If Timex Social Club were a Kenyan band, the opening lines of their hit song Rumours would not have been that rumours are started by “the jealous people and/ They get mad seein’ somethin’ they had and somebody else is holdin’...”.
Instead, Michael Marshall, Marcus Thompson, Samuelle Prater and Alex Hill could have discovered that in Kenya, rumours are started by ignorant ill-educated people who think with their fingers and hide behind computer screens or mobile phones.
That discovery could have been more apt last week, when in a rare occurrence, Kenyans were united in joy, as opposed to getting united in grief as they often do. It came to pass that the Kenya Sevens rugby team did wonders in Singapore, and gave Kenya more mileage than all those lethargic Bland Kenya bodies and other niggardly tourism entities that are tasked with marketing the country will ever do.
When the team’s plane touched down in Nairobi, some of Kenya’s ignorant (sports) journalists and social media editors started spreading all sorts of rumours and lies why the team flew Qatar Airways, and not Kenya Airways, its main sponsor. Their lies were not only shamelessly parroted by Kenyan Airways officialdom but ended up in a national newspaper which reported that Qatar Airways is a sponsor of one of the ten legs of the Rugby Sevens Circuit, but could not name that leg.
This piece is not about rugby or specifically ignorant, lazy and ill-trained Kenyan journalists, who think with their fingers, lack the wherewithal to fact-check and when taken to task, start thinking with their hearts and not their heads.
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This piece is about how easy it has become for Kenyans to manufacture stories, and start spreading them in the hope that they will become the truth. The sad thing about lies is that you cannot tell only one, and thus, Kenya is increasingly becoming a nation of liars. Lies or rumours getting started by ignorant non-entities and later finding their way in to major public offices is not a new phenomenon in Kenya.
Many years ago, before the advent of social media, a rumour, nay, a lie was started about “Luo culture” which was christened wife inheritance, and later, in a bid to be politically correct, was changed to widow inheritance.
First, human beings are not inherited in Luo culture. What has been given a bad name by non-State organisations working with State bodies and mainstream churches — and nowadays county governments — to get funding from foreign philanthropists, is actually a consensual remarriage of a widow.
Luos had societal safety nets, and when a husband died, it was the duty of the family or the clan, to care for the widow and her children. When the widow was a young woman, she had the option of getting remarried, to any of the husband’s younger brothers, or what you call paternal cousins.
It was consensual, and she was not forced to get married to a mentally-challenged man as you have always heard, and the new husband had to pay bride price again — and they lived happily or unhappily ever after and even had children.
If the widow was an old woman, the man-in-her life was just a ceremonial head of her family so that she could not feel neglected and could always have a man to call on if she needed a hard task accomplished.
It was such a simple and beautiful tradition which ensured that Luoland did not have neglected orphans and desperate mothers roaming the villages with begging bowls and being taken advantage of by louts.
About two decades ago, this tradition of protecting widows was demonised and listed as Luo culture, and adjectives such as retrogressive were thrown in its wake, as if there was anything progressive that was being offered to widows.
It was said that clans seek out mentally-challenged men and force widows to live with them — and that lie was given legs, and wings and nowadays county government officials and governors whose mothers were actually remarried run around villages speaking about widow inheritance being a retrogressive Luo “culture.”
There is no such thing as widow or wife inheritance in Luo tradition. It is not even Luo culture. Period.
