The Greyhorn is one utterly exasperated ruminator. Try hard as he may and no matter how earnestly he vows to himself that he shall no longer bother writing about tribal politics in Kenya, the ugly tentacled fiend of ethnicized politics just keeps dragging his thoughts and intellect into that sorry subject.
It has become a sordid, recursive game of abandoning and re-abandoning this most unsavoury of topics. Ask anybody on any street or village trail in Kenya and they would acknowledge that tribal politics is something worth fighting and vanquishing -- the only problem for Greyhorn has been how to fight this vice objectively without being consumed, obsessed and without being possessed by that very same demon!
Now GEMA is an acronym that stands for Gikuyu (variant of Kikuyu), Embu, Meru Association {perhaps soon to include Akamba and doing away with 'Association'?} which are all tribes found in central Kenya. Amongst other things GEMA has become a by-word for tribal conglomeration and ganging up on tribal lines in the quest to attain political ascendancy and supremacy. It is also Greyhorn's belief that GEMA is a thin veil for something far much more flagrant and wicked -- an aggressive, negative and bellicose promotion of Kikuyu supremacy.
Before I get to the urgent business of soundly rubbishing the semi-'racist' GEMA for all it's worth, there are a few things that I feel need to be made clear.
First and foremost I personally find nothing wrong (and there will never be anything wrong) with community based organizations that strive to uplift it's members' welfare. We are all on this planet called Earth working ourselves to death for one reason and one reason only -- to uplift our standards of living and to live fulfilling quality lives. Any positive course of action towards this end should be commended and encouraged. If they be through community based organizations that lawfully voice and fight for the socio-economic welfare of it's members, then good for all of us.
Secondly, in political matters there is also nothing wrong for people sharing the same culture, traditions, language and whose members live and come from the same geographical location to sit together and determine their leadership structure. Even more importantly how they can play a more effective role and be adequately represented and be heard in national affairs. That is the reality all over the world.
Beginning to imagine it as totally unacceptable simply because you might not be represented in such a group's interests is immersing oneself into the realm of futile self-pity, jealousy and envy. Just band your community together and make your own tribal outift; that way the other outfits are bound to pause and listen . . . perhaps they themselves would even begin to wonder if tribal outfits are actually the best way to go! More simply it is something that we just have to live with regardless of the fact whether we may like it or not.
Finally tribal and cultural consciousness is something innately human. It is something that is better exploited in a positive way rather than making attempts to quash or suppress such strong sentiments. (Even in Tanzania where tribalism is celebrated as a dead thing you will still see it crop up from time to time -- there are still pesky tribal stereotypes that have simply refused to remain dead, such as the one about the Chagga and their inordinate love for money). Cultural organizations -- a subset of tribal agglomeration and agglutination -- are known to be good ways of preserving cultural diversity, languages (and so forth) into posterity.
But I daresay this GEMA is none of these things. When GEMA was founded by Njenga Karume in the 1970s he pre-eminently had one thing in mind -- perpetuate Kikuyu domination and control of the Kenyan state apparatus by the Kikuyu. As he perceived it in his own crude way political power was to remain firmly in Kikuyu hands for eternity. (For the umpteenth time I do urge you to read David Throup’s treatise which is posted in this blog and you can judge the veracity of this claim for yourself).
Therefore GEMA in essence was created for one main purpose (the rest are simply for camouflage purposes) and that was it's founders contrived to politically subjugate and economically dominate (enslave really) all the other communities till kingdom come! Yes, if you are not a Kikuyu or a member of one of the GEMA communities, GEMA envisages the role of a subject and virtually a mindless slave for you! By ganging up all the Kikuyu together and their overwhelming economic might and human resource they really do believe they can run this country according to their whimsical wishes forever.
The GEMA philosophy was and still is an abhorrent, myopic and hateful philosophy. That is why the Attorney General at that time -- the foresighted Charles Njonjo, himself a Kikuyu elite -- fought GEMA and the insidious mentality it espoused with all his might. Njonjo could see and perceive (as an educated fellow, including many of his intellectual peers such as Kibaki- the current president) that this was hamstringing the entire Kikuyu community and their GEMA allies for the short-term benefit of a few crude politicians and a bandwagon of idiotic and rapacious Kikuyu businessmen.
When Moi (a Kalenjin) ascended to the presidency, GEMA (which had feverishly worked to prevent Moi from becoming Kenya's second president because he was not a Kikuyu) dissipated and it's members ran for cover. By nature the Kikuyu extremism espoused by GEMA had been inimical to the idea of Moi and his non-Kikuyuness and therefore when the tables turned the last thing Moi would have been jolly about is GEMA or anything GEMA-like in Kenya's political landscape. More so given the heart rendering humiliation the leading members of GEMA had put him through (while he was the Vice President under Kenyatta). Moi (theoretically the second most powerful person in Kenya) would be slapped by his Kikuyu juniors in the civil service and harassed at police road blocks in broad daylight, leaving this grown man to cry in anger and embarrassment. It is a small miracle that he did not have the whole lot of them hanged when he assumed power.
