Fighting for the state while the nation splits apart

(This piece first run in the East African of February 11, 2008)

The ongoing negotiations between Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki’s administration and the Raila Odinga-led Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) should consider as one of their immediate aims a political settlement aimed not at making the militias lose their appetite for destruction but rather at ensuring that the security forces, and especially the army, are united enough to act effectively.

They have so far wrongly assumed that they are the sole actors in the ongoing drama and that the singular aim of their bitter contest is the taking or keeping of State House. Their hardline positions in the negotiations assume that time will force the opposite side to concede defeat, that other actors are stationary and have little part to play in the outcome.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. They are fighting over control of a state that presides over a Kenyan nation that is now threatening to split into opposed nationalities.

The prize of the state will be hollow and short-lived since the split in the nation undermines the very basis of state authority, which is significantly derived from the ability to deploy effective and obedient security forces.

THE INVISIBLE ELEPHANT AT Kofi Annan’s mediating table is the fact of the state so far failing to maintain a monopoly on the means of violence against ragtag, ill-equipped militias, and its constrained ability to call on its armed forces to enforce order due to the very ethnic calculus that is driving so much of the violence. If the state cannot function, then the Kenyan nation will not survive the forces tearing it violently apart.

If there is common ground shared by the Kibaki and Raila camps, it is their need to remain the primary drivers of events on the ground and for the political arena to maintain the shape it has had since independence. This ground is threatened.

President Kibaki and his key supporters will only remain relevant to their political base provided they can deliver order. This will be especially true as businesses continue to close in the unrest and refugees from Rift Valley stream into Central and other provinces. Yet their ability to deliver successfully is dependent on effective command and control of all branches of the security services. This, as has been noted earlier, is an increasingly fragile capability in the present atmosphere of ethnic animosity.

It creates a power vacuum now being filled by violent militias that are gaining legitimacy and material support from the administration’s political base by promising to deliver security and order. The stronger these militias, the more detrimental they are to ODM’s aspirations since they make it tougher for the Kibaki team to cede ground during the negotiations for fear of becoming politically isolated. The same applies to the militias in Rift Valley and Western Province that have so far identified themselves as pro-ODM.

They too expect order to be delivered. They differ from their pro-Kibaki counterparts in expecting the ODM leadership to deliver State House by following through on its tough negotiating stance. Any substantive retreat at the Annan table, as is normal in all such processes, will only lead to the militias acting ever more independently of their putative leaders.

THE DIMINUTION IN THE ability of the Raila and Kibaki camps to drive events on the ground is matched by their reduced prestige and support in the international arena. Already, 10 Members of Parliament from both parties may be barred from visiting the United States. This falling off in legitimacy has disturbing and far more important local implications.

Legitimacy is the lifeblood of successful civilian control of the armed forces. The current split threatens to give birth to opposed nations, all fighting over control of the resources and mantle of the state. The inability of the security forces to act against the violent forces tearing the nation apart undermines the positions of both Kibaki and Raila.

The more their teams are doubted, questioned and censured abroad, the more tarnished they become in the eyes of the Kenyan soldier. There is a further erosion of their authority if violence continues to be unleashed by militias in the name of ethnic solidarity.

This will only deepen the existing chasms within the ranks so that soldiers increasingly react to the chain of command in similar fashion as their civilian counterparts. In this part of the world, a divided force of well-trained and equipped men and women leads logically to a Pandora’s Box.

TO PEER INTO IT IS TO SEE security personnel both aiding and abetting ethnic cleansing or so paralysed as to cede their mandate to protect to hyper-violent militias. Either possibility means the Kibaki and Raila camps will find it difficult if not impossible to forge a settlement that is comprehensive enough to isolate the violent militias in Rift Valley and Nairobi. For the political status quo on which the two camps depend to survive, there must be unity among the personnel of all the security agencies.

That unity will only come if the leadership of all the branches of the security forces (and even organs such as the National Security Advisory Committee) become a part of the ongoing negotiations. Junior security personnel must be convinced that the chain of command is diverse and inclusive enough to keep them focused on their professional duties and not on their ethnic affiliations with embattled and bitter civilians. This is a more modest but critical goal of the Kofi Annan mediation process compared with a settlement that is Solomonic enough to please all sides.

IT IS HIGH TIME THAT THE Kibaki administration and ODM understood that militias and a divided security force are a threat to them both. They should not believe that the violence will automatically stop because they have come to an agreement, since reaching it involves making fundamental compromises that largely go against the grain of their core supporters’ sentiments. Rather the violence, which has now travelled far past the scope of the anger at the election results, will only cease once it becomes clear that Kenya’s security personnel can act effectively irrespective of their ethnic and political differences.

Reaching an agreement that strengthens the civilian command and control will take the worst case scenario — soldiers turning against each other violently or supporting militia campaigns — off the table.

This aspect of the agreement can be hammered out separately and quickly so that it effectively buys time to fashion a more lasting and widely supported dispensation.

Generation Fire

(This post originally run in the February 3, 2008 issue of The East African.)

Watching television news the other day, I was struck by how many of the pictures of the rioting youth showed them apparently in good cheer. This despite the anger in the country about the presidential election results, at the lack of economic opportunities and at the violence being meted out by both rioters and the security forces.

When the cameras roll they capture among the perpetrators of violence is one of euphoria and carnival despite the suffering and destruction that the country has experienced in the past month.

They were rolling recently when a group of young men stopped a car, forced out the driver, and stripped it of whatever was easily carried before setting it aflame.

They laughed and celebrated, holding their machetes and clubs aloft, a few pranced around the car’s burning hulk. In another scene, a crowd, again mostly of young men, uprooted a section of a railway track. Others chased children from school and burned down government offices.

These young men, especially the ones in spontaneously formed groups as opposed to well-organised ones, are in the grip of a moment of intense fellow feeling. They are experiencing euphoria at their shattering of moral and material boundaries.

Power, the power to destroy what seemed so unassailable, so permanent, they are increasingly realising, is like a drug that you need in ever greater supply. The burning and the maiming, and especially the increasing instances of rape when combined with the pictures of euphoric expression combine to suggest that some of the country’s youth are part of a gruesome festival that can potentially engulf ever larger parts of the country.

These bands of young men on television are like young men everywhere in the world and, throughout history, who have been caught in the periodic joining of political rage and the licence to transcend normal social limits. They are unmaking their world.

THE BURNING OF SHOPS AND homes, the destruction of transport infrastructure and government property and the taking of life, is not chaos as so many of us term it. Rather it is the flipside of order.

Their destruction overturns, if only momentarily, the normal order of the Kenyan universe. However, as many of their elders would like to believe, their violent actions do not eject them from Kenyan society. Rather, they are an intimate yet alienated part of it that has decided for the moment to defy the normal laws and morals of their upbringing.

To transgress a boundary you must first believe in its existence and its importance. Burning chiefs’ houses and destroying infrastructure paradoxically confirms how important these are to their destroyers.

