Naked weapon

More often than not, the superstitious among us will be of limited education, and I don't just mean formal education, but education of all forms. Kenya is largely superstitious despite the proliferation of all manner of faiths,  faith-based organisations and faith systems. It is why some still live in fear that an old woman's nakedness is a curse. It never occurs to them that the physiology of an old woman and that of a young woman are the same and that therefore, a naked young woman should be able to curse too.

Just so I am not to be understood to be mocking the system of curses that naked old-woman flesh might be responsible for because I am enamoured of faith systems, let us agree that even faith-based superstitions are ripe to be mocked and mocked mercilessly. It is why superstition has not place in law enforcement. But if you wish to deploy superstition in order to prevail in a private argument, please go ahead, though you will invariably invite mockery and ridicule.

Apparently a motorist and a matatu driver were involved in a minor road traffic accident and the two failed to reach a settlement. The motorist called the police, the matatu driver called the owner of the matatu, who turned out to be a woman of mature years. She offered to settle the dispute with the motorist, but the cops were having none of that since they had been called to the scene of the accident. She stripped in protest and, according to some of the supporters of this type of woman power, as a curse on what are presumed to have been male policemen. This recalls somewhat the mothers of political prisoners who stripped naked at freedom corner, as a curse on Baba Moi's government and the policemen who enforced his diktats. (It might be important to note that Baba Moi did eventually set them free, but that his government survived an extra thirteen years before he peacefully left State House and retreated to Kabarak.)

If I were one of the policemen being threatened by a naked woman in broad daylight, I would not only have charged the matatu driver with a traffic offence, but I would have scoured the Penal Code so that I could charge the naked woman with the offence of being idle and disorderly. This is the twenty first century and to imagine that dispute resolution requires superstitious assistance is a sign that your degree of education and edification still accepts the existence of Father Christmas as the arbiter of goodness and badness among juveniles!

We are a nation of laws. We may not always observe them faithfully, but that is the bargain we made to ourselves when we declared Kenya to be a rule-of-law nation. Nakedness-based curses are not to be found in the Traffic Act or the Penal Code, unless I have been reading from the wrong sections of th Laws of Kenya. Now don't take this as knocking Willy Mutunga's call to rely on witchdoctors in alternative dispute resolution; the Chief Justice doesn't say that witchcraft has a place in dispute resolution, but that witchdoctors,who are frequently both feared and respected, can contribute to dispute resolution. 

What we must reject is the idea that superstition should be the basis for the enforcement of the law, or that it should be accepted widely among a people with, at the last count, sixty five universities at their disposal. Institutions of high learning are supposed to liberalise our minds from the shackles of superstition, such as the idea that naked old women can put a curse on a policeman doing his job.