There were two prominent news stories from earlier this week, which on the surface seemed to be worlds apart, but from our local Kenyan perspective were intricately linked.
One was the ongoing controversy over the government’s plan to allow for imports of GMO (ie, genetically modified) maize into Kenya. Most prominently this debate had the American billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, who was on a visit to Kenya, proclaiming the benefits and safety of GMO grain; while the former Prime Minister Raila Odinga declared that the proposed introduction of GMOs must be viewed with doubt and suspicion.
And the other story was the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, which is expected to lead to catastrophic financial loss for the many Kenyans who had invested in this digital currency.
Being from an older generation that does not invest in things we do not understand, I had not taken any interest at all in cryptocurrency, and so was amazed to learn that approximately four million, mostly young, Kenyans were cryptocurrency investors who had considered such investment to be a guaranteed path to great wealth.
So, what exactly do these two news stories have in common?
In my view they both remind us that 'new facts' are rarely judged in isolation. Such facts are viewed through a preexisting frame of reference. Also, that it usually takes an exceptionally long time for anyone or any community to change their frame of reference in any particular matter.
And for many Kenyans, a dominant frame of reference is what we might call 'a psychology of victimhood'. This is basically the idea that there are people or communities or even nations, out there, who have made it their business to 'keep us down'.
Due to this psychology, in the case of the FTX cryptocurrency disaster, far from acknowledging that far more money has been lost by American investors than by those four million Kenyans, a Kenyan sceptic would pose this question to the young investor who had just lost his shirt trading in cryptocurrencies:
“If indeed, arising from an American innovation, an easy path to the rapid accumulation of great wealth had been created, do you really think that the American innovators would offer it to ordinary Kenyans like you? Would they not keep it to themselves? Do you really imagine that they consider it their business to provide us with an easy path to prosperity?”
So, any day now we may expect to read that the entire cryptocurrency bubble was merely a scheme to 'keep Africans poor'.
Then there is the proposed mass importation of GMO maize to provide for the drought-stricken communities in Northern Kenya. From the viewpoint of that same psychology of victimhood, this would be seen as, first, the initial step in a process that would result in the destruction of the crop production capacity of the maize-growing farmers of the Rift Valley.
And second, the introduction into our maize reserves of a product that may well have immediate benefits, but which will eventually prove to have side effects that would be nothing less than a national calamity.
This mindset is of course not unique to Kenya. It is in fact fairly widespread within the US too. An example comes from the recent Covid-19 pandemic, during which right-wing activists in the US alleged that the lifesaving vaccines that were developed within a year to fight this pandemic were developed with suspicious rapidity.
From this arose the absurd accusation that they were not effective at all, but were merely being used as some kind of entry mechanism for introducing into our bodies mind-controlling substances that would allow the likes of – who else? – Bill Gates to control us as they moved on with their agenda of world domination.
My point here then is that communities which have an entrenched belief that powerful 'outsiders' have often used such power to oppress them, need to be understood within their own frame of reference.
For among such people, even where there is an overwhelming scientific consensus on the benefits and efficacy of some recent technological advance, the most outlandish conspiracy theories will still be easily embraced, and the scientific consensus disregarded.
