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Errant Natives, Submissive Obsequious Comprador and the Question of Imperialism
The illusion of sovereignty and state arising out of territories created in 1885 is fast disintegrating. The false political medium in Africa modelled after the Westphalian nation-state which Zbigniew Brzezinski aptly described as "pseudo-states", is undergoing Samual Huntington's political decay. In this case a situation where social-political awareness and activism has evolved at a pace beyond the ability of the colonial institutional order's ability to adapt.
Natives under the delusion of rights that they presumed they had as a natural outcome of the false liberation from colonialism, make untenable demands on the imperial order. These demands consequently lead to fracture of the illusion citizenship and statehood. As the political medium has matured and aged natives' attempts to align what they have been taught in school and what they instinctively believe to be the reality they exist in, is testing the fabric of the medium to it's limits.
This was best exemplified by the March 26th 2017 Jomo Kenyatta International Airport incident in which the Kenya Government removed a native born lawyer by the name of Miguna Miguna to Canada. Miguna Miguna was born in the Kenya territory but had acquired Canadian citizenship. Simply, a man was expelled from his country of birth and ethnic heritage, not by his people but by the instrument of colonial imperialism that had long since been presumed defunct.
The moment revealed the incorporeal prison grid that is the Westphalian nation-state geopolitical system. For both the ignorant and informed the Miguna Miguna "deportation" debacle exposed fundamental contradictions that are intrinsic to the Westphalian nation-state system.
His courageous demand to be allowed to re-enter his country of birth without passport validation created a clash that spewed to the surface the rotten core of colonial imperialist thoughts carried by a native elite whose vacuity was now beyond the political but also human.
To the south, another native, the founder and current leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters Party – Julius Malema threatens the illusion of the Rainbow Nation. Challenging the South African independence fraud which granted "political freedom" without release of the reigns of control of the economy, yet another falsity of such ontological improbability, it's mere existence is testament to the ideological bankruptcy of natives of the African continent.
"I was born here! This is my country of birth!" shouted Miguna Miguna
While standing at the doorway to the plane that was meant to fly him to any destination but his home country.
A native, begging for jus soli (Birthright citizenship).
Native. Jus Soli.
The irony of our dystopic reality.
"I am a Kenyan!"
Declared Miguna Miguna demanding jus civile in a state of colonus, intending jus naturale, while in an actual state of jus gentium. Ignorantly claiming jus civile where no state even exists.
"I am JaLuo", directed at the JoLuo Ruoth would have been more conceptually consistent with jus civile, though even more impotent. Given in our coloniality, we have obsequiously embraced inane oxymoron like "negative ethnicity", at once de-legitimizing our own "larger families" and compelling submission to colonial abstractions like "Kenya" which are defined and redefined at will by the imperialists, as we witnessed in Sudan and other regions of the world. An example being the current re-engineering of identities in the Middle East through the Greater Middle East Initiative GMEI which is re-mapping the old and worn genocidal British-French Sykes-Picot colonial order of the 20th Century in America's sociopathic imperial image. The cry "I am JaLuo" would sadly not only have been impotent but also politically incorrect.
One is only allowed to identify with the identity imposed by the imperial colonialists, any other is met with ridicule at best, and the potential danger of political lynching for "tribalism" by fellow serfs, at worst. No-one dare shout "I am ndorobo!", on an international stage, where when Phil Neville says "I am British and Proud". His ethnicity is not only acceptable but is also recognized institutionally and procedurally. White ethnic identity has citizenship, in fact sufficient jus civile to cater for any whom the white power structure would deign to grant use of their ethnicity i.e. an Arab and Somali can say they are British without fear of contradiction while the reverse would be preposterous. The small "n" in "I am ndorobo!" and the capital "B" in "I am British and Proud" is deliberate.
With this simple "sleight of hand", the imperialists can enjoy citizenship in expropriated lands where they do not belong. They have created political aberrations like "kenya", which enable contradictions that sustain a system that keeps the native inhabitants of colonies and occupied territories from enjoying the rights of citizenship in the suzerain's homeland, while allowing the imperial citizen to enjoy rights in the occupied land equivalent to those in his own.
The colonial status and identity structure Prof. Mahmood Mamdani effectively described is based on the melanin phenotype. Rights belong strictly to low melanin individuals who look pink but are termed white and defined as imperial citizens, they are governed by Civil law. This superstructure is also occupied by a sub-class of individuals with more hyper-activated melanin, termed as brown. Though this subject-class occupy the upper strata governed by Civil law, they exist below the citizens and only have privileges. Natives occupy the substructure as a large muddy brown to black muck that has neither rights nor privileges and exist outside the remit of Civil law. The implications of which are, for example, murder does not apply when it is of a black (notice the absence of the term person) by a white person.
Simply put, the right Miguna Miguna demanded was a right of being a Luo to the Luo Nation. He was demanding this natural right from the un-natural entity of a colony which itself masquerades as a State and therefore has in essence no citizenship to offer, anyone.
"I am a Kenyan!"
Cried Miguna Miguna for the umpteenth time to any and all who would listen, a peregrini (alien), now out of his depth desperately using any and all means of identity available jus coloni (Serf; status of tenant farmer in Rome between freedom and slavery), jus soli (Birhtright citizenship) in order to be granted access back in to the "Kenya" province of the Imperial Empire, not knowing neither civile nor gentium exist for the natives.
"I am a Kenyan!"
Demanded Miguna Miguna the house negro, through the transparent airport departure lounge door to excited members of the Ministry of Truth in a bizarre moment loaded with dramatic scenes and contradictions that leaped back and forth between shakesperean drama and orwellian dystopia.
He flashed his chattel tag, the infamous kipande.
Yes, he was definitely one us, a slave, he belonged in our fields.
No longer a resistance "General"?
The curse of native cyclopia. Given yet to "form" "mind", "essence" makes no "matter".
He demanded to be allowed back in to the field. He had realized, that though being a field negro was wretched, being amongst his fellow slaves consolidated his identity and reinforced his esteem and sense of self, compared to living in the lap of the master where there was all comfort, but total deontological corrosion.
Why was he now seemingly rejecting the safety and security of his master's house? In exchange for what we dare ask? The negro had tasted life. The field promised fame, power, relevance he could never enjoy in the master's house, which though comfortable was cold. Nothing beyond the comfort was real. Man was not created to live in the comfort of another man's house. It is not natural, not for any Man, only for a slave.
The fields though harsh are real, hardship strips masks, revealing us to ourselves, giving rise to struggle, struggle to meaning, meaning to purpose, purpose to life.
The life the negro had tasted.
"I am a Lawyer!"
Exclaimed the plebeian in patrician outrage. Shocked by the treatment meted out on him by fellow members of his own underclass.
Neither being "born here" (wherever "here" is), nor being a Lawyer, nor being "Kenyan" entitled the poor agitator to anything. In actual fact, being "a Kenyan" his greatest defence actually qualified him for the greatest subjugation. As being a Kenyan unlike being a Somali or a German, was the actual slavery.
According to the Kenya Gazette Supplement No. 93 of 7th December 1960 the term "Kenya" means, the colony and Protectorate of Kenya Crown Land.
What is the "Kenya Crown Land"? It rises from the Crown Lands Ordinance (C.L.O) of 1902.
To be "Kenyan" is to be chattel property of the Crown, to be "proudly Kenyan" is to be proudly chattel property of the Crown.
"I am undocumented!"
Protested Miguna Miguna. Imagine that; A world in which to be undocumented is to be institutionally non-existent. But close scrutiny reveals that "some animals are more equal than others", as the "Citizens" of the world do not need to prove their right to re-enter their countries using Passports. Reaffirming the fact that the native has no systemic rights in the imperial order, even in his native land of birth.
"I do not have status!"
Shouted Miguna Miguna at the highly professional pilot. "I have no status in Dubai!" he cried very legitimately. As landing in Dubai without immigration status could expose him to unnecessary harrasment, potential prosecution and even temporary incarceration.
This, for the first time was serendipitously correct in literal terms, and in Dubai he would have been treated exactly as such, a runaway slave.
Without the chattel tag in form of passport or identity card, the native literally has no status, anywhere. While the Queen of England does not require a passport to travel anywhere, not even his President escapes this procedural requirement essentially exhibiting the pecking order even at Head of State level. As for the native he is no less a slave now than he was a century and a half ago, secular imperialism has only evolved an incorporeal yoke for him.
Guns mean nothing! Guns are not issues!" sneered Miguna Miguna disdainfully…
while standing at the barrel end of the insurmountable power of the loaded gun of imperium, he inadvertently revealed why he and his ilk are damned to eternal slavery to men.
Guns are key. Gun ownership is organically related to political agency. Gun ownership in the sense of right to arms is fundamentally integral to Citizenship. The "Gun control" controversy the World has witnessed in America is not about the civilian attacks conducted by deranged gunmen that the main stream media so loves to amplify. It is about political agency. The American people having an instinctive sense of the true essence of slavery having been both subjects and slave owners, and now FREE MEN. Americans deeply understand that "Gun regulation" is political subjugation.
Arms and guardianship were defining characteristics of Citizenship even in Ancient Greece and Sparta. Only chattel slaves were not allowed to own arms then, guns now. Natives. If one can take a moment to flash back to the "Westgate"incident. The Asians who out of nowhere filled the parking lot, for local citizenry, bore a strange arms configuration – Semi-Automatic and Automatic Weapons. No organized group of native civilians is known to be armed in this way, not even in the Private Security Companies. Begging the question, how? Why?
