The psychologist: a new element in changing Kenya

The Kenya that exists today is only a shadow of what is to come in the African continent. It is only a shadow of what changes are to come. Industrialization, modernization and progress are only words taken out of a Western dictionary and implanted into African customs and beliefs without a prior handbook as to what their effects will be on the indigenous population. As a Kenyan story goes, the African was given a Bible as a basic text towards his education. As he gathered more and more from the Bible, so the missionary gathered more and more of his land, and eventually changed status from missionary to settler. As for the African, his status changed from that of farmer to missionary. A paradox of changing times, and yet, a change to what?

And so society has gone on, adapting to this ‘new’ change and relinquishing the past, a process that has now been explained as the ‘melting pot’ syndrome. Social change has given rise to a ‘new’ way of modernized living. However, the repercussions of this were never foreseen. It can only be said that current events in society are mainly due to a lack of full awareness of mistakes made in the West.

Over the years of interaction, many indigenous groups of people have begun to lose their own ethnic cultures and to formulate new behaviour patterns from other cultures. The result is that a ‘new’