Creaw Portal

Trouble started the day the music died. It was the music of life. The music was packaged in the arts - in poetry in dance and in drama. It was found in paintings and in sculpture. In the way we spoke and even in the way we told stories and laughed. There was music in our manner of dress and in the gaiety of OUf walk. There was beauty here, there, everywhere - in everything. It was the beauty of life in a beautiful and kind world.

But that was also the time when we were in school. We were listening to big people who told us not to read girls' stuff. They said reading the Bible, history and storybooks was to read girls' stuff,women's stuff. "Where will that take you, anyway?" They would ask and laugh very loudly, just to put you in your place. Real men read real manly things. They read mathematics, physics and chemistry - MPC, they called it, which was to say 'Man Power Combinations.'

So what? Some boys preferred girls' stuff, any­way. I did. We read stories - Bible stories and fairy stories. We even read girls' stories - Alice in Wonderland, Beautiful Nyakio, Mwelu the Os­tricth Girl, Jande's Ambition, Jane Eyre, Lorna Doone, Wuthering Heights, and even Great Ex­peetations, and the lot. We also fooled around with drawing and painting. Girls' stuff edified the spirit and the soul. It made us human. There was nothing like a good story, a beautiful painting or photograph.

Then,one day,the Government decided that girls' stuff should be removed from school.They did not say so in so many words.They just said that some things would be removed from the na­tional examination.Art and crafts, music, home science and even agriculture were removed.They wanted everybody, boys and girls alike, to focus only on the important things of life - man­ly things.Children even stopped singing in class.They stopped playing in school. P.E.lessons were marked in the timetable only to fill up the space. But instead of P.E. and music,they taught 'man power combinations.'

Slowly, slowly the music began dying.Every­body wanted to become tough. There were no

prime Minister Raila Odinga visits a survivor of gender violence.

P.E. breaks or music lessons,nor painting and handwork to cheer up your spirits in school.The home became an extension of the school.At school and at home, it was only pressure and more pressure to pass examinations.The school became a' factory where they manufactured Grades A and B in national examinations.Schools which manufactured more A's and B's bought space in newspapers to show off their good grades. That way, more parents would take their children through the graders that schools had now become. Character building and per­sonality formation went down the drain.

In the proper order of time, we have begun reaping the fruits of killing the beauty of life. Both those who excelled and those who failed started getting beastly. If both philosophers John,Locke and Thomas Hobbes were right about the nature of the human being, then we ended up developing Hobbes' person at the expense of Locke's.

For it was Thomas Hobbes who said that  care once long ago, before people began living in civ­il society, men lived in what he called the state of nature. The human being in the state of na­turewas a beastly wolf-like thing. For all the peo­ple in that state only thought of themselves and of what was good for their survival

They were free to use their physical strength to get anything they wanted, without caring whom they hurt in the process. In that state of nature, everybody was at war against everybody else.

Life was truly solitary, nasty, brutish and short. And so people decided to get together in civilized society, to have government and to have laws and rules. Then life started getting beauti­ful. People no longer worried that someone might harm them or kill them. They started sing­ing, drawing, telling stories and enjoying the beauty of life.

In Kenya today, we have returned to Hobbes' state of nature where life is selfish, solitary, nas­ty, brutish and short. We have used the school and our personal examples to teach children that only self-survival is important. There has been no time to expose them to the beauty of life through what we would love to call "girls' stuff." And so the melody of music and the mellifluent singing voice have been replaced by wild vio­lence. The human soul died in school, the day the music died.

Now there is trouble everywhere. There is trouble as men fight for state power and for space in the traffic on the. highways. There is trouble at home, where soulless husbands and wives batter their spouses.

Fathers rape their daughters and grandsons defile their grandmothers. Thieves slit your throat open and go away laughing with your property, because the music died. It died at home, in school and even in the Church, where they only talk of money, hardly sparing a thought for the poor Christ who died on the cross. They do all this because they killed 'girls' stuff' so that they could develop Hobbes' man in the new state of nature. Maybe, some day, we will creep out of the state of nature again.