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."

Kenyans, until we replace our competition mindset with a community one, we won't get what the problem is with our education system. Education is not a race. It's a community activity. It's about ALL OF US. So it doesn't matter if NUKE is the only or the most elite university.

https://twitter.com/wmnjoya/status/1305799812688818179

Education and information are the social equivalent of the air that we breathe. It helps us relate to one another and make decisions. It is not supposed to be a gift that you fight over in exams so that you can get a sweet from Mr Tajiri. Education is organic and your birthright.

The problem with the system now is that it makes education scarce, makes others fight through exams for a few spaces, and then gives power to those few who to make decisions on behalf of all of us. This isn't about being intelligent or not. It's about democracy.

Tekayo is going full steam ahead in creating education segregation in Kenya. He has now appointed a bunch of professors to create the National Elite University of Kenya. I knew that these degree bashing stories in @StandardKenya @ntvkenya were hiding something #degreeofdoubt

Last year, the @CUE_Kenya put out a half hearted notice about amendments to the university act which I don't think the public was supposed to see. Unfortunately I did, and I wrote this letter to the commission but they did not reply. #DegreeOfDoubt wandianjoya.com/blog/proposed-…

In the letter (available on my blog), I specifically addressed the powers which the president and the cabinet were being given to establish universities on the basis of cabinet memos. I addressed the threat to academic freedom #degreeofdoubt

The role of the government, this Anglo-American contraption which gives us grief, is to contain us so that a few royals who don't work survive on our work. Unless we get this basic reality, we'll continue to tell stories like #DegreeOfDoubt
Thread #maishakazini

Some history. First the missionary came to prepare our hearts for capitalism. For them, conversion to Christianity wasn't abandoning African culture. It was entering the capitalist economy as a worker. #degreeofdoubt #maishakazini

Missionaries attacked mostly cultural practices which interfered with Africans working for wazungu. They talked about human rights and whatever, but their evidence of conversion was if you got employment at a mzungu farm and used the money to buy mzungu trinkets. #degreeofdout

I get the seduction of this narrative that all mothers are equal, but sorry, Yvonne and the rest, I don't agree with you.

This isn't a mothers issue. It's a political issue of land grabbing and inequality, and I resent that motherhood is being used as a distraction. #Newsgang

https://twitter.com/citizentvkenya/status/1304156513032863746

We know Mama Ngina not because she is a mother but because she has power to promote her clearly spineless son, and to amass property. It's really an insult to all decent, hardworking mothers who brave the odds to raise kids with better manners to put them in the same boat as her.

The fact that we can forget land injustice - which is what kills us every five years - in the name of motherhood, demonstrates that motherhood is so cheap that we joke, banter about it and fight toxic NIS narratives.

The war of the Kenyan state and capitalist godfathers against pastoralism is more than a fight to grab land. It's a philosophical fight about demobilizing Africans. Capitalism can't exploit people who are moving. It needs people who are still and in one place.

Demobilized people are are easy to control because politicians can keep forcing people to vote how politicians want, under the threat of being uprooted and displaced people, and they can force people to seek employment at low wages.

With pastoralism, it's difficult to exploit people when they are moving. They are not where you are the last time you saw them, and if you try to fix them to a program, they'll tell you "we'll think about it and whether it fits on our schedule."

At the height of Nyayoism, KANU hawk Kamotho said that pictures of Moi should be hung in our bedrooms. That's how reactionary politics had invaded our intimate lives.

My generation was sexually repressed, which is linked to the way we are also politically and socially stunted.

This sexual repression came in the promotion of the purity movement among educated, Christian youths of the 80s and 90s. The sexual purity movement targetted educated Kenyans (hence its prevalence in schools) and was an overt political project.

The purity movement was vicious and traumatizing. It made youths sit on their sexual lives. A certain book "I kissed dating goodbye" taught against any form of intimacy before marriage. It was circulated and used in Kenyan church circles.

Uthamakism is rooted in white pathology and works like fascism. It's European in thinking, no matter how many proverbs, spears, gourds and mutura GEMA elites throw into the picture. Kenyans who can't deconstruct white pathology will find it hard to understand uthamaki fascism.

The first thing to understand about #uthamakifascism is that it is European, not indigenous to Kikuyu or Africa. Second, uthamaki comes from white pathology which crushes diversity and forces people to swear allegiance to one identity. European kingdoms did it in Europe as well.

