US President Barack Obama embraces his sister Auma at the Safaricom
Stadium Kasarani gymnasium in Nairobi on July 26, 2015 after she invited
him to give a speech. PHOTO | CARL DE SOUZA |
AFP
I would like to recall an incident that took place at a town
hall debate where ordinary citizens could ask questions of the
candidates during the electioneering campaign in 2000 that ended with
George W. Bush acceding to the presidency of the United States.
A
member of the audience turned to then Governor Bush and said something
along the following lines: Your state, Texas, executes the most
prisoners on death row in the United States.
Do you
worry that in your zeal to carry out death sentences, a mistake might be
made and an innocent person executed? Without pause, the governor
retorted: “We follow the law.”
I could not believe what
I heard coming from a man who claimed the Christian Bible as his
favourite book and Jesus Christ as his hero.
Why do
these identifications matter? Because if there is a tenet that is at the
heart of Christianity, however it is conceived, it is that, as humans,
we are irremediably fallible. This fallibility means that anything that
is contrived by us is permanently vulnerable to error and liable to
mistakes.
I just witnessed a similar instance of lack
of humility and grace coupled with thoughtlessness on the podium at the
joint press conference addressed by the American President, Mr Barack
Obama, and his Kenyan host and President, Mr Uhuru Kenyatta, on
Saturday, July 25.
The American president, a scion of
an ex-colonial Kenyan father whose antecedents included the murderous
dehumanisation of his people by British colonial overlords, and who
himself is also an inheritor of an equally egregious history of racial
victimisation in the United States that he is still battling even as a
twice popularly elected sitting president of his country, cannot be
accused of being flippant or trivially seeking to score ideological
points when he dared to analogise the struggle for gay rights and the
one for civil rights in his homeland.
When he then
declaimed that unequal treatment of citizens of a polity on the basis of
who they are — blacks, in one instance, gay, in another — cannot be
good, one does not have to agree with him. However, what one should not
do is to treat his remarks as unworthy of more than a rehearsed,
to-the-ready, dismissive response that gay rights “is not really an
issue on the foremost mind of Kenyans. And that is a fact.”
I
have no doubt that Mr Kenyatta was playing to the gallery. Many had
been steeling him for that moment when he would show Africa’s resolve
not to be pushed around any more by the West.
I think
it is unfortunate that in his totally unnecessary show of “resolve” Mr
Kenyatta came across, as Mr Bush did, as thoughtless and arrogant.
A little thought would have made him first acknowledge the difficult
but enlightening history of the struggle against oppression and for
human dignity that Mr Obama referenced and the equivalent of which Mr
Kenyatta’s own forebears prosecuted in Kenya, too.
And
instead of dismissing it as a non-issue, a little humility would have
forced some acknowledgment that some Kenyan citizens — it does not
matter how many — may be impacted by Mr Obama’s call, but that the
government remains committed to full equality for all Kenyan citizens,
including those who may be adversely affected by current laws and
practices.
Does Mr Kenyatta seriously believe that
human rights depend on popular preferences? Does he sincerely believe
that Kenyan homosexuals are, one and all, misbegotten and deserving of
whatever mob “justice” is meted out to them in the name of a received
civilisation, Christianity, which is now naturalised as African in order
to justify mayhem on a vulnerable segment of the citizenry over which
he presides?
When African leaders play to the gallery,
when Africans decide shamelessly to play the racism-inflected “Africa
is different” card, when we tell the world that we really do not care
for or about significant segments of our citizenry, we perform our
penchant for moral abdication.
It is an abdication that makes us worthy of scant respect from the rest of the world.
At a minimum, our leaders should do better than the rest of us. Mr Kenyatta just disappointed this simple expectation.
Olufemi Taiwo teaches at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA. ot48@cornell.edu
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