Tribes is now the predominant form of identification anywhere in Kenya. Before someone asks your name he/she will ask where you come from and your tribe. The same culture is rife in Maseno and the biggest tragedy of our time is us taking this as a normal part of our being and not doing anything about it, negative ethnicity affects us all, so we need a deep reflection on our context as students and the place of tribal antics in the years to come. Our socialization has corrupted our thinking; imposed on us a story that is one sided, making us not to see each other as brothers. Let us rewrite this, redefine our biased values and engage our mental processes and be a part of the solution. Its time we draw a few lessons to tone down this culture: let us make the following part of our lives comrades of Maseno.
Let’s rid ourselves of ethnic badges and identify people with their personal traits and attributes. This culture of identifying people with their tribes, yule kijana mluhya, yule mjaluo, yule mworiah robs us of our identities as individuals and ties us to an ethnic group. We can instead use identification that are not ethnically based or prejudicing such as: that third year dude, the tall guy who lives here instead of yule mjaka huishi hapa. This will help us see each other as a people who share a common purpose, unified and not divided along ethnic lines. This will in turn tone down the negative culture of ethnicity within maseno.
Social stereotypes and myths such as all Luo’s having pride or unproportionally high egos and all kikuyus loving money or worse still every Somali being a “fala” robs one of their dignity, dispossess people of their personal identities and divides us further, we need to purge ourselves of such traditional notions.
We need to embrace a culture of free thinking individuals, “group think” robs us of a lot of rational reasoning and a keen observation will show you that as individuals we all regard each other as brothers but once people from the same ethnic groups come together then our tribal woes begin. Think independently comrades.
Lets practice tolerance of people’s opinions at all times, when an individual speaks he or she speaks out of his/her own will and no person has the audacity to speak for a whole tribe. Our diversity should be the source of our unity, of our progress and a heritage that talks of success.
Grouping and regrouping especially along tribal lines creates an illusion of progress, we need to get rid of tribal clubs and groups, lets join clubs and organizations that are issue based, universal and progressive, if at all the groups we have within Maseno are progressive then why is its membership confined only to some regions and communities?
The schools administration should also institute some strong punitive measures to those student leaders who mobilize students along their ethnic cocoons, ban the KKK alliance and all such other alliances.
Before you regard this as a very idealistic article, JUST THINK AGAIN. It’s only from the ideal that we can shape the reality of our time. If only we tried as individuals and made this part of our lives then we might realize that ending tribalism amongst us is after all not beyond our capabilities. We are human first; Kenyans second, why resort to tribalism?
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