Christine Mungai vs Kuki Gallman
She's gone ballistic after an article reported in the Guardian - Who Shot Kuki Gallman?
โVerified account @chris_mungai
You know, I was going to leave it alone. I really was. But this story has got me shook.
This story is so steeped in neocolonial tropes it's almost astounding that @guardian's editors didn't catch it
1. The lack of historicity. "White settlers came to [Laikipia] to farm wheat and raise cattle during the first half of the 20th century"
The underlying premise is that this land was terra nullis. An empty, unclaimed vastness waiting for someone to put it to good use
No, @t_mcconnell. Laikipia had owners, pushed out by the gun. Firepower and coercion made it the emptiness beloved by white settlers
"The land is home to elephants and rhinos, giraffes, zebras and antelopes, wild dogs, bat-eared foxes and lions." See? Again, no people.
The white savior. Again and always.
Kuki Gallmann, "committed to protecting the environment and its wildlife" is up against "impoverished local men". Look at that. The natives!
3. (I forgot to continue numbering)...the erasure of Kenyan people and voices. Kuki Gallmann is quoted nearly 20 times. One Kenyan quoted.
(At first I was angry that these kind of massive editorial holes still have to be pointed out in 2017. But now I am just bored)
(Is bored the right word? I mean this: ๐. Defending your humanity makes me feel like that. This conversation is uninspiring, even to me)
But let us carry on.
"โSince many, many years my aim is to try to prove that people and environment can survive together, you have to have a balance,โ Kuki says.
What a revelation. If it wasn't for "the conservationists", we would never have known that. Right, guys?
4. When she talks about how she came to own an 88,000 acre ranch in Laikipia: "I totally and utterly fell in love with Ol Ari Nyiro..."
" ...and I felt โ and itโs irrational and difficult to explain -- that I had come home and there was a reason for me to be there." ๐๐๐
She had come home. HOME. And there was a reason. A REASON.
Isn't it interesting how there are wonderful empty places in this beautiful Kenya waiting for someone to fall in love with them?
That you can land in far-off country with a pile of luggage shipped in from Venice, and your love gets you an 88,000 acre ranch?
But anyway fam, there's a reason for this.
5. Some ranches have closed and some owners are considering selling, but others, among them Gallmann, are hunkering down, the article says.
"They are going to get tired of it. I know I will outlast them. There is no doubt in my mind," says Gallmann.
"They" is the impoverished local Pokot militia encroaching on "the environment". They will get tired. Kuki Gallmann will outlast them.
Of course they will get tired, Ms Gallmann. They are poor, impoverished and local, after all. They children will hunger and thirst.
*Their* children, I mean. They will turn against each other. They will run out of ammunition. Politics will change. They will scatter.
In a way, you are right. They *will* get tired.
And there you are, waiting for "them" to scatter, to hunger, to thirst, to turn against each other and just go away. To disappear.
Or at least to go back to being poor, local and impoverished, but quietly. QUIETLY.
I want to go on, but I can't. This feeling > ๐, has been replaced by grief.
The grief of knowing that someone is waiting for our death, our quietness, our hunger and thirst and confusion.
The End.