Now, word in Dar es Salaam has it that some Tanzanians are kind of enjoying Kenya’s present plight. Of course this shall not be said nakedly. Tanzanians do not just speak nakedly. Words are well dressed. Kind eyes will open in concern and ask you: ”Ohhhh ndugu [brother], how bad things are for you … tell me, tell me more of the terrible things happening in your country. Argh … shame … God will provide …”
Our tourists are all over Zanzibar. Their port, Dar es Salaam, can start to take Mombasa’s business.
Things have not been good for Kenyans in Tanzania for years now. We are rude. Instead of saying, ” I humbly ask you to bring me a cup of tea”, we say ”Bring tea”.
Then there is all this work work work business. Working Working Working … no time for being decent and sharing and communing in a brotherly way. Last year Tanzanians started calling Kenyans Nyangau – beasts.
The government started to deport Kenyans with extreme malice. Of course, Kenyans were not innocent: with their dynamism came crime, cons and tricks.
Anti-Kenyanness has become a campaign platform, I am told.
Of course, the strange thing about all this is that white investors get a free pass. Even right-wing Afrikaners. White people are crazy anyway, people nod appreciatively. They are bringing development. But Kenyan investors are stealing our wealth.
It is disturbing to see people being productive, dynamic and generally mannerless when they resemble you: you have to assume there is something rotten in their hearts. Or … maybe, just maybe, there is something to learn from them?
It must be said too: people often become productive because they have been through something terrible, have been hoisted out of their past by war, competition or colonial land evictions. In much of early colonial Africa, those who went to school first were often the poorest, the orphans and the alienated. Those who had nothing to lose by leaving their moral universe.
Last year I lost my temper in Arusha, after trying repeatedly to find out, from my tour guide, which bus I was supposed to enter. I had been in planes for more than 20 hours, and was being given a certain kind of runaround. It was passive-aggressive malicious goodygoodyness at its worst: as white guests were lovingly led to their various premises, a glaze would come over the man’s eyes whenever I would approach him, in broken and studiously polite Kiswahili, for assistance. He would head off in a different direction, as if he had something of international importance to do with his clipboard. I learnt that day that this is deliberate; a veil of vagueness is one way resentfulness is manifested.
A Tanzanian intellectual once told us that Julius Nyerere, in his kindly manner, came to do all the thinking for the nation. The special kind of oppression in that country was one where you were all assured stability — if you did what Mwalimu (teacher) said. But like most students, you dozed and avoided your homework, all the time convinced that teacher would rescue you from yourself.
Kenyans are not immune to this. Nor are South Africans. In Kenya, in Eastlands, the highly productive Somali community is resented. It is said this is because the Somali behave like this, or like that. It is never said that it is because the Somali have created wealth in Eastlands. This idea plays out all over the continent in one way or another.
Xenophobia has come to mean demonising the dynamic: their behaviour is demonic simply because it shows you up.
In countries that have fathers-of-nations and such, it becomes the father’s job to get his little children into the school soccer team. The process is simple: the head of the Parents’ Association, to get more votes, speaks to fathers and tells them that those foreign students import their soccer boots from Dubai, and have an added advantage because of this.
Parents are quick to see this train of thought, and propose, somewhat loudly to the headmistress, that these children be removed from the soccer team. The headmistress suggests that everybody get boots from Dubai, sponsored by the parents of the foreigners. This idea is greeted enthusiastically.
But the next year, it is Dubai Woollen Socks, and as the team starts to win, the temperature of possibilities rises. The foreign parents meet and decide to buy the headmistress a new bicycle. The foreigners are only marginally wealthier than the locals and are feeling the pressure.
After four years (two days after the PTA elections), a year after the school soccer team — with seven foreign players in the first eleven — wins the provincial soccer tournament, the foreign kids are hounded out of the team for their dishonesty. Humph! Did they think they could just bribe us! We have values in this community!
And this year, the headmistress, who angled for a car and did not get one, is found to be unsupportive.