Prof. Mahmood Mamdani in his treatise on Citizenship equips us with the tools to understand the colonial system. Once clearly understood it reveals the existing socio-political identity and dispensation to be simply a paint job, cosmetic makeover of the imperial system established in 1885.
To recap, the top rung is occupied by individuals like Tom Chomondeley, the great grandson of the 3rd Baron Delamere, who has the three vital characteristics necessary to citizenship under Secular Imperialism; very low melanin, property ownership and guns. The bizarre drama all witnessed where then "state employee" Attorney General Amos Wako, flew "state employee" Director of Public Prosecutions to Nakuru NOT to initiate but to terminate the prosecution of Tom Chomondeley, in a case where he was being charged with killing Samson Ole Sisina, a state employee!? This conundrum is only effectively explained by Prof. Mahmood Mamdani's classic treatise "Citizen And Subject" which revealed the real imperial writ, that has been insidiously cosmetically masked by a bankrupt native elite using a false constitutional order. A white man killed a native, a legal non-person. The promulgated constitution of the territory did not and does not apply to imperial citizens. The constitution is then in reality the amalgamation of customary norms of natives into a social contract strictly for natives. Scaled to state level where the property is "oil and minerals" and the guns are "nuclear weapons", one finds an analogically equivalent order, which qualifies and enables "white" nation ownership rights to all the oil and minerals on earth and possession of Nuclear weapons. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is the demarcation line between Civil States and native territories. Thus the great political effort to de-nuclearise the East.
The materialist nature of Secular Democracy compels a logic of power as the criterion of rule i.e. "Might makes Right". Citizens for this reason must guarantee their rights from the sovereign, their rights are not guaranteed by the Sovereign. The right to ownership of arms is not manifest in the "Firearms license" local drug dealers, elected natives and other petty bourgeois who like flashing at restaurants, when not terrorising family members and competing lovers with.
Gun ownership is epitomized by Cliven Bundy. It is manifest in Cliven Bundy's ability to exercise defensive power against an organized expropriator in the form of the United States rogue government. The legal dispute between Cliven Bundy and the United States Federal Government is not the primary issue of importance. Of concern is how the armed standoff between Cliven Bundy's armed militia and armed agents of the United States Government Bureau of Land Management between April 5th 2014 and April 12th 2014, ended with a United States Government standing down.
Why did the United States Government hesitate? Why not another Waco? This is a government which is infamous for love of overkill, be it by conventional, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons means. Death of innocents is no matter for the United States Government, what about an armed militia?
One has to understand how the white horizontal rungs intersect with the columns of the global property rights regime to create the power structure that Imperial elites depend on to subjugate the World. It is in this interstice, that Cliven Bundy made his stand.
The United States Government could not de-legitimize Bundy as a fanatic like David Koresh and neutralize him, given first, his call was Patriotic, second he is a "White Property Owner". Patriotism is the call the United States Government uses to raise canon fodder for its imperial wars around the world. Such contradiction would have endangered the false basis of its existence with exposure. Given second he is White and owns Property, his execution would have potentially undermined the power structure that the imperial elite depend on to subjugate the entire world.
This is why the Imperial United States Government, owner to a standing military of a million plus clones, Nuclear Submarines, Carriers Strike Groups, Nuclear and Ballistic Missile arsenals unrivalled by any other power (now and in history), X-37B robotic space plane and the HTV-2 hypersonic glider prototype, when confronted by a small band of armed, white, property owners… blinked.
Had "the people" owned arms in England during the expropriatory "Enclosure" policy (essentially robbery of land by the elites), the history of the entire World would probably be different.
Guns matter. Raising the question, how does the other errant native, Julius Malema intend to accomplish his mission?
"Expropriation without compensation!"
Declared the Leader! "Expropriation without compensation!" chanted the crowd in ecstatic consent! "Expropriation without compensation!" demanded the renegade! "Expropriation without compensation!" saluted Africa!
What is your method, Julius Malema? Who or what is your sovereign source, Julius Malema? Given you support Democracy, from where will you raise force to compel, reward and punish? What is your new "post-expropriation" world order? Where are your guns?
The title deed is an article defined by law but more importantly anchored in the sovereign. Thus Beth Mugo's infamous statement "The title deed is sacrosanct", implying to undermine it is to undermine the sovereign. It is the most powerful manifestation of the concept of "property rights". To expropriate is to negate "Property Rights". Property Rights are a global regime. To negate property rights is tear up the global property rights regime. It is an attack on the global imperial sovereign.
Lenin, Trotsky and their merry band of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks respectively, tore up Tsarist ancien régime and instituted Communism. A world that promised equality to the masses, "distribution" to everyone as much as they needed, "expropriation" from everyone as much it could. To the elites party membership and safety from the Red Army and dreaded Cheka.
The Queen of England massacred natives around the world, tore up their communal order and instituted Secular Imperial Colonialism in the form of "In-direct Rule". For the masses who collaborated, the Queen promised acquisition of transcendental real-estate through Christian conversion. For the elites who collaborated, the Queen granted English as a Language, token real-estate and a place in her extractive administration overseeing native labour. For all others, her soldiers torched their villages, mowed down men, raped and killed their women and children of all ages, pogromed and interred their entire tribes and nations into camps and reservations where she would starve them into submission and death.
America killed hundreds of thousands using nuclear weapons to send a message to the entire world, Imperium. Like the Queen of England in a necessarily paraphrased copy and paste, America has "massacred natives around the world, torn up their social-political order and instituted Secular Imperialism in the form of "Democratic Rule". For the masses who collaborated, America promised "Freedom" through Secular conversion. For the elites who collaborated, America granted "lives of the Rich and Famous", and a place in her extractive capitalist order. For all others, American soldiers torched their villages, mowed down men, raped and killed their women and children of all ages, pogromed and interred their entire tribes and nations into refugee camps around the world where the United Nations Security Council would use them as pawns on Zbigniews Brzezinksi's Grand Chessboard as their 'Peacekeeping Soldiers' abused them and their children".
What is your source of authority Julius Malema? What imperium will you leverage to execute expropriation? What framework will you use to phase-in to a new political post-expropriation order?
Or are you Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whom after successfully stamping out resistance through the Haitian revolution of 1804, then sought to re-engage his nation to the same Imperial system that gave rise to his oppressors? This was repeated more recently through Democratic process by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. A journey of blood tears and sacrifice out of Misr, literally, then right back in to the arms of Firaun.
While vengeance is sweet, vengeance is right, and vengeance is just, vengeance is only linear at individual level. At sociological level it is evolutionary. The sequence of events in relation to cause and effect only move in one direction along the timeline. A simpler but poor analogical example is, in contracts of kinship. When one marries to end the marriage one undertakes a divorce, one does not undo the marriage by un-marrying.
The failure or inability of the natives to successfully defend their land or conduct a revanche created a new reality which cannot be altered by the same political praxis that created it. Iraq and Afghanistan cannot remove the Imperial occupier through Secular Democracy, this is a matter of ontology. Somalia cannot remove America's proxy occupation – AMISOM by the method of invitation which it presumably used to create it.
Expropriation is materialist praxis, the method of Secular Imperialism. One cannot "undo" expropriation by expropriating. Expropriating the expropriator (though fun and probably vindictively satisfying) does not undo the first act of expropriation but in essence effects a new act of expropriation with it's own effective outcome. Vulgarly, equivalent to "raping the rapist""murdering the murderer". It is a completely new, different, separate action/event in the continuum of life. The purpose here is to create and share a template that can help understand and discuss the nature and consequence of this line of action. This submission is not advice to "do or not do".
Iraq and Afghanistan will lift the yoke of Imperialism by Islamic revolution. A new Islamic dispensation ordered on the sovereignty of the Sharia of Allah (Mighty & Majestic), enabled by the praxis of the Sunnah (Method) of the Prophet and last Messenger to Mankind, Muhammad (PBUH). The method for Islam to acquire dominion and the post revolution civilisation are clearly articulated in Islam's holy texts. To those whom Islam would rule, Islam governs by rational gravity of truth, not the brutal logic of power. Islam for instance solves the problem of land concentration by instituting a land tax based on the productive potential of the land rather than expropriation. This compels productive use of the land triggering an explosion in employment opportunities (as Agriculture has in economic terms the largest potential for employment at all levels, low skill, middle to high), a drastic drop in food prices, food security, all the while averting the social and economic upheaval that devaluing the title deed would cause. As, for those who have neither the interest or capacity to cultivate the land and used the title deeds purely speculatively, the will have the opportunity to voluntarily surrender the excess they hold of the limited resource that is land through voluntary commercial transaction. Taxing the land rather than labour not only increases the treasury of the state but also the disposable income of the population creating an explosion in economic activity. Islam articulates purpose of and for life. Islam gives Language. Islam grants individual and societal tranquillity by answering the pan-ultimate question of Man. The reordering process compelled by rout and replacement of existing sovereign, is therefore complete.
Expropriation is impossible without the establishment of a new sovereign through revolution. As the Economic Freedom Fighters Party Manifesto does not articulate any new or potential sovereign source, no revolution is possible let alone in the offing. The EFF's commitment to non-violence and democratic process will lead the people to activity that will exhaust their energies ultimately leading to surrender by the vast majority. The few strong willed and committed to ending the imperial occupation will either pressure for armed insurgency or break away to form an armed insurrection. In the South African context, this path of events seems highly unlikely.
