Many columnists are used to receiving vitriolic email messages from people who do not like what they have written, but the one I received a few days ago was particularly disturbing.
A Kenyan (who might also be a US citizen) going by the Internet name “Nick Hagono”, who I believe lives in Pennsylvania, USA, sent me a message that should concern the National Commission on Cohesion and Integration.
He was irritated by my column two weeks ago where I talked about the parallels between the current anti-Kikuyu debate and the 1980s’ “Asian Question”.
In the email message, he called for an Idi Amin-style expulsion of Asians from Kenya, calling me a “filthy brown mutt”, a “stupid chooti” and a “curry-munching twat” and suggested that I “pack up and move to Somalia”.
(If this constitutes hate speech, then Nick could face criminal charges in Kenya under the new Constitution. And why he wants me to go to Somalia, I have no clue.)
This is not the first time I have been racially attacked by Kenyans in the diaspora. For some reason, they find it easier to be racist, perhaps because they live in racist societies.
I believe that one of the reasons Kenyans – and non-white communities in general – living in the West are prone to be more racist than Kenyans living at home is because they have probably been victims of racism themselves.
Unable to retaliate against their provocateurs, they lash out at innocent third-parties, like the badly-treated employee who goes home and beats his wife. It is a form of displaced aggression.
Besides, they don’t live in their home country and do not have to bear the consequences of their hate-mongering.
They have nothing to lose – if ethnic violence breaks out here, they will not die or be displaced.
They will watch Kenya burning from afar, from the comfort of their adopted homes in far-off lands.
But it is not just the racism amongst Kenyans abroad that is most worrying, but the negative ethnicity that borders on fascism.
An example is a listserv posting by the US-based columnist and academic John Mulaa at the height of the post-election violence in 2008.
Mulaa did not hesitate to state that Kenyans should support “an armed struggle leading to eventual partition of the country”.
In reference to Kikuyus, he said: “We cannot forget or forgive what these guys have done. There is no guarantee they will not repeat it. It is in their DNA.”
This from a man who holds a doctorate in public policy!
During the 2007/8 violence, I received many such email messages from Kenyans in the diaspora.
Some of their wrath – not just against me but against entire ethnic groups in Kenya – has been captured by Prof Kimani Njogu in a chapter titled “Globalised Identity: Diaspora Kenyans and Local Conflict” published in 2010 in the book (Re)Membering Kenya: Identity, Culture and Freedom.
Prof Njogu believes that Kenyans in the diaspora are prone to negative ethnicity because “when moving from the homeland to a foreign state, citizens do not delete their cultural solidarities and tensions; rather, they ‘suspend’ them momentarily and retain traces which can be activated during moments of anxiety, fear and crisis” (for example, during an election).
Kenyans abroad exhibit a number of traits, he says, including a conscious decision to maintain a collective identity as Kenyans or members of particular ethnic groups.
They have also developed relations of solidarity with co-ethnic members in other host countries.
And because they are not fully accepted by their host countries, they are prone to feelings of alienation, exclusion and the occasional superiority complex vis-à-vis their compatriots at home.
Kenyans in the diaspora are potentially a dangerous lot. If Nick and his hate-filled, xenophobic ilk are going to have voting rights in the next General Election, then we are in deep trouble as a nation.
This is not to say that there are no voices of reason in the diaspora.
Indeed, some of the most vocal Kenyan proponents of tolerance live outside this country.
But they could be overwhelmed by the voices of intolerance which threaten to plunge the country into what the late Martin Luther King called “the dark abyss of annihilation”.
They must be stopped before it is too late.
Comments