By trying to unmake the hold of the law on themselves, they are confirming its policing of the bounds of a society that they now believe deserves rupturing and remaking.

If the high politics practised by elected leaders does not address past injustices and does not heed the anger and alienation of the young, then it will be replaced by the politics of the street. This is a politics of fire that seeks to destroy all in a desperate and very rarely successful attempt to justly remake society and re-establish its shattered moral bounds.

Why are there so many fires? The obvious and correct answer is that they are being started to send a message to politicians and their supporters about the widespread opposition to the election results — or support in some areas.

A more speculative answer is that they are a kind of political pyromania, a fundamental rhythm that dictates the life of euphoric violence; and they will only increase the more the political realm continues to withhold a good reason to return to the status quo.

I am saying here that violence and war have their own logic, which is not shared by those who set them in motion.

The violence may have its architects or patrons and those who benefit from it in the tit-for-tat of politics, but it owes to none of them its intimate rhythms, its joys and excesses. The mistake is age-old: leaders believing that they can switch the rage of their supporters on and off at will. But if they ever had any control of the situation, then this is power that is growing more distant by the day.

The reason such atrocities as we have suffered in Kenya are possible is that the perpetrators believe that they are engaged in just actions. The anger at the election results has morphed into a state of festival: a period when normal laws and habits are suspended.

This feeling of living in a world or a time outside society’s normal bounds accounts for the euphoria experienced by the youth around those bonfires and riots. According to them, they are quite literally destroying their world in order to save it.

If there is a lesson in all this to the political elites, it is that if Kenya’s morals and laws excuse injustice for too long, as is the case with our history, then there will come occasions when enough people will feel the need for a radical change.

If this happens outside the normal political space, due, for example, to a failed election, then all that is needed is for a spark to allow for a violent reaction.

Too often, Kenya’s political analysts and writers insist on believing that politics is a secular affair governed only by material means and ends.

Yet even as they believe that about politics, the rest of their lives are suffused with belief in the transcendent.

We go to church on Sundays and intersperse our day with prayer. But politics too is a realm of charismatic belief. Our politicians understand this intuitively. Their promises are akin to promises to be Moses leading their constituents to the Promised Land.

POLITICS IS A REALM THAT STRA-ins toward the transcendent, which is to say it periodically makes a dash toward its boundaries and retains the potential to breach them. These young men in the Rift Valley, Central Province and elsewhere destroying and causing so much suffering, are exploring moral spaces beyond the frontiers that have up to now governed their everyday lives.

The longer the political impasse continues, the more the society they left behind will seem less real than the violent and unjust one they are creating.

There is still time to douse the fires and stop the deaths. The leaders whom Kenyan citizens have given the responsibility to police the precincts of this moral community we call the Kenyan nation have failed more often than they have succeeded.

If they do not stand tall for once, or move aside for those who can, then politics will indeed move from the halls of government to the streets.

For now, the young men causing so much suffering still believe in the existence and importance of the boundaries they have violated. They believe that violence will lead to a new season that speaks to their aspirations and hopes.

They are mistaken. All around Kenya are examples of countries that have fed on the flames and now need decades to recover what they built so laboriously.

It is a simple choice for those who are in positions of political and adult responsibility: either move decisively to enthrone just rule and a political and economic system that is broadly believed to be fair or face the flames that will pulverise Kenya and leave nothing standing but the memory of your failed leadership.

Regional Interests and Kenyan Stability

With all respect to the Kofi Annan mediation effort, perhaps it is time that the region’s leaders visited Nairobi as a group and insisted on some movement toward a political settlement. In the same way that the Lusaka and Arusha peace agreements, aimed at Congo and Burundi respectively, were crafted from tough negotiations led by the region, Kenya too should follow this path. The difference being that the region has very real interests in a stable Kenya and that it has leverage against both sides. How much longer for instance can Rwanda and Uganda seat on the sidelines and watch as a major trading and investment partner – not to mention a thoroughfare for their imports and exports – go up in flames?

Kenyans peering at their belly buttons – fiddling while the place burns

I am going crazy. I am blogging seating at a table with a small group of Kenyans here in Johannesburg. One of them is visiting from Nairobi and he is filled with the smug knowingness that characterises our country’s elite and is the biggest reason why the flames are up and may stay up for much longer. I am so sick of this Kenyan feeling that the normal laws of violent conflict somehow do not apply to us because we are different. We are special and peaceful. That the guy burning and killing just wants to fill his belly and will soon calm down. What nonsense and what really is it going to take for us to get it through our heads that our country is disintegrating while we fiddle around and believe that it is 300 shs cocktails as usual.

Trying to explain Kenyan trouble in Swedish

For those of you who understand Swedish and want to hear some Kenyan ranting on Sveriges Radio, please go to the Konflikt page and tell me what it is being said other than the parts in English. Same applies to this much shorter interview also in Swedish.

Kenya still burning

Have pasted in four opinion pieces below that have run in the East African and elsewhere in the last month. Trying to restart blogging but my brain feels leaden and uncooperative.

Generation Disaster

This opinion originally run in the East Africa on January 28, 2008 under the title,

‘The problem with Kenya’s politics is the old guard‘

The next revolution in Kenya will not be a violent one, contrary to the bloodletting presently underway. Rather it will be the rejection of the generation of men from whom the leaders of this country have been drawn.

The major politicians were in politics long before the majority of Kenyans were even born and who even today enjoy inordinate sway in the country. President Mwai Kibaki was born in 1931. Ex-president Daniel arap Moi was born in 1924.

They are still doddering on, unable to relinquish the reins of the power they have held onto tightly for half a century.

Theirs is a generation steeped in tribal arithmetic, in a cynical nationalism; their values have infected those thousands of young people who are roaming the countryside in a killing frenzy.

The young men throwing stones and shooting arrows and the youthful riot policemen opposite them lobbing tear gas and firing live ammunition are fodder for the failed politics of a generation of old men who may just take all of us to the grave with them.

I was raised to respect my elders and there are many whom I indeed respect. But the time has come to assess in the broadest and most personal terms how the generation of leaders that took this country from independence to the bloody and dangerous present has performed.

The oldest were born in the 1920s and the youngest of the lot in the 1940s — opposition leader Raila Odinga, who was born in 1945 is the youth wing of this generation. They can be counted as a single generation in the sense that their vision of what constitutes Kenya and their role in it is widely shared.

This generation has played and continues to play a prominent role in politics, in our intellectual life and in the business community.

While there are many among them who are capable and well intentioned, the defining characteristic of this generation is failure in leadership.

It is not enough to lay the blame on a few individuals. These prominent wazee (old men) have defined for us the content of our politics and the ethics of governance. They are our very own Boomer Generation except that the boom in this instance is the sound of our dreams and aspirations exploding. It is time we named them Generation Disaster.

It is a popular pastime to compare Kenya’s performance in economic and human development terms with that of the Asian Tigers such as South Korea and Malaysia. How often I have heard it said that these countries in economic terms were neck and neck with Kenya in the 1970s, only for them to surge ahead in the past three decades while Kenya trod water and in many instances retreated on the advances it had made.