What for Mzansi, Julius Malema? What is your promise for Mzansi?
Melanin as political criterion will not cut it as the Khoisan lady at your Cape Chamber of Commerce debate with Clem Sunter showed. To succeed you must establish a new sovereign, then lead us. The Dialectic Material sovereign failed. Only one of two choices of possible sovereign anchor remain; Extant Secular Capital and revolutionary Islamic Shari'yah, tightly coupled with their commensurate praxis of Expropriation and Proselytizaton, respectively.
Choose carefully. Do not shed human blood in vain.
Letter to the 'Tribe'
To Mzee,
It is not your fault.
You did not fail to lead. You had no thought.
You did not fail to protect. You had no dominion.
You are not a child of two worlds colonialism and post-colonialism, pre-World War II and post-World War II, you are child of no world.
You are silent because you are lost.
How can you become what you do not know? Who knows what a Kikuyu was? Was like? So that you could be Kikuyu?
What does interring 1.5 million members of a primitive agrarian tribe do to its memory?
It sears. It purges it.
It prepares it for loading with new thoughts, new memories.
Mzee, you were de-centred before you were born.
What Riika (Age-Set) are you? Who are your relatives to the other in the larger family that is tribe?
Yes, Mzee, you would not know. And this is through no fault of your own. Your sole point of access to tribal history and initiation into the social order was interdicted decades before the birth of your generation. That is the "Riika" social system. It is not only the repository of the social map of the Kikuyu tribe, it also facilitated social initiation in ceremonies that defined transition from boyhood to warriorhood to junior elder to senior and finally to tribal council. It is this information void that makes every Kikuyu, a stranger to every other Kikuyu. It is the information that makes every Somali a brother to another Somali. It is the information at the heart of "Somali FIRST".
There has not been a Riika ceremony in a century and a half. The Colonial Government in a stroke of diabolical genius banned the one dated for 1910 making the last one of 1898 the last existent social memory of self.
The breadth and depth of the Imperial war to enslave your people was multi-generational and socially kaleidoscopic in terms of spectrum of tools applied; consisting of conventional, economic, psychological, biological and cultural prongs.
Your history and identity were systematically erased at all levels of consciousness and awareness.
The Church Missionary Society that cultured you was all about Imperial mission. Did you know the idea of the Church Missionary Society was conceived by Charles Grant, the Chairman of Imperial British East India (IBEI). And it was executed by British Members of Parliament William Wilberforce, in the last quarter of the 18th Century, all Secular Imperialists, not a single clergyman.
Closer home, the Presbyterian Church of East Africa which was the institutional protagonist of Christianity in the Central Highlands is actually the bastard child of the Imperial British East Africa company believe it or not. Yes, it is not a secret, it is public information. One century after the establishment of the Church Missionary Society around 1891 Sir William Mackinnon, Mr. A. L. Bruce and other directors of the Imperial British East Africa Company dispatched another group of Imperial agents with Bibles in their hands to British East Africa. As incredulous as it might sound the spiritual values of the Kikuyu tribe were given to it by its expropriator and slave master, the infamous Imperial British East Africa Company.
Can you see why Kikuyus are capitalists by faith? Why sons kill fathers for land and wives kill husbands for property? Why poverty is the ultimate sin in Kikuyu land? Can you now see the source of the Kikuyu tribes' pseudo-Imperialist hubris? The Imperial British East Africa (IBEA) Company is the Kikuyu tribe's pseudo-deity, it is the sovereign source of its spiritual beliefs.
During "the emergency" in the fifties, when the "Mau Mau" resistance rose, the church, both Protestants and Catholics, did not remain silent, neutral or inactive. The missionaries threw their weight behind the British forces and joined their ranks even serving on armed patrols. Yes, "the missionaries" did not call for peace and or love here, there was no division between the Catholics and the Protestants, there was a unified call to in-discriminatory armed action against all "natives". Bring them to bear, how dare they resist Imperial expropriation and Christian occupation!
This language and phrasing as harsh as it actually sounds is actually quite mild. As bizarre as it may sound they did see themselves as Christian saviours of savages, and were surprised by the resistance. In fact, so much so, their analysis of the Mau Mau resistance ranged from a form of mental illness to spiritual evil. Language exactly equivalent to that being used to describe Muslims resisting the brutal occupation of their land, pillage of their resources and rape of their women; Terrorists, Irrational, Bloodthirsty, Extremist, Retrogressive, Deranged… How could anyone hate American Democracy? How could anyone hate British Christianity?
Mzee, not even your denomination is a matter of theological consequence. Your denomination is a result of imperial interest. What I mean is that your Catholicism or Protestantism was decided by the outcome of the Kikuyu 1913 Conference, a meeting wherein the Mission divided between its various missions different regions of the Kikuyu highlands with Sykes-Picot level avarice. Stating that it would prevent "unseemly competition"(sic) and ensure strategic obstruction of Islam into the region. It was the First Council of Nicaea all over again, pure empire.
I am reminded of a quote by Paul J. Getty "The meek shall inherit the earth, but not it's mineral rights…". Our dear father is the promise of transcendental real-estate, a "paradise" where we would continue, condemned to servitude, damned to sing for eternity, in praise of a nondescript god who denied us everything in all worlds, for eternity, yes father, for eternity.
Do you now see what the network of churches and schools in the Mt. Kenya region are? Do you understand the ramifications of their concentration in the 'white' highlands? It is Kenya's "Iraqi Greenzone". It is the network of snake pits, it is the operational heart of the occupation.
The network of churches and schools in the highlands you grew up in, formed the imperial psycho-socio-cultural beachhead. Its concentration intensity is an indicator of the special interest the British Imperialists had in the Kikuyu tribe and its land. Or did you think the appearance of Rev. Musa Gitau, the establishment of Musa Gitau Primary school in 1901, the 1907 recruitment, culturing and emergence of chief collaborator Johnstone Muigai Jomo Kenyatta from this institution and the simultaneous banning of the tribal Riika ceremony of 1910 as all coincidence? The Kikuyu tribe was being specially prepared for a special task. Remember the Kikuyu tribe was not simply broken like other tribes, it was actively re-programmed to serve as the vanguard of British Imperial order in the territory. A sociological scale "nyapara" (taskmaster).
And now to compound an already irreversible problem, the colonial territory's administrative order many think is "their" government, "Serikali nisaidie", entrenched, expanded the socio-cultural and psychological warfare infrastructure that is the Christian Imperial-Missionary schools it inherited. It not just the physical infrastructure but the organization i.e. schedule, format, management method and all. Not just the syllabus but even the book contents as well. Imagine, the native administration did not even bother to either review even re-write the history books. In effect, it became natives yoking each other and their young physically, economically, intellectually, culturally in a never-ending cycle of self-driven slavery into perpetuity.
The Kikuyu tribe was totally socially reprogrammed. Not even your diet was spared. But how could diet escape control, food in that age was the entire economy. Food is sustenance, to enslave people control their survival, bringing me to my next point.
Total cultural re-engineering via economic and belief interventions. In 1893 depending on which version you want to believe, Mr. John Paterson who came to support the "Christian mission" introduced the first coffee seeds.
Why is this significant?
The use of food as a weapon can be later seen as captured by the insidious intent of the Royal Commission on Population, which King George VI had created in 1944 "to consider what measures should be taken in the national interest to influence the future trend of population." The commission found that Britain was gravely threatened by population growth in its colonies, since "a populous country has decided advantages over a sparsely-populated one for industrial production." The combined effects of increasing population and industrialization in its colonies, it warned, "might be decisive in its effects on the prestige and influence of the West," especially effecting "military strength and security."
Let me digress a bit to magnify the ramifications of this, not as articulated by me, but by the imperialists themselves. Henry (Heinz) Kissinger in a report for the United States of America, the imperator of our century, in this rather obviously labelled report "Food as a Weapon" revealed knowledge and awareness that dependency on imports for basic food ultimately lead to famine and death that for them has the intended positive outcome of population reduction outside of Birth Control means.
It has statements and questions that any human being would find fiendish. Listen to the "celebrated Statesman" Heinz Kissinger state; "Mandatory programs may be needed and we should be considering these possibilities now," the document continued, adding, "Would food be considered an instrument of national power? … Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can't/won't control their population growth?"
He also predicted a return of famines that could make exclusive reliance on birth control programs unnecessary. "Rapid population growth and lagging food production in developing countries, together with the sharp deterioration in the global food situation in 1972 and 1973, have raised serious concerns about the ability of the world to feed itself adequately over the next quarter of century and beyond," he said.
The report goes on to predict, that the cause of the coming food deficit would not be not natural, but a result of western financial policy: "Capital investments for irrigation and infrastructure and the organization requirements for continuous improvements in agricultural yields may be beyond the financial and administrative capacity of many LDCs (Less Developed Countries). For some of the areas under heaviest population pressure, there is little or no prospect for foreign exchange earnings to cover constantly increasingly imports of food." Kissinger Said.
"It is questionable," Kissinger gloated, "whether aid donor countries will be prepared to provide the sort of massive food aid called for by the import projections on a long-term continuing basis." Consequently, "large-scale famine of a kind not experienced for several decades—a kind the world thought had been permanently banished," was foreseeable—famine, which has indeed come to pass.
