RELIGIOUS DOGMA IN RATIONALE PERSPECTIVE:

They say when one person is delusioned, its madness and when many are delusioned its religion. You cannot put this better if you are a keen observer of today’s religious society. Sometimes some people take me wrong when I hurl asperity on the so called opium of masses. I have tried severally and every trial I make attracts dogmatists who come out breathing fire. The passion with which they come out is incredibly scarily. They might make you feel headed for limbo the next moment you raise your finger.

  

My little experience has taught me not to question faith but my rationale advises me otherwise. I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use at the cost of the deceptive heart. I am a rationalist who believes in the Bible the same way I belief in the sun not just because I often see it but by it, I am able to see all other things. That is not to mean that the Holly Quran, the Bhagavad-Gita, the book of Mormon and assorts are lesser of books.

We believe in supernatural beings for spiritual nourishment that eventually makes us better people, not holier than though as fundamentalists would suggest. Our spirituality should not make us at any point stop applying our rationality. It is obvious that you cannot trust your spiritual element over your rational element. Accepting this simple fact is in itself rational. That is my rationale but all I see, all I hear every day is dogmatic religious selfishness which does not make things any better but worse.

Rationale is not selfish; it inspires love and understanding for all humanity. Rationale is not the opium of masses but a gift for every individual human being. Rationale does not segregate the human race. In religion, I have seen people kill in the line of defending their faith. I have seen religion impoverish people; I have seen it turning people against each other. I have seen religion selectively prohibiting people from intermarrying. Some have fought each other for superiority, power and control. That is not love, it is cancerous selfishness.

In religion, sect groups have emerged and caused anarchy in societies. The Mungikis the Al-Shababs, and the Al-Qaida of this world have something to do with religion, don’t they? Albinos are being hunted and killed in Tanganyika by some believers for spiritual remedy, that’s religion for you. How moving would religion be had it united the world and not divided it. How encouraging would it be had it been one and not segregated and confusing as it is today. How amazing would it be had it inspired love for all and not hatred for some as it is eminently evident today? Quite frequently, religious fire begets ashes but occasionally it spawns more fires. I will stick to my rationale.

By Duke Mwancha.

WHO BEWITCHED OUR CHAPS?

You cannot see it when it is dwelling with you; this is an old cliche which cannot validate the inability of me not being able to understand what is within us. Being a man is not so much different from being a woman and being a woman is not so much the same as being a man. Some will say that men are from Mars and women from Venus but I would say women are men from there and men are women from nowhere. The difference is the same yet so different. Beyond this, I do not know much about women much as I know much about men!

Hail to our fathers of the world, the men who discovered this and that; no need to recapitulate their well incubated names and their well archived histories and good reputations. They literally impregnated the world with their theories and discoveries of hope; after all they were not women but men. It did not take long before the heavy world gave birth to the autocrats of the 19th century, tyrants of the 20th century and the buffoons of the 21st century who were and are all men.

Man made religion; man disintegrated religion and manned it with the many menaced men headed patriarchies. Men colonized and enslaved. They became chauvinists and sexists, the reason why women are on the gender agenda demanding gender equality from the endangered gender—that’s right, endangered gender!

Men dominate the world, society, politics, families, their wives and even themselves. Ooh! Sorry, I am being unjust; it is not men who rule the world, it is not men who instigate nuclear, racial and tribal wars. It is not men pirating at the high waters of Somalia. Men were not involved in the Darfur crisis neither did they fight during the post election violence in Kenya. The Mungiki, Chinkororo, Amachuma, SLDF and the Kayabombo are not men. The Al-Qaida, Taliban, Al-shabaab and LRA are not men either-I got it all wrong.

In Kenya men are fairly scarily; they will steal and kill but then dare squarely share forty slots at equal shares for tea. Men will sell the same piece of land to five different people and disappear with money to live them fight. Men will kill their sons and fathers for land. They will exhume the rested in peace for land. Like England and Greenland, Kenya should adopt uniqueness and be called “Landmongerland,” a just government of men like it is insinuated in parliament.

In Kenya, men will marry, merit merry but then re-marry only to end marriage and marry again. Lucky will be a woman with one man who is man enough to be her man. Unfaithful married men hunting outside marriage for the unmarried are all men. Old men deceiving little ones for sex are men. Men proposing to fellow men for marriage are also men. Men who rape their wives, their grannies and infants are all men.

Bar rooms are full of men. You will find them there discussing absolutely nothing important but squandering money later to carry the mess home to their women they call honey. Men of today will deliberately cause oil tankers and beer trailers to overturn for free harvest of oil and beer. Men will do this and that and much more little queer things not good for pen and paper. This makes me wonder, who bewitched our men!!

By Duke Mwancha.

A SOCIETY LIVETH IN INFAMY:

Our social and political environment has eminently been polluted to an extreme baffling friend and foe alike. We are not oblivious to circumstances leading to this infamy but we have chosen to proverbially bury our heads in the sand. Our society is on the verge of maladjustment if the social confusion and political roughshod that we are experiencing today is anything to go by. All this is happening in our full conscious under the auspices of our so called forth estate which is literally spitting on our beautiful innocent faces.

