By Jared Juma and David Wanjala
The recent visit by US President Barack Obama exposed so many things in us as Kenyans. Just on the eve of his arrival, a lot of beautification had been going on with Nairobi Governor Evans Kidero being criticized for his last minute rush to make the city look the way it should. It was on the eve of the visit when CNN (Cable News Network) ran a news flash to the effect that President Obama was heading to a hotbed of terror. That got Kenyans really mad!
The overzealous Kenyans on Twitter (#KOT) mobilized to object to CNN reporting, which warned that Obama was “not just heading to his father’s homeland, but to a region that’s a hotbed of terror”. The report quoted a security analyst who said that while it was unlikely Al-Shabaab would get near the President, an attack somewhere in the country during the visit could not be ruled out.
The hash tag #SomeoneTellCNN began trending on Twitter, as Kenyans fought back against what they called negative, one-dimensional reporting. Many shared images of Kenyan wildlife and holiday sites to provide a contrast to what they thought Kenya is a hotbed of. Majority of them were very remarkable and admirable, for example, athletics and beautiful sceneries. Others never shied from telling CNN that even Obama whose security they were over cjoncerned with is actually a son of a Kenyan man, and by extension a Kenyan.
It even got President Uhuru Kenyatta taking a jibe at CNN. While addressing the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Nairobi, the President remarked as follows: “…you will without doubt discover that Kenya is a hot bed of vibrant culture, spectacular natural beauty, a wonderful people with infinite possibility” much to the applause of the audience who felt that the hot bed remark from CNN needed to be rebutted.
But language and language use are covered in a field of science called Linguistics. The technical thing about it is that it is rule-governed while at the same time allowing for creativity in communication. However, any creativity must still fall within the set rules. A paradox, if we can say!
The Cambridge English Dictionary defines the word hotbed as a place or situation where a lot of a particular activity, especially an unwanted or unpleasant, is happening or might happen: It goes ahead and gives the following sentential examples: The police department was a hotbed of corruption. In the 60s the city was a hotbed of crime.
In linguistics, there are certain things called collocational restrictions. It is a linguistic term used in morphology. The term refers to the fact that in certain two-word phrases the meaning of an individual word is restricted to that particular phrase (comparable to an idiom). For instance: the adjective dry can only mean ‘not sweet’ in combination with the noun wine. Certain words therefore collocate only with specific words and not any other. In the words of German trained Linguistic expert Dr. Ochieng Orwenjo, collocational restrictions refer to the morphological company of words that a specific word is allowed to keep (hence collocative restrictions).
Dr Orwenjo says that it is the company of words that a specific word is likely to be found in that we say it collocates with. Just like smell collocates only with bad senses of the nose, hotbed collocates with something negative or undesirable as we have seen in the above sentential examples of corruption in the police and crime in the city. Therefore, our President was wrong in saying Kenya is a hotbed of vibrant culture, (unless he meant that Vibrant culture is not a desirable commodity). Because a vibrant culture is something positive and desirable, it, accordingly, cannot collocate with hotbed in the same stem.
Looked at through a purely linguistic lens, CNN was right in collocating Kenya or East African region with terror. We will shortly hereunder address the factual position. But first, patriotism is something that can make people go gaga in defense of their country.
A little digression. Remember the common calling that gripped the social media when it was reported that a Chinese restaurant declined to admit Kenyans after a certain time of the evening? Majority of Kenyans, who are often divided by ethnic politics got, all over sudden, united to condemn the discrimination of their own in own country by foreigners. Even those who joked about the fear of eating dog meat in a Chinese Restaurant still felt that a Kenyan who willingly wanted to expose oneself to the risk of eating such delicacy should not be deterred. It is the same patriotism that gripped Kenyans in defense of their country’s reputation.