Based on my understanding it becomes clear that the I.B.E.A and P.C.E.A Church were the modern day Monsanto and Bill Gates Foundation G.M.O alliance of your time. Where the founding P.C.E.A church wielded the Imperial Bible to justify subjugation and domination, Monsanto and Bill Gates Foundation wields science and influence to push 'democratic' equality in a veiled philanthrocapitalism agenda.
The introduction of a cash-crop economy coupled with taxes and forced labour, Mzee, was not economic warfare, it was slavery, a brutal war to enslave.
Everyone loves to quote Winston Churchill "We can afford to be generous in victory…". The British were definitely generous; to the French they granted Limestone mining concessions, the American's off-shore oil drilling rights. They, the British, own everything else; the Gold, the Oil, the Titanium, the Land and even the Women. And what in terms of land or minerals they have been unable to exploit for capacity, timing or other political or economic reasons, they have cordoned off with expropriatory legal tools titled "Natural Wildlife Reserves", "National Parks", "Conservancies" and all other manner of evolving terms.
One hundred and sixty seven years ago (Jan. 2nd, 1851), Henry Venn uttered these words:–"If Africa is to be penetrated by European missionaries, it must be from the East Coast."
Mzee, consider us fully – penetrated. From the East Coast. If only you would have been awake to their designs.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi a pre-eminent Daimyō, warrior, general, samurai, and politician of the Sengoku period in the 16th Century is regarded as Japan's second "great unifier". In November of 1586, Hideyoshi ordered the expulsion of all Christian missionaries on Kyushu. Later on in 1596, he ordered the crucifixion of six shipwrecked Spanish Franciscan missionaries, three Japanese Jesuits, and seventeen Japanese Christians at Nagasaki.
This moment, I submit Mzee, was the moment that bought Japan another 500 years of independence. This was the reception Dr. Johann Ludwig Krapf should have received when he hit the East Coast beach in 1844, under the patronage of the Imperial British East Africa Company via it's psycho-social-cultural warfare arm – the Church Missionary Society.
Mwene-Nyaga does not exist, Gikuyu is lost, there are no Kikuyu. The land has been conquered and the tribe has been scattered. It was actually effectively scattered in 1890 when the last Riika ceremony turned out to be the last. With its history lost its identity evaporated in a Century even awareness of genealogical existence will cease to exist. In simple terms, the tribe will not exist in 100 years. Imperial British East Africa Company with its socio-cultural prong the Presbyterian Church of East Africa succeeded in reprogramming an agrarian Bantu tribe into an amorphous mass of secular capitalist individuals. The Kikuyu are victims of the victory strategist Sun Tzu classified as not just victory, but a victory that is complete. The Kikuyu tribe vanquished, never to rise again. The women who bear Kikuyu genealogical heritage should be married and absorbed into the tribes that survived the imperial scourge, this is their only hope for safety, security and honour. The Kikuyu men who cannot establish new colonies and tribes should dissolve into the nihil of time.
The only way is forward. The Kikuyu as a people or as individuals must reject Man as Sovereign. In Monarchical form or Demos form both have translated to tyranny. There is no way back to the past, the "Mungiki" attempt revealed everything about where the path back into the past would lead. The Kikuyu must find a new Sovereign, or be damned to eternal humiliation.
If the new Sovereign be a man or material being, it can bring nothing but misguidance and oppression. For the true sovereign must be able to answer the question of where we have come from, why we are here, where we are going. The true sovereign must be established above and outside our material reality for creation cannot define its own purpose. The true sovereign will create just, cogent, tranquil internal and external order.
I have walked my journey, conducted my search, and found a sovereign who qualifies vengeance, guarantees inheritance of the earth to those who serve him unreservedly and promises Jannatul Firdaus, an afterlife replete with spoils of war that make Valhallah pale in comparison, adorned couches and raised thrones, wide-eyed virgins and youthful serfs.
This is the Sovereign I will serve, this is the Sovereign my son will serve, this is the Sovereign I invite you to serve, Oh Gikuyu.
Your son,
Empire Man
Kissinger's 1974 Plan for Food Control Genocide by Joseph Brewda
Executive Intelligence Review
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya – Caroline Elkins (2005)
The early attempts at ecumenical co-operation in East Africa: the case of the Kikuyu Conference of 1913
Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae, October 2010, 36(2), 73-93 – Julius Gathogo
Plotting Our Raging Hope
"Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it. In underdeveloped countries the preceding generations… fought as well as they could… we must realize that the reason for this silence lies less in their lack of heroism than in the fundamentally different international situation of our time."
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Nairobi, 2003: Following the indefinite closure of Moi University due to a students' strike against the system that privileged self-sponsored parallel students over the regular ones, I teamed up with a friend who had graduated from Catholic University and set out to mentor and inspire primary and high school students in the name of Preparing Leaders Of Tomorrow (PLOT). However, we had limited access to the students owing to Michuki era matatu strikes and watchmen who, lumping us together with religious missionaries, turned us away or directed us to officers least interested in our proposals. While we contested the misrecognition and missed opportunities, the fact that we spoke to more watchmen than students and the contradictions of our own lives was also a cause for laughter at the time. However, with the insight of hindsight (mediated by significant ideological shifts), I came to learn that this was not a laughing matter.
Here I was, a public university student whose comrades were now serving long suspensions due to resisting the privatization of higher education walking side-by-side with an unemployed private university graduate (then postgraduate) trying to prepare leaders of tomorrow while being ill-prepared to make sense, or inhabit the present effectively. Also significant for me was our inattention to the political lives of the readily accessible watchmen who, knowingly or unknowingly, had prevented our short-lived, and ill-conceived initiative from reproducing the same maladies that we were desperately seeking to break away from.
Reflecting on our inattentiveness to the watchmen's lives often returned me to childhood memories of an episode of the KBC TV drama/ situation comedy Plot 10 where the plot watchman Munai (Ronald Kazungu) reminds the caretaker Kajogoo (Joseph Njogu) of the cold nights he endures while the tenants sleep in their houses and the end-of-month hunger experienced due to salary delays while the tenants go for their monthly feasts. However, Munai's own suffering does not translate into empathy for tenants such as Adam (Thomas Onsongo) who requests for an extension on his rent payment due to his wife's medical bill.
Munai's lamentation and impatience with Adam was crucial in helping me to see differently, and in more politically perspicuous ways, the tragic inattentiveness that makes it difficult, if not impossible for urban inhabitants to compose lives in common even with those with whom we share a time/space — our contemporaries. From the intimate space of the plot, we learn of the multiple webs of assistance and resistance that tenants create in order to survive. We are also reminded of adaptation, self-help mechanisms, and resilience developed in response to the privatization of key services and amenities that make urban life more precarious.
Like actual multi-occupancy, low-rent, tenement spaces, the fictional Plot 10 is hospitable and hostile in equal measure. But this understanding of the word plot does not exhaust its meanings. Plot also has connotations of the designs/plans for a ravenous night out (plot/ plan/mpango) and an undeveloped piece of land. More recently, the desire to have a plot of land of one's own has turned associational life into a means of individual gain, credibility/creditworthiness, entitlement, self-actualization, and ultimately, pleasure. It is a guarantor of intergenerational hope for those who possess it and a cause for hopelessness and rage for the dispossessed.
With the moralization of plot ownership, being plotless or homeless is considered an individual rather than structural and systemic pathology related to the institutionalization of private property and disposal of unalienated land in ways that benefit those closest to the sites of power. Similarly, the plot, the dark underside of the colonial ideal of the green garden city that kept the black native quarters separate, unhygienic, overcrowded and male-dominated is normalized. In a postcolonial city characterized by fragmented rhythms and fortified enclaves the simultaneity of concrete plots and green gated communities make it difficult to imagine common times and a generational politics that is not predicated on class.
When inequalities such as those alluded to above create an existential rift between age-mates, the idea of generational mission becomes frivolous and unattainable. Accordingly, Fanon's call for each generation to find its mission and a politics attuned to the weight of international structures from the standpoint of time raises fundamental ethical/political questions regarding how to live (well) with those with whom one is in synchrony with. Better still, we are forced to ask what it means to be contemporaries, to share a time/space, or even a mission with others in a world characterized by alienation.
In cases where the ideal of the generation does not acknowledge how different people are situated in the world/time, it becomes difficult to imagine a new human due to fidelity to the land, to the (mother) tongue, shibboleths, oaths, bloodlines, race, or class. Generational lines here involve the passage of things and meanings between variations of the same in ways that maintain foundations while disavowing foundational and other forms of violence. This desire to stay true to the name of the father, the son, and any other thing that they find holy, which in most cases is race, property, and group propriety, makes people inattentive to the lives of some of their contemporaries.
However, it is possible to compose a dissensual sense of time, 'other' contemporaries, and a common world with those who we are told are carriers of an insurmountable difference. In the Kenyan context, this involves refusing colonial inscriptions and narrow crisis-based sympathies that invoke old bloodlines as moral lines and even lines on the map. It is also a refusal to join alliances that invoke elite destiny/destinations and origins while being inattentive to our co-presence, people's material conditions of existence, and ambiguous ethical relations.
