<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt"><div>Walu<br><br>Is inane chatter not an abuse? Or are there some who are allowed to abuse the people on this mailing list?<br><br>What do people gain in defending the corrupt? Why do we fear to hear the people who are incorrigibly corrupt being rebuked?<br><br>JM<br></div><div style="font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br><div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><font size="2" face="Tahoma"><hr size="1"><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">From:</span></b> P Gitau Githongo <pgitau@githongo.com><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">To:</span></b> j.maina@ymail.com<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Cc:</span></b> KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke><br><b><span style="font-weight:
bold;">Sent:</span></b> Monday, December 8, 2008 3:14:06 PM<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Subject:</span></b> Re: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace<br></font><br>
<br>Alice,<br><br>Might I suggest that you add a guiding principle to the mailing list rules,<br>along the lines of.. <br><br>'Contributors should seek to improve or benefit the understanding and<br>knowledge of others as well as their own.' <br><br>You could then urge contributors to gauge their own statements according to<br>such a principle before forwarding to the group. <br><br>Hopefully that way, the rest of us seeking to practice the above principle<br>are not subject to the kind of deluge of inane chatter seen last week. <br><br><br><br>-----Original Message-----<br>From: kictanet-bounces+pgitau=<a ymailto="mailto:githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke" href="mailto:githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke">githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke</a><br>[mailto:kictanet-bounces+pgitau=<a ymailto="mailto:githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke" href="mailto:githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke">githongo.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke</a>] On Behalf<br>Of <a
ymailto="mailto:alice@apc.org" href="mailto:alice@apc.org">alice@apc.org</a><br>Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2008 8:45 AM<br>To: <a ymailto="mailto:pgitau@githongo.com" href="mailto:pgitau@githongo.com">pgitau@githongo.com</a><br>Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions<br>Subject: [kictanet] Vitriol in cyberspace<br><br>Dear All,<br><br>Could we comment on the presentation that Brian (a Kenyan) made at the IGF<br>currently taking place in Hyderabad. It was an excellent presentation on<br>access befitting the theme of the forum: "Internet for all" and he has<br>done us proud.<br><br>It is also great to have quite a large Kenyan delegation at this India IGF<br>contributing Kenyan specific IG issues. The IGF is a process/event/forum<br>that had not received enough attention both at the national and regional<br>level.<br>---------<br><br>I will also take this opportunity to remind listers of some of the<br>KICTAnet mailing list rules:<br><br>
* Please mind your manners:<br> * Be polite - virtual members are real not a cyberspace borg with no<br>feelings.<br> * Watch your words. Kick the bad language - People are listening.<br> * Laws are laws - What's real in the real world are the same in<br>cyberspace.<br> * Don't send rude or offensive e-mails or postings.<br> * Be ethical in your posting. Don't lie, plagiarize, defame, or<br>deliberately do harm to another KICTANet forum user.<br><br><br>If you are not able to respect these simple rules...the KICTANet<br>administrator will have no choice but to suspend you!<br><br>best<br>alice<br><br><br><br><br>Binaifer Nowrojee wrote:<br>><br>> For those who have not read this opinion piece, I would urge you to do<br>so and reflect on it. Why do we need to bring down Brian Longwe on the<br>basis of his nationality? Why not
celebrate his success? Why assume<br>that a non-Kenyan will not positively contribute to Kenya?<br>><br>> Best<br>><br>> Binaifer Nowrojee<br>><br>><br>><br>> Barack Obama and the graveyard of hope<br>><br>> Wambui Mwangi (2008-08-11)<br>><br>> <a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50078" target="_blank">http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50078</a><br>><br>> Printer friendly version<br>><br>> There are 2 comments on this article.<br>><br>> I am finding it very difficult to join in the jubilation about Senator<br>Barack Obama. Not that I want to deny the man his victory, but my<br>impulse to celebrate keeps deflating on the idea that the best thing<br>that happened to little Barack was not growing up in Kenya.<br>><br>> I have been imagining alternative trajectories for him if he had come to<br>know the world through the eyes of a Kenyan citizen, if his mother
