Kenya

Past versus Present: Rich Social Networks

While it's true that the country's 33,000 Internet hosts have nominally connected Kenyans across ethnic groups, as well as between political parties, religion, geography, and any number of other casual connections made on Facebook, electronic social networking in Kenya is two-dimensional at best, and at worst, completely dishonest. It is a connection, but a specious one that with any scrutiny cannot compare with the more profound and numerous social networking systems that have served Kenyans at a very deep level for a very long time; the nature of social networking on the Internet, compared to these older systems, brings the cultural models into a tellingly value-laden landscape.

For example, the Akamba are one of the tribes of the Bantu people and represent about 11 percent of the Kenyan population. Akamba children grow up hearing or reading stories (ngewa) about their past, taught to them by their elder kinsmen. In these stories, Akamba's infamous trickster, the hare (sungura), is considered the wisest of all the animals, but his wisdom lies in his knowledge of human behavior; an encounter with a hare in an Akamba story inevitably results in someone being tricked and taught a lesson.

In such orations, the performance of the story, including any poetry or songs, must be tonally and rhythmically appropriate for the time, place, and audience; that is, any audience would expect such nuanced perfection in a performance to connect with his/her ethnic history through complicated, embedded cultural markers in the narrative, which transports the audience to the end of time, known as tene. When a Mukamba hears tene muno, he knows immediately that the events in this story took place at a time beyond which time cannot go. This in itself is very significant for many reasons, one of the most important being that tene muno is where all of one's ancestors are and, thus, it is seen as a [Page 465]repository of the collective wisdom made available only to the Akamba. The Akamba are born into this long line of ancestors, and everyone moving toward these ancestors looks forward to joining in this zone; they will bring their accomplishments and the wisdom they have acquired from these deeds to the great repository of knowledge. Thus, in a sense, the Akamba live their lives backward; as they age, they get closer and closer to their deceased relatives and their source of knowledge. This is why old people are treated with such respect among the Akamba. From their view of the world, it seems wrong to think of aging as moving into the future where nothing has yet occurred; as one ages, he moves backward in time. With the exception of events that occur in nature, such as the birth of a child, the Akamba do not think of life in terms of the future.

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