Let 2018 be our year of going back to African culture, roots

Circumcised Maasai young men wearing a ritual costume covered with hunted birds come out from the bush to receive blessings from ceremony masters near Kilgoris, Narok County, on the last day of the annual one-month-long circumcision ceremony, on December 20, 2017. PHOTO | AFP

What you need to know:

  • We need to know who we are, where we came from, so that we can understand why we are the way we are.

  • I don’t think the application of Western religion and thought has helped Africa to create healthy and stable social structures.

  • The strongest societies are those that have preserved important cultural elements that help to establish identity and manage the society’s expectations and behaviour of individuals.

  • Traditional authorities could also control the behaviour of reckless politicians.

I have a plan for the new year. There are many mountains to climb in 2018 but I think it will be the year of understanding, a year of study into our culture and origins.

This, you might think, is a boring undertaking. But the one thing I can’t stand is not knowing. We need to know who we are, where we came from, so that we can understand why we are the way we are.

During colonialism, we lost the collected wisdom of millennia. We were taught to forget everything that we had learnt about ourselves and the earth and learn civilised things about the British. Which was okay, it has been useful, but we should reclaim what we lost, if we can.

Ten years ago, I had a chat with a friend and I happened to mention something about Meru warriors. He laughed and asked, “The Meru had warriors?” He is a professor, but a fool, and he probably has allowed his feelings of ethnic superiority to take the place of knowledge in his brain.

CHARITABLE

To be charitable, it may also show how successful colonialism was in wiping out our curiosity about history and culture.

In fairness, the Meru are also very secretive about their stuff. For hundreds of years, their religion was led by a grand seer, the Mugwe. From 1907, the British tried to find out who the serving Mugwe was. They left 60 years later without a clue. One rule about Africa is that, just because you don’t know about it does not mean it doesn’t exist.

The Meru stored their history and culture in their heads. And there was an elaborate system of retrieval, in which retired elders regurgitated this knowledge to younger elders in sessions that could run into 10 hours of monologue.

HISTORY

Every Mzee was a walking library. Fortunately, in 1969-1970, an American researcher sat down with 100 of these ‘libraries’, recorded their recollections, cross-checked against those of other ‘libraries’ and written records and wrote a fairly comprehensive history of the tribe going back to 1700.

On a recent trip, I saw the Kisii Cultural Centre in Kisii town and it gave me an idea: County governments should lead the effort to revive and record African culture.

Every county should fund a department and chair of cultural studies at a local university — its job being to research, study and record ethnic culture and language. And each should have a big department of culture with the responsibility of organising cultural events and being the custodian of traditions.

Such departments would oversee the election and composition of the councils of elders, for example. It would also oversee initiation and the cultural activities around it to ensure safety and compliance with tribal law.

SUCCESSION CYCLE

In communities which have an established succession cycle, the management and naming system for the age sets can be re-established and the local authorities oversee the handing over of traditional leadership between generations.

Some British administrators and scholars, having noticed that traditional institutions created healthier and stabler African communities, pushed for the adoption of the structures into the colonial administrative state. I presume that is where the idea of the chief came from.

I don’t think the application of Western religion and thought has helped Africa to create healthy and stable social structures, from the family all the way up to the nation-state. I also think that the strongest societies are those that have preserved important cultural elements that help to establish identity and manage the society’s expectations and behaviour of individuals.

In some parts of Kenya, you can take a poor man’s land, go to court, buy a judge and have the parcel transferred to you but you will never set foot on that property. Here, elders act as the court of last resort. And traditional justice is not for sale.

MORALITY

The benefit of this return to the past is that it will help to teach traditional morality and integrity to a nation that increasingly has no shared values — apart from greed and an unbridled thirst for power. It will also bring back the law: Today, you can drive on the wrong side of the road without consequences, depending on who you are. And you rob the national treasury with impunity.

Would it not be lovely to put a curse on those who steal our money so that their legs face backwards? Or their necks become knotted?

Traditional authorities could also control the behaviour of reckless politicians. They will stand up to those who declare war or put their ambitions above the vital interests of the country.

It is true that some of our traditions — such as eating others, hacking women’s bodies and witchcraft — were clearly unhelpful and foolish. Nonetheless, people should not come from another world and declare ours dirty, pagan and primitive.

In any case, this is my year for discovering the pagan in me. If you see me walking around in skins, don’t think I have lost my mind.