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Written by Wambui Mwangi
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Friday, 18 July 2008 |
Lately, and very promisingly, Kenyans have been asserting rights against various manifestations of official excesses, demanding adherence to duly enacted provisions and laws, whence springs our current fascination with the Merchant of the Grand Regency, a.k.a. the ambiguously honourable Amos Kimunya, and our varying predispositions as to how to treat those accused of involvement in post-election violence as per the amnesty debate.
We justly demand our long over- due measures of accountability in the first instance and of atonement in the second, but perhaps we might also want to consider that citizenship carries certain obligations and duties, as well as rights and privileges. Reconstituting ourselves as holders of responsibilities and debts in response to various Kenyan challenges as opposed to merely holders of expectations and rights may predispose us to a more rigorous yet also more compassionate cementing of justice in Kenyan life.
Story I.
The Merchant of the Grand Regency is everyone’s favourite punching bag these days. My words had been pre-dipped in highly caustic acid as I too, started out to comment unfavourably on Mr. Kimunya’s current prospects, suspect behaviour, and diminishing future viability as one of Kenya’s top representatives. Fortunately all around, the man resigned and saved us all the dubious merits of another vitriolic diatribe against him. By resigning (especially before dying) he changed our obligations towards him because now, he is-- at least theoretically-- merely a defenceless and vulnerable citizen like the rest of us, threatened with the grinding official machinery representing the awesome and punitive power of our more or less democratic Kenyan state. What do we owe this man?
The Merchant of the Grand Regency recalls another notorious one, Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. In high school in Narobi, we had to memorise Portia’s “mercy” speech, reminding us that its quality is not strain’d, and that the strongest indicator of power and authority is clemency.
The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest ....
It is instructive that this play was taught to us, as Kenyan high school girls, as a romantic comedy, because all the lovers pair up and our valiant Antonio gets some of his money back at the end. The heart of this story is really Shylock’s “hath a jew not eyes” speech, in which he makes his impassioned claim, subsequently ignored, to our compassion, our empathy, and our recognition of him as a fellow human being.
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
This story is in reality a tragedy hidden inside a rather frivolous love story format, as Shakespeare invites us to notice that Shylock is defrauded by the very man who spits on him in public and speaks of him with scorn, that Shylock’s daughter elopes with the first likely looking boy who bats his eyelashes at her, taking a considerable amount of Shylock’s assets with her, and that at the end of the tale Shylock is all alone, utterly broke and forced to convert to Christianity. Not only does he not get the money he lent to Antonio in good faith back, but Antonio is consequently awarded half of his remaining assets by a complicit Portia. Although Shylock has the law on his side initially, through Portia’s machinations (and her impersonation of a lawyer, to boot) he has been denied due process on his legally binding contract signed with Antonio.
The latter, no matter his later and understandable qualms about fulfilling the terms of his contract with Shylock, had not exhibited these hesitations and niceties when he was taking Shylock’s money.
This story is really a narrative of the comprehensive trashing of justice in Shakespeare’s Venice, and Shylock represents our poor, our dispossessed and our therefore easily despised. It is not for nothing that Shakespeare made Shylock such an unpleasant character: we do not usually find those we oppress particularly attractive.
Story 2.
On a recent evening, Kenyan drivers just outside the new Shell station in Nakuru erected a spontaneous dynamic vehicular sculpture of awesome dimension and organic complexity. It might have been called just an extremely bad traffic jam by some, but it was so big that it entered a different category. It was a bizarrely intricate and morbidly beautiful arrangement of cars facing in multiple and contradictory directions at the same time, all unable either to advance or to retreat , to the Kenyan traffic sound-track of rhythmical syncopated honking and growls of engines revving.
Quite a work of performance art.
Such was the chaos that headlights of different cars were facing each other, while directly behind them the taillights of two others faced each other too, and three matatus side by side were stuck across the railway tracks, whilst behind them a pick-up truck full of live chickens, but facing the other way, tried to navigate a gully that was obviously impassable. The completely intractable chaos radiated out in concentric circles, visibly growing in hopelessness, helplessness, volume, mass, and Rabelesian absurdity.
Suddenly, and apparently both spontaneously and simultaneously, a group of each of the two sets of professional bullies that Kenyans love to hate, the military police and matatu touts, emerged out of various vehicles and combusted into co-operation. They had found themselves entangled in the traffic imbroglio with the rest of us, and one of those mysterious Kenyan moments happened. Not only do all the rest of us hate both matatu touts and the military police independently, but they hate each other even more also, which takes the game up a notch or two. The four or so military police made themselves into a human intersection, whilst the ten or so touts spread out amongst the snaggled cars to direct traffic into the new “lanes”—a suggestive instance of a flammable spirit of co-operation that overcame significant antipathies in Kenya in an almost magical way, if only for a short while.