#uthamakifascism has crushed the complex histories of the former Central province and melted them into one history that makes Kikuyus have a European style king. The ideology is then repeated until it appears like truth. @MutemiWaKiama broke it down here theelephant.info/radio/2017/08/…

If you knew that someone is planning to kill you to prove a point to his friends, what would you do?

Would you go to his friends' meeting to ask for "inclusion" in the game, as a strategy to protect yourself? Or would you smash the game and disempower him?

The strategy we wananchi are playing with #bbireport is the same. These politicians negotiate with each other on the basis of how many members of their own tribes they can give up before the Anglo-Americans intervene. And instead of us smashing the BBI game, we ask for inclusion.

Politicians negotiate on how many of us die, not on what we want. Tekayo won in 2013 on nothing else but the Kikuyu bodies of 2008. And because @EUinKenya @UKinKenya @USAmbKenya think Africans are literal and stupid, they support #BBIReport based on its literal claims.

The other white pathology narrative that has confused Kenyan elites is that annoying word called "privilege."

Here goes the thread.

That story of 'privilege" makes our every day life sound like we walk around with tickets which we use to open doors.

It's like I go to an office and there's a check list:

"White? No.
Male? No.
Upper class? No.
Educated in the Roman imperial system? Yes.

Here's your place."

So you find people saying stuff like "your male privilege," "your elite privilege," "your American privilege."

But that is not how race, tribe, class and gender work. They work from loyalties, not access. So, for example, white people are asked to be loyal to the imperial aristocracy by virtue of being the same skin color as the aristocrats.

The Kikuyus who want to die for the Tekayos should just register with State House and we finish with that story. Some of us are tired of living under a seige mentality. What this cannibal is doing is preparing an altar for blood sacrifice.

THREAD

Tekayo is blackmailing home guards of other ethnic groups with a slice of the unnecessary and overrated Kikuyu vote.

For me, I will probably not vote.

https://twitter.com/wmnjoya/status/1287287615910273025?s=20

.

I refuse to keep going to polling booths terrorized by strange fruit, swinging on the trees, blood on the leaves, blood at the roots. They killed Msando, mocked him, then we voted like nothing happened.
movies2.nytimes.com/books/first/m/…

Kenyans need to strategize on ballot and economic boycotts. The principle is simple: make the political class irrelevant.

We have historical precedent. That's how our ancestors resisted colonialism and made the British perform legal tricks to force us into the state economy.

The purpose of colonialism was to get labor for colonial settlers, force Africans into the cash economy so that Africans can buy Western "manufactured" trinkets.

But Africans disnt budge. They had food, and they used cows as a medium of exchange within and across communities.

The other thing I hadn't seen is that colonialism operated through creating insecurity. As Chheikh Anta Diop said, European empire, and it's vices like usury, individualism and theft, come from a deep seated social anxiety in Western culture, and uncertainty about tomorrow.

Something that struck me in this thread is the role of traditional African spirituality, and the obsession of the colonialists with it.

It struck me because even for Mau Mau, it wasn't the weapons or the politics that the British were obsessed with. It was the oathing.

https://twitter.com/annesoy/status/1286659700621279235

Yani the British destroyed and tortured whole communities to destroy their core spirituality. What the British did to the #Talai clan was literal genocide. They cut people from the land, took them to where disease would kill them, and then put a stigma to socially kill them.

By its definition, genocide is not only about killing people but killing the memory of their existence.

The story of the people must be retold, otherwise we become complicit in the British project.

For the longest time, the British were frustrated by the Kamba. Like the Giriama, the Kamba didn't enter the cash economy. They used cattle as a medium of exchange for food, dowry and other transactions.

The colonialists came up with a plan. Destocking. #politicaleducationKE

The colonialist claimed that the Kamba had too many cattle. But more than that, in 1938, the colonial governor wrote an order commanding the Kamba to give up their cattle to a slaughter house in Athi River called Liebigs. And the Machakos DC was going to get a cut.

The order was brutal. In places like Kangundo, people were losing up to 90% of their stock. So the Kamba mobilized people to resist the order, and held a six-month sit-in to protest. The British pulled back the order because they were afraid that the struggle would turn violent.

God in heaven. I've just remembered the sordid history of Black reconstruction in the US, and it has clicked why the UK wants black uneducated workers.

Wah.