Unlike co-presences that bring together multiple lifetimes, there are conceptions of the contemporary and generational times that fetishize a consumption of the present that erases the past and ruins the earth. These presentisms makes life in the present intolerable for many and the future improbable for other generations of human and non-human beings. They also invoke alternative histories and family stories that treat past injustices, dispossessions, and broken promises as anachronistic threats that call up ghosts that are too old for us to be concerned with today. So, they go on their knees and call on us to Forget! Forgive! They want a chance to develop the present without the burden of the past and responsibility to the future.
This is the mantra of the leadership of 'our' generation. In its quest for reconciliation, it shies away from the truth that the dry bones from the past constantly throw at it. It remedies the quest for justice, or dissenting voices through violence first and then development projects underwritten with human blood. With blood-soaked hands, they point upwards invoking gods of forgiveness. Downwards, they point to rails and roads that project today's debts into the future. Pointing east, they contract comrades who pour concrete over the blood-soaked lands quickly entombing the dry and not so dry bones. To cover up their tracks, they accelerate time. They turn history into ethnology; compare one group to another, crunch numbers, and then project them into a perverse developmental scheme. Schools, roads, hospitals, language and other common entitlements become communal favours and bribes that individuals can plot to plunder.
In defence of this time of development and/as plunder, young tongues are sharpened. They sing praises and lick crumbs from the floor. They silence their own multi-lingualisms and disavow their impurities. These young tongues traffic in diglossia— two versions of the same language— one for the people that they now want to constitute as a single and unproblematic whole, and another for those that they consider part of their proximate, exclusive, and intimate world. A world that, even in the face of gaps in material conditions of existence and incommensurate world-views, considers itself to be one with the potentate, the potentate in waiting, or the one who is robbed of the status of potentate and pursues it perpetually.
As committed presentists, the figureheads of generational wars and cleavage stand hand-in-hand. They claim to be forming something new but only speak the old language of Peace, Love, and Unity now recast as grand projects of anti-graft and neoliberal development. In this monolingualism, the oneness of tongue ensures that only a few lick the bones dry. For them, being a contemporary is a perverse gastronomy. It involves eating together and then devouring those who serve them. It is a potential cannibalism that turns away from the cries of their contemporaries – "Watameza mate sisi tukikula nyama."
During this orgasmic feast, we are told to suspend politics in the service of the economy. For these brothers turned foes, and then turned brothers again, the present is "our time to eat." Others, other generations, must wait for their turn. In the meantime, their tongues can be put to better use…speaking in tongues, singing praises, and hurling abuses. After all, we are a generation of forgivers.
For the impatient, the generation of leaders-in-waiting, and those whose time has come and passed, they are summoned to hustle! Gamble and speculate. To be a plotter of one sort or another. To learn many trades and always throw their eyes askance. To learn how to wink and lick their lips. Engage side-hustles, side-kicks, and 'side-dishes' "…you never know which one will land on your lap. You never know which one will be an economic boom, or which one will make your loins 'burst.'" They are told to plot and have no time for the plotless.
Beyond the shared games, our generation is forced to ask what it means to inhabit a rift between oneself and those with whom one shares a living space but whose rhythms of life, recent tongue-waggings, and eating habits, make it impossible to share a common world/time? Are they still your contemporaries? We are forced to speculate on how we can live with those who, owing to their dealings, do not only live in an exclusive space, but have fractured our present such that they can afford to live in another time. Those who shared our childhood but, in order to secure the future of their own children, have accelerated accumulation and destabilized the present for today's children.
Speaking of our times in common involves breaking hegemonic temporal rifts between those who declare that it is their time to eat and those who live in perpetual hunger. Between men, women, and all others. Between those who are made premature elders complete with ceremonial adornments irrespective of their age and experience, and those subalterns who remain perpetual children. It involves disabusing ourselves of the times of otherness that is assigned to those who, according to Johannes Fabian, are located allochronically – in another time of human development (infantilism) or of social development (primitivism) and therefore must be represented, converted, developed, and brought into national or capitalist time even if they resist. For, according to the owners of our time, these people from another time do not know any better. If they resist, watajua hawajui.
But hope persists. Not due to a panglossian optimism that always announces that "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds," or a focus on the soul (for which it is well) even when things are evidently broken. Hope persists because we believe it is possible to compose new, ethical, and more equal ways of being-in-common while refusing to adapt and live with otherwise intolerable indignities. For a generation that had its hopes domesticated through the mantras of positive thinking, the fetishization of the hustle, funny memes, fancy civil society themes, and the language of adaptability and resilience rather than resistance against the intolerable, a new and raging hope becomes an imperative. One that breaks up with those children of the first and second liberation who salivate waiting for their turn to sit at the table as it is currently constituted. Like the South African Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall movements, this hope that is all the rage invokes old names and devises new revolutionary games for the dispossessed who refuse to be crushed any further.
This hopeful rage for a postcolonial age exists in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's novel Matigari where Matigari ma Nijirũũngi returns from the bush and finds a new generation of neo-colonial collaborators such as Johnny Boy Junior (the son of the colonial collaborator John Boy).With new contemporaries from another generation— Muriuki , a poor boy who lives in the wreck of a Mercedes , Guthera, the sex worker, and Ngaruro wa Kiriro, the leader of the workers' strike—, Matigari imagines and works towards a dissensual, yet more life-affirming present and future. These dissenters, children-turned-comrades do not only tell us what is amiss but point out that what we think is a gap, is really a gaping abyss. They make it apparent that the land problem, police brutality, education, and exploitation of labour, are not things to be solved through individual effort or some perverse form of self-help. They can be addressed by composing a more affirmative commonwealth.
Like the old laws of the fathers that Matigari contests, an old bifurcation is descending upon us today. One where familiar and familial handshakes on screen or behind the scenes are presented as solutions to 'our' problems without acknowledging their spectral character, their sacrificial logic, and their global connections. Standing hand-in-hand, the sons vow to get over with politics and return to economics (not political-economy) as if the economy were a domain devoid of politics.
But 'our' generation should know otherwise. Having lived through the tragedies of structural adjustment programs, the explosion of neoliberal self-help and occult economies, we know the violence of moves to naturalize the separation of the market and the state. We know that the economy is political and that the public / private split has been mobilized for the ruination and privatization of the commons as part of our neoliberal common sense. We know what IMF letters of intent mean and tremble when the appetite for borrowed money pushes us to live in borrowed space and borrowed time.
We have seen how the things we "cannot not want"; development, democracy, life, have been projected into the logic of sacrifice, enmity, and abandonment where some lives have to be given up in order for 'our' democracy or development to survive. For those who lived through the Moi years, we know the death-deploying force of emergency measures geared towards getting rid of traitors and 'treasonous plotters' by constantly asking people whether they want to be free or secure. Whether they want peace and security or free and fair elections. Whether they want politics or development. Whether they want peace, love, and unity under a single party and the 'stability' it guarantees or chaos and disorder of democracy and pluralization. These false choices affirm the sacrificial logic and sovereign violence that has always been part of our national plot.
A logic of sacrifice holds multiple generations captive. It asks them to choose between friends and enemies, politics and economics, modernity and tradition, good and evil with violence being deemed permissible if not necessary for the maintenance of order. As liminal figures, the uncertainty-generating youth become a problem to be solved through uncritical pedagogy, entrepreneurial services that turn them into a lootable resource and discipline. To maintain order, youth disorder or dissensus is dealt with violently at home, on the streets, at school, and across the border. Putting the youth in their proper place becomes a state fetish that 'our' generation silently condones or loudly cheers on in the name of restoring discipline, certainty, preserving the sanctity of property, and securing the nation.
But loss of certainty is more than a youthful concern. The uncertain times that 'our' generation is living through are tied to larger displacements of certitude on one hand, and the emergence of new forms of certainty or resurgence of old ones on the other. Under such circumstances, familiar political codes and coordinates do not hold. Calls for peace serve as a moral alibi for pacification, and developmental encroachment on wetlands and accelerated ventures into extractive carbon economies (like oil and coal) cover up the slow violence, corruption, and environmental destruction that is already here and that which is yet to come. They also pave way, not only for the end of the world as we know it (as Immanuel Wallerstein put it), but for the possibility of a world without us. A world marked by more drought, floods, smoke, choked seas, and more blood owing to backhand plots that decimate spaces that human beings (not a generation) share with other non-human beings.
These are the signs of our uncertain times where seemingly small acts in this small part of the world have effects elsewhere. After all, aren't the fault-lines in Mai Mahiu causing speculation about continental drifts in the anthropocene — an epoch where man is recognized as a geophysical force. As UoN's Amollo Kenneth Otieno (2016)states, we cannot continue relating to the land and construction in the same way in light of increased flooding and subterranean erosion along the existing fault line as well as the fissures arising from the liquefaction of less cohesive soils. However, the hustle continues. We people of the plot, even in the face of the earth opening up see opportunity in the weak volcanic ash/sand from Mai Mahiu. With this sand, we mercilessly build the ever-collapsing vertical plots of Huruma.
