Battling Tribalism

Here's today's rant from one of my parental units. (I have more than two, but you know which one.)

It is the mind that instigates the crimes that we commit, including the chauvinism which leads you to attack your neighbour on account of his ethnic affiliation. The upshot is that, in the war on crime, mental education is a hundred times more effective than a hundred manacles.

The chief failing of all [Kenyan] upbringing – including the classroom formality that we claim to be “education” – is that it does not attempt to remove from our minds any of the groundless assumptions, sentiments and thoughts that we hold against one another as ethnic communities.

THE CHIEF CULPRITS ARE OUR PARENTS, OUR teachers, our priests and – by the favouritism with which they hire and fire – our government officials. If these are members of our most “educated” elite, how can we expect our mass of peasants and proletarians to know any better? [SNIP]

The police may have prevented much of what has happened. They may arrest us and the courts may sentence us to stiff punishment.

But they cannot arrest and detain or jail the parochialism that hag-rides us as races, tribes, genders and religions. It is not their duty. Appalling is the revelation, since December 27, that, since independence, Kenyans have not moved even a flea-hop in the direction of mental education, uplift and refinement.

Nothing is more embarrassing than to listen to PhDs from one community, seated at the counter of a pub, uttering the most fetid drivel about other tribes. They demand “revolutionary changes” in the body politic but only if these changes are manned by members of their tribe. At the counter – that’s why I call them counter-revolutionaries.

FOR IT IS THEY WHO OUGHT TO PLAY THE VANGUARD role in our seemingly insuperable task of creating a single national mind out of a conglomeration of disparate ethnic minds. Yet since December 27, I have not seen even a single suggestion from the academic community that tribalism is our national bane number one – leave alone how to tackle it. [SNIP]

No, December 27 has not intensified our parochialism. It has merely removed the outer coating of our small-mindedness. It has merely laid us bare.

The Kenya Crisis

Comments

[Rich]

That really brought back the old days. Your parental unit hit all the high notes: chauvinism, vanguard, proletarians. Oldies but goodies.

[baldilocks]

Well, he is a commie still--like most of the old-school Africans who were educated in the USA and in Europe. :-)

[Zendo Deb]

As long as the Marxists think in terms of the proletariat - the unwashed unthinking bottom of society only suitable for hiring out as beasts of burden - the problem will never change.

They are individuals with free will responsible (legally and morally) for their actions. If those actions include genocide - or in this case ethnic cleansing - they are still responsible.

If you expect a society to change, but you don't expect any of the individuals to change, you have a slight problem.

And I believe it can (and they can) change.

[Rich]

I know J but I like to hear them now and then. Kinda like dusting off and playing an old reassuring song. Remember? When the commies (Russia, China) were our only enemies? Play it again Sam....

[lfox]

Tribalism isn't unique to Africa, even today. The major block to a peaceful Ireland (both North and South) has been the unrelenting tribal affiliations of the Catholic and Protestant Irish. They unthinkingly support "their" people, and manipulate business, professional, educational, and political spoils to keep the division intact.

I am totally opposed to that thinking, yet I see it daily in school systems, both North and South. It is promoted by both communities, as well as the teaching staff and the administrations. As a result, students never learn to go beyond their parochial interests. A few learn that selfless connection to a larger identity in the services (ironically, strongly opposed by leftists), after their graduation.