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Creating a New Society, New Nation and New Leadership Quality in Kenya through African Traditional Education Principles

Creating a New Society, New Nation and New Leadership Quality in Kenya through African... The article is a bold extraction of the intangible cultural heritage (ICH) value of traditional African education, attempting to capture the essence of what education made a young person be when he/she qualified for marriage. At the marriage stage an adult was given the green light to become the head of a family and manager of a home, and permitted make all the decisions touching on the family and, at the same time, take care of the community and country at large. In that situation, Prof. F.X. Gichuru has identified the qualifications as five pillars, viz. self-discipline, self-drive, integrity, harmony and patriotism, qualities that have been eroded in Kenya today by modernization and westernization, rendering the people generally irresponsible and non-accountable. The author proposes the five pillars as a solution to this problem, thereby creating a new accountable and responsible people, a new nation and a new leadership quality, targeting the young as the people to culturally transform in the space of twenty years. The African Cultural Regeneration Institute the author founded, now accredited by UNESCO to advise on ICH in Africa, has been proposed as the institution to champion this transformation of the national ethos of Kenya, starting with an initial action of two years. The success of the model will serve other countries of Africa and, indeed, the global community, in showing how ICH can be used to solve the challenges of modern society. Keywords: society, cultural transformation, national ethos, African traditional education, five pillars, responsibility, accountability INTRODUCTION This article deliberately climbs down from the academic citadel and attempts to put into practice what I have authoritatively identified as five 111 Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society pillars that characterize the African traditional education process, a bold decant of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) from Africa. Discounting any controversies, I have propounded these pillars as a sound foundation from the African traditional culture on which the modern Kenya (and, by extension, Africa and the wider global family) can rediscover sanity in her socio-economic developmental agenda, especially now that Kenya has adopted a new constitutional order. This is, effectively, a proposal for resolving a predicament that has dragged the country backwards since independence in her attempt to advance in favour of the common good. For that reason, therefore, I note that the cultural ethos of the Kenyan society today has been warped by modernization and globalization. During the cultural transformation that took place when Kenyans/Africans were adapting to modernization, something must have gone gravely wrong. Kenyans understood globalization or modernization to mean indiscriminately adopting foreign values and lifestyles, dropping what is African or indigenous, wrongly believing that whatever was practised in traditional society, however positive, was not good. This understanding left Kenyans in a confused state, as seen today, and Kenyans must take responsibility for this. Therefore, the mindset of Kenyan people today is generally individualistic and selfish, tending towards arrogance, corruption, tribalism, ethnicity, looting of public resources and land-grabbing, and with a lack of patriotism towards the country. Such a mentality cannot guarantee a bright future for the people, no matter what material developments take place in the short and long term. This mentality led Kenya to the warped elections of 2007 and to the post-election violence (PEV) between December 2007 and March 2008, demonstrating serious weaknesses in the social philosophy and matrix of the Kenyan society. This mentality needs to be radically corrected if the future of Kenya is to be guaranteed.1 Correction of this mentality will be in the form of cultural transformation of the society by targeting the young generation as the main group, using senior citizens to teach the young, re-educating the adults, and peer teaching among the youth, in order to create awareness in all the agents of change. The action that I am proposing will be championed by the African Cultural Regeneration Institute (ACRI), based on five pillars2 that I have derived from the essence of the indigenous African traditional education, Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society whereby a child was brought up through various initiation rites into adult life. For example, the rites of passage to become adult (e.g. male circumcision in certain communities or other rites in others) qualified a young person to the stage where he/she was allowed to marry and bring up a family. At that stage, the young person was qualified in five principled areas, as I will elaborate below. In the current Kenya, the five pillars of traditional education are no longer used to qualify an adult's behaviour. Today's African education system is not teaching the five pillars that are based on traditional African values and ideals.3 At the same time, our society has changed dramatically in such a way that the informal education that used to take place traditionally, via parents and other agents of change, is no longer in place to provide this important aspect of education. Kenya, therefore, needs this template to provide an original and creative solution to the problem where the lack of such education has largely contributed to the warped society that I am talking about. The five pillars do not contradict the core ethical values of mankind, the universal human values of love, peace, respect, trustworthiness, responsibility, service and community initiative; they are principles that are consistent, universal and trans-cultural.4 The five pillars are a summary of universal values, with an emphasis on training the will of the individual to take action. In this regard, the African traditional education anchors on the fact that the individual is promoted into responsibility through a process of accountability from an early age, through different stages, while ensuring obedience and respect for authority. Starting with a two-year proposal, the long-term action of ACRI will target the young generation in the next twenty years. During the first two years, there will be meetings and workshops, production of teaching materials,5 training of trainers (ToT), and facilitation of artists and media to deliver lessons based on the five pillars. The action within this shortterm period, it is hoped, will create a self-propelled movement, a multifaceted approach, involving various actors, to participate in the cultural transformation of Kenya. The actors will include parents and guardians operating at the family level, grass-roots community leaders targeting children during public meetings and interpersonal encounters, teachers in educational institutions at various levels, religious leaders in church, mosque and temple environments, and the media. The age groups identified for the training will be: firstly, babies/toddlers/children Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society at the family level (aged 1­6); secondly, children at primary school level (aged 7­12); thirdly, students at secondary education level (aged 13­20); and, fourthly, students at universities and tertiary institutions (aged 20+). These age groups are not mutually exclusive. The action enables the society as a whole to transform itself for the benefit of development by re-engineering itself into responsibility. The young generation will see the world in a different light and strive to take charge of the country's predicament. The two-year period will awaken in the Kenyan psyche the urge to create a new generation based on the African culture, according to which people were trained to take charge of their own affairs. Once the national ethos is changed in the direction proposed, the eventual outcome will benefit the whole society, including the poor, marginalized and vulnerable, and will empower all sections of society to participate in pushing for change, and the people will feel included in national development. Needless to say, the action will necessarily be a work of networking, involving many actors, to achieve the common objective of producing a more accountable society in the development processes. The five pillars consolidate the qualifications that sanctioned the indigenous African traditional education, which today has been corrupted by modernization. The general behaviour of Kenyans today, therefore, shows that the individual is not trained to be self-disciplined; rather, s/he is not characterized in action by principles, but by fear of the authority of parents, teachers, police, road bumps, superiors and bosses. Today's individual is not self-driven; rather, s/he waits to be told what to do and has a tendency to not take the initiative or take a risk with selfassurance. Today's individual is not meticulous about integrity, which means self-respect and respect for others. Today's individual is not harmonious; rather, s/he is acrimonious, jealous, ethnic, belligerent and vengeful; this attitude was evident during the 2007­2008 post-election violence (PEV) in Kenya. Today's individual is not patriotic; which means s/he does not care about his/her country and people; rather, s/he cares only about him/herself. For example, the meaning of environmental protection is not taken seriously; there is too much drive for selfgratification, to the detriment of the common good and to the disadvantage of future generations. The best illustration of this is the wanton destruction of trees and water catchment areas in Kenya. Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society The intervention during the first two years is basically a foundation stage to the sustained campaign that is envisaged to continue to the year 2030. The success of the resultant infrastructure will be judged by the availability of guidelines and campaign materials, a charged network of trainers for the doctrine of the five pillars, a charged army of artists and their creations, and a charged general population, united from parents to leaders, in the drive to create a new society out of the young. Given that this project is concerned with transforming the cultural ethos of Kenya, relevant government departments will be involved and private sector institutions, themselves interested to see better citizens in the short and long term, will also be asked to participate as much as possible. The project is aware of the effort by the Kenya Ministry of Justice, National Cohesion and Constitutional Affairs and the National Economic and Social Council in developing a draft policy framework on a national value system for Kenya. Our action is a contribution to this effort from the cultural perspective. Kenya is a signatory to the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) and one of the obligations of the state parties is to enhance the functions of ICH in society and promote its mainstreaming in economic policy planning. The targeted cultural agents for this project are diverse cultural artists and actors. The cultural artists include the creators of music, art, dance, poetry and drama. These creations will be based on cultural traditions including adaptations of imported manifestations of culture. In the cultural actors we include parents, religious leaders, the teaching fraternity and those we have called the Senior Expert Citizens Force (SEC Force) ­ these are, generally, the retired but energetic elders whom the modern society has tended to ignore and sideline. During the training of trainers (ToT) workshops, these different cultural artists and actors will be mixed. They will all benefit by acquiring knowledge, ability and skills to influence the nurturing process of the young into responsible adulthood. The action of these cultural artists and actors will be a force for change towards unity and a cohesive society. The action accomplished by the project in two years will be tantamount to placing an engine of change into society for the purpose of nurturing a responsible generation of Kenyans. At the end of the period, the training in the five pillars will reach the target groups and will touch the larger society to influence in nurturing a new generation of responsible Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society and accountable Kenyans. The learning will have a spill-over effect on leadership quality because it will influence the election of new leaders into political leadership. The final beneficiaries of the project will be the young generation, their parents and the society as a whole in the sense that, to a certain extent, the training in the five pillars will affect their behaviour and make a fundamental change to their outlook and comportment in the longer term. The effect of this on the larger fabric of society is expected from the spill-over effect from the grass roots. This will be reinforced countrywide by the media campaigns, which will be ongoing as an activity to educate Kenyans on the doctrine of the five pillars. PROBLEMS, NEEDS AND CONSTRAINTS OF TARGET GROUPS The way the young are growing up today in Kenya, and how they turn out to be irresponsible in adulthood, worries parents, irrespective of their background, religion, tribe or colour. Parents are yearning for responsible children but they don't know how to bring them up. It does not matter what type the parent is, corrupt or not corrupt, elite or not elite; they all want responsible children with a bright future for their country. This proposal is addressing this craving and, once the parents and leaders understand the objectives thereof, they will passionately cooperate and help to achieve the goal. The hope that the project inspires will drive everyone to participate, at least the majority that care about the future of the society and their children. As a consequence, the project will be an effective recipe for a national movement for a positive cultural transformation of the national ethos. The project is a must because there can be no real change in Kenya unless people change their attitudes. But, since the project aims at character transformation, it is not easy to change the older folk since they are already fixed in their ways. That is why we are targeting the young, since they can be educated and trained in new ways of thinking and behaving. They are a malleable group and can adopt behavioural change. The doctrine of the five pillars that we are proposing is not a monopoly of any ethnic group but is founded on the African nurturing methodology of bringing up children. To the extent that traditional Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society education taught children to be responsible, decisive, harmonious and patriotic adults, the project of the five pillars will enhance national solidarity, values and aspirations. To achieve these objectives the project will use both traditional and modern cultural artistic creations. We shall use artists from different parts of the country to employ local cultural traditions in their artistic creations, carrying the message of the five pillars, which, in essence, promote unity in diversity in the sense that all the ethnic groups of Kenya want a peaceful, prosperous and united country, after experiencing the 2007­2008 PEV. It goes without saying that the values promoted by the five pillars do not negate the culture of any community; all parents in the society, irrespective of their communities, want responsible and patriotic children. This definitely encourages inter-community and inter-cultural dialogue, harmony and integration of the people. Individuals practising such principles will abhor corruption, automatically respect each other, uphold justice and live by human rights principles. Democratic values and good governance will be enhanced as most Kenyans will be tolerant of each other, listen to each other and seek to work together for the development of their country. This learning will ultimately have a spill-over effect on leadership quality because it will influence the elections of new leaders into political leadership based on these qualities, which will now be demanded by the electorate as prerequisites for good leadership. With this, the young people will stop running away from Kenya and the citizens will work in a committed manner to realize the paradise of Kenya that God gave freely. This ethos will be taught to children from the earliest age, at home, through the school system and in society at large, so that it may be a way of life and a culture of the people. That, of course, will be a long process. The five pillars will help Kenyans reverse the current underdevelopment syndrome, where, due to constant quarrels, focus is diverted from the development process. The mentality of future leaders will follow a different philosophy from that of today, based on the concerns of the people. The pillars are interrelated and will cut across many issues that we have today. The imperatives of national solidarity, unity in diversity and harmony are covered by the fourth and fifth pillars. The effort to establish a new society, new nation and new leadership quality through the five pillars will take time, about twenty years, in order to fully succeed. The campaign to build a new society will be done from Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society all fronts: the family level, the education system, the church-mosquetemple environment, and the socio-political establishment. ELABORATION OF THE FIVE PILLARS Analysing the situation in Kenya today, and seeing the corruption, hatred and tribalism deepening in the society, the author of the five pillars has created a dream, which, if implemented, will change the face of the country and will serve as a model for other countries who aspire to accountable citizens and leadership. A new philosophy and a new education must be launched to reach the new generation of Kenyans, starting with those born today, and reaching all levels of youth ­ in primary schools, secondary schools and tertiary institutions. Even the older generation, those who can learn and adopt new ways, must be encouraged to learn and live by the five pillars. As we have said earlier, the effort to establish a new society, new nation and new leadership quality through the five pillars will take a long time, about ten to twenty years, to succeed. The campaign to do this will be done from all fronts: the family level, the education system, the church-mosque-temple environment and the socio-political establishment. The following is a description of the pillars: FIRST PILLAR: Self-discipline We state here that our society today is not built on this pillar, the philosophy of self-discipline. People have been hitherto trained to do things because they fear some authority, not because they follow any specific moral principles. A child has been trained to do things because he/she fears the parent, the teacher or the older sibling. An adult does things because he/she fears someone, a policeman or a boss or any other authority ­ not because he/she follows any specific principles. The new philosophy that we are proposing will teach all, starting from the very youngest child, to do things as guided by certain principles. A person without self-discipline will first look left and right before doing something. If, then, what someone is about to do is bad or illegal, the person will not do it when he/she notices that someone is watching. But if no one is watching, then the person will do the bad/illegal thing. By contrast, a person of self-discipline, even when locked up in a room with all sorts of temptations, he/she will come out of the room Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society after three days without having committed any infringement whatsoever, simply because he/she is governed by certain principles. When we succeed in creating citizens who are self-disciplined, then we shall avoid many a misbehaviour that we currently witness. SECOND PILLAR: Self-drive This pillar requires every citizen to have an engine in oneself. A new generation of Kenyans must be developed so that there are citizens who are self-driven, not those who behave like wheelbarrows. A wheelbarrow is normally pushed around, and when you place it somewhere it stays there until you push it elsewhere. Kenyans are generally like that today ­ they wait to do what they are told, because the system has trained them to do only what they are told. Thus, they cannot decide to do what is right simply because they wait for orders from someone else. For example, at the household level, a child would wait to be told to remove a cup that is wrongly placed in the doorway, or pick up a plate that has fallen off the table. You will see a child pass over such a cup or plate, not deciding to remove the item from the wrong place. The child expects someone else to do so, or otherwise someone should tell him/her to do so. Such behaviour happens elsewhere in other circumstances. Take, for example, a water tap erroneously left turned on in an institution and the water pouring wastefully away. A student at a university or another person elsewhere would not take the initiative to turn off the tap and prevent the water from being wasted; he/she would say, "It is not my job". Similar behaviour may be witnessed in offices where a worker may not do anything until the boss says so, even though the work may be extremely important and urgent for the office. A child who has completed his/her schooling would just sit there, waiting for the parent to tell him/her what to do. This happens irrespective of the many opportunities available! These are the type of people we generally have today ­ people without initiative, people waiting to be told what to do. For that reason, many good things do not happen and, hence, we remain non-vibrant and backward. To train a child to be self-driven, parents and teachers will have to adopt a certain attitude ­ let the child be reasonably challenged in life. Do not create an unnecessarily easy life for the child, where many things are done for him/her. An example will do here. If a one-year-old child is Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society laying on his/her belly on a bed, struggling to reach a bunch of keys about six inches away, you, as a parent, should not just abort the child's struggle by handing over the keys to him/her. That would be disastrous! If you do so, you will have removed a developing engine from the child. The child will, in that case, record in his/her psyche that there is no need to struggle because someone will do it easily for me. And that will permanently harm the self-drive in the personality of the child in later life. Parents and teachers have hitherto "removed engines"6 from children and thus created zombies of personalities. By contrast, for such a baby struggling to reach the keys, the parent or guardian should just facilitate the child to reach the keys on his/her own. For example, one could reach the struggling legs of the child and quietly place a prop on the feet of the child so that he/she can step on it and push forward towards the keys. When this child reaches the keys, it will be such a triumph! The child will record in his/her psyche that all you need to do is struggle without giving up and you will eventually succeed. Experiences of this nature will help the child to eventually adopt a philosophy of life for survival, and, hence, such a child will grow to be self-driven. If, as the nation of Kenya, we create a new generation of self-driven people in the next ten to twenty years, then we shall have the engines to drive us off to economic prosperity. THIRD PILLAR: Integrity We plan to make this pillar the future measure for quality of personality. Today in Kenya, what do we observe as a measure of quality of personality? Take, for instance, what we observe quite often in the Kenyan churches. When a visitor enters the church as the service progresses, or even before it starts, people observe how he is dressed ­ they observe him from head to toe and make a judgement based on his attire. If the fellow is dressed expensively, then that is something! And the people throw glances at each other, signifying that someone of quality has entered the church and, hence, they are happy because they think they are lucky. Then you will observe the people making efforts to look outside to see what kind of vehicle the fellow is driving. If it turns out that the visitor drives a Kshs 20million fuel guzzler then the people will be reassured that indeed someone of value has come to their church. Then, later, the people will make investigations to find out where the great visitor lives. Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society When they find out that he has a fifty-room house, all furnished with imported equipment, then their guesses will be confirmed ­ indeed, a real man of value had visited their church! It would not matter whether anybody was living in that house, given that the man (if the visitor is male) cannot even keep a wife because of his vanity. If this fellow, say a man, who normally has a big protruding belly, returns to the church about five times, then he could easily be elected to be chairman of that church. The above example illustrates what is the measure of a quality person today in Kenya: WEALTH AND PROSPERITY, irrespective of how one has acquired his/her property. That means, therefore, that even thieves and criminals are considered quality people today because of their wealth. That explains the nature of our backwardness as a country and how we cannot develop because we have glorified crime and immorality, and thus kept vermin as kingpins in our society. This proposal plans to make the virtue of integrity the yardstick for a quality personality. How do we define integrity here? This refers to the quality that makes a person respect himself, in the first place, and others and their rights, in the second place. A person of integrity cannot do certain things due to respect for himself; he is sweet to live with, he does not steal, does not trample on the toes of others, and loves truth and justice. A person of integrity is not selfish, is not hypocritical and is forthright in all that he/she does. Such a person can be a good leader because he/she will respect the people and the community. A person of integrity can be a good steward because he/she will respect the property entrusted to him/her. In our vision, integrity will therefore be the standard for measuring the personality of worth in the new society that we are proposing. This virtue will have to be cultivated from the earliest period in childhood, all the way through the primary, secondary and tertiary levels of education, indeed, in the churches and other public places. The school, religious and political systems will be engaged in this enterprise of creating a society based on integrity, irrespective of prosperity. FOURTH PILLAR: Harmony This pillar of society will try to unite the people in everything; people will be supportive to one another at work, not undermining each other or bringing each other down. People will stop considering where one comes Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society from, whether from the east or west, north or south; it will be irrelevant whether one is Kalenjin or Luo, Kikuyu or Kamba, Meru or Taita, Masai or Turkana, Boran or Swahili7­ all will consider themselves Kenyans, not different people. Today, Kenyans are kept backward by these divisions ­ namely, sectionalism and tribalism. For the country to develop, Kenyans must fight tooth and nail against all tribalism, ethnicity, sectionalism and clannism, at both the local and national levels, to make the nation feel as one and act as one. The campaign for this type of Kenya will start in the family, through the inspiration of the political class, then move into the school system and into the society at large. Children will be taught to appreciate the varied cultures and to learn and benefit from what is good in cultural diversity. The proposed Kenyan ethical culture will be to support anyone who succeeds and to push him/her into further success. He/she will, in turn, be expected to pull up the rest that are left behind and make them successful as well. The culture we shall cultivate will make anyone uncomfortable if he/she climbs up at the expense of the others or to the detriment of the community. Such a cultural sentiment will counter the spirit of exploiting others; it will nurture the spirit of working together for the common good. The community spirit will mean that the people will work together as much as possible. The example from the kingdom of small ants, and other small insects that God has placed in nature to educate humans, will be the model of cooperation in the Kenyan community. The tiny ants are able to carry a big cockroach carcass from one corner of the house to another, simply by cooperating. We, human beings, are capable of greater things if we learn to work in common like tiny ants, or like the bees. Kenyans can make a "big magnificent mountain" or "copious delicious honey", more than the ants or bees can ever make, if only we can learn to cooperate. That spirit must be promoted in the political philosophy, which should be devoid of the exploitative individualism that has characterized the cooperative movement today. This working together for a common purpose will be the greatest asset for Kenya's development. But Kenyans must work deliberately and consciously to achieve this oneness. Our youth, who are the targets for this training for new leadership, must adopt the philosophy and attitude, and this will require a considerable and conscientious effort from the family, school and community. Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society FIFTH PILLAR: Patriotism This is the central pillar of the edifice that Kenyans must construct in order to achieve Vision 2030.8 We call it patriotic commitment to the country because the citizens of Kenya need to know that, without consulting or charging any cost to anybody, the Almighty God gave Kenya a literal paradise. We mean "literal" because Kenya is naturally a paradise of a country. A young man asked one day, "What makes you say that this miserable country is a natural paradise?" Come to think of it, if you want snow in Kenya, you can get it on top of Mt. Kenya, if you want a desert, you can get it in the arid parts of northern Kenya, if you want a beach fronting a big ocean, you can get it at the coast of Kenya, if you want lakes, there are many in Kenya, if you want animals of every colour, you will get them, if you want birds of every description, you will get them, if you want forests and vegetation of every type, you will get them, if you want rain, you will get it twice a year, if you want a nice climate all the year round, you have it in Kenya ­ agreeable and soothing weather all the year round, different temperatures found according to your choice, and all the other wonders of Kenya, including cultural diversity. Who, then, says that Kenya is not a paradise? The white people who colonized Kenya knew this. When they arrived at the beginning of the last century, they declared Kenya "A White Man's Country", and planned to move the indigenous populations to the arid areas, to the fringes of society. Africans thwarted this move through the Mau Mau rebellion.9 Today, the whites still think of Kenya as a paradise. When this author went for a conference in Hawaii in the USA in 2003 he met a fellow professor and asked him, "Have you ever visited Kenya?" The professor replied, "Yes, in 1998." Then he was asked, "How did you find it?" He replied, "It was HEAVEN!" That is the view of outsiders about Kenya. This author knows it because he has visited many regions of the world: Australia, Europe, America, the Middle East and other parts of Africa, and therefore he can vouch that Kenya is literally a paradise. The problem is that Kenyans don't seem to know this. For that reason, they loot Kenya, plunder it, rape it, sell it, betray it, and mess it up in every way, and the youth run away from Kenya when they get a chance. They go to America or Europe to work as waiters, nurses in old people's homes and watchmen, doing all sorts of menial jobs in the name of pay, and leave their paradise because they don't know how to Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society enjoy it. The white people, by contrast, know how valuable Kenya is and they wonder "What a paradise!" And they lament that the owners of the paradise don't know it ­ they are fools! For that reason, Kenya is a "Fools' Paradise" because the owners are fools. Imperialists, therefore, and other foreigners scheme to take over the paradise from the "fools", and legally, for that matter. However, when Kenyans know the value of Kenya, and understand how unfaithful they have been to their paradise, then they shall be very alert and committed to the country. The new nation that Kenyans have to create requires a new generation of leaders and citizens who know the value of Kenya and who appreciate her as a God-given paradise. With that knowledge and appreciation, the new Kenyans will love her, will be jealous of her, will work hard for her, will protect her, will cherish her, and will die for her. The meaning of this is that the new Kenya will have citizens and leaders who will be ready to do everything possible to protect her, above all, and appreciate and realize the potential and opportunities within the paradise, which have not hitherto been put into value due to ignorance and/or malice. Consequently, it will be very hard to bribe the owners of the paradise, and it will be very hard for the sons and daughters of the paradise to loot and destroy her as Kenyans have hitherto done through corruption and mismanagement. The fifth pillar is, therefore, central in this new edifice, the new nation that is envisaged. This pillar is named Patriotic Commitment to the Country. With it, the new Kenyans will never again run away from the paradise and the citizens will work in a committed manner to realize the paradise that God gave them freely. That commitment will be taught to the children of Kenya from the earliest age, through the school system and by the society at large, so that it will be a way of life and a culture of the people of Kenya. That, of course, will be a long process, just as for the other four pillars. The five pillars elaborated above will help Kenyans to reverse the underdevelopment syndrome that they have suffered so far. The mentality of future leaders will follow a different philosophy based on the concerns of the people. This author has been disappointed by the selfcentredness of the politicians today and their extravagant lifestyles. They seem to see only their own needs and not those of the people they represent. In short, their extravagant lifestyles and warped priorities tend to formalize a negatively productive culture and justify, for the entire Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society population, a behaviour that is detrimental to sustainable socio-economic development. This author presented a paper in January 2005, entitled "Ostentation And Hypocrisy ­ The Bane Of Underdevelopment In Africa: Towards The Education Of The Mind And Heart"10, teaching that underdevelopment in Africa is in the minds of men and women! The realization of this project will depend on financial, material and moral support from those who share and appreciate our vision and effort. The model will form a basis for a template of an interface between education and culture in Africa. Notes 1 See Mark Nowottny and Andrew Firmin (eds.), Putting Culture First: Commonwealth perspectives on culture and development, Commonwealth Foundation, 2008. 2 See Francis X. Gichuru, 5 Pillars to create a new society, a new nation and a new leadership quality. ACRI Working Paper, 2006. 3 See Kenya Ministry of Youth Affairs, Kenya National Youth Policy, 2006. 4 See Justus G. Mbae, "Social Ethics in Kenya: Education or indoctrination?" Chapter 22 in Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change, 2005. 5 New materials outlining training guidelines for the five pillars need to be developed because the current education system is not designed to produce them. These guidelines will be the basis for future curriculum development to change the education paradigm of Kenya and, indeed, Africa. 6 I have created new vocabulary for this action: "to de-engine the child", that is "to remove the engine of the child". This is a crime every parent, every teacher and everyone should avoid. 7 These are names of some of the more than 42 tribes of Kenya. 8 By that date the Kenyan government, in Vision 2030, has planned to make the country an advanced middle income economy. 9 The Mau Mau were the freedom fighters in Kenya during the 1950s who fought off the white men in order to liberate the land. 10 Paper presented at THE COLLEGE TEACHING & LEARNING CONFERENCE, January 3­7 2005, Walt Disney World, Florida USA and published in the Journal of Development Alternatives and Area Studies, vol. 24. nos. 1 & 2, March­June 2005. Suggested Reading Adeyemi, Michael B. and Augustus A. Adeyinka. "Some key issues in African traditional education." McGill Journal of Education, Spring 2002. Boateng, Felix. "African Traditional Education: A Method of Disseminating Cultural Values." Journal of Black Studies, vol. 13 no. 3: 321­36, Mar 1983. Gichuru, F.X. "Étapes de l'éducation dans une société africaine traditionnelle ­ modèle du Méru Kenya." Cahiers de pédagogie africaine, No. 1-1978, Bordeaux, 1978. Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society Horsthemke, Kai and Penny Enslin. "African Philosophy of Education: The Price of Unchallengeability." Studies in Philosophy and Education, Volume 28, Number 3: 209­222. Kariuki, Josiah Mwangi. "Mau Mau" Detainee: The Account by a Kenya African of his Experiences in Detention Camps 1953­1960. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1975. Kenyatta, Jomo. "Initiation of Boys and Girls". In Facing Mount Kenya. New York: Vintage Books, 1965: 125­49. Marah, John K. "The Virtues and Challenges in Traditional African Education". In The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 1, no.4, June 2006: 15­24. Mbae J. Gitari. "Social Ethics in Kenya: Education or indoctrination?" Chapter 22. Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change, 2005. Nowottny, Mark and Andrew Firmin (eds.). Putting Culture First: Commonwealth perspectives on culture and development. Commonwealth Foundation, 2008. Okoro Kingsley, N. "African Traditional Education: A Viable Alternative for Peace Building Process in Modern Africa." Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences. vol. 2, no. 1, 2010: 136­59. Omolewa, Michael. "Traditional African modes of education: their relevance in the modern world." International Review of Education, vol. 53, no. 5­6, year: 593­612. Peatrik, Anne-Marie. La vie á pas contés, Génération, âge et société dans les hautes terres du Kénya (Meru Tigania-Igembe), Nanterre, Société d'ethnologie, 1999. Republic of Kenya (NESC). Kenya Vision 2030: Transforming National Development, Nairobi, 2006. UNESCO, Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, MISC/2003/ CLT/CH/14, Paris, 17 October 2003. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology de Gruyter

Creating a New Society, New Nation and New Leadership Quality in Kenya through African Traditional Education Principles

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Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by the
ISSN
1584-1057