The episodic killing of contemporaries is part of the political imaginary we grew up with. It is not merely part of the assassin state's extra-judicial violence, it is also a demotic people-sanctioned violence. Today, we cannot be critical of the militarization of the police in Kisumu without seeing its connections to the violence in Kismayu and the martialization of society. All the talk of "Our boys in uniform" in Kismayu intensifies hatred of the enemy without and prepares the ground for the violence, preemption, and revenge of 'Our boys' in Kisumu. The scandal, the tragedy, is that 'we' cheered on the KDF when they ravaged the Somali as part of Operation Linda Nchi. We turned a blind eye when they threatened to close Dadaab and deport the refugees. Silence…when the police ransacked Eastleigh and incarcerated the Somali in Kasarani as part of 'Usalama Watch.' 'We' are silent when Boni forest is bombed as part of Operation Linda Boni. We cheer politicians who wear military fatigues and dare each other to a fight.
Now that the guns are turned inwards and contemporaries deported, we put our faith in the handshakes of the sons of founding fathers even though we know that they conceive violence narrowly. With each embrace, with each song, with each prayer, we see new capitulations each generating a narrower sense of those one considers their contemporaries. These capitulations show that the old games do not work. The political appeal to the human conscience and moral good sense of the state and the 'international community' is falling on deaf ears. The Kenyan democratic order, borne out of popular struggle in concert with allies is now being sacrificed based on business and security interests. Based on the imperatives of the War on terror, AFRICOM strategies, Chinese business partnerships, and a gluttonous political elite that misreads diplomatic codes and trivializes the suffering of Kenyans, and non-Kenyans in Somalia, Palestine, and elsewhere. In their dealings, they reproduce the complicities of a previous generation that sat silently, exploited, and turned a blind eye, to the violence of apartheid in South Africa.
Whither the reformers of yester-years? They are both the subject and object of betrayals. In their perpetual calculations, capitulations, and political realignments, they too lost the plot. They betrayed the cause. The liberal democracy they summon is no longer compelling for it is taking place in an era when liberal ideals and the neoliberal economic order is in its terminal crisis globally. An age characterized by what some call illiberal democracy. An age that privileges resilience over resistance and as always, holds Africans and African politics to a lower standard… "rigged peaceful elections are good enough."
We have been betrayed. Like their predecessors, the younger leaders remain inattentive to precarious lives at home and abroad. They reproduce the phallic logics of an older generation rather than composing something totally new. Because we are held captive by the law of fathers (patria) and the fetish of the fatherland (patriotism), both elite and subaltern classes articulate a phallic logic of comparative entitlement: "My suffering is bigger than yours, we are a bigger community than you are, our cut is deeper than yours." The resultant phallocracy, if we are to borrow Grace Musila's words, haunts Kenya's politics. It is transgenerational and involves one generation of men learning the phallic logic from the other men in their lives. It permeates institutional and popular narratives about the 'return to tradition', fidelity to 'our son/ our people', the impossibility of co-habitation or mwanaume ni kujisimamia. The contest of sons, and protection of 'our' corrupt sons/daughters has become the basis of new friend/enemy distinctions. It is the basis of moral calculations about lesser or necessary evils and ultimately, the possibility or impossibility of co-habitation with those contemporaries marked by an insurmountable difference. It is the basis of the desire for more virile versions of an old self as a guarantor for 'our' survival. It is a most tragic and self-perpetuating sovereign 'cock-fencing' based on anxieties over 'spending power.'
Can we, in search of a different plot, in the name of a new hope, dis-identify with the familiar/familial categories through which we are counted today? Can this generation, this composition of contemporaries, betray the forms of affiliation, phallic logics and fantasies, as well as the violence, and desires cultivated by the generations past? Can we decolonize our bodies and minds? Can we proceed in ways that question rather than merely assert what it means to be a part of a community (broadly conceived) or to be contemporaneous with others? Can we compose commons rather than seek our seat at the table farthest away from the commoners?
To do any of the above requires the betrayal of some of the things 'our' generation holds dear; its plots, its hopes, and speculations. It involves dis-identifying with the ideal of the generation and composing new contemporaries. From Matigari, a man who composes new contemporaries in the struggle against oppression, we learn that struggle and hope in struggle and life is vital. That victory, if there is one to be won, "is born of struggle" and even in crushed times and moments of darkness; "There is no night so long that it does end with dawn."
ME AGAINST THE SYSTEM: The frustration of Wasted Potential
At almost 35, I'm yet to find balance in life. I was born into a family of five, two parents, two boys and a girl. I am the first born. My two siblings are doing just fine. Set in the family way, raising children, pursuing and living life by their own personal terms, happily, no less. Given all the trouble they put me through growing up, I can honestly say their success is my success, and wouldn't have it any other way.
My personal life however, is a conundrum of sorts. No family. No (real) job, No prospects! Growing up in Kayole, Eastlands in '94, life was harmonious and easy for a child who saw the world through innocent eyes. Kayole estate was a World Bank housing project designated for the middle class. In the original plan, facilities such as schools, dispensaries and markets were strategically placed to serve the residents with paved roads and functioning streetlights. The houses came with large parking lots and a fully functional drainage system that stands to date. Crime was rare. In early 90s, there were a few white folks living in Kayole before they all moved out and relocated as the neighbourhood lost its gentrified status.
Apart from the few model houses that were built to World Bank standards, the rest of the dwellings were squatting houses that mushroomed into a hostile takeover after residents began flaunting the building regulations with no consequences. Those who were connected, began constructing 8 to 12 rooms on 50×100 plots and the Eastlands suburban vision that was part of the original plan fell apart. Toilets, bathrooms and cloth lines were communal in these new dwellings and with it came congestion tension between tenants.
In the early 90s, Kayole was characterised by wide open spaces everywhere, a gigantic play ground. Our days were marked by childish pursuits that included, football matches played using improvised polythene plastic paper bags rolled into a tight ball then fastened with sisal strands to give it a firm texture. My love for the sport was, as my mother put it, more than that of life itself. She had a point. I had a dream of becoming a professional footballer and joining the ranks of Roberto Baggio, the Italian midfielder, Luis Figo, the Portuguese Forward, and the Brazilian striker sensation, Romario, my football godfathers of the 90s. All of whom I followed on KBC, thanks to a portable radio that my dad had bought to keep himself updated on the politics of the day.
I must have been 12 years old when I first started noticing the three white men visiting our neighborhood and spending a lot of time watching us play. Two tall men, both lean in frame and the third, a bald man with the beginnings of a paunch. They drove an old Nissan Sunny. After the matches they would sit us down and offer us soft drinks and cookies engaging us in polite conversations about our families, our education, dreams for the future and whether we wanted to play footie in Britain! I particularly intrigued them a great deal.
Their talk of playing in Britain, cast a spell on me and I became obsessed with the idea. They kept on showing up every few months each time bearing gifts of new balls and sport shoes. Eventually, they insisted on meeting my parents to "introduce" themselves. My mother was super elated and quickly gave in to the request after I broke the news at home. My father however, a hardware store employee off River Road, downtown, warned me about fraternizing with strangers. His authoritarian style of parenting stifled any designs I had about my own life choices. So when he said no, it was final. Attempts by mother to bring him on board bore no fruit. His refusal adversely affecting me and I was diagnosed with clinical depression that required psychiatric evaluation.
The final blow came in 1997 when the indiscriminate land grabbing linked to David Mwenje, then Member of Parliament for Embakasi and other politicians in the Moi era arrived in my neighbourhood. The political class and their cohorts embarked on a privatisation spree, leaving no open public space untouched including our playground. Marooned and helpless, the sport died a natural death and the football scouts stopped coming. Consequently, my hopes died shortly thereafter, my dreams, valid as they were, with me as well. It would only come to emerge later that they were UK agents scouting for new talent in Africa and I was on their watch list. Twenty two years down the line, I wonder how my life would have turned out had I gotten my professional football break!
To stave off the pain of loss, I began drawing and sketching and my scribbling morphed into a budding career in calligraphy and poetry. My passion for creative writing was inspired and fueled by Tupac Shakur's 1996 Album, Me against the World. I felt like a social pariah and Tupac's music and US hip hop on inner city experiences became relatable. In the mid 90s, the transport sector experienced the emergence of a new breed of vehicle in Nairobi as the privatisation and free market bug hit with the collapse of the two major state funded public transport bus services, the Nyayo and Kenya Bus. The privately owned matatus ushered in a new-fangled culture that revolutionized the whole matatu industry and gave it its present day mojo. This was the age of the Manyanga, a name drawn from the original street Sheng term used to depict a young voluptuous woman. The pimped matatu was a far cry from its weathered predecessors, with graffiti cutting across its body, both inside and out. They spotted large sport tyres with flashy rims and loud music systems that played a lot of hip-hop and reggae music to lure customers. Influenced by both American hip-hop and Jamaican ragga cultures, both weed smoking and baggy jeans hip-hop fashion became vogue as the flashy touts paraded their brand of swag that quickly caught on as a trend that started in Eastlands and spread on to all parts of the city.
My two skill sets found a place in the industry where I spent my days in garages designing creative works and getting paid for it. I became a matatu graffiti artist and settled in my new 'career' until a directive from the Ministry of Transport under the famous "Michuki Rules" instituted by John Michuki in the Kibaki era banned matatu art. Flashy matatu art was term as a conduit for "hooliganism" and undesirable social elements and in an effort to streamline the industry, monochromes and yellow strip became the new civilised matatu look. Most garages closed shop ostensibly forcing many youths to look for alternative means to survive. All I was left with was my poetry and prose.