Fifteen minutes later, matatus and passenger cars were docilely following each other like lambs in the new paths forged out of our morass, giving way to each other with exaggerated and inexplicable courtesy, and another Kenyan problem of our uniquely self-inflicted and seemingly insoluble type was resolved with dispatch and relish.
In the midst of our unrelenting criticism of these otherwise traumatising men in other contexts and for other reasons, the military police and the matatu touts came to our aid and to each other’s in that small micro-crisis with a professionalism and a precision that amounted to an exhalation of grace. Possibly those same young men will be in a combat of abusive language against each other soon enough, if they do not attempt actually to break each other’s heads over one thing or another, or more probably, to threaten the rest of us in their different but similarly effective ways. Nevertheless what do we owe these militaristic and matatuistic men, who show themselves possible of exhibiting such grace?
Story 3.
The same night, I met a separate group of young men whose most energetic occupation at the current moment is the smoking of bhangi and the cultivation of ‘petty criminal’ and/or ‘small business’ opportunities. They had used the former term, but when I asked for clarification of the activities they described the latter to me. This was not formal research and it was a flat tire that had caused our conversation, but only people this age can be this astonishingly frank and honest, and only they can relate such heinous activities with such tragic earnestness and soulful conviction.
Two of their number changed our flat tire with a speed that would have put a Formula One pit crew to shame while I asked the rest, with a tactlessness that only young people can tolerate, if any of their friends were currently being held as the government’s guests over post-election violence-related crimes, and if they themselves had participated in any of the mayhem. As I listened to their affirmative responses and sympathetic reconstruction of their activities, built along the logic that they themselves had been defending “their” people, but that the other side had been the “aggressors” in one way or another, and to the repeated declaration that as “the youth” they had only been fighting for their rights and their future, two ineluctable suspicions were reinforced.
One was that it was utterly inconsequential which of the various “sides” these young men identified with—this narrative is fairly unchanging across the ethnic boundaries. The second was that that people this age are usually right. If not always in the content of their arguments, then almost always in their moral certainty, or in the direction of their moral criticism, people all over the world of this age have an ethical rectitude progressively denied their older and more cynical compatriots in every culture, and possibly but not verifiably in every age. To counter this idea, they stole our phone.
Nevertheless, that our young men, as perpetrators of the violence, feel victimised by rather than bellicose towards the rest of us raises a compelling flag of truth, and suggests that the current debate over the granting of amnesty or the contradictory imperative to follow the strict letter of the law may be both morally skewed and deserving of these young men’s rather eloquently articulated contempt for us. They too, regularly traumatise us, but we, after all made them, and no matter what “side” they were on, they believed themselves to have been fighting and killing “for us.” What do we owe these young men, and their friends in jail?
Story 4.
The same night, I also encountered the most disturbingly friendly traffic policemen possible, at two different traffic check points, many miles apart. At both of these, the policemen solicitously inquired as to our health and state of journey, at one checkpoint wishing us God’s blessings without any prompting whatsoever, and at the other checkpoint fulfilling our request for directions with a friendliness that bordered on lunacy to my paranoid eyes.
Cynical eyes might detect bribe-seeking behaviour, but no, nothing of the sort. Lo! They were simply two unconnected instances of unprovoked courtesy and helpfulness from our incomparable police. These checkpoints were the only two at which we were stopped, at the others the police waved us by with a polite wave and every indication of unremitting efficiency: some of them even smiled. The same cynical eyes will detect that we had a mzungu in the car, and indeed we did. Aha! cynics say, and they would be right, but this would miss the point. What do we owe our police?
Story 5.
That afternoon, a group of eleven year-olds graduated out of “junior” school at a local academy. [Full disclosure: one of them was my godson.] They really looked almost edible, like dewy fruits, or dawn-picked market vegetables, shining with promise and glowing with hope. (This will confirm racist stereotypes that we Kenyans are cannibals.) My godson and his classmates were sitting in white plastic chairs, like rows of precious but variegated eggs of the most delicious kind. There were light brown ones and dark brown ones in different skin tones, young Kenyan boys and girls cupped in the confidence and innocence of their awaited future.
All these little multi-culturual Kenyan citizens, and both boys and girls, presented a series of performances for their parents and friends. One was surprisingly, my informant assured me, a Turkish dance, although I would have voted for Hungarian—but these young Kenyan students were dancing whatever it was with verve. They feel, and it showed, that all the treasures of the world’s cultures are theirs to enjoy and to experiment with. They also performed a play that militated against the overloading of our children’s play-time with too much work and not enough childhood, as well as delivering broadsides against parental violence and adult propensity to judgement. Then they recited a poem that reminded us that ‘heroes are made and not born.’
