Is this our whirlwind to reap?

It is every son's wish that his parents be proud of him. So a dutiful son will do well in school, get a good job, get married and sire grandsons for the pride of his family. He will also uphold the cultures of his tribe, including language. If he is good, he will become a respected member of the community, and he will be sought after for advise and financial assistance. His parents will hold their heads high in the community and they will beam with pride when their son's name is mentioned in company.

There is a generation of sons who have been hamstrung in their efforts to make their parents proud. They have been disappointed by a social system that has completely broken down. Their parents have become the victims of circumstances beyond their control. The French call it force majeure, an act of nature. Acts of nature cannot be stopped; they can only be mitigated. But it is not acts of nature that have hamstrung the sons of today; it is the acts of their parents' generation that have all but guaranteed a Darwinian selection of the fittest over the weakest.

Kenya has had a tortuous history. The tribes that commanded all that they could see or steal were subjugated brutally by first, the mzungu missionaries, and then Imperial British East Africa Company, then the British colonial government, thereafter the first Kenyatta the Elder Independence government followed by his rule-by-fiat de facto one-party dictatorship which was succeeded by Baba Moi's de jure one-party kleptocratic dictatorship which was succeeded by Mwai Kibaki's tribal kleptocratic quasi-democracy. While events were unfolding on the political stage, sons were increasingly losing the guidance of their communities, of their families and of their fathers. We are reaping the whirlwind of the seeds we sowed when our cultural development stopped with the arrival of the bibles and guns of the European missionaries at Rabai.

It is politics that has shaped the fates of families for the past fifty years. Political decisions have been translated into government policies and which in turn have had real world economic consequences on families. These political decisions have compelled fathers to work longer and longer hours and to drive mothers into the job market and they, in turn, have been compelled to work longer and longer hours. Fathers and mothers, by and large, have been compelled to move to towns and cities and have slowly lost their connection to their extended families and their communities. Substitute communities in the city do not have the same legitimacy or utility as the real deal. In all this, sons have been neglected ad some of the key lessons they were meant to draw from their parents and their communities have passed them by.

So it is not out of order to advance the argument that if cultures had developed as they were meant to develop and sons were raised as they were meant to be raised, even the economic challenges facing this nation would not appear to be so intractable. This is not to say that daughters occupy a lesser place; but their rise was always going to be a factor of cultural and economic advancement. Not even a rigidly patriarchal society could prevent the rise of the  girl child in an interconnected world. It is the fall of the sons that has led to the cultural and social breakdowns witnessed in all our tribes, where individual greed has surpassed even the capacity of the community to satisfy it. If we do not do something to educate sons on their responsibilities, on the roles they must play in their homes, families, communities and country, all the political manifestos and economic blue prints will not lead us to greater prosperity, but greater misery.