While moonlighting as a matatu art creative, I completed a certificate course at Utalii College specialized in food and beverage and joined the multitudes in the job market hunting for opportunities. My first stop was at The Norfolk, Nairobi, where a college buddy worked courtesy of his father, an industrial kahuna. He tried pushing my case with the head chef who agreed to an internship but personnel blocked my entry sighting my "nobodiness!" Undeterred, I kept pushing my luck for about a year until the management had enough of my persistence and finally physically threw me out of the premises.
Disillusioned, I decided to send over a hundred applications all over the country hoping for the best only to receive one reply, a regret letter, no less. In my desperation, I stormed through hotel doors demanding to see human resource managers to explain the problem! Was it me or them! Most would ask in surprise rather than shock at my audacity, "Who sent you?"
"Myself," I would reply, "I sent myself" but that was not the response, they wanted to hear! I had no godfather in this skewed system, essentially, a nobody. As the post election conflict of 2007-2008 and the ensuing unrest blew over the country, I despaired, weeping and wiping my tears silently as my country burned with my hopes and dreams.
After a year of listlessness, a job vacancy landed on my lap in March of 2009, when I received a message stating, "a tour company is looking to hire new drivers, for more details, call the number below," The number and company was unfamiliar but I went ahead and called the number immediately. A lady shared directions to their offices, in industrial area where I reported for an interview and despite my absolute lack knowledge of the tour operator space, I got hired on the spot and training started promptly. I began travelling to the country's game parks, Nairobi, Nakuru, Meru, Mara, Tsavo guiding visitors and learning about wildlife. I experienced the novelty of museums, hotels and resorts as a tour driver, met new people and got wide exposure to Kenya's rich natural and cultural heritage. There was one challenge though, the company was not paying us salaries even after seven months of hard labor. Frustrated and fed up, the bunch of disgruntled workers decided to exercise to two options left at hand, paralyze the operations and sink the ship or jump overboard and swim to shore. We settled for the former then bailed. Needless to say, I was once again on the streets scratching my chin, staring into space, my college certificates in hand. There were no breaks for another year and a half. Thankfully, the seven month stint had equipped me with enough skills and contacts to maneuver.
Shelving my academic credentials, I began hustling every top dog I had come to know in the industry, head-on. Luckily, my number came up and I got absorbed by one of the many I reached out to. Wilfred was a good man who wanted good for everyone. The management sadly misconstrued his kindness for nepotism and fired him. Without a safety net, my godfather dispatched, I knew it was only a matter of time before things went south which happened a week later. From then on, the job tap ran dry. At my wits end, living an insipid existence, I started entertaining suicidal thoughts.
My turning point was triggered by an old, torn bible handed down by my mother which sat gathering dust on my table. I was never a religious person and my church attendance was incidental but something caught my eye between the pages. I opened the book and stumbled on Acts 17:26-27
"And He has made from one origin and blood all nations of men to settle on the face of the earth, having determined their periods and boundaries. So that they should seek God in the hope that they might feel after him and find him, although he is not far from each of us."
This verse provoked my contemplation on my spiritual purpose and the place of God in my life.
About to close the book, I happened upon this,
Romans 10:13 "Whosoever calls on the name of Jesus shall be saved."
I stared at the verse, blankly, then vividly remembered a quote someone had once shared of a drowning man clutching on to a serpent. I closed my eyes and uttered a very simple prayer, crying, then shut the book and put it aside. Nothing happened and life went on as usual. Three months later when I started having psychic revelations, that correlated with live situations during the day. I started noticing very "mundane" things like a person's energy, when one is in distress. I could discern impending illnesses, investment outcomes, accidents, robberies, even death, surprisingly. I attributed all this to a divine revelation and embarked on a new spiritual journey in the Christian faith my mind renewed. Jesus saved me!
Meanwhile, old buddies I had met along the dusty streets of struggle kept enquiring about my welfare. Some had joined the taxi business to earn a living. With nothing to lose, I found myself reunited with them chatting the days away, occasionally covering for any absentee drivers and developed an interest in the taxi business as a new career path. My first car was a Nissan B14, silver in colour that belonged to a senior police officer in Nairobi who always threated to shoot me if I ever played him. He had a serious demeanor. The threat was not taken lightly.
I entered in the taxi world feeling like a fish out of water. By day, Nairobi is the city in the sun. At night it is a hell hole that requires intelligence and a thick skin to get by. A puzzle to be solved before one can advance to the next level. By any measure, a pain in the butt. Police want a piece of you. City Council use any opportunity to shake you down. Thugs lurk at every bend and fellow operators want you dead.
The experiences I have faced are surreal. I remember my first case, her name was Dorothy. Heavy with child, we had just left Uchumi supermarket, at Adams Arcade and were discussing baby names headed to Nairobi hospital where she was to be admitted waiting to deliver. The two way Ngong Road was legendary with traffic jams that turned full blown chaotic during the rainy season. Everything was fine until she started feeling some kind of "wetness" and sharp pains from her lower abdomen that saw a previously calm woman turn breathless and scream in agony. I was clueless in matters of childbirth. The screaming sent me into a panic seizure and my thinking brain was suspended. It would take the intervention of two good Samaritans to deliver a newborn baby in my backseat. Between them sat Dorothy, looking half dead with blood all over. A few meters stood a cop directing traffic away from us, shooing curious onlookers that had gathered. It would take me months to recover from the ordeal.
Another bizarre episode happened at The Junction months later when a thug put a gun on my skull intending to steal my car as I walked towards it. His mission however, proved impossible when two police officers arrived and stood by obliviously waiting for a matatu. I took off singing Amazing Grace. I have ferried a corpse, had distressed a woman ditch her 2 year old daughter in my cab, had to deal with horny couples copulating in the back seats and met a long list of unsavoury characters in line of duty. The taxi business is Nairobi peppered with drama but the best was yet to come. In February 2015, more disruption came knocking when Uber, the app-based modern day taxi hit Nairobi streets running.
With its remote management capabilities, cheap rates and new cars, industrial dynamics changed drastically giving it an unfair edge over us old school traditional taxi types. Mass protests by local operators to have it deregistered met with tear gas courtesy of the government as we fought for the measly crumbs off the taxi table. This would mark the third time the government and free market forces had kicked me in the nuts and arrested my development! Days turned into weeks and weeks into months and years but nothing gave. My story was now akin to that of a wounded dog of war relegated to the back alleys to leak its wounds, waiting for death. To cope, most of my peers found solace in alcohol, gambling and prostitutes.
I have been caught between the proverbial rock and a crazy place, for almost a decade now and my youth is spent with nothing to show for it. I kill time by writing. It is my alcohol, my mistress, my prostitute. I love her and together we stare at the horizon hoping for better days ahead in this, my country.
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Free shipping in the USA (lower 48) when your order is over $89 (excluding gift certificates and sales tax, if applicable).
In Stock. Lead your students in an exploration of the world using this collection of 60 national anthems. Includes interesting facts and figures for each country, as well as translations and pronunciation guides for unfamiliar languages. For unison or 2-part voices.
� 2018 Music44. All rights reserved.

subset: commoncrawl


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To make money through networking we've already said you have to get in the game. The next part becomes easier as you practice.
You can't learn to swim by reading a book about swimming, you have to get in the water. So practice is the key.
4. Listen carefully - Once you have started asking questions, it's equally important to listen to the answers. This might seem obvious but you would be surprised how many people have perfected the art of asking questions but have no clue about listening and therefore miss all the important information they might find useful later.
5. Look for ways to help - The worst thing you can do is to try selling to someone at a networking event, and this is the biggest mistake the novice makes. They start talking with someone who shows interest in them and they get so excited they think they have to do a deal there and then.
Instead, ask how you might help the person you have just met. Who do they want to meet or need to talk to? Ask what sorts of clients they are looking for right now and if you have the opportunity to introduce them, go for it.
People will always remember those who have helped them first. If you find you are in a position to help someone in business, with no other agenda, it will come back to you time and time again.
The most successful networkers who are making money through networking are those who ask questions, listen carefully and provide help to the people they meet, whenever they can.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009
Make Money Through Networking - Pt 2
Posted by Simon Smith at 09:11
Labels: helping others, listening, making money, marketing, networking
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Speculation that Jose Mourinho is set to replace Louis van Gaal as Manchester United manager hit new levels following the damaging defeat to FC Midtjylland on Thursday.
And there are even reports about who the former Chelsea manager might want to bring with him to Old Trafford in the summer.
There are reports in Italy that the 53 year old wants to sign former United academy star Paul Pogba.
Gazzetta dello Sport say Mourinho tried to sign the Frenchman at Chelsea last summer and faces competition from Manchester City and Real Madrid this time around. The midfielder has also been linked with a move to Barcelona, but the Spanish giants have hinted they are no longer interested.
Meanwhile, Spanish newspaper Sport say Mourinho is also keen to line up a move for Athletic Bilbao defender Aymeric Laporte. The believe United will have to meet the 21 year-old's £38m buy-out clause to complete the deal.
Watch: United fans away day in Denmark - and their hilarious chants in the stands
READ MORE: Jose Mourinho to Manchester United: How papers are reporting manager situation
READ MORE: Manchester United: Jose Mourinho says clubs are looking for him as he plays down Inter links


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Girls' Soccer Semi-Finals
Filed by AlexV on Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Congratulations to the girls soccer team for their win against Martingrove in the semi-finals. Thanks to a goal by Jacque Keeso and a shutout by Lisa Hekrich, the girls were able to win 1-0. The girls play Silverthorne in the finals tomorrow at 3:30 on our very own field. Come on out and support your Rams!


