Identity Crisis – The Kenyan

I am asked to give answers to the questions, “What is African? Who is African?” but I still don’t yet have the answers to, “What is Kenyan? Who is Kenyan?”

There have been attempts at defining the ‘Kenyan.’ Remember the Kenyan dress? I don’t own one let alone recall what it looks like and I know less than five people that do. ‘Kenyan’ is a hard nut to crack. It’s an animal that has been discovered and named, has features that are recognizable yet stubbornly refuses to be classified. It’s a chameleon that changes its colour so often in the various environments it steps into, that no one can figure out its original colour.

Traditions and culture are heavy words. So heavy in fact, that we have carried them with us and fought and died in their name. T.D. Jakes gave a great analogy of traditions. I’ll paraphrase it. A husband asks his wife why she keeps throwing out a bit of the pork on the edges before she cooks it and she says that she doesn’t know but she learned it from her mother. He asks her mother and she says she learned it from her mother. So he asks the grandmother, who says that it’s because back then there were no refrigerators so you had to cut off the edges as they were likely to have gone bad. Her daughter and granddaughter kept the tradition going not realizing it was archaic and redundant.

There are traditions and bits of our culture that must go. FGM (Female Genital Mutilation), wife inheritance, discrimination of women and superstitious beliefs that have led to the burning of old women in the belief that they are witches, are just a few. However, there is the often silent yet very present mind-sets that are also eating us alive. “We are better than them. We are superior to them.” Those beliefs built around our cultural identities are the most dangerous. They are like landmines hidden away ready to detonate at a misstep.

There are those who cling to the past, taking excessive pride in their cultural and ethnic identities above all else. Yet, there are those who have renounced their cultural and ethnic identities claiming they know only ‘Kenyan.’ I am for neither. I am of the school of thought that they are both extremes and we should instead find a middle ground. Putting your ethnic allegiance first leads to tribal clashes and the PEV (Post-Election Violence) we witnessed in 2007. Denying your ethnicity and culture leads to lack of roots. I suppose that’s why we still cannot define ‘Kenyan.’ We are either completely for our ethnic origins or we are ashamed or out of sync with it.

There are so many good things that we can be proud of from our culture such as our languages, dressing, food, names, ancestral wisdom, stories and the list goes on. I only recently began to take pride in my cultural identity. I suppose I was suffering from, for lack of a better word, a neo-colonialist mind-set.

The symptoms of this disease range from negative ethnicity to shunning our ethnicity. The good news is there can be diversity in unity and unity in diversity. The bad news is it’s not an easy process and requires time and patience which is a challenge as we are a band-aid society, using one even for internal injuries that require surgery!

So what is Kenyan? There are as many theories as there are counties! At the end of it all, are we a bunch of tribes forced by boundaries drawn up by foreigners to live together? We have not embraced nationhood. We are still dealing with the tribe in the negative, still dealing with tribal clashes. Tribal clashes are not just the Tana clashes. The attitudes we hold that rear their ugly heads from time to time are clashes too. We kill ‘them’ in our minds long before we ever actually do.

Kenyan is you and I. You and I are from different backgrounds and have different worldviews. There is no one solution that will magically heal our nation and unite us. It’s a process. A process I believe begins by first acknowledging that we are not where we should be as a nation.