The approximately 3 per cent of Kenyans who are above the age of 65 and from whom the bulk of Generation Disaster is drawn, have led us to an average life expectancy of 55 years compared with South Korea’s 77 and Malaysia’s 72 — according to the online Institute World Guide, which allows country comparison of economic data.

The economic numbers are even more dire. Kenya’s gross domestic product of $38 billion as of 2005 is only a fraction of Malaysia’s $287 billion and South Korea’s $1 trillion. Per capita, Kenyan citizens have only 12 per cent of their Malaysian counterparts’ income and 6 per cent of the South Korean GDP per capita of almost $23,000. At the turn of the century, 40 per cent of Kenyans were unofficially unemployed compared with fewer than 4 per cent of Malaysians and South Koreans.

These statistics, we can suppose with reasonable confidence, have deteriorated in the past three weeks and they mean that Kenya can count itself first among equals only if compared to the Congos and Guineas of this world. Our leaders’ vision is only to be lauded if compared with countries that have experienced genocides and decades-long civil wars.

Yet this generation, which touts its anti-colonialist credentials, its Kennedy Airlifts (the US scholarship programmes of the 1960s), its Makerere (university) pedigree and its ambassador-at-30 mentality has only managed to take us from one disaster to the next.

I grew up hearing about the inferiority of one tribe as against the other, in jokes that now seem like macabre warnings of a day when they would become deadly serious. My elders were ever focused on their belly buttons. Not for them to learn from the experiences of other countries — especially the disasters that were unfolding around us and sending refugees by the thousands into our country.

Their language was a curious construction. “The Kikuyu are now in power,” they would say even though I hardly saw a penny from this so-called power. “The Kalenjin have taken power,” they complained as President Moi stepped into State House, “They will finish us now for sure.” “The Luos can never rule this country; the Kikuyus are thieves; the Luhyas don’t know how to take power…”

This language is what has given birth to the present crisis and has underpinned the governance of this country since Independence.

Such a leap into the illogical, for our generation of leaders, is the very basis of logical thinking when it comes to apportioning power and privilege among themselves. It has served them well, this spokesman-of-the-tribe role.

It is the position that has enabled all those Mercedes Benzes to be bought from the proceeds of Goldenberg, Anglo Leasing and the dozens of financial schemes to rob the Treasury in the name of fulfilling the privileges of tribal mandarin.

Though they developed these roles before the majority of us were even born, their thinking has infected us all. Say what you will about the opposition, it too is a gathering of “spokesmen of the tribe” challenging a government largely constituted from similar material.

The one thing that such politics will not deliver to this country is the kind of vision and leadership that led South Korea and Malaysia from poverty to wealth. We may continue chasing “those people” from one area or the other and supporting the powerful on the basis that they are “our people,” but perhaps we only need to remember that the cost in lives is borne by individuals.

What does it matter that there is a Kikuyu president when you are a Kikuyu living in Nairobi’s Mathare slum? This generation of wazee has infected the country with its self-serving obsession with ethnicity as politics and politics as ethnicity. It has lived longer than most Kenyans can expect to live and yet it refuses to exit the stage.

Generation Disaster has repeatedly turned down opportunities to appeal to our better natures. It has chosen advancement from enmity rather than from strengthening our bonds.

Fear and suspicion are its stock in trade. These wazee sap on the blood of the young and seek gratification of their lust for power even if it leads to the destruction of this fragile, injured thing we call Kenya.

Why exactly should we respect this generation that has lived longer than most of us can expect to live and yet refuses to exit the stage, like an ill-mannered guest who insists on staying an extra night?

Kenya can avoid years of civil strife by sharing power

Kenya can avoid years of civil strife by sharing power

(This editorial originally run in the East African on January 21, 2008)

There is no great mystery about what the future has in store for Kenya.

Other nations, too, have trodden the path of contested electoral outcomes, the formation of winner-takes-all governments, mass protests, mass violence, civil war and their breaking and shattering before they are put back together laboriously.

Still others have shied away from the abyss after an initial period of bloodletting similar to the one that has been experienced in Kenya during the past three weeks. They have been blessed with wise statesmanship and have embraced reforms that enable power sharing, empower their citizens to emerge from poverty and embrace a politics that promotes cohesion as opposed to discord.

Kenya’s choices are simple: life or death, penury or prosperity, a cohesive, well-governed nation that counts its diversity as strength or a suspicious, hateful one governed by the cynical and awash in the blood of its young. The leaders too must now decide whether they will be remembered as the men and women who destroyed a nation or as those who rescued it and set it on a glorious path that will be remembered for generations.

Raila Odinga has a right to call for peaceful mass protests. If that right keeps being denied, we cannot continue to consider our country a democracy. But the opposition should not assume that it has enough of a national mandate to force the government out through extra-constitutional measures or to try and use violence by its alleged supporters as a stratagem to force the government’s hand.

Unfortunately, Raila Odinga, who promised the country transformative leadership, must begin leading before he occupies State House. President Kibaki can choose to govern a country that is unravelling or bring about reconciliation by pushing for genuine power-sharing measures that will allow for the gains of Vision 2030 to be his permanent legacy. Other countries have been at a similar crossroads.

In December 1980, Uganda held its first presidential elections. Milton Obote was declared the winner of a poll that international observers monitored and declared to be far from free or fair. A losing aspirant by the name Yoweri Museveni, refusing to accept the decision, led 27 men into the bush to wage a bloody six-year guerrilla war that brought him to power, where he remains more than two decades later.

The government of Milton Obote, on its way to defeat, killed over 300,000 Ugandans. Kenya looked on, refugees crossed its borders, and many Kenyan children were taught by Ugandan teachers on the run from a country that had become the bone over which men of outstanding viciousness and cynicism fought.

Lesson to Kenya: Beware those thwarted by the ballot and refused the right to organise peacefully, come to believe that the only course of action open to them is the bullet. This may not be decided by the opposition of the day but perhaps by one of the millions of now-unknown Kenyans who feel left out of the process of governing. Perhaps we should learn also that power-sharing is national survival and not merely a procedural choice.

For three decades after independence, Ivory Coast was the Kenya of West Africa. It was ruled over by the authoritarian Felix Houphouet-Boigny, but nevertheless distinguished itself for generally harmonious relations between its ethnic and religious groups, and its strong economy.

In the mid-1990s, this island of calm turned away from cohesion and openness to destructive difference, as Henri Conan Bedie, Houphouet-Boigny’s successor, turned to a policy known as Ivoirité to maintain his tenuous grip on political power.

Ivoirité initially referred to the country’s common cultural identity, but in the cut and thrust of politics came to exclude many northerners whose origins were in neighbouring countries but who had acquired citizenship. What followed was a period of coups, cancelled elections, rigged Supreme Court decisions, bloody riots in Abidjan targeting “foreigners” and a decisive turn toward the politics of difference.