and<br>grandparents had not rescued him from our chaos and contradictions and<br>brought him up somewhere his intellect and talent could grow.<br>><br>> If he had grown up here, and had he somehow managed to retain most<br>elements of his current self, he would have been another outstanding,<br>intelligent and competent Luo man in our midst: and he would have been<br>killed.<br>><br>> Yes, we would have assassinated a Barack Obama if he had remained ours,<br>with us, one of us here in this schizophrenic cauldron we call home.<br>This is not going to stretch the imagination of any Kenyan - after all,<br>when we had that incredibly good-looking and charismatic home-grown<br>hero, Tom Mboya, we shot him to death.<br>><br>> And when that austerely intellectual and elegant leader, Robert Ouko,<br>threatened to look overly intelligent to the world, we killed him too.<br>We killed Pio Gama Pinto and we killed JM Kariuki. There is no reason
to<br>suppose that Barack Obama, whose integrity of purpose and stringent<br>sense of ethics even his enemies concede, would have survived his Kenyan<br>roots.<br>><br>> He is much too intelligent, too charged with the promise of history, too<br>bold in his claim to a shining destiny, too full of the audacity of<br>hope, for us to have let him survive. Kenya would have killed Barack<br>Obama, or at least his dream, as we inevitably destroy, in one way or<br>another, the best and the boldest of us. Goldenberg whistle blower David<br>Munyakei's challenge to his country to be bigger than our greed was met<br>with a whimper, and then with rapid abandonment. We did not deserve him,<br>either.<br>><br>> As for John Githongo, he should have known better than to take the idea<br>of public ethics seriously - this is Kenya, after all. Let him enlighten<br>people at Oxford instead; such considerations are too virtuous for us,<br>too sensible, too
conducive to a promising future. We do not even remark<br>on the haunting wastage of all this shining accomplishment - Micere Mugo<br>sings her lyrical poetry for Americans, and we do not even know enough<br>to mourn the loss.<br>><br>> And yet we are all enchanted with the power of the idea of Barack Obama,<br>the hope of him, the beauty of his life's trajectory, the universe of<br>possibilities and probabilities that it conjures for the least of the<br>rest of us. If someone's cousin's friend's neighbour makes it to the<br>United States... then we all have a chance. We have a strange<br>predilection for schizophrenic loves and loyalties; we let geography<br>dictate our alliances and imaginary lines decide our friends. It is as<br>if our social contract states that here, at home, we are obliged to<br>behave like fighting rats to each other but when abroad, when released<br>from the shackles of kin and clan and conclave, we can fly and soar
and<br>master the sky.<br>><br>> When Wangari Maathai is abroad, we feel that her Nobel Prize is partly<br>represented in each of our Kenyan living rooms; when she comes home, she<br>is just another Kikuyu politico. We preen about our athletes winning yet<br>another international competition to anybody who will give us half a<br>chance, but when they are at home we turn them into more fodder for<br>militias.<br>><br>> Caine Prize winners are Kenyan by automatic assent, but Binyavanga<br>Wainaina is a Kikuyu writer when at home and Yvonne Owuor is indelibly a<br>Luo - we shrink them to fit the midget-sized visions we have of<br>ourselves.<br>><br>> It is clear to all of us, and the evidence continues to accrue, that we<br>have, collectively, a certain global competence, as Kenyans, that we<br>produce individuals of substance and historical purpose.<br>><br>> Being Kenyan, however, we prefer to drown in the pettiness of
our<br>parochial quarrels when at home, and if one of us threatens to be too<br>hopeful, too ambitious, too intelligent, too creative or too<br>inspirational to fit into our trivial little categories of hatred and<br>suspicion, we kill them, or exile them from our societies, or we just<br>cause them to run away inside, hiding from us and from themselves the<br>grandeur of their souls, the splendid landscapes of their imagined<br>tomorrows.<br>><br>> Nothing but the worst for us, at home. We recognise each other by our<br>most rancid rhetoric. We insist upon it, we cultivate it, we elevate it<br>to an art form: Kenyan, and quarrelsome.<br>><br>> Kenyan, and clannish. Kenyan, and counter-productive. Kenyan, and<br>self-destructive. Kenyan, and consistently heart-breaking. Genius<br>everywhere, and not a thought to be had. Promise and potential<br>everywhere, and not an opportunity to be had. Money everywhere, and not<br>an honest penny to be
earned. Helicopters aplenty, but no help for the<br>needy. A land awash in Cabinet ministers and poverty.<br>><br>> I have been watching Kenyans getting high on Obamamania, and I am<br>wondering what we are so happy about? It is perhaps that we are<br>beginning to acknowledge what we should always have known - given a half<br>a chance, an ever so slightly conducive context, Kenyans are more likely<br>to over-achieve than not. At the faintest provocation, Kenyans will leap<br>past expectations without breaking their stride or breaking a sweat,<br>especially if they happen to have escaped the imprisoning edifice we<br>call home and found foreign contexts to flourish in, no matter how<br>alien.<br>><br>> I went to a town in the Canadian Arctic once, in the far north, where in<br>summer the sun shines even at midnight and in the winter the world is an<br>endless landscape of ice and snow. Here, far, far away from home, where<br>nothing was
familiar except the gentleness of elderly Inuit women and<br>the comforting weirdness of the white residents, I was told that the<br>local dentist had, for many years, been a Kenyan. Everybody said he had<br>been an excellent dentist, out there in the desert of the cold. I was<br>unsurprised.<br>><br>> We are an adventurous people, we Kenyans, and we take to the world<br>outside our home as if born to a conquistador culture - we are brave and<br>brash and bold, out there. We buy and sell things, and make money at it,<br>out there. We go to school and excel and cover ourselves with<br>accreditations, out there. We win things, out there. We get prizes, out<br>there. We are at our best, out there.<br>><br>> However, at home, for some reason we refuse to either acknowledge or<br>examine - we have chosen simply to set aside this capacity. Here, at<br>home, nothing but the very lowest common denominator will do; nothing<br>but the basest and most
brutal aspects of our selves are to be presented<br>to each other; nothing but the most cynical manipulation is the basis of<br>our political space. We prefer to be ruled by individuals whose<br>mediocrity is matched only by their mendacity, here at home.<br>><br>> We prefer to abdicate our adult responsibilities and capacity for reason<br>to "leaders" whose lack of virtue is as legendary as our attractively<br>exotic pastoralists. We do not only waste talent, here at home - we go<br>out of our way to suppress and repress it. We do not only deny dreams,<br>here in Kenya - we devour them, and ask each other, "Who do you think<br>you are?" As if the success of another is an affront.<br>><br>> In Kenya, grand vision and soaring imagination is illegitimate; here,<br>they just call you naive. Out there, you stand a chance of becoming a<br>hero; at home, you will have nothing but the taste of ashes in your<br>mouth. Mothers, take your children
abroad.<br>><br>> Barack Obama has written two books, in which he discusses ideas. Ideas.<br>This is a man with vision and conviction, and enough good ideas that<br>even those who do not like the pigmentally-advantaged are listening, and<br>changing their minds.<br>><br>> Even those who think that his name sounds suspiciously like a<br>terrorist's are reading his books and listening to his speeches, and<br>changing their minds. This is a man with interesting and inspiring<br>things to say - which disqualifies him from any Kenyan-ness we would<br>have liked to claim.<br>><br>> Americans like the image of them that Barack Obama has painted in words;<br>which Kenyan leader would dare to build dreams bigger than his roots?<br>Which Kenyan leader would ever be so foolish as to attempt inspiration<br>instead of instigation?<br>><br>> Barack Obama has seduced the world by the power of his persuasiveness,<br>and while Kenyans raise
another glass to the accomplishments of "one of<br>our own," it seems clear to me that we gave up our rights to him when we<br>gave up our hopes for ourselves. When we settled for incompetence, and<br>corruption, and callousness, we defined ourselves out of his universe,<br>and out of his dreams.<br>><br>> We rejected Barack Obama-ness when we allowed those pangas to slash our<br>dreams, when we watched our hopes spiral away in smoke. We allowed the<br>ones who had done this to become the only mirrors of ourselves, and then<br>squelched our disgraced selves back to the mire of our despondency.<br>><br>> Barack Obama cannot be a Kenyan, and Kenyans cannot grasp Barack Obama's<br>dream. We have already despaired of it, and of ourselves. His dream<br>would have died with ours, here at home, here in the graveyard of hope.<br>><br>> But oh, how we yearn to see ourselves reflected in his eyes...<br>><br>><br>> *Wambui Mwangi is an
assitant professor of Political Science at the<br>University of Toronto, Canada. This article first appeared inThe East<br>African, June 15 2008.<br>><br>> *Please send comments to <a ymailto="mailto:editor@pambazuka.org" href="mailto:editor@pambazuka.org">editor@pambazuka.org</a> or comment online at<br><a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/" target="_blank">http://www.pambazuka.org/</a><br>><br>><br>><br>><br>> _______________________________________________<br>> kictanet mailing list<br>> <a ymailto="mailto:kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke" href="mailto:kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke">kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke</a><br>> <a href="http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/listinfo/kictanet" target="_blank">http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/listinfo/kictanet</a><br>><br>> This message was sent to: <a ymailto="mailto:alice@apc.org" href="mailto:alice@apc.org">alice@apc.org</a><br>> Unsubscribe or change your options at<br><a
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