DP Ruto loose tongue will stop him from being 'Rais' - Barrack Muluka

Deputy President, William Ruto, has a bee in his bonnet about liberal education in Kenya. His hostility towards the arts is not just a philistine obsession.

It borders on pathological fear. Accordingly, he will every so often go off the handle, throwing invective at liberal education in a confounding manner that can only be pitied.

Between President Abraham Lincoln and novelist Mark Twain, someone said that it is often better to keep your mouth shut and let people doubt your grasp of things, than to open your trap and-in the process-remove all doubt.

This is a fundamental challenge in Africa. The moment someone occupies high office, they miraculously “know everything.”

Suddenly, they are everywhere issuing shallowly researched high-sounding edicts. Unfortunately, their edicts only expose embarrassing knowledge gaps.

Where the challenge is not a knowledge gap, we can only conclude that it is a factor of some sinister agenda. What is it about Kenya’s Deputy President?

The Deputy President has been at it again, this last weekend. He told a gathering somewhere in Central Kenya that we should stop “teaching useless subjects like anthropology, history and geography in our schools and colleges.”

In the village of Emanyulia, where I was born and reared, the knowledge of history and geography is critical. Anthropology is of the essence. You need to know who you are.

You should be told that your great grandfather was a rapist, if he was one. You could be a third-generation product of rape.

Rape flows in your bloodstream, and you should know. That is why the villagers may not allow you to play certain cultural roles.

Regarding our history in Emanyulia, therefore, our people say that it is only the great grandson of a night runner who is hostile to memory.

For, all history is simply memory. Those who have a dark past to hide want all memory destroyed. They don’t want us to know where we have come from-and especially where they have come from.

Indeed, is it not legitimate to ask why some people don’t want us to remember who they are and where they have come from?

At some level, you would imagine it was only a matter of common sense. You can only get where you want to go because you know where you are.

And you know where you are because you know where you have come from. If someone has hundreds of thousands of acres of land in the midst of dire land poverty, there must be a big story behind it.

How did it happen? Did some fellow just wake up one morning became a superclass land baron while everyone else woke up hopelessly poor? What big bang happening led to this? There must be a story behind it. The memory of that story is what history is made of.

But let us bring this closer home. Just now, the political class is up in arms again, crying about the Constitution. But why do we seem to focus on the Constitution all the time?

There are, no doubt, those who don’t know that we African people who are called Kenyans did not always have a common Constitution.

It has been forgotten that the forty-plus tribes of Kenya were once each totally independent entities, each with its own tribal customary laws, traditions and practices.

Those customs constituted each tribe’s constitution. But historical happenings changed all that forever- at least for now.

The Mzungu came this way, someday. He arbitrarily tore up our continent and put us in new pockets and bundles of togetherness, called colonies.

He imposed his colonial law upon us. One day, we decided that the Mzungu must go. Yet, when he was leaving, we could not go back to what we had been before.

We could also not continue with his colonial laws, which were now irrelevant. How would we go into the future? We met in Lancaster to make our new supreme law - the Independence Constitution.

To date, we are still groping for the right constitutional order. If, today, you are telling us that we should forget this memory, you either have sinister intent or you have a worrying knowledge gap - or both. 

We must especially worry about your sinister intents - or knowledge gap - if you nurse the ambition of occupying the most powerful office in our land.

How can we trust you to be a fair umpire over our public affairs when you want to destroy our memory? Just imagine waking up one morning without your memory! You don’t know who you are.

You don’t know where you are. You have no idea of who is sitting next to you, what you are doing there and how you got there.

You only exist in a temporary fleeting present moment - which you will forget in the next few seconds anyway, because your faculty of memory is damaged. This is what the Deputy President is telling the world that Kenya should become-a society without memory.

Our geography and history tell us of the mind-boggling minerals in the Congo Basin of Africa. Together, they tell us how foreigners from Europe laid claim to the Congo in the 1880s, with a Belgian king taking a whole territory as his own personal property - the Congo Free State.

The two subjects also tell us of the transformation of Europe through the Industrial Revolution and how the subsequent activities brought these people to Africa. We are still staggering from the colonial blow and from that of Slave Trade. Don’t we have a right to know?

If people have built railway lines, roads and factories, it has been because of historical and geographical factors.

Hence, in Kenya today, the people of the Western Region have been lamenting the collapse of major industries there. Why have these industries collapsed?

Why is agriculture now also collapsing there? What is happening to maize farming in the country? Who is benefitting from the situation? Kah! You don’t want us to teach history and geography?

The other subject that came under Deputy Presidential assault was anthropology. Anthropology is the study of societies and human behaviour - both in the past and in the present.

It is about the norms and values of those societies. And I think this is the crux of the Deputy President’s recurrent verbal assaults on liberal education. Let me give you the context.

The DP says that anthropology, history and geography contribute nothing to development. He says we should instead teach engineering and other science based studies.

First, his notion of development is convoluted. For, development only begins with human development.  Human development, itself, begins with development of norms and values. You get it?

If we learnt just a few of the values embedded in such studies as anthropology, history, literature, geography, religion and philosophy, we would be a better people.

The world would look at us and say, “Yes, those people are developed.” Someone, please say these things to Deputy President William Ruto. For, he will not read this writing.

He will use this paper to wrap meat. Tell him that the reason I personally think he should never ascend to the highest office in the land is that he embraces dangerous notions about education.

Such a person is dangerous for the country. He must never over rule us.

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