‘Greatness’ at others’ expense

These days, media blogs - extremely popular going by the hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, thrive on selling the mundane and, they smile all the way to the bank while spoiling what we would all agree are the cultural elements of what makes us tick as Africans let alone box ourselves in nationalism and its idiosyncrasies.

Going by fancy names or bountiful marketing tags like Africa is watching and so on and so forth, they proceed to fill you in with sex, nudity, murder if you are lucky and debase acts of depravity (incest for example).

They are happier bolding stories of incest than the need for hard slogging work. Every time a foreigner is given a dog’s bad name (don’t we love these), they go to town never bothering to do the basics i.e. balance the other side of the story. So the story is a foreign investor is a leech. They forget there are always two sides to a story.

The more civil publications like the one you are reading this piece on, are having a hard time selling civility, moral rectitude, diligence what is going on in the stock exchange, honest stories of valiance and the hard work it takes to grow wealth. These are indeed tough times.

Do we accept defeat or like Maggid Mjengwa and John Francis Kitime, do our part and let history be the judge?

Maggid has lived a life in which the story takes precedence over the writer. Uncle Kitime, on the other hand, confesses his first love to music. John Francis Kitime (JFK) has been there and done it all for the love of music and, if Tanzania had its venerated Music Walk of Fame, JFK’s name would be on it, along with Mbaraka Mwinshehe among others, of course.

JFK’s other love is telling a good story and especially if there is music somewhere in the heart /at the centre of the great story. And that song does not have to be his, it can be that of his aunties, his folk, rival bands, competition, non-Tanzanian music just, good song.

If you follow both Maggid and Kitime, you will learn a lot of unbiased history of Tanganyika, Zanzibar, even East Africa.

An example when the news broke Rishi Sunak may well become United Kingdom Prime Minister, Maggid broke it down and told his audience the man has East African roots.

Rishi’s mother was born in Tanganyika and his father in Kenya, both during colonial governance of the two East African nations. I find this important because other blogs, the supposedly more popular ones amplified the Tanganyika root and ignored his Kenyan heritage.

If you read Maggids’ anecdotes on the Simba - Yanga football rivalry there is plenty of room for KMK of Unguja as there is acknowledgement of Kabwe warriors of Zambia, Mufulira Wonderers of Malawi and Gor Mahia of Kenya. They have all been part of the history and good story that cannot make Simba Yanga great without them.

The lessons from JFK and Maggid is that our needs for greatness does not need, depend, on us diminishing the role of others simply because of their colonial originated nationality.

JFK is working on his memoirs and I have had the privilege of reading excerpts of the draft manuscript. To my mind this needs to be a high school set book for secondary schools in Tanzania but will it?

For Kitime’s forthcoming book to make it as a public set book it has to glorify our demi God political class and make others, our neighbours, those of different heritage look bad in order for us to look good.

That is the theme of this entire write up. Why is the writer who is independent, tells the story as it is and avoid sensation of the kinds that misleads our youth and rewrites history for short time gain becoming a rarity?

The tragedy is not just with populist blogs and social media. We have national political parties, political titans, ideologues, pseudo intellectuals, teachers, editors all who believe that embellished data, avoidance of facts will make us look swimmingly great. It won’t. If anything, it only postpones our collective shame and worse it teaches bad habit to the hope of our future, our youth.

Will JFK’S book become an award winner and sell beyond his wildest dreams, say a million copies?

A nations’ dreams are carried by those who see the nation in all its colours warts and all not those who cover the faults funika kombe mwanaharamu apite. There you have it living heroes JFK and Maggid Mjengwa and, I have no idea why but both hail from Iringa.