This unfortunate period culminated in a mutiny in 2002 carried out by soldiers of northern origin. It escalated into a full-scale civil war whose main bone of contention was how the definition of a citizen affected who could hope to govern the country.

The fighting lasted five years and cost many lives as well as bringing that formerly vibrant economy to its knees. The northerners’ exclusion from government led them to lose hope in politics as an arena that they could usefully participate in; they concluded that the best course for them was to attempt to topple the system that had judged them ineligible.

Last year, the conflict appeared at an end when President Laurent Gbagbo signed a power-sharing agreement with Guillaume Soro, the rebel commander.

Lesson to Kenya: Power sharing will be the way of governing whether we wait to fight a civil war to realise that point or enact it immediately and render it as law in a new constitution. Neither Gbagbo nor Soro or any of the other leaders in Ivory Coast had the support of the majority — just like the situation in Kenya today — which ultimately meant that they did not have the mandate to force their version of government on the entire nation.

A further lesson is that discrimination, whether in the form of Ivoirité or in the Kenyan version of cobbling together alliances to exclude one tribe or the other from the table of government very rarely delivers a lasting political victory. It should also be noted that armies and police forces reflect the feelings and identities of their fellow citizens. To promote the politics of difference risks ultimately splitting the security forces, with disastrous consequences that are visible throughout the continent.

South Africa, even as it came out of decades of the brutal apartheid system, had the benefit of having leaders of vision and courage. Rather than push for a “winner-takes-all” system, Nelson Mandela and the ANC, which could have secured the two-thirds parliamentary majority to force any constitutional changes it wished, instead chose to form a government of national unity. This government included the Nationalist Party that had championed apartheid and the mostly Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party whose supporters had fought a brutal low-intensity war against the ANC’s supporters in Kwazulu-Natal.

That Mandela and his colleagues could share power with those who had detained them and brutalised millions of their fellow countrymen is a testament to their profound understanding that the path of governing alone would lead them to further misery rather than a healing democracy.

Today, South Africa remains mired in the legacy of apartheid but there are few in that country who believe as they did in the mid-1990s that the country will come apart at the seams and degenerate into a widespread civil war between its internal nations.

Surely, if Nelson Mandela could share power with the Nationalist Party, then it is not too much to expect President Kibaki and Raila Odinga to do the same. It is not their individual ambitions that should now concern Kenyans. Rather, citizens must now push to overhaul the brutal machine inherited from the colonialists, designed as it is to maintain the power and privilege of the few by turning us against each other.

It is up to Raila Odinga to show Kenyans that he will not stand by as Kenya disintegrates, that the love of country that distinguished his years of struggling for democracy and enduring detention and torture will rise to the fore. He must allay fears, however unfounded, that many in the Mt Kenya region have of him as a leader, and he must castigate violence with feeling and conviction.

For the rest of us Kenyans, we must rally to a Citizen’s Agenda that rejects leaders who do not bring about a closure to the election either by a re-tallying or a re-election after an appropriate length of time. We must agitate for a government of national unity to deliver us a new constitution that improves mechanisms for the transfer of power, enables the equitable regional distribution of state resources and trims the powers of the executive.

We must demand the restoration of the lives of the displaced, and their rehabilitation and reconstruction. We must act on past injustices in the allocation and ownership of land while acknowledging that not to deal with these matters will forever threaten our peace.

Finally and most importantly, Kenyans must teach politicians that they are leaders to serve and not be served, and that we shall reject them should they appear to take positions that bring our country to ruin.

A country created by grand theft, ruled by a clique

A country created by grand theft, ruled by a clique

(Originally printed in the East African on January 14, 2008)

Robbery has thrived in Kenya for many decades now. The very creation of Kenya a century ago was an act of grand theft. Our country won its independence but has never broken free from the idea that political power is a license to rob by means fair or foul.

For decades as colonial subjects we were not allowed to vote freely. When we finally won the right to vote, most of the subsequent elections were stolen from us. The 2007 poll thus found a people rooted in a history whose course, twisted by the machinations of brutal thefts and shady backroom deals, had meted out injustice and indignity to more people than it enriched or empowered.

Yet Kenyans, despite this chequered history, had in the years since the early 1990s become bigger than their circumstances. They had begun believing that they could indeed change their country for the better. The ballot had become, despite the best attempts of their erstwhile leaders, a way to impose their will on a political elite whose most prominent members had been part of the old boy’s club that ruled with an iron fist for decades.

The election results, when they were announced by Samuel Kivuitu, the formerly much-respected chairman of the Election Commission of Kenya, rather than appearing to express the will of a large section of the electorate, seemed to many to be one more act of robbery. Others who had rallied around President Mwai Kibaki, who was now quickly sworn in to a second term, felt that justice had been done. Yet Kenya in 2007 is not the Kenya of 1987.

Young men who felt that their vote had been rigged turned on their neighbours who they believed had been supporters of the president’s Party of National Unity. They thought that they had been witness to an act of robbery that released all their latent resentment over other perceived past injustices.

They burnt down houses, they beat many and killed some, they looted and destroyed shops — most belonging to Gikuyus who as a bloc had been solidly behind the president.

Machetes swung, rapes happened, a church containing dozens of people seeking safety within its premises was torched, cars were burnt, and roadblocks manned by angry, bribe-demanding young men peppered roads across the Rift Valley province.

Now you hear it said boldly, no longer whispered as it was before the election, that ethnic cleansing or even genocide is underway. Senior members of the government have publicly stated that they have evidence that the attacks were planned by people associated with the opposition.

The truth of these claims or their counter-claims will become apparent with time. But the allegation alone, coming as it does in an atmosphere of rumour, innuendo and conspiracy theory is a danger to the country.

If there is a repetitive pattern to mass violence through history, it is that victimisers usually begin as the victimised or at least perceive themselves as such. We should beware our fears because they can turn us into monsters. This is especially true among those with a great deal of power, since their fear can lead to a worse conflagration than any we have witnessed so far.

Returning to the young men who have burnt and killed in the Rift Valley and elsewhere in the belief that they were acting to right the wrongs of stolen lands, ethnic chauvinism, government neglect and a rigged election, their acts of violence, rather than bringing them closer to gaining justice, have only driven them to join the great Kenyan tradition of robbing and dispossessing the perceived enemy. They have raised a mighty fear in the moneyed classes, especially in Nairobi.

What do you own in the elite neighbourhoods of Kileleshwa and Lavington when violence erupts in Kibera’s slums? The large screen television remains in its usual spot, except that this time it is reporting fire and death in Nairobi and not the Gaza Strip. Cars stay in their driveways.

The bank vaults holding the billions of shillings that the government had proudly proclaimed were the creation of its policies stay unopened for the days while Kenya burns. The expensive paintings in Nairobi’s luxurious malls are seen by no one and the imported designer clothes remain undisturbed on their hangers.

The only things that spread are fear and rage. They fill all spaces. The violence is dispossession by remote control. The political and economic elite that had celebrated the steady rise of the Nairobi Stock Exchange Index, which marched alongside their fortunes, cower and wonder whether their security guards will protect them or join the rage coming through the radio and television.

