With Kenya at crossroads, will Ruto's song and dance change?

This place Emanyulia is at once addictive and revitalizing. It is spiritually fortifying and morally rearming. You depart from here mentally and physically restored. You step out emotionally ready to face the suffocating din ahead. The hustle and bustle of the towns, Nairobi in the lead.

It has been a serene Christmas season. It has been edifying to spend quality time with Papa Jairus. He staggers on in his 90s, with Mama Roselyn in tow, in the late 80s. They fill you up with sadness and joy. The sadness of witnessing loss of youth to age, and the joy of the elders being around, despite the challenges. And the challenges are many. But we don’t complain. We thank God for grace.

We, especially, celebrate the gift of this New Year. New Year always reminds us of our departed grand patron, Samuel, and the virtues he implanted in us, every January. You see, Samuel attended the Maseno School, today Maseno National School, between 1906 and 1911.

His four sons, Papa Jairus among them, later attended the same school. Samuel learned at the feet of James Jamieson Willis, the founder of Maseno. Archdeacon Walter Edwin Owen baptised him Samwiri on December 8, 1918. He confirmed him on November 10, 1921.

Samuel’s diary shows that he got married to our grandma, Rosa (an alumna of Butere Girls School), on February 19, 1925. Accordingly, next month we turn 100 years as a family.

Church records show that our grandma was baptised in the Anglican Church on February 1, 1925, as part of the prep for the wedding on the 25th. This living history that surpasses one century explains many things, especially the undying love for this place of birth, and the rich mix of orientations that have informed this column for 27 years. Most of all is the stubborn resistance to compromise.

Stand in the pulpit

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Born and raised in an essentially Levite background, I disappointed my grandpa by not taking up Church orders. I consider myself far too blemished to be the one to stand in the pulpit, to claim to show people the Truth, the Way, and the Life. Yet, in a secular sense, this column makes up for that.

Behind this background, I watched with rapture as Kenyans danced their way into this familial centenary. President William Ruto was in the lead. For different reasons, they danced to the now all too familiar beat of the Kasongo drums. The lowest common factor was defiance. The new sheriffs in town, the Gen-Zs, danced in defiance of the political establishment under President Ruto. The President danced in ridicule of the Gen-Zs.

The philosophers in State House think that mockery is the best way to stem the anti-Ruto Kasongo memes in social media. And what better way than for the person Gen-Zs cast as Kasongo to dance into the New Year to the Kasongo song?

As chance would have it, earlier in the day, I perused through an old copy of Things Fall Apart. The evening dance in State Lodge, Kisii, reminds you of Achebe writing, “There was a saying in Umuofia that as a man danced, so the drums were beaten for him. Mr Smith danced a furious step and so the drums went mad.”

We are asking, here in Emanyulia, is Kenya’s President dancing a furious step? What drums will play for him in this year of years, 2025? Will the drums go mad? In the case of Mr Smith, Achebe writes, “He saw things in black and white... He saw the world as a battlefield in which the children of light were locked in mortal conflict with the children of darkness. He spoke... of sheep and goats and about wheat and tares. He believed in slaying the prophets of Baal.”

We believe here in Emanyulia that President Ruto sees things in black and white. There are no grey spaces in between. No room to listen. No compromise. His world is a battlefield in which the children of darkness must be slayed. For, in his own words, “They are mad, unpatriotic, and even stupid.” He alone is right. This is a furious dance.

Kenya’s drumbeat of 2025 promises to be wild, unless the steps at the very top change. And how do they change? Let Dr Ruto listen to Senator Richard Onyonka of Kisii. This man is worth more than all the advisors in the Ruto government rolled into one. Onyonka can show the President the steps of the dance that Kenyans want.

Happy New Year.

-Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser. www.barrackmuluka.co.ke