Kenyan culture of glorifying rot and ridiculing integrity killing us

Morally, a professor once told us, the traditional African societies were more developed than the west.

In terms of values such as respect for others and generally being good human beings, we were up there with the saints.

Well, it may be true that we were always fighting and robbing other communities of their livestock, food and beautiful girls, but we were untainted by the current lust for cash and material things.

After the advent of colonialism, however, we took a wrong turn. We bought the lie that we were savages and needed to be civilised. Of course we learnt a few good things from the west, like wearing clothes and living in decent shelter. But generally we acquired mostly rotten tastes and bad manners. One, self-hatred. We became convinced that we were savages who had to change all our ways, including what was good.

In our fawning admiration of the colonial oppressors, we discarded simple values and started worshipping cash. We also started attaching more value to concrete-and-steel edifices than the empathy we had for others.

So today we punish ourselves to be like the models in the west, including surviving on tomato soup for weeks just to avoid what was yesterday’s very poetry of African beauty.

Today, if you take a loan and start making clothes and brand them ‘Made in Kenya’, you will probably be auctioned.

Flip the coin. If you were to start buying second-hand clothes from Gikomba and branding them ‘Made in Italy’, you will be a dollar millionaire in months. You see, we were long socialized to hate ourselves.

This is to say nothing of the skin-lightening creams, the surgeries to get ‘socialite’ body frames and the rising cases of women who have refused to breastfeed children who will help them in old age. So a girl from Shamakhokho or Magutuni joins a public university wearing decent rubber shoes. She also sports well-kept short hair and has fleshy legs encased in a kind of trousers that second-year ‘style-up’ ladies scoff at as old-fashioned.

They laugh at the new entrant for a whole year, because she goes to church every Sunday and even rolls her eyes whenever someone tries to make advances. She is branded mshamba (from the bush). Until she starts smoking, gulping vodka like a Russian playboy on a death wish and can juggle five boyfriends. You know, one man for walking around with, another one for the finances, a brainy classmate for doing her assignments and a secret one for other roles.

Even in high school, a boy from the village was typified as backward, and only those from towns were  streetwise and could steal ‘special’ food from the kitchen. Being a ‘villager’ was equated to being hopelessly gullible.

It is a culture that makes those who cheat in exams, in elections and those who steal their way to power and wealth to be ranked as role models. Those who lead a modest clean life are branded idiots.

If you listen to Kenyans speak in bars on how so-and-so is mjanja (shrewd) after leaving a State corporation he headed a penniless shell, you would not believe these are the same people setting social media aflame with hypocritical posturing on corruption.

It came as no surprise at all that a recent research showed that a majority of the youth find it normal to get rich through graft.

On Tuesday, a taxi man called Henry, who has watched all this hypocrisy for more than three decades, asked me: “What message do you send to a leader when you come out clapping and taking his photo just because you saw him walking on the streets? Isn’t he a mere mortal like his constituents whose job should be to walk around and see what people go through every day?”

Yes, Kenyans are hypocrites, and their own worst enemy.