Paranoia rules. Streams of refugees leave the Rift Valley and Kisumu and Mathare and Kibera. Violence is a form of language, one that speaks the world into two camps: the merchants of violence and their victims. The results of the election were being invoked as a reason by the rioters but their point went deeper.

They were screaming to the world that they too could rob and take as so much has been taken from them; they were rendering the objects of power and privilege impotent. They succeeded for some days before a lull set in. But the anger and frustration remain present.

Those young men are watching for the backroom deal. They have their eyes focused on men and women in suits meeting in secret places and whispering secret things and agreeing on how to keep that Nairobi Stock Exchange Index continuing its happy rise to the heavens.

They see a lot more than the politicians believe they do and now that they have had a taste of the paralysing power of violence, they will man their powder kegs waiting for the betrayal that has always issued out of the backrooms where power has been cobbled together and distributed among a very small group of people.

Yet because the rich and powerful, especially those who are in possession of the reins of state, have been scared by the violence, they may become even less partial to sharing power.

It would do well to heed the fire, for it has only been damped down for the moment.

It will not go out at the orders of government spokesmen. Rather, real peace will only come from acknowledging our history of betrayal and robbery and heeding citizens’ demands that a fundamental change be made in the way the country is governed.

Ethnic strife: How Kenya’s politics was tribalised

This piece appeared in the East African in the second week of January 7, 2008 as Kenya continued to burn.

Ethnic strife: How Kenya’s politics was tribalised

It is Friday, December January 4. I walk through the lobby of the Serena Hotel in Nairobi. Packs of politicians and their entourages hurry past. Most have mobile phones into which they whisper urgently. They brush shoulders with white men and women lugging large cameras, trying to arrange for taxis to take them to the nearest scene of carnage and bloodletting. I get the impression that the more the politicians whisper into their phones, the more images the international press will capture.

Kenya at the moment must look to those watching CNN or BBC what Zimbabwe or Nepal looked like to me in the past. But then I know that the country is not in the grip of atavistic hatreds, images of machete-wielding, church burning men notwithstanding. This is a political crisis fuelled by ethnic differences that in Kenya are now, as never before, political differences.

Growing up, tribal stereotypes were the source of much shared humour among friends and family. Difference was funny. But underneath the jokes, in the same way that we say that there is no smoke without fire, was the recognition that our differences, no matter the friendly way we tossed them out, were actual and lasting.

In the 2007 campaign season for parliamentary and presidential seats, what had previously been jokes morphed into paranoid and even hateful mobile text messages. The intention was to drive the country into tribal camps from which votes for the particular candidates would issue.

I am a Gikuyu like President Kibaki and therefore expected to automatically be ready to vote along these lines. In many political conversations that I had with relatives, the opponent increasingly was not only the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) as a political party but rather the Luo tribe of Raila Odinga.

The opposition’s intention (many Gikuyus believed) was not only to win the election and lead with different ideas and policies but rather its aim was to destroy the country and us along with it. I was told that we were in a fight to the last, that the winner would take all and damn the loser. The opposition too was driven by similar ethnic mathematics even though the trend – which was confirmed in the 2005 constitutional referendum – was of the rest of the tribes aligning themselves against a perceived Gikuyu determination to hold onto power at all costs.

Three years ago, I interviewed a woman who was imprisoned in Rwanda for participating in the 1994 genocide. She has remained vivid in my memory for a curious remark she made when I asked her how far back the genocide’s planning started.

“The war,” she said, “started when I was a little girl in the 1970s and other children would tease me for having Tutsi legs?” Two decades later, the length and thickness of your legs determined who died and who lived at a roadblock. Imagine for an instant one of those children that did the jeering and teasing, now an adult with machete in hand faced by an ID-less girl with long, thin legs.

To the men huddled around the poolside tables at the Serena Hotel, political parties are not expressions of ideological or policy differences. Instead, political leaders are in a fight to our death for a politics they envision as a system of spoils.

This fight to get a larger slice of the “cake” has been growing in divisiveness and hateful rhetoric. We are like infants drawn to touch a flame or driven by a horrid fascination with what lies beyond the cliff’s edge, curious perhaps to test the limits of our peace after decades of tut-tutting at the many wars in our neighbourhood.

Kenyans for the past few years have worn tribal lens when looking at the political landscape. In this decoding by many of my fellow Gikuyu, ODM is perceived as an existential foe, not just an electoral one.

To be anti-Kibaki, or at least opposed to him, as was the case with a majority of the country’s provinces and at least 45 per cent of the voters, was going to be regarded by many Party of National Unity supporters, particularly those from the Mount Kenya communities, as inimical to their existence and survival as a collective.

A similar sense of drastic opposition applied to many ODM supporters. The stage was set for the violence seen across the country during the past week.

In politics, perception is reality. And the reality of politics, its fundamental meaning, at those rare moments when it enjoys the greatest clarity to the greatest numbers, is that it is a pitched contest between friends and enemies.

Many Kenyans have chosen their friends and enemies on the basis of tribal loyalty and identification. Beyond the much-repeated admonitions against such politics, let me suggest that we have dipped our toes into dangerous waters. That politics will fundamentally continue to be the struggle between friend and enemies and will not cease.

This is a struggle that is subject to the principle of escalation. One side’s paranoia is matched by that of the other side, one rumour with another, and text messages are sent out which appear to mirror each other in the claims of victimhood and outrage.

This escalation, which is already much in evidence, holds out the frightening possibility of a “war of all against all.” If indeed politics is friends versus foes, then how we define who are our friends and who our enemies are, is of the essence. This is the abyss into which the country is staring.

The campaign period turned the ethnic map into a political one. The individual Kenyan, despite his membership of and loyalty to different identities is now more strictly enfolded (perhaps imprisoned is a better word) in a single tribal collective that owes loyalty to those within – no matter their crimes or failings.

Its character is oppositional, its language that of the victim. Societies that have become engulfed in political violence rarely get much warning. The lead-up to conflagration is characterised by the political rhetoric of reasonableness on all sides when they speak into the larger public space.

But in their asides and coded messages to “their side,” foaming-at-the-mouth, hateful messages are uttered to secure the vote. Suspicion and rumours of fantastical conspiracies have been all the rage in the past year of campaigning.

A pamphlet that was found in Rwanda immediately after the 1994 genocide had this to say about how to motivate Hutus to loath their Tutsi neighbours and countrymen:

“Never underestimate the strength of the enemy, and never overestimate the intelligence of the target audience. Strive in your language to identify the enemy with everything feared and loathed. Lies, exaggeration, ridicule, innuendo — all ably serve the ultimate aim of winning over the undecided, sowing confusion and division among the opposed. And this freedom from the confines of truth opens up a powerful technique for sowing fear and hatred: ‘accusation in a mirror.’”

Accusation in a mirror. This is Kenya’s leading political tactic. Accuse the other side of rigging the vote while you do just that. Accuse the other of intending to rob the treasury while you do just that or prepare to have that very privilege on ascending to office.

