Peter Mwaura
25 February 2006
column
Nairobi — According to the Firearms Act, anybody aged 14 or more years can obtain a gun if the licensing officer is "satisfied" that he has a "good reason" for acquiring it "without danger to the public safety or to the peace" and that he is not "for any reason unfit to be entrusted with such a firearm."
It also empowers the chief licensing officer, appointed by the police commissioner, to revoke a firearms certificate if he is "satisfied" that the holder is "of intemperate habits or an unsound mind" or that he is "otherwise unfit to be entrusted with a firearm."
He can also withdraw the permit if the holder fails to comply with a notice requiring him "to deliver up the firearm certificate."
If a licensing officer refuses to grant him a firearm certificate, or revokes the permit, he can appeal to the minister- currently the one handling Internal Security - whose decision is final. In practice, however, only the rich and the socially or politically correct or well connected manage to obtain firearms certificates and keep them.
Power and potency
Thus the gun law can be pretty arbitrary and subjective in its application. Even then, one wonders why the commissioner is now ordering some Goldenberg and Anglo Leasing suspects to surrender their firearms?
Is the intention to emasculate them? If so, the commissioner has hit home where it really matters. Taking away their guns is like taking away their manhood, power and potency.
Not that they really need the guns for protection. Guns kept for protection by civilians are almost never used. Some may not even know how to use a gun. The Act does not require gun holders to undergo any training on weapon handling.
But what matters is that most of them gain psychological pleasure from owning a gun. Call it firearm worship, if you will. It is pretty strong stuff. For them, a gun is a symbol of power and potency.
Just like the spear of yore, a gun completes the image of a man of substance. Owning one is a statement that one has arrived and is rich and powerful. Rich people own guns to reaffirm their status. Never mind that they don't really need them, or that guns are of greater danger to themselves and their families than to their intended targets. They want to own them, that is the point.
They are fixated with the gun. For them, the gun is a symbol of control and power. And those who have been ordered to surrender theirs now feel not only gunless but also powerless and impotent.
The gun symbolises authority. It represents the power of life and death. Most of all, it is a phallic symbol, not only here but also everywhere. It was Sigmund Freud, the Austrian physician and founder of psychoanalysis, who first theorised that all our weapons are nothing but phallic symbols.
Dick Nauta, a researcher at the University of Nairobi's Institute of African Studies in the seventies, carried out research on the traditional spear and came to the same Freudian conclusion that, for most Africans, the spear was a reflection of virility.
For the Maasai moran, for example, his long and beautiful spear was pride, an extension of his manhood. He also used his spear to establish his right to sleep in a hut with a woman who was not his wife.
The Marakwet used a spear called asiepiret, the latter part of the word meaning penis. The gun has replaced the spear as a phallic symbol.
During the Chepkube coffee boom of 1976-77, when some businessmen-cum-politicians made millions by selling smuggled Uganda coffee, the gun took on a new meaning as the symbol of affluence and status.
Coffee boom millionaires
Some of the coffee boom millionaires would meet at a popular five-star hotel, remove their holsters and parade their weapons on the table as they sipped Remy Martin and Black Label.
As symbols of potency, however, guns go back to many years and many cultures. In a 1933 film, "She Done Him Wrong", American actress Mae West asks one of the male characters: "Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"
The words are often quoted because of the phallic symbolism associated with guns, to say nothing of the heavy inflection of sexual innuendo with which she said them.
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