Why are Kenyans surprised that there are socialites and campus divas among us? This blogger has argued before on this blog that Kenya really got the short end of the stick when it came to the quality of the colonial-settlers that landed on the East African Coast. Among those men were pederasts, murderers, bastards (in every sense of the pejorative), thieves and swindlers of every shade. That some of them came bearing bibles doesn't revise one whit the low moral or entrepreneurial quality of that lot. It is only when you examine their increasingly racist, land-grabbing activities in the light of the shocking, even by European standards, Happy Valley style of living that you know, deep in your marrow, that we were well and truly fucked before we even got in on the game.
Wallace Kantai, writing in the Business Daily (How Vera Sidika represents the new face of capitalism), sees what many young people see and what Macharia Gaitho, writing in the Daily Nation (National Dialogue? We have divas, a true reflection of our warped mores), and his generation, do not. Young Kenyans are not hobbled by the shame that restrained their parents in their youth; young Kenyans have only one overriding motive: get rich quick. Capitalism, rather than the staid African socialism that promoted respect for the elders and reinforced Victorian social mores, is the key to unlocking the entertainment "millions" that some socialites claim to bank.
If the social contract that existed between the old and the young had survived the tea and coffee crises of the late '70s and early '80s, the rampant land theft that took place throughout the 1980s, the corruption that pervaded the provision of public goods and services in the 1990s, and the political corruption that defined the nation since the day it became a British protectorate, maybe we could have staved off the appearance of the socialite and the campus diva just a bit longer. But when the parents who should know better are competing against other parents who should know better in the vicious rat race where the almighty shilling is the only factor of importance, and when their competition leads them to elide moral and social mores for the expediency of me-first victory, it should come as no surprise that high class harlots are the new role models.
Let us not pretend that the post-independence decades were characterised by moral probity or the upholding of social mores; Mr Gaitho's generation knew exactly what was going on when vice-presidents "sent" their wives packing, when attorneys-general asked to be released from certain vows, or when assassins' victims had their genitals mutilated.
The biggest difference between Mr Gaitho's rose-tinted halcyon days and the younger generation's is that you have to have the clandestine skills of the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, also known as Mossad, in covering your tracks because with the proliferation of mobile phones, instant messaging, the internet, e-mail, social-media sites and other tools of modern communication your dirty laundry will not remain hidden. And the insatiable demand for salacious gossip for the armies of youth who cannot farm because there are no farms, and who don't have white-collar jobs because there are no white-collar jobs to be had, will all but guarantee a steady market and a steady supply of aspirational socialites and campus divas.
Mr Gaitho should know better than to try and persuade us that Kenya has ever had a moral or social mores register that was acceptable. Kenya is a hypocritical country. What we are doing is simply removing the hypocrisy from our daily transactions. It is as the mzungu of antiquity intended: money at all costs, whether that cost be moral or financial.
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