Both sides pronounce themselves victim and the cynical acts of manipulation they utilise are framed to look like reactions to the “enemy.” Across the Rift Valley, in Kisumu and Nairobi, young men are roaming machetes in hand to finally destroy the enemy.

What many of these young men do not know is that the Serena Hotel and similar founts of privilege and wealth are the home of the very political class that has defined the friend and the enemy in Rift Valley and Central Kenya.

On Thursday last week, as people who had tried to assemble for the opposition rally in Uhuru Park were chased back and forth by the police, just beyond the Serena’s fence, I was seated next to groups of politicians who were certainly not ethnically cleansing each other off their sodas and croissants.

They were muttering into their mobile phones the messages that were driving those young men across the country to violence on behalf of a political class that is willing to sacrifice our lives on the altar of their lust for power and privilege.

Kenya is burning

Everyone reading this blog must know that Kenya is aflame. We have burnt churches with dozens trapped in them, we have seen a peaceful election with the highest turnout in our history end as farce and the number of displaced citizens has risen to more than 100,000. I wrote a piece last October that I hate reading and that I did not believe a few days after writing it. Too pessimistic I thought. Take a look at it and let me know what you think:

http://bulletsandhoney.wordpress.com/2006/10/10/kenyas-coming-fire/

Will be back with more.

Kenya’s Coming Fire?

I grew up being told that Luos were clever but addicted to showboating; Kambas were clean but stupid; the Maasai brutal and backward; people from the Coast were lazy; while we Gikuyus were ambitious and a tad dishonest. In a Kenya where the president’s marital wars impact national politics more than his economic policy, it is not strange that the personal becomes the political. The jokes I heard at home have now become phone texts whose intention is to drive us into tribal camps pitted against each other. The enemy increasingly is not ODM as a political party – it is the Luo, the non-Gikuyu. The opposition’s intention (many Gikuyus are starting to believe) is not to win an election and lead with different ideas and policies; no the aim is to destroy the country and us along with it. It is a fight to the last, the winner takes all and everyone else is damned. As a mugikuyu, I think it’s important for our country to have a Gikuyu political grouping that vocally refuses to merely toe the tribal line. It is not that the opposition leadership is not driven by similar ethnic mathematics, but rather that the trend – seen in the 2005 referendum – is of the rest of the country aligning against a perceived Gikuyu determination to hold onto power at all costs. This is going to hurt Gikuyus not to mention the country in the long term, possibly violently. The bigger the segment of Kenyans willing to give their support to candidates for non-tribal reasons, the closer we will be to a peaceful, strong democracy.

Recent mobile text: “Nari Koruo Kibaki arendia nyamu ici cia ruguru (meera) nakuu Thailand. Tutiguo tutari ona imwe. kana tugiciheane ouguo tuhu? Ukuuga atia weemundu wa Mumbi?” (If only Kibaki was selling these Luo animals to Thailand (like the elephants that the Kenya Wildlife Service controversially wanted to sell to zoos abroad) Or should we just give them away for free? What do you say child of Mumbi?)

Delivered with a laugh and a wink just as it was when I was a child.

Two years ago, I interviewed a woman who was imprisoned in Rwanda for having participated in the 1994 genocide. She has remained vivid in my memory for a curious remark she made when I asked her how far back the genocide’s planning started. “The war,” she said, “started when I was a little girl in the 1970s and other children would tease me for having Tutsi legs…” Two decades later, the length and thickness of your legs marked who died at many a roadblock. Imagine for an instant one of those children that did the jeering and teasing, now an adult with machete in hand faced by an ID-less girl with long, thin legs.

Kenyans have been toying with the flames of hatred for decades now, imagining ourselves to be immune to the violence that has engulfed our region since independence. “We are special, Kenyans are just different,” said a friend of mine last night as we shared a beer, “we can never become like Rwanda or Uganda, we like peace too much.” I thought that she might have forgotten to pick up the Sunday Standard to read stories of tribal clashes in Rift Valley and Laikipia. But she does know of them, but prefers to remain a fully paid up member to Kenya’s national amnesia and head in the sand approach to the consequences of our politics. Like the people of Ivory Coast thought they were different when looking to the Biafras and the Liberias rejecting outright that they too were vulnerable to the same logic until they plunged into a massive civil war.

Let us be honest and acknowledge that our political parties are not expressions of ideological or policy differences. Instead the leaders of ODM and Narc-Kenya are in a fight to the death for a politics they envision as a system of spoils.

This fight to get a larger slice of the ‘cake’ has been growing in divisiveness and hateful rhetoric. We are like infants drawn to touch a flame or driven by a horrid fascination with what lies beyond the cliff’s edge, curious perhaps to test the limits of our peace after decades of tut-tutting at the many wars in our neighborhood. Past clashes at the Coast and the Rift Valley are our version of dipping our toes into hot water to test its temperature. But beware the push from behind by our politicians who would have us dive in if it protected their positions. We may (thank God) not become a Rwanda but we can easily create a country balkanized along tribal lines. Where a Gikuyu cannot peacefully live in the Rift Valley or a Kamba work in Kisumu and a Luo settle in Mombasa.

The December 2007 elections approach after three years of intense campaigning and politicking. President Kibaki has dropped in and out of public view; the Cabinet has been reshuffled; high-level resignations and firings for corruption have occurred; a constitutional referendum has come and gone; while political alliances have been dissolved and elsewhere reconstituted. The lightning and thunder of these events has been directed by the elite’s simple calculation of tribal alliance. On the one side is the Narc-Kenya camp which identifies itself – and is identified by many Kenyans – as pro-Gikuyu. Its public utterances are aimed at winning next year’s elections against the leaders of the Orange Democratic Movement. Kenyans know that what is said by politicians in newspapers and on television, and which a non-Kenyan might imagine to be news, is actually then re-interpreted by most of us to fit tribal frames. It is in this decoding that ODM is increasingly perceived by many Gikuyus to be an existential foe, not just an electoral one. To be anti-Kibaki, if we keep to our present path, is going to be regarded by Narc-Kenya’s supporters as inimical to their existence and survival as a collective: the first step toward violence.

In politics perception is reality. And the reality of politics, its fundamental meaning, at those rare moments when it enjoys the greatest clarity to the greatest numbers, is that it is the contest between friends and enemies. Many Kenyans, especially the Gikuyu middle class to whom this letter is directed have chosen their friends and enemies on the basis of tribal loyalty and identification. Beyond the much repeated admonitions against such politics, I want to suggest that we have dipped our toes into dangerous waters. It is not that the rest of Kenya is not tribalistic or that the higher reaches of ODM are in anyway driven more by the national interest than are Kibaki and company. My point is that the regime in power for better or worse is tying its fortunes to the fluid but popular identity of ugikuyu and betting that it can remain in power in our name. That politics will continue to be the struggle between friend and enemies will never cease to be the case. That this struggle is subject to the principle of escalation, when one side enmity and its resulting actions is intensified by the others, and holding out the perpetual possibility of a ‘war of all against all’ is also unavoidable if we accept that politics is the battle ground against enemies. How we define who are our friends is therefore the determinant to the shape of the struggles to come and the constitution of the armies that will march.

