With a click of the mouse, I am in out and into the world. I can watch videos, read blogs, read international newspapers, and even get direct advice on the world's latest. That is who I am; a global citizen.
I read online literature, I get the latest music, I can download the latest movies, I interact with the people of faraway lands. I can book a holiday, pay for it and even book transportation; all at the click of a mouse. I know of the latest innovations, the latest advances in research, business mergers and acquisitions, business models at the turn of my Google Reader.
With the click of a mouse I can learn Chinese, Spanish, Tagalog, French and any language I would love to know. I can take my imaginations from Honolulu to Mexico to Hawaii as I fancy. But when I move away from my computer I am reminded that I am a Kenyan Citizen of a certain ethnicity.
To be honest, I am tired. I am tired of thinking in a narrow box. I am tired of being threatened for being, which is what it is because I cannot help but be what I was born. The nation has expended a great deal of its mental and physical resources as normally productive people engage in endless speculation about how they will punish so and so for being a member of ethnicity xx. It is tiring, it is draining, and it is not constructive; it is standing in the way of the progress we have made these last five years.
We have dedicated almost a quarter of a year in our lives to politics. Those efforts are too much to be wasted on a bunch of people who think Kenya is up for grabs.
Kenyans are suffering; they are hating, cutting, lashing and chasing each other about on the basis of flimsy tribal stereotypes and myths. We are starting to regard each other with such great suspicion;that quite suddenly, we are only comfortable with people who speak the same language as we do.
Our very development is at stake here. Synergies and the spirit of co-operation are what have brought us to where we have come so far. We went to school together, played with each other, laughed and shared, worked with each other. What is different now?
Somehow we have even learnt to appreciate the stereotypes by which we identify each other, we know where we fit into the caricature of Kenyan society these stereotypes inhabit. Yet the same stereotypes we promulgated and entrenched for many years are being used now to divide us, to pit us against each other. What stereotypes we did not even think to counter believing they were innocently spoken are now being turned into vicious weapons against us by those we called our brothers and country-men. Through repetition and the inclination to do certain things in certain ways we have built these positions and in our minds fashioned worlds and economic spheres that can only be entered by members of certain ethnicities. Even where no one makes the explicit statement, that this is the case, we harbour resentments against the success of our friends and country-men.
It is for me something I am afraid to admit; the fact that I was too involved being a global citizen to realize my country was being divided into amorphous tribal conglomerations. I was so busy typing away on my computer that I even forgot I had another name with a tribal affiliation. Should I now do away with my name if it is the one that identifies me with tribe? How do I prove to all and sundry that my support of a presidential candidate has nothing to do with my name?
Will my identity as a generation Y save me from the tribal killers. When they ask for my Identity Card, should I give them my Yahoo Email or the Gmail one? Will they then proceed to ask what tribe is the Yahoo or Gmail Identity?
Sad that I realize now, back on this other end of the cable, that I was moving alone into the global world. My brothers and sisters from the village were left at the point where educational and social opportunities were unequal. They have never seen a computer nor typed into one. They couldn’t even spell the word Google if life itself depended on it. Yet in my capitalist world it’s “God for all”. I don’t know how I am going to turn my brothers and sisters into digital citizens because that is definitely what we need to turn away from the epidemic of hate.
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for a season yes. But the same people who applauded when 'aliens' were being frog marched to their so called ancestrial land or being butchered are now having to deal with the wrath of the boys who were given weapons but whose buds have now tasted the thrills of power and what it can get them. The whole thing is spiralling out of control. Look at Kisumu.