Thursday, January 03, 2008

Diary of a Mad Kenyan Woman: Enough!

Diary of a Mad Kenyan Woman: Enough!

Wow! My brothers and sisters this is the best piece of writing that I have come across about this current crisis in Kenya. We should all read it and think deeply about what she writes.

Here are some excerpts...

Now look what we’ve done, we Kenyans. Just look at us. It is a bloody disgrace - no, I’m not swearing, I am offering a precise description of the situation on the ground. Bloody and Disgraceful.

Let us at least have the courage of our venality; let us look at ourselves squarely in the face and say "we screwed up big time, and we knew it all along, we did it knowingly and now we have to suck it up and deal with the results of our mistakes."

It bears repeating that biased preference is the essence of democratic right - you can vote for whoever you want to vote for, even if the cumulative effect of this democratic right in Central Province looked somewhat like the hypnotised members of a cult were voting for their messiah; nevertheless, you should be allowed to do that and live to regret it at leisure.

How have we produced this population of Kenyans so estranged, so alienated from a sense of collective hope and a progressive trajectory that they are willing to burn to the ground this national edifice we call our home?

And then we exclaim in shocked horror: oh goodness, me! However could this have happened? Oh please, please, well, gracious me, whatever shall we do?

On the other hand, whatever can Kikuyus think we are about, saying complacently that "we" won the election when even Europeans who can count are quite able to figure out the implications of votes which add up to fifty thousand and are transmuted into seventy thousand by some mysterious Kikuyu alchemy?

The drunken man in a bar in a PNU stronghold who leeringly raised his glass to me in celebration of the government being "ours as usual" should, as he nurses the inevitable (and I hope excruciating) hang-over, ingest with his Panadol the human costs of maintaining the feudal principality of Kikuyustan--especially when other people would rather live in Kenya. Where does he think he will flee to, when the flames of discontent spread, as they inevitably will unless we come to our senses?

Enough. If we are to sink with the ship, let us at least not pretend that all along we thought it was only a spring shower that was brewing, and not a furious tempest.

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