Since our independence, and arguably prior to it, Kenyans have only rarely experienced the high ground of politics when the enemy stands out in stark relief. Our nationalist writing of history suggests that this is what the Mau Mau war represented but then we all know despite our history curriculum that in reality the rebellion was never an act arising from a national consensus. In fact the nationalization of the Mau Mau has not allowed a national sharing of rights and privilege, but rather has rendered invisible other anti-colonial movements that existed, and served as a shield to the powers that have placed themselves at the head of the nationalist line against democratic opposition. But we do have national moments, when Kenyans feel themselves to be part of a nation, and these for us who do not shirk from the notion of politics as enmity are clearly to be identified in moments when the opposition is in view. We feel Kenyan watching the Olympics five thousand meter final and seeing the Ethiopians trying to surge ahead of our compatriots. In a similar way, we felt Kenyan during the 2002 election period by identifying the enemy as Moi’s mercenary regime and its attempt to survive its term limit. We united against its narrow tribalisms, its cynical henchmen and its attempt during the 1990s to rob us of all hope and saddle us with corruption as a permanent state of being. That precious moment of nation-hood, which we all recall with nostalgia, is now only alive in the fleeting moments when we watch a race or the Harambee Stars. It has been swamped by the struggle against tribal enemies.

The private jokes about un-ambitious Luos and admonitions against an overly ambitious Raila Odinga are the symbolic roots of a growing public chasm between us Gikuyus and other Kenyans that is being actualized in the conduct of this ‘Gikuyu’ government. Those jokes and stereotyped opinions function to enlarge the tribal space while shrinking all the other identities (marriage, church, profession, neighborhood, economic class etc) that Kenyans share. The individual despite his membership of and loyalty to different groupings is coming to be strictly enfolded (perhaps imprisoned is a better word) in a single tribal collective, ugikuyu, that owes loyalty to those within – no matter their crimes or failings. Its character is oppositional to ODM, its language that of the victim so that it in not unusual to hear prosperous and powerful relatives of mine refer to the Gikuyu as victims of a political process that seeks to destroy us or consign us to the dark margins. At some point, as the electoral battle heats up, it is possible that this feeling of victimhood will escalate beyond the outcome of polls or the chance to ‘eat the cake,’ and into a perception of physical threat: that an ODM government would kill Gikuyus. It is here that the real danger lies. Yet the inevitable outbreaks of violence in political rallies in the coming year will be identified by many a subtle demagogue as evidence that a victory for ODM is tantamount to a clarion call for anti-Gikuyu violence.

Societies that have become engulfed in political violence rarely get much warning. This is because its lead-up is characterized by the political rhetoric of reasonableness. Prolonged political conflagration is far less the province of the foaming-at-the-mouth ideologue, the hater, it is to be found among the ‘reasonable.’ The Kibaki government and its supporters dress in the robes of order and reason. In this tribalized atmosphere, they charge their opponents with being the armies of disorder and unreasonableness. It is us versus them, and no other political ground to stand on is identified as viable. We are reasonable, they are unreasonable. Since we are for good schools, Kibaki, safe streets, prosperity, honesty and ugikuyu, they can only stand for failing schools, insecurity, Raila, Luo power and dishonesty.

I occasionally ask Gikuyu supporters of this regime to describe to me what they mean by order. They identify it with the reigning in of law-breaking matatus, the campaign to beautify Nairobi (by painting buildings, sweeping streets and planting flowers on roundabouts) and the destruction of slums, ugly kiosks and the aggressive pursuit of squatters. Order in other words is a paintbrush and a rungu. It did not strike a close relative of mine that it was unreasonable for squatters in a Nairobi slum be given ten minutes warning before their shacks were bulldozed and razed to the ground by thugs hired by the landowner and acting with the assistance of the police. We speak the language of reasonableness knowing full well that its actualization is unreasonably violent and unjust. But politics is not shooting fish in the barrel, the bulldozer and the askari’s rungu carrying forth our Gikuyu version of order will not always be met with entreaties and tears. The enemy too is subject to the law of violent escalation and will with time gain the will to resist, which in turn will drive the regime to send in even more bulldozers and bigger rungus. The Gikuyu middle class’ uncritical identification of its interests with those of the Kibaki regime will only make it seem that those rungus are wielded by us rather than by a narrow group of people who want to hide among us while pursuing their own selfish ends.

Hopefully I am wrong about the turn to violence that our present politics will lead us to. But consider again, for a moment, what the politics of either-or lead to. While we take possession of reasonableness and order, refusing to believe that other Kenyans are also driven by similar desires, we will eventually conclude that the only way to hold to these hopes is to bring others – those ‘beasts of the west’ – have to be brought to order. And this as I have mentioned before, by virtue of the shape and history of our state, which retains all its colonial trappings and tendencies, will be a recipe for our supporting violence and the disenfranchisement of our ‘enemy.’

The propaganda to come will go beyond humorous abuse to sinister whispers of what Raila and others have planned for Gikuyus should they win. A pamphlet that was found in Rwanda immediately after the 1994 genocide had this to say about how to motivate Hutus to loath their Tutsi neighbors and countrymen:

Never underestimate the strength of the enemy, and never overestimate the intelligence of the target audience. Strive in your language to identify the enemy with everything feared and loathed. Lies, exaggeration, ridicule, innuendo—all ably serve the ultimate aim of winning over the undecided, sowing confusion and division among the opposed. And this freedom from the confines of truth opens up a powerful technique for sowing fear and hatred: ‘accusation in a mirror.’

Accusation in a mirror. Remember this tactic: what we are told about the motives of ODM and Raila will often be exactly what the Gikuyu xenophobes have planned for others. That way, they will continue to present themselves as (potential) victims and the most cynical acts of manipulation and even violence that they initiate will be framed to seem as reactions to the ‘enemy.’

I do not want to end on such a pessimistic note, and I pray that I am wrong in believing that a nation cannot play with hatred and tribal division without being plunged into some degree of violence. And no, I do not think that we are on the way to becoming a Rwanda or a Congo. But I do know that one week of tribal clashes in Nairobi is all it will take to forever change our country for the worse.

I am proud of my family’s entrepreneurial courage, my being raised to be ambitious and forward looking but I recognize that these are not exclusive Gikuyu traits. I love one-man guitar; feel a twinge when I hear Kenny Rogers; and have acquired a great hunger to own land of my own. But I have lived in Nairobi and elsewhere long enough, among many people from other parts of the country and the world to know that I share these interests with others who were not born in the shadow of Mt. Kenya. A failure to take this into consideration in the coming year, by joining ranks with a supposed Gikuyu regime will only ensure that I am not true to my life. And that I will betray the ideals of flexibility and open-mindedness that my Gikuyu mother brought me up with and that have allowed me to thrive in Nairobi and abroad by being open to others with whom I share so much.