It is unbelievable how our agenda setting third eyed boys and girls in the media blissfully make vice fashionable in the name of transforming society from conservatism to dynamic conventionalism. May be this is democracy the contemporary way but I always have a feeling that their interest is extremely far fetched. You will agree with me that whatever comes out of the media makes a difference between a morally upright society and a society in anarchy.

The public mind is yours for taking if you can convince it that what you do is for its interest. However most often what the public experiences is confusion groomed by its ill fated cliché, public interest. Think of a society like Kenya that has been a powder keg of ethnic mistrust, betrayal and imbalance. The political environment is always electrical thanks to the media. Deadly tribal politics have immensely been made popular and inevitable. The media generated ethnic mistrust and stereotypes that people so innocently pander have more than once come back to haunt the innocent and are now at the pick.

I am not completely disregarding the role of the media. There are a number of good things that journalism has accomplished in society. That is why I took a career in Journalism which I am so passionate about. However I am being perturbed by the arrogance accompanied by this career.

I have had many people blatantly referring to newspapers in mediocrity. Electronic media has been blamed as the source of all evil and cultural confusion that is rendering society into disaster. I am not privy to the fact that journalism is no longer about empowering people but it is increasingly becoming a tool for acquiring political power and profit boom power for a few affluent individuals. Media has become a hard nut to crack with no brave person willing to give it a check. This ideally confirms the fears of our scholars a few decades ago who felt that power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I do not have political hair on my chest but I can comfortably say that there is a disgraced symbiotic relationship between the media and politicians. One wonders when all the crap and dramatized hate comments and speeches from politicos became of public interest. It is amazing how the media glorifies affluent men and women who are hell bent and so smitten to consign limbo this society.

The most disgusting thing is how the media bedevils and forcefully facilitates their well master-minded political bigotry down the throats of people. Ironically, with eyes closed they hurl blame to politicians only when their roughshod turns horrible to society effectively locking the stable after the horses have bolted.

Listening to radio has turned sour. Particularly the domineering frequency modulation radio stations that now epitomize a society in the wildness. Discussions in the so called breakfast shows and assorts are literally effing and blinding. It is here that the abstract monster called public interest comes hurtling down like the meteor that consigned the dinosaur family extinct sixty four million years ago. They don’t give people much option but just to have them listen to their dogma only to assert later that it is exactly what people want. Their abstract public interest evangelism has indoctrinated many myopic young fanatics and it is greatly gained momentum.

Remember it is darkest before it is completely dark. We forthwith need to diffuse a time ticking bomb in our presence and save our society from anarchy by throwing sense into the bargain. Together we should make this society Incorruptible by shooting from the hip rather than serving from the lip. People should take control of their destiny away from the capitalistic media. If we choose to feed society with good morals, we should take control away from the media now. Any further delay is practically postponing the day of reckoning as we have done in the past, making it potentially much more destructive. Destiny is not a matter of chance but a matter of choice. It is not something to be waited for but something to work for.

By Duke Mwancha.

THE KENYA WE WANT SPEECH:

Friends, ladies and gentlemen, please lend me your ears -and your eyes for that matter. You and I come from different ethnic backgrounds whose cultural diversity lay the foundation for our beautiful nation. No man, no woman knows better than you do that God made us one and equal despite our ethnicity. Over the years we have been seduced by the monster called tribalism. Some call it negative ethnicity. 

This monster has always lured us into the bigotry of subscribing to tribal cocoons on matters political. It is a monster that has killed and buried our spirit of independence. Because of the monster, our development has been retarded culminating to tribal conflict. The 1992 tribal clashes and the 2008, post election violence are some of the clear-cut mess this monster has driven us to.

Kenya is not the sole country in the world with myriad tribes. However I am being baffled and I am sure you too are being baffled by the magnitude this natural diversity has taken us to. Our unscrupulous politicos have taken this monster as their riding horse. They use tribalism to rise to the top of leadership and when they reach there, they pretend to be solving our problems when all they do is literally emptying our pockets more aggressively driving us from the frying pan into the fire.


We too have a tendency of masquerading to be saints clean of tribalism in public but replenished of it in our offices and homes with our friends and families. This is unfortunately having a cake and eating it too, an instinct worse than that of the wild pig.


Ladies and gentlemen, we have a common challenge; we know that tribalism begets corruption and other vices which subsequently spawn more tribalism. We should stop bragging about our history and start thinking of who we are. Our history and our future are important but dependant on whom we choose to be. What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.


Our destiny is not a matter of chance but a matter of choice; it is not something to be waited for but something to work for. Today, today my friends today my brothers and sisters-let us arrest the monster. Let us hung it in the cross like it was unjustly done to Jesus Christ two thousand years ago.


I talk to you today my friends that despite the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, we can kill tribalism. Go back to Eastlands Nairobi, go back to Westlands Nairobi and go back to your homes and villages knowing that you and I can kill tribalism. It is our responsibility to dig the deepest grave for the monster and certainly the obligation of our politicians to disown it, force it to hurtle down the grave like the meteor that consigned the dinosaur family extinct sixty four million years ago.


And my friends let us join hands; we should always join hands to sing the beautiful words of our national anthem-“Ewe Mungu nguvu yetu…...” Then, and only then shall we banish tribalism from our national fabric and be able to say that change has come to Kenya.


END
(This speech was delivered at the “Kenya We Want Forum” to a live audience at the Boulevard Hotel Nairobi on 4th May 2009 by Duke Kosprin Mwancha.)