Comment Sunday, July 27, 2003 PHILIP OCHIENG' / Fifth Columnist She's a rebel without any social causeThe word I italicise is composed of two Greek elements. The first one, eikon, should be familiar to those given to superstition and ritual. An icon is a picture or other kind of image before which � much to Yahweh's chagrin � people prostrate themselves in idolatry. The second, klastes, is less familiar. But it means no more than a destroyer. An eikonoklastes, then, is a person who smashes sacred objects � a rogue bull in what Mark Twain, the celebrated American iconoclast, called a "doxological workshop". The word iconoclast has thus come to mean anybody who tramples underfoot any traditional assumption, principle, taboo, enjoinment or institution. As I say, ever since the collapse of what Ludwig von Bachofen called Mutterrecht ("Mother Right"), iconoclasts have usually been bulls. But Wambui has shown that a cow, too, can still invade the fireback rampageously. Wambui has absolutely no respect for certain institutions which society considers sacrosanct. Yet she is no Emmeline Pankhurst, Rosa Luxembourg or Angela Davis. She is not a focused breaker of images. She has no social cause or intention to make history. Yet she makes it. For, as Marx pointed out, in the market society, though all individuals pursue their interests freely in all directions, the sum total of their actions forces history in one particular direction over which none of them has any control. As individuals, we make our history freely, and yet, as society, we are slaves of history. Wambui and her ilk are helping force the whole Kenyan society onto a certain historical trajectory simply by pursuing what are purely individual self-interests. Like most individuals whom history appoints to implement its agenda � she is manifestly unaware that she is playing any catalytic historic role. She couldn't sit behind a computer to write a paper giving you a sociological explanation of her actions. She just happens to have been born in a certain class, a certain social milieu, a certain critical period. Before Chief Waiyaki wa Hinga's time, the individual's interests � though catered for as amply as any single tree in an equatorial selva � was smothered in the anonymity of the extended family. Despite the outrageous allegation which Prof Godfrey Muriuki allows his publishers to make in the blurb to his book, he himself shows in A History of the Kikuyu that, until the advent of British colonialism, the Kikuyu were a strictly communal society, totally loyal to the mbari, the clan defined by the ridge between two rivulets, what the Luo call thur. How the colonially created Kikuyu elite took to flaming individualistic greed and heartlessness so fast and so completely is a story which we can tell exhaustively. Wambui was born and raised in the colonial chiefly Waiyaki household in that part of Kenya � Upper Kabete � which was undergoing the most rapid cash-based individualisation. Yet beware the folly of reductionist behavourism � the psychology of, for instance, B. F. Skinner � according to which upbringing alone is responsible for all our individual or group behaviours. It is true that most Kenyans � of all tribes � are now, by nurture, as avaricious and as self-seeking as any 19th-century American Robber Baron. And many Kenyan grandmothers have married outside their tribes, challenged traditional burial customs and wedded mere striplings. Yet they did not make any headline with it. For not many Kenyans will go after their self-interests with the same gung-ho adventurism with which Wambui has blazed the trail all her life. Intrepidity of this kind is usually inborn. It is an _expression_ of nature, not nurture. This is probably what explains the contradictory factor which catapults Wambui into the newspaper pages. She is not a genuine iconoclast. Or else her "rebellion" would not observe all the rules of colour and formality � two formal weddings, a spectacular court case, a keen eye for property... That's why the contradiction is not insoluble. Wambui-Otieno-Mbugua is a rebel without a social cause. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
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