking they had already received at home.
Both the left and the right can't tolerate liberals. But the liberals rule because both they and the right gang up against the left. With liberals silencing the left, the right comfortably campaigns for fascism, to which liberals reply that we can fix everything with "inclusion."
It's insanity.
This is the elephant in the room: capitalism. The right thinks it will work if more violence is used on minorities. Liberals think that it will work the beneficiaries are more diverse. The rest of us know the truth: It can't work. It's not working. It wont work.
Economists are cheating us that capitalism is about the market. No, capitalism is about monopolies, not the markets. Think of the Mama Mbogas at the market. They share goods, help each other with change, take care of each other's stalls. That's not capitalism.
In Kenya, political gatherings are always infiltrated. If today I have a workshop on anything remotely political, there'll be a cop. I have said repeatedly that where two or three people gather in Kenya, the state has a mole. So I assume every protest crowd has cops in it.
NIS is also very good at organizing vents to evacuate people's anger. In the days when Twitter worked, they would use sexual hashtags. And remember just this weekend we got another unofficial video of the Health CS talking of abstinence. The video came out of the blues.