By Nkwazi Mhango
May I, with sadness and shame, pen this letter to Kenya as I try to clear the air? I don’t intend to support or oppose, calm and engage but not to enrage. I seek to educate but not to abuse or debase. May I be the voice of reasoning as I pen this open letter. Contextually, we recently evidenced how blinkered, cantankerous, different, and duplicitous some of us can be as a people and countries. Again, those who forlornly involved themselves in this saga wrongly thought that they represented us. They’re ours and look like us whether we like it or not. Unfortunately, as it is, they’re our collective drawback. Thanks to them, we evidenced uncalled-for volley of abuses, accusations (false and farfetched of course), lies, condemnations, slanders, defamations, and all sorts of horrid and eldritch stuff sent from both sides of a subsequent redundant conflict, namely Kenya and Tanzania in the name of defending themselves. Essentially, after Tanzania expelled some Kenya Human Rights Activists including alas my elder brother and friend Willy Mutunga (PhD)–––who treated me cordially when I lived in Kenya–––many Kenyans, blindly, boorishly, and spitefully fabricated and fanned all sorts of abuses and barbs.
However, one side, namely Kenya seemed to have won this game of psychotically, self-abuse. Concomitantly, a couple of things attracted my attention, pitched, and stirred me to pen this letter. First, the frivolity of the arguments. Secondly, nauseating systematic self-centeredness and stonewalling. Third, the rashness of the actors on both sides. Fourth, veiled hatred between the two people in question. Fifth, mind-boggling levels of witlessness and even foolhardiness about each other as well.
For example, Kenyans, though not all, accused (and others still do) Tanzanians of not ‘knowing’ or mastering English. Again, do we eat our English? Do Kenyans know English more than others? What should Uganda where many Kenyan pupils are exported to acquire apt education say? How do our ex-colonial masters view us for our craziness and obliviousness besides discriminating against ourselves, our cultures, and languages? Why are Kenyans jutting about English but not Kikuyu, Dholuo, Kamba, Luhya, Kiswahili, and others? What does this speak to? Ironically, generally, Kenyans do neither master English nor Swahili! Is language (colonial and far-off) something for which to waste our time or make us hollowly feel superior or inferior thereof? What does insanity mean if this isn’t? What are practical gains of such barefaced and pointlessly idolised, internalised, and normalised systemic coloniality and idiocy?
If Kenyans know English better and more than others, where do we put British in this psychosis? Ironically, those who fabricated and fanned such humbug don’t know English to well and such a discourse is academically unwholesome. Again, should we be bothered about the outlooks of such ignorant and foolish people who purportedly pretend to represent the two sides? I wouldn’t have wasted my ink and time to pen this letter had our Parliamentarians refrained from and negated to be part of this collective indignity. I heard one Tanzania MP saying that Kenyans have nothing to teach Tanzania. Equally, I heard a Kenyan senator brashly saying that Kenya should enact or put in place unspecified ‘radical’ measures against Tanzania. My doubts and jolt are why our leaders fell into this cheap ensnare? How and what’ll we benefit or gain from this untowardness? Are we such cavalier?
Again, when I clinically, critically, and honestly look at and remember baffling and engrained snags the two nations face, I feel like puking. Perhaps, I’d honestly admit that I’m witnessing this goony tussle and duel of the duet. Why Kenyans failed to address and tackle their Gen Z’s abductions about which I’ve already written a book to congratulate them, but still have the guts to holler for the ‘rights’ of Tanzanians? Charity begins at home though. The sage’s it that apes don’t see their nates except those of their colleagues, which are but typical replicas of theirs? Isn’t a sort of mental health challenge to demonise each other? I don’t know.
Thus, then, what should we do? Let us face I t and culpably and collectively say mea culpa, mea culpa, forgive each other, and move on. Let’s also be proud of our cultures and languages as we carefully spurn those of others even if we use them. More importantly, we’re blood kin whom our colonisers divvied and moulded for our perpetual degradation and exploitation. However, it becomes sacrilegious when we voluntarily snig ourselves and each other thinking we may languorously become better than others. Shame on us! Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on me.
My words and works will live longer, spread wider, speak louder, and be more valued than their creator who happens to be me. They’ll speak when I won’t have power and time to speak. They'll speak even in my absence.
Mhango is a lifetime member of the Writers' Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador (WANL), an expert in Terrorism and author of over 20 books among which are Africa Reunite or Perish, 'Is It Global War on Terrorism' or Global War over Terra Africana? How Africa Developed Europe and contributed many chapters in scholarly works on many issues of importance on Africa with the specialisation in the deconstruction and decolonisation theories he has been working on for a while now.