They played different instruments, spoke in several languages, and enthusiastically participated in democratic governance structures in their school. These may be only the children of the privileged middle-class, but let us beware. We seem to be teaching them to believe rather strongly in ideas of justice and pluralism and they may one day actually insist on having a fully realised Kenyan democracy, and worse, condemn us for having faint-heartedly failed to provide a working one for ourselves.
They were utterly convincing in their roles as reminders of future Kenyan generations’ absolute power as the Commissioners of Inquiry of History. Their Commission of Inquiry into our present Kenyan moment, unlike our own ordinarily rather feeble ones to date, will have real teeth because by then our children and our children’s children will be judging us by our results and not by our rhetoric. Our children are talking back to us because they are watching us, and this is only the beginning of History’s judgement of us. What do we owe our children?
***
These stories are only fraudulently connected—the events, apart from the first, arbitrarily happened to be observed on the same day, within hours of each other, on the same stretch of the Nakuru-Nairobi road. Even this non-causal juxtaposition in time and place however, qualifies them as distinct exemplars of Kenyan life. The questions raised are persistent—as we militate for accountability and responsibility from both our youth and our powerful, what are our obligations, in turn, towards them?
We owe Mr. Kimunya both fairness and justice, as we owe it to each of our citizens because due process and the presumption of innocence must prevail, or we will like countless of unaware audiences to Shakespeare’s cleverness, merely be applauding our own defraudment and our own complicity in a corrupt and unjust system. Every time another audience applauds the successful defrauding of Shylock by Venice’s rich and powerful, we are in essence cheering our own oppression and that of the dispossesed.
We owe our energetic young warriors in the police forces and in the matatu industry a chance to exercise all that manly (and womanly) strength and physical conditioning in the cause of something other than, or at least in addition to habitually frightening us out of our wits. The levels of physical and organisational skills involved in their various professions are an obvious asset, and it is not beyond the realm of imagination (since it happened already) that these could be harnessed in productive and socially beneficial ways that do not involve these young men threatening or frightening us, or indeed, each other.
We owe it to these young men, as much as to those engaged in post-election violence, to stop conceptualising them perpetually as the problem to be fixed or the equation to be solved. The problem is not so much how the post-election offenders will have to atone for, or how; the problem is that of how we ourselves are going to atone to them for permitting them to become this frustrated, this reckless, this disillusioned with themselves –we turned our sons, fathers and brothers into murderers, rapists and arsonists, and it is our own lack of democratic rigour that allows impunity in high places, more often than not.
We anticipate being terrorised or at least grossly inconvenienced by the red-beret wearing gentlemen and their matatu foes and we anticipate the usual surly insolence from check points of the Kenya police. We are astonished when this fails to be the case, if pleasantly so, but the real question is: since all these men keep proving that they can behave with decency and admirable decorum without prompting, why do we not insist that they behave in this way all of the time? It is clearly possible, why is it not then generalisable?
Similarly, there are a variety of reasons for why a white presence in a Kenyan vehicle would elicit such cheerful policemen, from the charitable one that the Kenyan instinct to hospitality assumes a white face must be foreign and switches to our auto-happy “jambo Kenya” mode; the other, less charitable, would suggest that we are just prone to bowing and scraping to mzungus as a general rule. However, this is irrelevant: the larger point is that what we should be insisting upon, for whatever reason we deduce, is that our police consistently deploy that spirit of “Karibu Kenya” to us citizens, or, in the latter model, be as obsequies and respectful to the general Kenyan public , as we are, after all, their Sovereign Taxpayers and they are our watumishi. Allowing them, as our employees and subordinates, to engage in disagreeable practices and then to take the blame on our behalf is clearly a dereliction of our sovereign duties and our collective responsibilities.
We owe, to ourselves, a muscular interpretation of justice as being both implacable and generously sweetened with compassion. How that works out depends on what we decide we are and what we wish to protect for ourselves, as Kenyan citizens. As to what we owe our children, Khalil Gibran once wrote:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
We owe justice, and Justice is rigorously stern creditor.
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Wambui Mwangi |
| About the author: |
| Professor Wambui Mwangi was born in Nairobi and currently lives in Nairobi and
Toronto. She attended Loreto Convent Valley Road and St. Mary’s School,
Nairobi before graduating from Smith College, Northampton,
Massachusetts.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 18 July 2008 )
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