A man at the heart of a crucial election had died and the country did not quite know how to react to his demise. I had expected some outrage, from all sectors of society but all I registered was a privatisation of grief. As though people wanted to be alone in their pain aware of the futility of making a spectacle over it.
There is more to be celebrated than denigrated but only if one remains aware of the history of the women’s movement and the sacrifices of the pioneers. The pioneer leaders of the feminist movement in Kenya bore a heavy cross in their individual attempts to pave the way for numerical presence of women in the National Assembly.
It becomes a case of classic conditioning when we remain unaware of inbred bigotries buried deep in our psyches. We have learned to associate elections with uncertainty. Young people, inherit the anxieties of their parents and regard competitive elective politics as a space of fear and violence.