In the concerted effort to dissociate beloved Kenya with the tag, some, on other social media outlets like Facebook, wondered why CNN would never refer to the USA as a hotbed of terror despite the September 11 attacks on America in 2001 by the Islamist terror group, al-Qaeda, the deadliest terror attack ever in the history of the world’s super power
According to Wikipedia, an online free encyclopedia, four passenger airliners all departing from airports on the U.S. East Coast bound for California were hijacked by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists to be flown into buildings. Two of the planes, American Airlines Flight 11and United Airlines Flight 175, were crashed into the North and South towers, respectively, of the World Trade Center complex in New York City. Within an hour and 42 minutes, both 110-story towers collapsed with debris and the resulting fires causing partial or complete collapse of all other buildings in the World Trade Center complex, including the 47-story 7 World Trade Center tower, as well as significant damage to ten other large surrounding structures. A third plane, American Airlines Flight 77 was crashed into the Pentagon (the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense) in Arlington County, Virginia, leading to a partial collapse in the Pentagon’s western side. The fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, initially was steered toward Washington, D.C but crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after its passengers tried to overcome the hijackers. In total, the attacks claimed the lives of 2,996 people (including the 19 hijackers) and caused at least $10 billion in property and infrastructure damage. It was the deadliest incident for firefighters and law enforcement officers in the history of the United States, with 343 and 72 losing lives respectively.
Hotbed however, speaks to frequency, not impact. In which case, the comparison cannot rebut CNN’s use of the word on Kenya.
But if we leave out questions of linguistics and look at the question of fact, then Kenya is indeed a hotbed of terror. Kenya has borne the brunt of most of the terror related attacks in this region than any other. More than five hundred lives have been lost due terror related attacks in just one year. This figure is conservative bearing in mind many attacks with minor fatalities go unreported especially in the Northern part of the country.
Statistics for between July 7, 2015 and February 1, 2014, collated from daily newspapers by Security, Research and Information Centre, an independent non-profit making organization committed to providing data and information on human security, are unflattering.
Sample Mandera County alone. July 21, 2015, at least 14 people were killed and 11 others injured after Al-Shabaab gunmen attacked Soko Mbuzi village near Mandera town on Tuesday night at around 1:00am; December 2014, at least 36 people were killed after Al-Shabaab raided the quarry and killed workers as they slept. In November, they had waylaid a bus destined for Nairobi from Mandera town and massacred 28, mostly teachers, by blasting their heads from close range. August 4, 2014, eight armed men hurled grenades at the Mandera county government offices. They were repulsed by the police officers manning the building and some reservists who responded to the 2am attack. May 18, 2014, at least six security officers and two civilians were killed following an ambush attack by suspected Al-Shaabab militants when they hijacked four pick-ups transporting miraa (khat) from Meru to Mandera at Arabia. May 1, 2014, Police shot dead two men who attempted to vandalize a power station in Mandera town and recovered an AK 47, 145 bullets, five magazines and Improvised Explosive Devises.
Because it will be an overkill to go into the horrible details of Lamu, Wajir, Garissa, Turkana, Bungoma, Mombasa and Nairobi Counties’ terror attacks, which every Kenyan is aware of anyway, we will not. Nonetheless, Kapedo, Westgate, Hindi villages, and Garissa University College cannot go unmentioned.
Lamu and Tana River Counties have been under curfew for over a year now. Recent attempts to lift the Curfew in one of them were met with fresh attacks. As recent as August 15, local dailies reported, 80 al Shabaab militants among them four whites; two men and two women entered Basuba village in Lamu East at 5:00am, assembled villagers and lectured them for more than two hours. Kenya is a hotbed of terror.
So in the wake of the use of hotbed remarks from CNN, some beautiful women on our local TV stations started castigating CNN, minus looking at the appropriateness of the word. It is granted that our media houses are full of beautiful women. This is a desirable thing. Trouble is that beauty does not always guarantee intelligence. One can therefore say that our media houses are at times a hotbed of obtuse ignoramuses.
Hotbed of terror or not, CNN knows that they have their East African Bureau here in Nairobi. So when the pressure mounted for them to give an apology, the world’s leading news broadcaster eventually ate humble pie. CNN’s executive vice president and managing director Tony Maddox had to fly to Nairobi to tender an official apology to President Kenyatta. Prior to the personal apology, Kenya Tourism Board had suspended a multi-million advertising deal with CNN that was meant to help market Kenya’s tourism Industry.