eISSN
2065-5002
DOI
10.2478/v10193-011-0007-y
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Abstract

The article is a bold extraction of the intangible cultural heritage (ICH) value of traditional African education, attempting to capture the essence of what education made a young person be when he/she qualified for marriage. At the marriage stage an adult was given the green light to become the head of a family and manager of a home, and permitted make all the decisions touching on the family and, at the same time, take care of the community and country at large. In that situation, Prof. F.X. Gichuru has identified the qualifications as five pillars, viz. self-discipline, self-drive, integrity, harmony and patriotism, qualities that have been eroded in Kenya today by modernization and westernization, rendering the people generally irresponsible and non-accountable. The author proposes the five pillars as a solution to this problem, thereby creating a new accountable and responsible people, a new nation and a new leadership quality, targeting the young as the people to culturally transform in the space of twenty years. The African Cultural Regeneration Institute the author founded, now accredited by UNESCO to advise on ICH in Africa, has been proposed as the institution to champion this transformation of the national ethos of Kenya, starting with an initial action of two years. The success of the model will serve other countries of Africa and, indeed, the global community, in showing how ICH can be used to solve the challenges of modern society. Keywords: society, cultural transformation, national ethos, African traditional education, five pillars, responsibility, accountability INTRODUCTION This article deliberately climbs down from the academic citadel and attempts to put into practice what I have authoritatively identified as five 111 Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society pillars that characterize the African traditional education process, a bold decant of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) from Africa. Discounting any controversies, I have propounded these pillars as a sound foundation from the African traditional culture on which the modern Kenya (and, by extension, Africa and the wider global family) can rediscover sanity in her socio-economic developmental agenda, especially now that Kenya has adopted a new constitutional order. This is, effectively, a proposal for resolving a predicament that has dragged the country backwards since independence in her attempt to advance in favour of the common good. For that reason, therefore, I note that the cultural ethos of the Kenyan society today has been warped by modernization and globalization. During the cultural transformation that took place when Kenyans/Africans were adapting to modernization, something must have gone gravely wrong. Kenyans understood globalization or modernization to mean indiscriminately adopting foreign values and lifestyles, dropping what is African or indigenous, wrongly believing that whatever was practised in traditional society, however positive, was not good. This understanding left Kenyans in a confused state, as seen today, and Kenyans must take responsibility for this. Therefore, the mindset of Kenyan people today is generally individualistic and selfish, tending towards arrogance, corruption, tribalism, ethnicity, looting of public resources and land-grabbing, and with a lack of patriotism towards the country. Such a mentality cannot guarantee a bright future for the people, no matter what material developments take place in the short and long term. This mentality led Kenya to the warped elections of 2007 and to the post-election violence (PEV) between December 2007 and March 2008, demonstrating serious weaknesses in the social philosophy and matrix of the Kenyan society. This mentality needs to be radically corrected if the future of Kenya is to be guaranteed.1 Correction of this mentality will be in the form of cultural transformation of the society by targeting the young generation as the main group, using senior citizens to teach the young, re-educating the adults, and peer teaching among the youth, in order to create awareness in all the agents of change. The action that I am proposing will be championed by the African Cultural Regeneration Institute (ACRI), based on five pillars2 that I have derived from the essence of the indigenous African traditional education, Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society whereby a child was brought up through various initiation rites into adult life. For example, the rites of passage to become adult (e.g. male circumcision in certain communities or other rites in others) qualified a young person to the stage where he/she was allowed to marry and bring up a family. At that stage, the young person was qualified in five principled areas, as I will elaborate below. In the current Kenya, the five pillars of traditional education are no longer used to qualify an adult's behaviour. Today's African education system is not teaching the five pillars that are based on traditional African values and ideals.3 At the same time, our society has changed dramatically in such a way that the informal education that used to take place traditionally, via parents and other agents of change, is no longer in place to provide this important aspect of education. Kenya, therefore, needs this template to provide an original and creative solution to the problem where the lack of such education has largely contributed to the warped society that I am talking about. The five pillars do not contradict the core ethical values of mankind, the universal human values of love, peace, respect, trustworthiness, responsibility, service and community initiative; they are principles that are consistent, universal and trans-cultural.4 The five pillars are a summary of universal values, with an emphasis on training the will of the individual to take action. In this regard, the African traditional education anchors on the fact that the individual is promoted into responsibility through a process of accountability from an early age, through different stages, while ensuring obedience and respect for authority. Starting with a two-year proposal, the long-term action of ACRI will target the young generation in the next twenty years. During the first two years, there will be meetings and workshops, production of teaching materials,5 training of trainers (ToT), and facilitation of artists and media to deliver lessons based on the five pillars. The action within this shortterm period, it is hoped, will create a self-propelled movement, a multifaceted approach, involving various actors, to participate in the cultural transformation of Kenya. The actors will include parents and guardians operating at the family level, grass-roots community leaders targeting children during public meetings and interpersonal encounters, teachers in educational institutions at various levels, religious leaders in church, mosque and temple environments, and the media. The age groups identified for the training will be: firstly, babies/toddlers/children Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society at the family level (aged 1­6); secondly, children at primary school level (aged 7­12); thirdly, students at secondary education level (aged 13­20); and, fourthly, students at universities and tertiary institutions (aged 20+). These age groups are not mutually exclusive. The action enables the society as a whole to transform itself for the benefit of development by re-engineering itself into responsibility. The young generation will see the world in a different light and strive to take charge of the country's predicament. The two-year period will awaken in the Kenyan psyche the urge to create a new generation based on the African culture, according to which people were trained to take charge of their own affairs. Once the national ethos is changed in the direction proposed, the eventual outcome will benefit the whole society, including the poor, marginalized and vulnerable, and will empower all sections of society to participate in pushing for change, and the people will feel included in national development. Needless to say, the action will necessarily be a work of networking, involving many actors, to achieve the common objective of producing a more accountable society in the development processes. The five pillars consolidate the qualifications that sanctioned the indigenous African traditional education, which today has been corrupted by modernization. The general behaviour of Kenyans today, therefore, shows that the individual is not trained to be self-disciplined; rather, s/he is not characterized in action by principles, but by fear of the authority of parents, teachers, police, road bumps, superiors and bosses. Today's individual is not self-driven; rather, s/he waits to be told what to do and has a tendency to not take the initiative or take a risk with selfassurance. Today's individual is not meticulous about integrity, which means self-respect and respect for others. Today's individual is not harmonious; rather, s/he is acrimonious, jealous, ethnic, belligerent and vengeful; this attitude was evident during the 2007­2008 post-election violence (PEV) in Kenya. Today's individual is not patriotic; which means s/he does not care about his/her country and people; rather, s/he cares only about him/herself. For example, the meaning of environmental protection is not taken seriously; there is too much drive for selfgratification, to the detriment of the common good and to the disadvantage of future generations. The best illustration of this is the wanton destruction of trees and water catchment areas in Kenya. Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society The intervention during the first two years is basically a foundation stage to the sustained campaign that is envisaged to continue to the year 2030. The success of the resultant infrastructure will be judged by the availability of guidelines and campaign materials, a charged network of trainers for the doctrine of the five pillars, a charged army of artists and their creations, and a charged general population, united from parents to leaders, in the drive to create a new society out of the young. Given that this project is concerned with transforming the cultural ethos of Kenya, relevant government departments will be involved and private sector institutions, themselves interested to see better citizens in the short and long term, will also be asked to participate as much as possible. The project is aware of the effort by the Kenya Ministry of Justice, National Cohesion and Constitutional Affairs and the National Economic and Social Council in developing a draft policy framework on a national value system for Kenya. Our action is a contribution to this effort from the cultural perspective. Kenya is a signatory to the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) and one of the obligations of the state parties is to enhance the functions of ICH in society and promote its mainstreaming in economic policy planning. The targeted cultural agents for this project are diverse cultural artists and actors. The cultural artists include the creators of music, art, dance, poetry and drama. These creations will be based on cultural traditions including adaptations of imported manifestations of culture. In the cultural actors we include parents, religious leaders, the teaching fraternity and those we have called the Senior Expert Citizens Force (SEC Force) ­ these are, generally, the retired but energetic elders whom the modern society has tended to ignore and sideline. During the training of trainers (ToT) workshops, these different cultural artists and actors will be mixed. They will all benefit by acquiring knowledge, ability and skills to influence the nurturing process of the young into responsible adulthood. The action of these cultural artists and actors will be a force for change towards unity and a cohesive society. The action accomplished by the project in two years will be tantamount to placing an engine of change into society for the purpose of nurturing a responsible generation of Kenyans. At the end of the period, the training in the five pillars will reach the target groups and will touch the larger society to influence in nurturing a new generation of responsible Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society and accountable Kenyans. The learning will have a spill-over effect on leadership quality because it will influence the election of new leaders into political leadership. The final beneficiaries of the project will be the young generation, their parents and the society as a whole in the sense that, to a certain extent, the training in the five pillars will affect their behaviour and make a fundamental change to their outlook and comportment in the longer term. The effect of this on the larger fabric of society is expected from the spill-over effect from the grass roots. This will be reinforced countrywide by the media campaigns, which will be ongoing as an activity to educate Kenyans on the doctrine of the five pillars. PROBLEMS, NEEDS AND CONSTRAINTS OF TARGET GROUPS The way the young are growing up today in Kenya, and how they turn out to be irresponsible in adulthood, worries parents, irrespective of their background, religion, tribe or colour. Parents are yearning for responsible children but they don't know how to bring them up. It does not matter what type the parent is, corrupt or not corrupt, elite or not elite; they all want responsible children with a bright future for their country. This proposal is addressing this craving and, once the parents and leaders understand the objectives thereof, they will passionately cooperate and help to achieve the goal. The hope that the project inspires will drive everyone to participate, at least the majority that care about the future of the society and their children. As a consequence, the project will be an effective recipe for a national movement for a positive cultural transformation of the national ethos. The project is a must because there can be no real change in Kenya unless people change their attitudes. But, since the project aims at character transformation, it is not easy to change the older folk since they are already fixed in their ways. That is why we are targeting the young, since they can be educated and trained in new ways of thinking and behaving. They are a malleable group and can adopt behavioural change. The doctrine of the five pillars that we are proposing is not a monopoly of any ethnic group but is founded on the African nurturing methodology of bringing up children. To the extent that traditional Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society education taught children to be responsible, decisive, harmonious and patriotic adults, the project of the five pillars will enhance national solidarity, values and aspirations. To achieve these objectives the project will use both traditional and modern cultural artistic creations. We shall use artists from different parts of the country to employ local cultural traditions in their artistic creations, carrying the message of the five pillars, which, in essence, promote unity in diversity in the sense that all the ethnic groups of Kenya want a peaceful, prosperous and united country, after experiencing the 2007­2008 PEV. It goes without saying that the values promoted by the five pillars do not negate the culture of any community; all parents in the society, irrespective of their communities, want responsible and patriotic children. This definitely encourages inter-community and inter-cultural dialogue, harmony and integration of the people. Individuals practising such principles will abhor corruption, automatically respect each other, uphold justice and live by human rights principles. Democratic values and good governance will be enhanced as most Kenyans will be tolerant of each other, listen to each other and seek to work together for the development of their country. This learning will ultimately have a spill-over effect on leadership quality because it will influence the elections of new leaders into political leadership based on these qualities, which will now be demanded by the electorate as prerequisites for good leadership. With this, the young people will stop running away from Kenya and the citizens will work in a committed manner to realize the paradise of Kenya that God gave freely. This ethos will be taught to children from the earliest age, at home, through the school system and in society at large, so that it may be a way of life and a culture of the people. That, of course, will be a long process. The five pillars will help Kenyans reverse the current underdevelopment syndrome, where, due to constant quarrels, focus is diverted from the development process. The mentality of future leaders will follow a different philosophy from that of today, based on the concerns of the people. The pillars are interrelated and will cut across many issues that we have today. The imperatives of national solidarity, unity in diversity and harmony are covered by the fourth and fifth pillars. The effort to establish a new society, new nation and new leadership quality through the five pillars will take time, about twenty years, in order to fully succeed. The campaign to build a new society will be done from Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society all fronts: the family level, the education system, the church-mosquetemple environment, and the socio-political establishment. ELABORATION OF THE FIVE PILLARS Analysing the situation in Kenya today, and seeing the corruption, hatred and tribalism deepening in the society, the author of the five pillars has created a dream, which, if implemented, will change the face of the country and will serve as a model for other countries who aspire to accountable citizens and leadership. A new philosophy and a new education must be launched to reach the new generation of Kenyans, starting with those born today, and reaching all levels of youth ­ in primary schools, secondary schools and tertiary institutions. Even the older generation, those who can learn and adopt new ways, must be encouraged to learn and live by the five pillars. As we have said earlier, the effort to establish a new society, new nation and new leadership quality through the five pillars will take a long time, about ten to twenty years, to succeed. The campaign to do this will be done from all fronts: the family level, the education system, the church-mosque-temple environment and the socio-political establishment. The following is a description of the pillars: FIRST PILLAR: Self-discipline We state here that our society today is not built on this pillar, the philosophy of self-discipline. People have been hitherto trained to do things because they fear some authority, not because they follow any specific moral principles. A child has been trained to do things because he/she fears the parent, the teacher or the older sibling. An adult does things because he/she fears someone, a policeman or a boss or any other authority ­ not because he/she follows any specific principles. The new philosophy that we are proposing will teach all, starting from the very youngest child, to do things as guided by certain principles. A person without self-discipline will first look left and right before doing something. If, then, what someone is about to do is bad or illegal, the person will not do it when he/she notices that someone is watching. But if no one is watching, then the person will do the bad/illegal thing. By contrast, a person of self-discipline, even when locked up in a room with all sorts of temptations, he/she will come out of the room Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society after three days without having committed any infringement whatsoever, simply because he/she is governed