Ukubwa-ness

I once dealt with Doris at a meeting. Not Doris from HR, but the other Doris. You know, our senior? Doris from HR is kindly and smiles, just like a proper HR boss should. She's like a baby version of Madam Faith. Anyway, back to the other Doris, who wears her ukubwa like it were a suit of armour. I'm not saying that she hasn't earned her ukubwa; she has. But she doesn't have to lord it over the little people as if we were nuisances, pits in her Jimmy Choos.

You remember Marion, don't you? My kindly, motherly, all-smiles colleague? Anyway, being the Marion she is, she is plenty busy helping folks so she spends a considerable amount of her professional time outside the office. So this random Thursday when she was out pulling some other State officer's bacon out of the fire, she asked me to sit in on one of her meetings and report back what was decided. That was when I encountered Doris, who couldn't hide her disdain for me. I could see it in her eyes: How dare I poison her air with my inexperienced ass? Being the patient fella I am, I explained where Marion was and what I was doing there. She would not have it.

It's not as if it were her meeting to begin with. She was just one other body from a department we all despise representing her boss too. If it wasn't for Mrs Muia simply acknowledging my misplaced ass and moving on to the agenda, I have a feeling that Doris, like akina would Olivia put it, would have caught feelings. I can't figure it out, this sniffy attitude some senior public officers have towards their juniors. We may not have the decade-plus that some of you have in service, but we are not exactly dimwits out to muck up your resumes.

Catherine calls it the Ukubwa Syndrome, where the higher you climb in the service, the more sniffy you get because of your rank towards "junior staff." You will not hobnob with them; you will only acknowledge their presence when you are about to issue commands. They are beneath you, and you stare down your nose at them from your high perch. They are to be seen, never heard, dedicated to doing your bidding. And so you take umbrage when your peers second some junior officer to sit in in a meeting that you can't get out of because of the offending presence of junior staff.

This, to me, seems like a die-hard vestige of the colonial service, where hierarchical divisions were enforced punitively. If you deigned to breath the same air as your betters, there would be hell to pay. Whether or not you were good at your shit didn't matter; if you fraternised with someone from the wrong rank or, worse, the wrong cadre, your career would hang in the balance and your peers or seniors would never treat you the same again. Doris would have made an excellent colonial era DO (Blacks would never have been made DCs). She has the ukubwa-ness necessary to thrive in an institution that values hierarchical rules and saving face. I just hope that now her whole division has been spun off, that I never have to deal with her again. I don't need that kind of poison in my life.