The problem is not that the Luo is better off than he/she was before the handshake, the problem now is that he/she is much happier in a country where Luo happiness has a price.
And that price is what YOU make of it.
It has not been easy for some people to process the last two years. Life in Kenya is now summed up in two epochs: Before Handshake (BH) and After Handshake (AH) or aaaahhh!
In just two years, the very assumptions about politics and power are collapsing, with it, a pathology older than this nation.
The most hurt group are hardcore tribalists at the core of the now jeopardized Uhuruto 20-year ethno-jingoism experiment.
The second most hurt group are the “third person activists” now forming the critical mass of Kenya’s dollar dominated civil society.
These people thought they would sit comfortably, while time away, even merry; as the state unravels on its traditional tormentors.
Some bets huchoma!
Luo happiness is evil.
With its flair, style and heft, it’s the response you get when years of marginalization, isolation and oppression — including the kind of heinous violence that plucks a three-month old baby from the hapless protective devices of the mother and murders her — surmount in one poor soul the resilience to overcome anything.
Anything!
The Luo call it ‘dhil’.
I do not know how to translate ‘dhil’ to this foreign language. The closest you come to it is in the morgue: that ice-cold body of a preserved dead.
Dhil.
Dhil is the generational commonwealth.
Dhil is learned.
Dhil is the bridge that connects one communal disappointment to another.
Dhil is the earned joy, fleeting for that moment.
And so, even now, regardless of what happens tomorrow, next week or 2022, to underestimate Luo passivity is to set oneself up for the kind of angst that now so pervades attacks on this government, especially by those who voted for it solely to banish the Luo from national reckoning.
Dhil is Luo survival.
The knowledge of this ability to survive is clothed in some relief.
That relief is called ‘Luo Happiness’.
It discomforts.