by certain principles. When we succeed in creating citizens who are self-disciplined, then we shall avoid many a misbehaviour that we currently witness. SECOND PILLAR: Self-drive This pillar requires every citizen to have an engine in oneself. A new generation of Kenyans must be developed so that there are citizens who are self-driven, not those who behave like wheelbarrows. A wheelbarrow is normally pushed around, and when you place it somewhere it stays there until you push it elsewhere. Kenyans are generally like that today ­ they wait to do what they are told, because the system has trained them to do only what they are told. Thus, they cannot decide to do what is right simply because they wait for orders from someone else. For example, at the household level, a child would wait to be told to remove a cup that is wrongly placed in the doorway, or pick up a plate that has fallen off the table. You will see a child pass over such a cup or plate, not deciding to remove the item from the wrong place. The child expects someone else to do so, or otherwise someone should tell him/her to do so. Such behaviour happens elsewhere in other circumstances. Take, for example, a water tap erroneously left turned on in an institution and the water pouring wastefully away. A student at a university or another person elsewhere would not take the initiative to turn off the tap and prevent the water from being wasted; he/she would say, "It is not my job". Similar behaviour may be witnessed in offices where a worker may not do anything until the boss says so, even though the work may be extremely important and urgent for the office. A child who has completed his/her schooling would just sit there, waiting for the parent to tell him/her what to do. This happens irrespective of the many opportunities available! These are the type of people we generally have today ­ people without initiative, people waiting to be told what to do. For that reason, many good things do not happen and, hence, we remain non-vibrant and backward. To train a child to be self-driven, parents and teachers will have to adopt a certain attitude ­ let the child be reasonably challenged in life. Do not create an unnecessarily easy life for the child, where many things are done for him/her. An example will do here. If a one-year-old child is Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society laying on his/her belly on a bed, struggling to reach a bunch of keys about six inches away, you, as a parent, should not just abort the child's struggle by handing over the keys to him/her. That would be disastrous! If you do so, you will have removed a developing engine from the child. The child will, in that case, record in his/her psyche that there is no need to struggle because someone will do it easily for me. And that will permanently harm the self-drive in the personality of the child in later life. Parents and teachers have hitherto "removed engines"6 from children and thus created zombies of personalities. By contrast, for such a baby struggling to reach the keys, the parent or guardian should just facilitate the child to reach the keys on his/her own. For example, one could reach the struggling legs of the child and quietly place a prop on the feet of the child so that he/she can step on it and push forward towards the keys. When this child reaches the keys, it will be such a triumph! The child will record in his/her psyche that all you need to do is struggle without giving up and you will eventually succeed. Experiences of this nature will help the child to eventually adopt a philosophy of life for survival, and, hence, such a child will grow to be self-driven. If, as the nation of Kenya, we create a new generation of self-driven people in the next ten to twenty years, then we shall have the engines to drive us off to economic prosperity. THIRD PILLAR: Integrity We plan to make this pillar the future measure for quality of personality. Today in Kenya, what do we observe as a measure of quality of personality? Take, for instance, what we observe quite often in the Kenyan churches. When a visitor enters the church as the service progresses, or even before it starts, people observe how he is dressed ­ they observe him from head to toe and make a judgement based on his attire. If the fellow is dressed expensively, then that is something! And the people throw glances at each other, signifying that someone of quality has entered the church and, hence, they are happy because they think they are lucky. Then you will observe the people making efforts to look outside to see what kind of vehicle the fellow is driving. If it turns out that the visitor drives a Kshs 20million fuel guzzler then the people will be reassured that indeed someone of value has come to their church. Then, later, the people will make investigations to find out where the great visitor lives. Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society When they find out that he has a fifty-room house, all furnished with imported equipment, then their guesses will be confirmed ­ indeed, a real man of value had visited their church! It would not matter whether anybody was living in that house, given that the man (if the visitor is male) cannot even keep a wife because of his vanity. If this fellow, say a man, who normally has a big protruding belly, returns to the church about five times, then he could easily be elected to be chairman of that church. The above example illustrates what is the measure of a quality person today in Kenya: WEALTH AND PROSPERITY, irrespective of how one has acquired his/her property. That means, therefore, that even thieves and criminals are considered quality people today because of their wealth. That explains the nature of our backwardness as a country and how we cannot develop because we have glorified crime and immorality, and thus kept vermin as kingpins in our society. This proposal plans to make the virtue of integrity the yardstick for a quality personality. How do we define integrity here? This refers to the quality that makes a person respect himself, in the first place, and others and their rights, in the second place. A person of integrity cannot do certain things due to respect for himself; he is sweet to live with, he does not steal, does not trample on the toes of others, and loves truth and justice. A person of integrity is not selfish, is not hypocritical and is forthright in all that he/she does. Such a person can be a good leader because he/she will respect the people and the community. A person of integrity can be a good steward because he/she will respect the property entrusted to him/her. In our vision, integrity will therefore be the standard for measuring the personality of worth in the new society that we are proposing. This virtue will have to be cultivated from the earliest period in childhood, all the way through the primary, secondary and tertiary levels of education, indeed, in the churches and other public places. The school, religious and political systems will be engaged in this enterprise of creating a society based on integrity, irrespective of prosperity. FOURTH PILLAR: Harmony This pillar of society will try to unite the people in everything; people will be supportive to one another at work, not undermining each other or bringing each other down. People will stop considering where one comes Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society from, whether from the east or west, north or south; it will be irrelevant whether one is Kalenjin or Luo, Kikuyu or Kamba, Meru or Taita, Masai or Turkana, Boran or Swahili7­ all will consider themselves Kenyans, not different people. Today, Kenyans are kept backward by these divisions ­ namely, sectionalism and tribalism. For the country to develop, Kenyans must fight tooth and nail against all tribalism, ethnicity, sectionalism and clannism, at both the local and national levels, to make the nation feel as one and act as one. The campaign for this type of Kenya will start in the family, through the inspiration of the political class, then move into the school system and into the society at large. Children will be taught to appreciate the varied cultures and to learn and benefit from what is good in cultural diversity. The proposed Kenyan ethical culture will be to support anyone who succeeds and to push him/her into further success. He/she will, in turn, be expected to pull up the rest that are left behind and make them successful as well. The culture we shall cultivate will make anyone uncomfortable if he/she climbs up at the expense of the others or to the detriment of the community. Such a cultural sentiment will counter the spirit of exploiting others; it will nurture the spirit of working together for the common good. The community spirit will mean that the people will work together as much as possible. The example from the kingdom of small ants, and other small insects that God has placed in nature to educate humans, will be the model of cooperation in the Kenyan community. The tiny ants are able to carry a big cockroach carcass from one corner of the house to another, simply by cooperating. We, human beings, are capable of greater things if we learn to work in common like tiny ants, or like the bees. Kenyans can make a "big magnificent mountain" or "copious delicious honey", more than the ants or bees can ever make, if only we can learn to cooperate. That spirit must be promoted in the political philosophy, which should be devoid of the exploitative individualism that has characterized the cooperative movement today. This working together for a common purpose will be the greatest asset for Kenya's development. But Kenyans must work deliberately and consciously to achieve this oneness. Our youth, who are the targets for this training for new leadership, must adopt the philosophy and attitude, and this will require a considerable and conscientious effort from the family, school and community. Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society FIFTH PILLAR: Patriotism This is the central pillar of the edifice that Kenyans must construct in order to achieve Vision 2030.8 We call it patriotic commitment to the country because the citizens of Kenya need to know that, without consulting or charging any cost to anybody, the Almighty God gave Kenya a literal paradise. We mean "literal" because Kenya is naturally a paradise of a country. A young man asked one day, "What makes you say that this miserable country is a natural paradise?" Come to think of it, if you want snow in Kenya, you can get it on top of Mt. Kenya, if you want a desert, you can get it in the arid parts of northern Kenya, if you want a beach fronting a big ocean, you can get it at the coast of Kenya, if you want lakes, there are many in Kenya, if you want animals of every colour, you will get them, if you want birds of every description, you will get them, if you want forests and vegetation of every type, you will get them, if you want rain, you will get it twice a year, if you want a nice climate all the year round, you have it in Kenya ­ agreeable and soothing weather all the year round, different temperatures found according to your choice, and all the other wonders of Kenya, including cultural diversity. Who, then, says that Kenya is not a paradise? The white people who colonized Kenya knew this. When they arrived at the beginning of the last century, they declared Kenya "A White Man's Country", and planned to move the indigenous populations to the arid areas, to the fringes of society. Africans thwarted this move through the Mau Mau rebellion.9 Today, the whites still think of Kenya as a paradise. When this author went for a conference in Hawaii in the USA in 2003 he met a fellow professor and asked him, "Have you ever visited Kenya?" The professor replied, "Yes, in 1998." Then he was asked, "How did you find it?" He replied, "It was HEAVEN!" That is the view of outsiders about Kenya. This author knows it because he has visited many regions of the world: Australia, Europe, America, the Middle East and other parts of Africa, and therefore he can vouch that Kenya is literally a paradise. The problem is that Kenyans don't seem to know this. For that reason, they loot Kenya, plunder it, rape it, sell it, betray it, and mess it up in every way, and the youth run away from Kenya when they get a chance. They go to America or Europe to work as waiters, nurses in old people's homes and watchmen, doing all sorts of menial jobs in the name of pay, and leave their paradise because they don't know how to Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society enjoy it. The white people, by contrast, know how valuable Kenya is and they wonder "What a paradise!" And they lament that the owners of the paradise don't know it ­ they are fools! For that reason, Kenya is a "Fools' Paradise" because the owners are fools. Imperialists, therefore, and other foreigners scheme to take over the paradise from the "fools", and legally, for that matter. However, when Kenyans know the value of Kenya, and understand how unfaithful they have been to their paradise, then they shall be very alert and committed to the country. The new nation that Kenyans have to create requires a new generation of leaders and citizens who know the value of Kenya and who appreciate her as a God-given paradise. With that knowledge and appreciation, the new Kenyans will love her, will be jealous of her, will work hard for her, will protect her, will cherish her, and will die for her. The meaning of this is that the new Kenya will have citizens and leaders who will be ready to do everything possible to protect her, above all, and appreciate and realize the potential and opportunities within the paradise, which have not hitherto been put into value due to ignorance and/or malice. Consequently, it will be very hard to bribe the owners of the paradise, and it will be very hard for the sons and daughters of the paradise to loot and destroy her as Kenyans have hitherto done through corruption and mismanagement. The fifth pillar is, therefore, central in this new edifice, the new nation that is envisaged. This pillar is named Patriotic Commitment to the Country. With it, the new Kenyans will never again run away from the paradise and the citizens will work in a committed manner to realize the paradise that God gave them freely. That commitment will be taught to the children of Kenya from the earliest age, through the school system and by the society at large, so that it will be a way of life and a culture of the people of Kenya. That, of course, will be a long process, just as for the other four pillars. The five pillars elaborated above will help Kenyans to reverse the underdevelopment syndrome that they have suffered so far. The mentality of future leaders will follow a different philosophy based on the concerns of the people. This author has been disappointed by the selfcentredness of the politicians today and their extravagant lifestyles. They seem to see only their own needs and not those of the people they represent. In short, their extravagant lifestyles and warped priorities tend to formalize a negatively productive culture and justify, for the entire Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society population, a behaviour that is detrimental to sustainable socio-economic development. This author presented a paper in January 2005, entitled "Ostentation And Hypocrisy ­ The Bane Of Underdevelopment In Africa: Towards The Education Of The Mind And Heart"10, teaching that underdevelopment in Africa is in the minds of men and women! The realization of this project will depend on financial, material and moral support from those who share and appreciate our vision and effort. The model will form a basis for a template of an interface between education and culture in Africa. Notes 1 See Mark Nowottny and Andrew Firmin (eds.), Putting Culture First: Commonwealth perspectives on culture and development, Commonwealth Foundation, 2008. 2 See Francis X. Gichuru, 5 Pillars to create a new society, a new nation and a new leadership quality. ACRI Working Paper, 2006. 3 See Kenya Ministry of Youth Affairs, Kenya National Youth Policy, 2006. 4 See Justus G. Mbae, "Social Ethics in Kenya: Education or indoctrination?" Chapter 22 in Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change, 2005. 5 New materials outlining training guidelines for the five pillars need to be developed because the current education system is not designed to produce them. These guidelines will be the basis for future curriculum development to change the education paradigm of Kenya and, indeed, Africa. 6 I have created new vocabulary for this action: "to de-engine the child", that is "to remove the engine of the child". This is a crime every parent, every teacher and everyone should avoid. 7 These are names of some of the more than 42 tribes of Kenya. 8 By that date the Kenyan government, in Vision 2030, has planned to make the country an advanced middle income economy. 9 The Mau Mau were the freedom fighters in Kenya during the 1950s who fought off the white men in order to liberate the land. 10 Paper presented at THE COLLEGE TEACHING & LEARNING CONFERENCE, January 3­7 2005, Walt Disney World, Florida USA and published in the Journal of Development Alternatives and Area Studies, vol. 24. nos. 1 & 2, March­June 2005. Suggested Reading Adeyemi, Michael B. and Augustus A. Adeyinka. "Some key issues in African traditional education." McGill Journal of Education, Spring 2002. Boateng, Felix. "African Traditional Education: A Method of Disseminating Cultural Values." Journal of Black Studies, vol. 13 no. 3: 321­36, Mar 1983. Gichuru, F.X. "Étapes de l'éducation dans une société africaine traditionnelle ­ modèle du Méru Kenya." Cahiers de pédagogie africaine, No. 1-1978, Bordeaux, 1978. Francis Xavier GICHURU / Creating a New Society Horsthemke, Kai and Penny Enslin. "African Philosophy of Education: The Price of Unchallengeability." Studies in Philosophy and Education, Volume 28, Number 3: 209­222. Kariuki, Josiah Mwangi. "Mau Mau" Detainee: The Account by a Kenya African of his Experiences in Detention Camps 1953­1960. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1975. Kenyatta, Jomo. "Initiation of Boys and Girls". In Facing Mount Kenya. New York: Vintage Books, 1965: 125­49. Marah, John K. "The Virtues and Challenges in Traditional African Education". In The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 1, no.4, June 2006: 15­24. Mbae J. Gitari. "Social Ethics in Kenya: Education or indoctrination?" Chapter 22. Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change, 2005. Nowottny, Mark and Andrew Firmin (eds.). Putting Culture First: Commonwealth perspectives on culture and development. Commonwealth Foundation, 2008. Okoro Kingsley, N. "African Traditional Education: A Viable Alternative for Peace Building Process in Modern Africa." Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences. vol. 2, no. 1, 2010: 136­59. Omolewa, Michael. "Traditional African modes of education: their relevance in the modern world." International Review of Education, vol. 53, no. 5­6, year: 593­612. Peatrik, Anne-Marie. La vie á pas contés, Génération, âge et société dans les hautes terres du Kénya (Meru Tigania-Igembe), Nanterre, Société d'ethnologie, 1999. Republic of Kenya (NESC). Kenya Vision 2030: Transforming National Development, Nairobi, 2006. UNESCO, Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, MISC/2003/ CLT/CH/14, Paris, 17 October 2003.

Journal

Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology – de Gruyter

Published: Jan 1, 2011

References

  • Some key issues in African traditional education
    Michael Adeyemi
  • African Traditional Education: A Method of Disseminating Cultural Values
    Felix Boateng
  • Étapes de l'éducation dans une société africaine traditionnelle - modèle du Méru Kenya
    F. Gichuru
  • African Philosophy of Education: The Price of Unchallengeability
    Kai Horsthemke