Let's fight discrimination

Concept of discrimination. [iStock Images] One afternoon I was at a restaurant in the city centre, when the lady at the counter hurriedly left our conversation mid-sentence to catch the attention of European tourists walking by. Night club goers recently complained of a separate entrance for blacks and for whites and Asians at the Alchemist club in Nairobi, which was enforced by black African bouncers. In a few of Nairobi's upper-class restaurants and service providers, whites and Europeans are treated with visibly more warmth and respect than black patrons by black waiters. It can be argued that the fight against unjust discrimination is the most important battle that humanity has faced in the last two centuries across the globe and continues to face today. Prior to the Second World War, discrimination was commonplace and widely accepted as a fact of life throughout the world, a world then governed by the Empires of Western Europe, who saw their race as the penultimate and most advanced of all humanity. It is this attitude that fuelled and justified the most unjust regimes and societies in the last two centuries. It fuelled the colonisation of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, from the 14th to the 19th Century, on the grounds that non-whites not indigenous to Europe needed the guiding hand of white Europeans in order to fulfil their potential. It fuelled the apartheid regime, which argued that black Africans were inferior to them and 'were in a separate phase of development, thus justifying their segregation and marginalisation under what Dr. Verwoerd termed a system of 'Good neighbourliness'. It fuelled slavery and Jim Crow in the United States, as the white Americans of the South considered their black slaves as subhuman property, and still regarded them as inferior in the following decades until the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Most dramatically of all, it fuelled the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe from 1941 to 1945, in which the Nazi's slaughtered up to six million unarmed Jews, Roma, and other minorities. Subsequently, in 1948, the nation of Israel was formed by Holocaust survivors, and its citizens were and are determined to make their country an ethnically Jewish state, at the expense of all other races and creeds. Recently in Africa, ethnic resentment and discrimination resulted in the Rwandese genocide of 1994, in which up 662,000 Tutsis were murdered. Within the context of Kenya, we too have our own struggles with discrimination. Prior to our independence, our ancestors were racially discriminated against by their colonial overlords, who refused to grant them the right to participate in democracy, govern themselves, or own land in certain areas. Missionaries told our ancestors that our cultures and traditions were inferior and ungodly, and convinced them to adopt European traditions and culture. But we and many other African nations have internalised this language of discrimination. Tribalism has plagued our country's politics for far too long since independence. Most of Kenya's citizens, particularly in the metropole of Nairobi have learned to live and work together despite our tribal differences. But every five years, every election cycle, politicians, and the media continue to talk primarily of tribal affiliations. Unending talk by political analysts and correspondents of the tyranny of numbers, of tribal spokesmen, of politicians, courting 'the Mountain' or 'the Rift Valley' or 'Western', do nothing but fuel our sense of tribal separation. Our political leaders campaign as tribal representatives, not as leaders and public servants. Politicians quickly revert to tribal rhetoric with talk of "our people" whenever hunting for votes. This year, in an effort to divide and conquer the electorate, certain politicians have employed a narrative of class divisions, of rich and poor, hustlers against the rich Martin Luther King once said that he dreamt that his children would not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. Though this speech was spoken 58 years ago, it is still the goal we should be moving towards. It is the only goal that ensures the end of discrimination and prejudice once and for all. But we also must change our mindset. Discrimination is a necessary part of life in a sense. Every society needs to discriminate. There must be discrimination between right and wrong. Between lawful action and unlawful action. Between justice and injustice and between truth and lies. People must discriminate between different types of individual people and their characters every day. You discriminate between this shop or that shop depending on who provides better goods and better service, for example, the same you discriminate between a liar and a trustworthy person. Currently in the West, however, there is discrimination based not on individual action but on perceived group identity or affiliation, causing great social animosity. Kenyans should not be too eager to follow these Western trends. In a meeting in Eldoret in 1962, Tom Mboya openly challenged a mob of white settlers in the Rift Valley.

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