Lack of basic national values pushing us to self-hatred

In her highly satirical novel, Purple Hisbiscus, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie magnifies for us the self-hatred and laughably hypocritical love for exotic things among the African middle class.

 In the award-winning novel we encounter Eugene, a wealthy media mogul whose pathological love for Christian doctrine ends up brutalising his children and destroying his own sense of humanity. Here is a punctiliously pious man who spends millions of Naira on priests and visitors who throng his house quoting the bible, yet he cannot help his own dying father because the latter is a ‘heathen’. To Eugene, anything of traditional African descent is either a pagan ritual or simply demonic.

This week, I finished rereading the novel and I found it a compellingly worthwhile read for everyone in Kenya. You see, our lack of national values is pushing us to fake exotic tastes that would be comical if they were not so destructive.

Take the case of Wambui (not her real name). She is a businesswoman in Nairobi. She wakes up very early every morning and goes to Gikomba, the headquarters of second-hand clothes. At Gikomba, she selects some old suits, perhaps donated or thrown away by some wealthy Europeans, Scandinavians or Americans. She buys an old designer suit, rumpled and looking as if it was snatched from the mouth of a hungry cow, at a paltry Sh750.

 Then she takes the suit to a dry-cleaning specialist on River Road who starches it back into shape. The tailor, who has long given up making new suits, has perfected the art of sewing stickers on the cuff, indicating they are original designer suits from Italy, Switzerland or London.

She then displays them at several high-end malls in the leafy parts of Nairobi, where they fly off the shelves for upwards of Sh20,000. It’s booming business, all premised on a people’s love for exotic fakes!

Don’t get me wrong. I know there are Kenyans who live by the ‘Buy Kenya, build Kenya’ mantra. I also know this desperation is partly born of a culture of mediocrity and a cavalier attitude to quality. Indeed, it is the failure to acquit ourselves well in the area of quality that pushes many of us to look elsewhere.

Thus, we opt for the single-malt Scotch whisky, and avoid local concoctions for fear that we may end adding our names to the list of those killed or blinded by poison brewed by shadowy Kariobangi thugs with no physical address.

There is also the small matter of seeking to transfer technology and best practices, which makes it understandable that we have to reach out to other parts of the world for inspiration and leadership. Well, I guess we can’t complain. Our girls and boys nowadays prefer octogenarians visiting the country probably with their lifetime savings because our young men are, the story goes, unromantic and grossly irresponsible.

 I have heard the jeremiad that we are so stingy, that we devour ‘nyama choma’ at the bar as the family back home has been reduced to unwilling herbivores ploughing through unpalatable wild shrubs and leaves throughout the year. We forget birthdays and all special occasions, and are a perfect antithesis of romance. And we Kenyan men, as we keep reminding the world on morning radio shows, prefer Ugandan ladies and travel by night to Kampala because our women are not submissive and subservient enough to our fat egos.

But how do we explain our hatred for even our mother tongues. I know we have to teach our children the official languages because we are a global village and all that. But it strikes me as comical whenever I find old Baba Brian speaking to his daughter or son in broken English, and sitting back to bask in the glory of it all.

 Is it the plummeting quality of our education or our dwindling cultural values that make us even want to ensure our children do not learn the same languages and cultural ways we have grown up on?

Or how do you explain the case of a county building a golf course and other decidedly useful things but which cannot be a priority in a country caught in the jaws of lifestyle diseases and no facilities at public hospitals? Don’t we need to go back to basic values that are the surest block to a national culture of patriotism and self-pride?