Kenyans need tolerance to overcome bad experiences

Ababu Namwamba

Two years ago I joined Americans in my alma mater city, Washington DC, to mark the 26th Martin Luther King Day. Established as a US holiday in 1986, it is one of two federal holidays designated to celebrate an individual. The other one is George Washington Day that honours the founding president. The 2011 King memorial was celebrated under a cloud of the chilling Tucson shooting where gunman Jared Loughner left six people dead and 13 injured, including Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

The dead included little Christina-Taylor Green, in whose memory President Barack Obama would later urge Americans to commit to forging a country forever worthy of the “gentle, happy spirit” of the 9-year old.

Addressing an overflowing audience of 14,000 at the University of Arizona in Tucson, a somber Obama declared “what we cannot do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each other... It’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds”.

In the aftermath of that tragedy, a leading online publication conducted a survey on tolerance to coincide with the Martin Luther King Day. The survey examined which US states were the most tolerant by measuring residents’ actions and opinions as well as the scope of state laws guaranteeing equal rights and protections. Wisconsin was ranked top on the tolerance index, followed by Maryland and Illinois.

While this may seem like some distant American scenario, there are, nonetheless, traits that bear striking resemblance to Kenya. America has been indelibly stained by the blood of its assassinated leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, J. F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, and of course Martin Luther King.

There have also been countless shootings that have cost the nation myriad innocent lives like little Christina-Taylor Green’s. Political and religious extremism has also stubbornly continued to lurk in the shadows, repeatedly rearing its head with catastrophic effects.

Groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) have soiled the image of the nation, while subterranean streams of racism, religious discomfort and economic exclusion continue to run deep. With all his gallant efforts to unite America and rekindle the Lincoln-Kennedy-King dream of “emancipation and boundless liberty”, Obama has remained the target for some virulent political machinations that border on the xenophobic.

Is our dear Kenya any different? Do the names Pio Gama Pinto, TJ Mboya, JM Kariuki and Robert Ouko ring any bell? Do we ever recoil when we remember the tribal clashes of 1992, 1997 and the devastating 2007 implosion whose seismic waves now reverberate in faraway Den Haag?

What goes on in our minds when we see some self-appointed tribal chieftains balkanising the country through Ku Klux Klan-like outfits? Where exactly are we headed when fellows of highly dubious extraction, with gruesome skeletons overflowing in their closets and boasting of wealth looted from ordinary Kenyans suddenly anoint themselves our “national saviours”?

What do we do when such characters that should be behind bars mount savage baseless assaults on true national heroes who have served this country with distinction? I challenge the youth of Kenya to learn from the sad experiences of the land of Obama and become more discerning.

In 1964, aged 36, Martin Luther King became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end racial segregation and discrimination through civil disobedience and other nonviolent means.

He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and a Congressional Gold Medal in 2004. Through his efforts, blacks and minorities were eventually granted many rights that they might not have today were it not for the positive exertions of his youth.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 helped to cement these rights. In his famous “I Have a Dream” speech delivered in 1963 during the March on Washington DC, King shared his dream of a country where “my children shall be judged by the content of their character and not the colour of their skin”. When exactly do you plan to stop judging your fellow Kenyan by their ethnic extraction and the architecture of their surname?

Writer is Budalang’i MP and Chair of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee