Without intending to down play other factors that may have contributed to post election violence, tribal prejudice played a key role.
Kenyans started seeing each other differently, and everyone felt compelled to hold a certain point of view about different communities, however misguided it was.
Few people were willing to listen to one another. Although we are now witnessing a reduction of this poisonous mind set, it’s not completely gone.
It wouldn’t take much to whip up similar emotions, and anybody who thinks different is misguided.
Kenyans need to understand that tribal bigotry has a tendency, more often than not, of creating two villains. In the end, it’s not possible to distinguish between the victim and the villain.
Defensive
We tend to respond in kind to bigotry and instead of reasoning, we become defensive. And in retaliation, we apply the same bigotry used against us.
Instead of seeing an attack as committed by one misguided individual, we take the wrong and blame an entire people from whom the individual belongs.
Kenyans need to beware of the virus of negative ethnicity. It’s highly contagious. You may not know it, and you may even consider yourself a victim, but most likely, it has made you a villain.
When we take a wrong done by an individual and blame it on his tribe, we affirm what is wrong as right, and make it impossible to stop this vicious cycle.
In Kenya, where diverse communities are separated by distinct boundaries, tribal bigotry become more entrenched when we retire to out communal comfort zones.
It becomes possible to trivialise the demonisation of others without feeling guilty since the victims are remote and unseen and, of course, we have the approval of our tribesmen. It, therefore, becomes easier to dehumanise others.
Atrocities
Even with atrocities committed during post-election violence, as long as we are willing to apportion blame to an entire community and not guilty individuals, we, too, become villains.
No community should think it holds the moral high ground or has the monopoly of violence. Tribal bigotry is the philosophy of the ignorant. It has no victims. Only villains.
{Nderitu Kariuki, via e-mail}