If you don't have the stomach to read about lynchings in the US, ignore this thread.

https://twitter.com/JaneMarriottFCO/status/1282903336828706817

Remember that the Boris Johnson government campaigned on an anti-immigrant platform and won both Brexit and the general election.

Who voted for them? British workers who were losing out economically. independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi…

And then remember, also, that British companies are now laying off workers and getting big bail outs from the US government.

Who is going to do the work of those same British workers who voted for anti-immigrant policies of Brexit?

Africans. socialistworker.co.uk/art/50355/Sava…

When I raised the flag about the sale of Makini and Riara to foreigners, people rudely told me it's simply business and shouldn't concern me.

Truth is, Kenyans thought they would afford those schools and wanted to give their kids an elite education, so screw the public schools.

But with the pandemic, we saw what happened. You could no longer afford the schools, and the owner showed you the finger.

So why would a British elite school buy another school in Kenya when Kenyans can no longer afford them?

Simple.

The schools are not for Kenyans.

The British elite schools are expanding to foreign markets, but the world's global elites cant afford prices in Britain in pounds. They can get British elite education cheaper if the go to a Kenyan satellite campus.

businessdailyafrica.com/corporate/comp…

This story is evil. But if you read between the lines, you'll see what's happening.

1. Delmonte is sitting on prime land.
2. Muranga county is not asking for all of it. Just a portion. And they don't want it for farming. They want to build concrete.
nation.co.ke/kenya/news/uhu…

3. Delmonte's lease is expiring, but "coincidentally," 😏 there is also a free trade agreement that Tekayo is supposed to sign.
4. The county started by lobbying (it most likely was haggling over the bribes)
5. The governor needs money for campaigns

https://twitter.com/SokoAnalyst/status/1282222337086103553?s=19

6. The place is not far from Northlands, city of Tekayo. The hospital and the other nonsense would be for serving the cannibals in the city, not for wananchi. The low cost housing is for Kikuyu workers who will be serving Northlands.

Maids and butlers can't live with the rich.

The people who need to do the most work in decolonization are white Europeans and their diaspora. It is because they have swallowed the Roman Empire kool aid of their aristocrats that the entire world is on fire. #decolonize

After the Roman Empire collapsed, Europeans were like the rest of the world. Ethnic groups, folk art, women as custodians of medicine and spirituality, and land in the commons.

The feudal lords grabbed the commons, and Europe massacred women in name of witch hunts #decolonize

Localized art, spirituality and knowledge in Europe were decimated to create a centralized state, religion and knowledge system controlled by the European aristocracy. The law forced disempowered Europeans into employment. Aristocrats aspired to be new Roman empires. #decolonize

Being a vocal critic of our schooling system, people expect me to take a stand against the closing of schools till 2021.

Honestly, I don't take a position on either side, because it still is a symptom of a much bigger problem.

For years, I've said that the school system is too narrow and rigid, and that education and certification need to be made more flexible and diverse. That means

1. Public universal education. The idea of some kids "left behind" only arises from the competition in education.

That competition is rooted in inequality. I've said that mindukras parents caring only for their own kids would bite them in the a--, because it would not be long before their kids join other kids who lack access to school, gadgets, or even basic necessities. Well, here we are.

I decided to educate myself on the Roman empire because it is the model of elitism that is killing the planet today.

Wah! Yani... You know this story of Africans being so tribal, killing each other and need to be pacified by imperialists?

Hiyo story ilianza huko. I was shocked.

The Roman empire built itself a myth. They told themselves that they needed to colonize Europe and Northern Africa to save the tribes who were barbarians killing each other

Remember that this is the curriculum on which British colonial officers were trained.

The Roman Empire itself is an orgy of violence. Its city was started by twin boys, Remus and Romulus, who were raised by a wolf. Then when Rome was started, Romulus killed his brother to rule Rome.

When an empire is started in such violence, what do you expect from its admirers?

One of the most effective things that white supremacy has done is to clothe economic arguments in the language of morality. Parents being held solely responsible by the state for their children is one such narrative.

THREAD

In Kenya, this narrative started in the neoliberal era (1980s) when World Bank SAP's demanded that government defund social services.

SAPs traumatized Nairobi middle class kids (my generation) who had grown up expecting the same social services their parents had benefited from.

SAPs were brutal on Kenyan intellectual life. They destroyed the backbone of university education, and degraded the university and artistic community already suffering under detentions and crackdowns from the Moi government.