By Ted Malanda
First, allow me to issue what is known in media circles as a hard-hitting statement to my Somali brothers and sisters. Brethren, Ambassador Amina Mohammed, Kenya’s newly minted Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary, is not yours.
Amina is ours — meaning she is the daughter of ingo, Kakamega County to be precise. She was weaned on obusuma (ugali). Tea, much beloved by my people, flows copiously in her veins. She played kati and watched bullfights not far from where the white men stole our gold at Ikolomani (gold mine) and shook her shoulders to isukuti drumbeats at Butere Girls High School as a teenager.
Accent
Unfortunately, we educated her so much that she ended up losing her isukha accent. That is us why when she speaks the Queen’s language, you hear music, not the famous Luhya guttural ‘kha kha’.
Now, having gotten that weighty matter off my puny chest, and not without a smirk of tribal pride, let me laugh, as we say in my village.
When our daughter was appointed Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary, a pretty lass from Kimilili (the people of Embu dream that she belongs to them, imagine) cooed that finally, Kenya had a welcoming Foreign Affairs chief, unlike previous male holders of that office whose faces were so rough that they scared foreign investors away.
I was, however, more amused last week when I watched the good ambassador, who is a lawyer by profession, flash a cute dimple and sweetly dismiss Chinedu, our Nigerian son-in-law turned pariah, as a two-bit bandit not worth talking to without saying as much. Her predecessors would have worked themselves into frenzy, banged the table and flung coarse insults at the Nigerian to make the same point.
More hilarious was reading Chinedu’s interview, published in a Nigerian newspaper, of this on-going circus. According to Chinedu, we Kenyans hate Nigerians with a passion, yet they do so much for us. Don’t some Nigerians run businesses that employ Kenyans and keep Kenya Airways afloat by flying on the pride of Africa with cocaine stuffed in their rectums?
Proof of how much they do for us, Chinedu said, lies in the fact they marry our terrible women left, right and centre. Yet — would you believe the horror of it? — no Kenyan man has bothered to return the favour by putting a tempestuous Nigerian woman in the house.
As happens, an outpouring of rage followed the article. Nigerians insulted Kenyans in horrid grammar, saying all manner of hateful things, including that we are no different from the animals in our famous national parks.
So when one gallant son of Nigeria stepped forward and commented that there was something about Chinedu’s story that didn’t add up and that some Nigerians in Kenya indeed peddle hard drugs, I sighed with relief.
Hyena
But an army of Nigerian ‘twitters’ rounded up on him with kicks and blows, calling him a dog, a hyena. Before I could digest the verbiage, someone had called him a stupid Biafran who hates the Ibos and the battle degenerated quickly into a tribal slugfest. Well, on that count, of looking at everything through a tribal lens and penning arrant nonsense on social media in horrendous grammar, these loud, rambunctious Nigerians are truly our brothers.