Thus during the 23 years of Moi's gruesome reign, GEMA remained a word that would be uttered in whispers. Unsurprisingly, immediately a Kikuyu president (Kibaki) was graciously put on the 'throne' (this time by an overwhelming and direct mandate of the Kenyan people) the cancerous GEMA and it's tribal ideology based on Kikuyu supremacy emanated like a phantom from some graveyard in central Kenya to breath once again staleness and morbid tribalism into the minds of the Kikuyu.
After the 2008 crisis Kenya was supposed to have undergone a paradigm shift; which means wholesome change of the mental conditioning and attitudinal perspectives in this country. The most salient of these was to have been in the way we think about politics.
But here we are in 2012 and the best the ingrate Kikuyu leaders can come up with is the misfit, tribal and reactionary ideology of GEMA. All of a sudden everybody in central Kenya is being urged to think like a 20th Century charcoal burner in the belief that some political gold would come out of this silly business; in the very least it is a callous move that is beset with peril on all sides.
When trully will our leaders accept (not just blabber about it) that the political landscape, the political consciousness of Kenyans and that even the constitutional threshold has changed? The latter day GEMA charcoal burners are a misguided bunch of political arsonists that will light up this country with tribal inferno.
Nothing became or came out of GEMA in the far much more propitious seventies -- it only galvanized everybody, including Kikuyu moderates against it's sordid aims. This GEMA can even be blamed for having done more than any other single factor in helping Moi come to power through the hateful and disrespectful manner they treated him. What makes those touting Kikuyu supremacy now that if they endorse a muthamaki (leader) who knows how to snuff tobacco (rũara) that the rest of us will tag along?
What irks me the most is that if today I decided to ‘convert’ from merely being Kikuyu-philiac to an honorary Kikuyu, I still won’t qualify to be a full member amidst those ‘racists’ in GEMA. They will probably butt me out to the periphery of the organization into some spanner boy, something like what Raphael Tuju used to be in NARC and PNU.
In fact being half-and-half Kalenjin and Kisii, they would probably bluntly tell me they don’t want mkate nusus (half-loafs) in their organization. My late father once told me that there is no such thing as half-tribe or half-cast, and I better accept early that I will be known simply as another Kalenjin till I die. In my mind I just thought he did not want to share a son with my mother’s tribe. I’m now worried that he might have been more accurate than even he himself knew – increasingly one is nowhere in Kenya without a solid tribal identity, at least that is what GEMA, Raila and his obnoxious Luo hordes, FORD-Kenya and it’s Luhya bandwagon, MRC, Wiper etc seem to be hammering into my hardened, idealist head.
Even though am trully Kikuyu by socialization, some Kikuyu idiot (whom I would be fluently speaking to in Kikuyu) would have probably hacked me to death in 2008 in some place like Naivasha simply because my identity card clearly spells out I am Kalenjin! (In those vengeful times that would have meant I was something absolutely worth hacking in Kikuyu territory.) This is madness! And yet GEMA is adding onto, not reducing, this tribal lunacy!
In conclusion, despite the colourful language I tend to use, I am not in the business of riling up hate and anger against anybody because I believe that I personally stand to lose the most; I sincerely pray that my opinions should not be cast in such light. As always this is an ardent appeal to our senses as a nation and this time particularly to my Kikuyu kinsmen and brothers. I urge that there should be change in tack or in the very least to change the GEMA name for this movement. This will detach and dissociate the quest of finding a single leader to voice the concerns and to represent central Kenya in national matters from the hateful, denigrating and tribal philosophy behind GEMA.
As for the rest of us, the non-GEMA Kenyans, I hope you are awakened to the fact that this new GEMA move and whatever it's objectives might be, is not forcing anyone to vote for their chosen leader (at least not yet) and Kenyans can reject him peacefully at the polls.
Finally I would like to imagine that somebody is thinking of ways of mitigating the harm that would have been done once this GEMA game would have served it's purpose. That is what to do with the ugly emotions that would remain as the result of the roused tribal consciousness and what would become of the defaced tribal identities of the GEMA communities once they are fused with short-term politicking and the fate of a few leaders.
With all these worries, I really do feel like seeking some spiritual comfort in intercessional prayers for this country. But alas! I can’t even go to a prayer rally or church without running the risk of getting right in the middle of this very same brand of politics. The politicians (down to the councillors) have fused and tainted prayers and spiritualism with politics. It is the new political fad and crowd gimmick in Kenya. There is simply no solace from bombardment with political invectives, most of them based around tribes and personalities.
M. Wycliff,
Nairobi.
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