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From university graduates, I expect attitudes a little more informed and educated than I often get concerning our so-called tribes.
Take corruption. Even from professors, I am frequently confronted with the balderdash that – after the catastrophic ethnic chauvinism of the Kenyatta days – we should never have put another Kikuyu in power.
We owe most of our ethnic stereotypes to British propaganda. Colonialism invented them to divide us along ethnic seams to forestall any pan-tribal anti-colonial rebellion.
Karen Blixen, Robert Ruark, Lone Leigh, Elspeth Huxley and other anti-Mau Mau writers deeply influenced those of us introduced to them by British literature teachers.
The thrust of colonial fiction was that the Kikuyu were born thieves, robbers, liars and murderers. They thirsted especially for the white man's blood and property, according to this teaching, and that was why they had organised Mau Mau.
Indeed, empirical evidence abounded. The Kikuyu were practically the only indigenous community involved in urban lumpenism: robbery, conmanship, mendicance, prostitution.
Court prosecutors and newspaper editors – all Europeans – went out of their way to point out that the accused was a Kikuyu. We internalised it so profoundly that, even this long into independence, it just refuses to perish.
The Kikuyu themselves came to accept it. Up to now, a stern warning might confront you: "Don't play with me: I am a Kiuk!" He means that, if you are not careful, he will kill you and take all your belongings.
Is it any wonder – to paraphrase Macbeth – that our "fears in the Kikuyu stick deep"? But the question is: How can such prejudices die when the university campus remains one of their hotbeds?
If there is any scientific explanation for any behaviour peculiar to any tribe at any time, how can we know it from the tribal myth-mongering that dominates our varsity common rooms?
It was probably with a knowing wink and a contortion of the face that a man – probably a university graduate – coined the term "Mount Kenya Mafia". If Kenya was drowning in corruption, quoth he, it was because President Kibaki is a Kikuyu!
How can I excuse a PhD holder who utters with uneducated confidence the simplism that the Kikuyu were the ones born with original sin and carry the mark of Cain?
But there are exceptions. Some scholars have bothered to show that these social evils are not in Kikuyu genes.
In his History of the Kikuyu, Prof Godfrey Muriuki explains the circumstances in which a Kikuyu class became Kenya's first to be imbued with such habits of the European market system as atomic individualism and inordinate greed.
A large land-based tribe, masses of it had been made landless by British land-grabbers and forced to hire their labour out to British plantations, factories and homes.
So close to Nairobi, they had been the first to take to individualist go-getting, enterprise, self-pursuit, callousness and licence. Mass unemployment, vagrancy and crime are always faithful concomitants with proletarianisation.
But everything has two sides. Capitalism always kindles awareness of political rights. Thus, if the Kikuyu took the lead in crime, they also inevitably took the lead in Mau Mau, the struggle for freedom.
But individuals and greed have since caught up with individuals in all tribes. Even the Njemps are now overwhelmed with greed. You can no longer say that the Kikuyu monopolise robbery, beggary, prostitution and street life.
If some Kikuyu individuals became as fat as shotes under Kenyatta, so some Kalenjin individuals swam in lucrative filth under Moi.
And only a fool can say that Luo individuals will not strut like tausi under Raila Odinga or Kamba individuals under Kalonzo Musyoka or Luhya individuals under Moody Awori or Pokomo individuals under Danson Mungatana.
On Anglo-Leasing, therefore, let us stop libelling the Kikuyu. Ours is an elite disease, not a tribal one. All of us – the British-created "middle class" – are thieves moulded by hand in the classroom.
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