Maisha Kazini: The loss of the Kenyan soul, with Mordecai Ogada (Part 1): Families and relationships

Last weekend's drama surrounding the location of teenagers who had been reported kidnapped, and the public conversation that followed, revealed disturbing truths about the soul of Kenyan society.
Mordecai Ogada is a conservation consultant and carnivore ecologist.

[@africatodayke]

Love these talks and how you pick each other's brains. Becoming a Mordecai fanboy ha ha.

[@amishmoussa3528]

Eye opening conversations. Thank you to the both of you 🙏🏽

[@juliusmoga4340]

Great conversation.

[@arnikolo2916]

Great show.

[@isaacwachira9242]

Great discussion as always! Kindly invite Mordecai more frequently. Thank you for the great work of enlightening us.

[@chitwak4568]

😕😕😕 thank you

[@puritykaranja6934]

I saw your tweet about fencing Mount Kenya...but now I see why we shouldn't engineer the environment...

[@joannewamaitha5822]

To be honest, this problem of uncontrollable kids was just waiting to happen. You cannot remove the fear of capital punishment from parenting and, with no replacement for it, expect kids to exhibit angelic qualities. Traditionally…African people/families do not “do” emotions or being kind and sensitive to their kids. Also, in many Kenyan families, kids do not grow up seeing, from the example of their parents, how to demonstrate openness and vulnerability. What African kids were traditionally taught was to FEAR their parents, and obey them in every respect. It used to be that parents could infantilize their kids so as to be able to control them better (infantilizing accomplished through preventing your kids from having any kind of interaction with the external world thru TV, phones, friends sleepovers etc. except for the interactions that you as a parent approve of like visits to relatives in shags).
I was raised like that in the 1980s and 90s, and I honestly was never even consciously aware that I might be 'missing some fun outside there'. The discipline I learned at that time has propelled me into successes in my adulthood that I would never have thought possible.
Today, kids suddenly have access to all these [strange to African culture] ways of ‘enjoying’ their freedom, and simultaneously the West is pushing for African parents to stop disciplining their kids, and still there is no genuine relationship of openness between the kids and parents. What happens is that kids slowly stop to fear and respect their parents, and actively work towards destroying their own lives. At 16 or 17 yrs., there would have been no possible way for any person to even have the opportunity/audacity to come to me with a job offer. The routine was home, church, school and back home- absolutely no deviation. Anybody with anything to tell me had to tell my parents so that they could decide if they will tell me.
In truth, the thing of infantilizing kids till they are in their early 30s still works (look at the kids of people from Asian communities, you will notice that there are lines that they never cross…and the few that try to do so are immediately excommunicated from their communities). Even in cases where the child/teenager/young adult is padlocked in the house for ages, there comes a time when the child himself “grows” into understanding why his parents did what they did, or raised him as they did. The thing is, fear as a tool should not be removed from African parenting until an acceptable alternative for it is found.

[@MaishaKazini]

What a pity you didn't hear a word we said. If adults can't listen to each other and have a conversation, I wonder why children would listen either.

[@samuelireri1295]

@@MaishaKazini Most likely a bot.