When children divide themselves into Jubilee & NASA

Pudd’ng is not clueless. She knows what is happening in the country. She does not know the whole story, but she has a pretty good idea about what is happening.  

While growing up, politics was not our dining table talk. Unless, of course, we had visitors who would talk their beards off, as the kids – who were not allowed to even cough – dug in our meals and avoided looking directly at adults. That’s unlike my daughter, who can ask me questions about almost anything, and follow it up with so many questions you would think she is Deputy CJ Philomena Mwilu, and she has cornered a “petition chaser”.  

And so, way back when, with just one radio station, I put two-and-two together from gleaned dining table conversations and reading Hillary Ngw’eno’s authoritative news magazine, Weekly Review, which my father religiously bought.  

Political-preparedness

Generally, most parents are unprepared even for parenthood. And nothing prepares a parent for such epoch-making turnarounds as we are witnessing.

Then again, nothing prepared us – and I am talking about 70s-born kids – for the sociopolitical upheavals that we witnessed, which brought the freedoms that some of us are now taking for granted.  

Divided classrooms

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A while back, Pudd’ng was telling me how pupils in her class were divided right in the middle: between - you guessed - Jubilee and NASA.

We grew up when former President Moi was the only leader we knew. We sang praises to Mtukufu Rais. We recited the loyalty pledge to His Excellency. We lined up Jogoo Road, with little paper flags, to welcome Baba Moi home from his many sojourns.

Then, if a classroom was divided, it was not along political lines, but because kids were scrambling for extra packets of Maziwa ya Nyayo. But now, more than ever before, teachers are faced with divided classrooms … and staffrooms.

Children pick political sides from people they interact with. And with tribal politics being our modus operandi, it is mostly from their parents or other familial authority figures.

Time for truth

I believe that, at such times as this, a father is supposed to tell his child the whole truth and nothing but. That is the only vessel that can get a child through these tumultuous waters.

I will only be making matters worse if I try to pull a fast one on Pudd’ng, in the mistaken belief that I am protecting her. Little knowledge is dangerous. The more truth Pudd’ng knows about what is happening, the better she will be able to handle the vagaries of this rollercoaster.  

The same thing – like police brutality - that disturbs any sane adult will, no doubt, emotionally unsettle a child. It is up to me to guide Pudd’ng, as best as I can, through this current maddening maze.

Not yet tabula rasa

While growing up, I used to hear older folks saying that we were the generation that would end tribalism. We were the tabula rasa generation. The young minds not yet affected by divisive socio-political experiences and tribalism. We were the country’s opportunity to start over without prejudice.

Many of our parents were economic migrants from the country. From the sticks, they lugged with them stereotypes and suspicions, learnt over tens of years, which would take eons to unlearn. And in the city, they cocooned themselves in tribal welfare organisations and “independent” churches, which, though good of itself, only managed to alienate tribes.   

Will Pudd’ng’s generation be the tabula rasa? Or will it be a cycle, again, of hoping against hope? With divided classrooms, it seems like this dream will yet again be deferred.