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A blog devoted to chess and especially chess theory, correspondence chess, and USCF elections
Jul 1, 2010
July FIDE Rating List: Four Things
ChessBase story regarding Magnus' amazing attainment, which is now official. Note several things about this all-time top ten list. First, Carlsen's achievement at 19 is nothing short of amazing. I anxiously wait to see just how much he will achieve. Second, taken by itself, Fischer's inclusion on this list 38 years after reaching his peak rating is also amazing, but it is particularly so when one accounts for almost 40 years of inflation. If memory serves, Fischer actually lost rating points by defeating World Champion Spassky. Third, Kasparov's and Karpov's positions on the list are noteworthy because of the age of their ratings. Karpov remains in the top ten despite the lapse of sixteen years and the attendant inflation, and Kasparov still holds the first position eleven years after his peak. Neither Carlsen, nor anyone else, will likely bump him down anytime soon. Finally, only one country has more than one player on this list. Unsurprisingly, it is Russia with four.


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It takes a special person to impact thousands of people…. Particularly in a positive way. Roene DiFiore was such a person.
I grew up with plans to attend BYU or maybe even Ricks College in Idaho. I'm not sure I even realized other options existed other than University of Utah and Utah State. Honestly… I don't know if I was even aware of Dixie College. Oh…. It had been around for a long time…. I just didn't know about it…. Or care enough to learn. I had my eyes and heart set on BYU and that was that. I didn't need to know about anything else.
Perhaps, in some ways, I missed out. Though I wouldn't trade my experiences at BYU for anything, I've often wondered what the experience of being under the wing of Roene DiFiore would have been like for me as a young College student.
My husband attended Dixie College. As a student there, he started attending a class called Program Bureau. He can't remember how he got involved, exactly, he just knows that some friends made him attend and his life has never been the same because of it.
Roene DiFiore was one of a kind. An amazing woman with talent and heart. She was asked by Dixie College to teach some students the school songs to give them the Spirit of Dixie. But, Roene went far beyond that. Not only did she teach students songs about Dixie, but she loved them enough that they very often came out of their shells. They learned confidence, but most importantly, they learned comradery and a genuine love for each other.
Now, I'm going to say something here that I hope won't offend former Program Bureau members. I would not consider Program Bureau to have been one of the top notch entertainment groups around. In all honesty…. A lot of the songs they sung were kind of old fashioned and corny. But you've never seen them sung with so much heart and conviction, and by a group of College kids that were having a ball doing it! Everyone they performed for absolutely loved it. And though there were a lot of talented students that were a part of Program Bureau, I don't think there was any audition required. At least not for the first few years, as far as I know. My husband doesn't remember having to audition for anything. Roene opened her class and her arms to anyone who wanted to participate!
And what do Roene's students say they gained by being a part of Program Bureau? When I asked my husband that, here's the answer he gave me: "It gave a shy, bashful, backward kid some self confidence." And I might add to that, some wonderful lifelong friends, who by the way, have made me feel like I was one of them. I might as well have attended Dixie for all they know. They have opened their arms to me in ways I can't explain.
Now, I've blogged before about how grateful I am to have been a part of Sounds of Freedom at BYU. I'm forever grateful for that opportunity. It played a big part in making me who I am today. And I have some wonderful friendships from that. Some lifelong friendships. A couple of my closest friends are because of that experience. I love all of the friends I made there dearly and enjoy it when we have reunions to reminisce and just have a good time. But, I have to give a big shout out to Dixie's Program Bureau….. even though those songs may have been old fashioned and corny….. Roene continued to teach the same songs to students year after year. Which meant, that every year at Homecoming or during 'D' Week, when it was time for Midnight PB (as they called it) …… it didn't matter what year you were in Program Bureau….. you knew the songs and the actions and had a great evening singing them all again! That was the Dixie Spirit!
From day one, after John and I got married and we came down to Midnight PB during Homecoming week…. Roene treated me as though I was one of her own, and I loved her for it. She truly was a grand lady. Because of her, my life has been richly blessed. Not only because of what she did for my husband, but because of the friendships he gained through those experiences that continue on today. And I love them almost as much as he does!
Roene wrote a special song for Dixie that really became their anthem. It's called Just For Now. It's a wonderful song that talks about the friendship and memories we make during college and how at years end, it's a goodbye, but Just for Now.
We get sentimental whenever we hear, The school songs of Dixie, or meet with the old gang
We start reminiscing of days that are past, And wonder why such happy times cannot last
But the hour is growing late, it's time for us to part, Strange how swiftly the moments take flight
Friends and sweethearts must soon say 'Good night', Just for Now, Just for Now
We've sung the last refrain , the echoes softly die, Like the school days when we had such fun
We'll remember them though they are done, Just for now, Just for now
See the clock in the church tower, its lights have grown dim. The moon or the campus is faded and thin
And so the years will pass, our friends will come and go, And that's why we hate saying adieu
To the ones who are so tried and true, But we must, though it's just for now.
Here's a small tribute my husband put together to honor Roene. Thanks to all who contributed photos.
I could go on and on about Roene DiFiore. There's a lot to say about a woman who's had that kind of impact on society. She's truly a Legend. I'm so grateful for her and for what she did. I'm grateful that she left her music to one of her students so that Midnight PB can still carry on! Though it's not as well attended as it was when Roene was still alive…… the Dixie spirit it still alive and well in those who do attend!!
Thanks, Roene DiFiore, for leaving behind a legacy that can and is being passed on down to our children! Thank you for the friends you brought together who still love and honor you today! I think we all look forward to seeing you again in Heaven someday and singing the songs of Dixie!
Are you from Dixie? …………..
I am Grateful! How are you?
Here's an article written for Dixie when Roene was put into the Hall of Fame: Roene Bigler DiFiore (1921-1990), affectionately known as "Mrs. D.", was born, grew up and attended schools in Nephi, Utah. Upon graduation from Juab High School she came to Dixie College where her ancestral roots ran very deep in the red Dixie soil. She loved the "Dixie Spirit" she found here. After her graduation she received a scholarship to the Julliard School of Music, but due the beginning of WWII and her marriage she had to set it aside. Dixie needed a sentimental song, so she responded with our now traditional song,' Just For Now." President Ferron Losee invited her to teach at Dixie, specifically to teach the school songs and patriotism. She came and established the Dixie College Program Bureau, the good-will ambassadors of Dixie. She expanded the love of country, church, school, home and the love of fellowmen in every song. For the next twenty years, thousands of young men and women performed for tens of thousands of conventioneers, clubs, groups and reunions. All were impressed with the caliber of "Roene's Kids." Then the payoff started! Her students began teaching music programs just like Roene and taught them. They wanted her music, not realizing that she played most of it by ear. She wanted, as the song goes, "to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony." Today members of the original Program Bureau send their children and grandchildren to Dixie, hoping to catch a glimpse of that great Dixie Spirit they had experienced with Roene.
Here's another blog post I found on Roene. I don't know this person at all. From the looks of her family picture, she was at Dixie long after my husband was. But this is proof of how many people's lives she affected over the years: http://hollandlife.blogspot.com/2009/01/sing-that-song-for-me.html
Here's a site dedicated to leaving a Memory of her. It was created by Ernie Doose, one of her many students, who was very close to her and considered her a great mentor. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=6155117


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Wal-Mart Endangers Vermont
Wal-Mart Endangers Vermont
Updated February 7, 2008
Wal-Mart is back. Not content with its four stores in Bennington, Berlin, Rutland and Williston, Wal-Mart has set its sights on building more than half a dozen new big boxes across the state. Plans for new stores are on the table in Bennington, St. Albans, and Derby. They have looked into new stores in Morrisville, Rutland, St. Johnsbury, and Middlebury as well.
In the mid 1990s when Wal-Mart sought to build in a farm field outside the city of St. Albans they were denied due to the adverse economic impact the retailer would have on local businesses and the economy. Now, however, they are back with the hope of building a 160,000 square foot store in the same location. VNRC is working closely with a citizens group in St. Albans to press hard for a downsized, downtown location but Wal-Mart has refused to adjust its one-size-fits-all business model. Wal-Mart's other plans call for more than doubling the size of their current store in Bennington and building a 150,000 square foot store in the rural, remote Northeast Kingdom town of Derby.
How and where Wal-Mart and other big box stores come into Vermont will have long-term consequences for the people and places where they locate. To avoid the high cost Wal-Mart can have on communities, VNRC has been working hard on a variety of fronts.
In the fall of 2005, VNRC joined forces with the Vermont Livable Wage Campaign and Vermont Workers Center to advance a "Higher Standards for Big Box Campaign." The goal of the partnership is to draw together the interests of businesses, workers, environmentalists, and Vermonters seeking access to affordable goods to thoughtfully address this important issue. Read more about this partnership here.
Community-owned retail stores are also promising. Also known as 'mercantiles,' this alternative allows communities to offer much needed goods at affordable prices on their own terms. Read more about mercantiles and the success they are having in communities across the country here.
Through these and other efforts, VNRC is working to hold Wal-Mart accountable to high environmental, land use and community standards. With innovation, viable solutions, and increasing public pressure, we are convinced we can achieve a better way of doing business in Vermont. Stay tuned…