The Gikuyu Debate Hots Up!

I thought I would take comments from Binyavanga’s open letter to his father and post them as a debate. Between Binyavanga and ‘Uncle Joe’ on the issue of Gikuyu tribal chauvanism as reflected in the actions of the Kibaki government. This argument really cuts to the heart of a debate that Gikuyus of the younger generation should be having right now. For more on this take a look at the section to the right on Home and Nation…

JOE said…

Dear Wainaina,

I am sorry that at the age of 35 we have to talk about this issue. But it seems you have a few things mixed up .First let me correct you. You are a kikuyu first and a Kenyan second. Long before the colonial government formed Kenya you were a kikuyu and long after the united states of Africa forms you will still be a kikuyu.

Son we have brought you up to be a sceptical ,thinking person like you have indicated ,believing in solid institution and building them but my dear son let me remind you that when you build a house you have to begin with the foundation, a strong tree can not grow without strong roots. You foundation as a strong African begin by being a strong Kenyan, and your being a strong Kenyan begins with being a strong mgikuyu.

My dear son do not be an apologetic for who you are. Do not be ashamed of your blood and your heritage. Son sometimes in life people will blame for their own laziness and inability to adopt to the modern world .Do not think that because you are able to cope and survive that you should take the blame for their failures.

My son! Sometimes member of our own community will act foolishly but that should not worry you .after all every market has its mad man. It doesn’t mean that the whole village is mad .so dear Wainaina do not over react to the situation at hand .like every other cloud it too shall come to pass. Long before it was Kenya vs. us we defeated the British, before that countless others. So don’t worry .Only remember it is said Nyumba ya Gikuyu and Mumbi igikajeta—nigeteka!

Your loving uncle
Uncle Joe

Binyavanga said…

Dear Uncle Joe,

Ah. Thank you for your wise words! For, honestly, until you told me, I had no idea what I was first or second.

I am enlightened and positively provoked by your contribution: it is wonderful to discover that I was a Kikuyu even before I was born; it is even more useful to discover from you that I am a Kikuyu because other people are lazy; and I am a Kikuyu first because you say so – and because you know me so well.

Now I know!

Some people may view your statement as xenophobic – but, wink, wink, we all know better don’t we -you have spoken deep truths and I am not confused at all.

By the way, Uncle Joe, by name is Binyavanga. A Gikuyu name too, uncle, as it came to me through our naming system.

It would be good if you would use it.

I will do as you ask and say nothing about all the madmen in the village who are robbing Kenya and Kikuyus blind. For we must close ranks and protect them – madmen are our people too!

Can you help me join the new government to contribute positively to my FirstKikuyuness?

Do I need to take an oath?

Joe said…

Dear Wainaina

And I insist on calling you Wainaina. I am glad you received my letter in good faith. I am also glad that your letter provoked the commentary it has.

Son yes it is in did true that the village mad man is our mad man and when a choice has to be made between our village mad man and the other villages mad men, I think I would rather support our mad man. Until other constructive villagers in our village or the other village come up. I am sorry to say I trust our mad man. You see my son that is the very problem we face a lark of choice. Given two bad choices then we have no other option but to choose the one we can relate to at some level.

As pointed out in one of the comments I am glad that you respect my choice to be a kikuyu first and a Kenyan second. They are both who I am and that does not mean I devalue the number two. I take great pride in both and I am sure you will find it in your heart to do the same .My son you can be a proud kikuyu and a proud Kenyan, the two are not mutually exclusive as some would like to insist .

Now my son since you last reply I too have been doing a lot of thinking your letter spoke volumes and I hope this correspondence can continue. On the issue of the oath. You don’t need to worry about that. When you were born you were automatically oathed remember I said ‘Nyumba ya Gikuyu and Mumbi igikajeta—nigeteka!’ maybe your raising this issue is your call to that oath

Your loving uncle

Uncle Joe

Binyavanga said…

Dear Joe, well, by using the name Wainaina, you are actually referring to my elder brother; and my grandfather – if you want to talk to them, feel free. Wainaina is a name associated with my family, but not a name used to address me: culturally or in any other way. If you want to know – it would have been great if you had the courtesy to ask first – for people often have good reasons for their names – now and a thousand years ago – I am Binyavanga wa Muigai.

Brittle things crack and break, they crack and break. Maybe this is why there are so many wa Wanjirus these days – the failure by the uncles to give dynamic answers to what are becoming complex issues.

Who froze things to make them so rigid – where did this mobile and flexible force – fast growing dynamic and welcoming go – for this pure blood so spoken about by some these days, welcomed, in those very old days so many other bloods, and ideas and dynamism.

And we inherited brittle men – unable to cope with the times and stewing in dissatisfaction and drink – and repeating mantras, refusing to participate in family, and leaving the dynamism to the women who filled the shoes.

Ahh!

But a man need not explain himself. And a generation who failed us need not account.

But we must listen?

Why can the uncles and fathers see they have lost their sons?

Uncle Joe said…

Binyavanga Wainaina, I am glad you true colours have come out. ODM Supporter. Clearly your loyalty is to ODM and not Kenya. If it was you would explain to us what a clean and none tribal Narc did for three years when the rest of your gang was in power. Is it only after they were kicked out of Government that the government became tribal. I am sorry to say you are fighting a battle you will not win. I suggest you get used to this program and get used to it well. Trying to demonize leaders wont help sure you want a change in Kenya we all want a change but what are you suggesting that we replace Kibaki, Karume and Michuki for Raila, Ojode and Otieno Kajwang. Come on get serious.

In fact there is no need to continuing arguing or discussing this issue now that your true colours have come out. Let the people decide. you continue your propaganda, but come December 2007 we shall settle this mess once and for all.

Binyavanga said…

Hi all. I am quite surprised at how strongly I feel about all this. Actually, for the past few weeks, I have been going around telling people we need to “normalize” the conversation around issues in Kenya, saying that I can’t listen to shrillness any more

So please forgive my shrill entry.

Certainly there are many identity and power issues in Kenya – and yes, I agree with Anonymous that these become ominous when allied to National politics – and what are, in effect, National Warlords – whose relationship with their “constituencies” is one where they are the biggest threat to violence and the potential providers of government violence when necessary to “save” their constituents from the “others”.

Their motive is not “patriotism” – Kibaki and Michuki are not interested in the “upliftment of all Gikuyus” – nor is Koigi any more, or all that clique.

It is Koigi who has led the takeover of KBC by a group of Gikuyu xenophobes.

Their fundamental objective is to create an environment where they, their families their class (composed of all the relatives of all the warlords who are in business together, and their suppliers, contacts, tender- (isers) and so on) keep feeding the Nation with bones while they are eating the nice meat and flesh, exporting the skin, hooves and head.

They care for us, certainly, they are human you know – just like you may care a lot for the fat dog you hug, brush, and feed your leftovers.

This political culture, invented by the Kenyatta clique is at war with a new generation who find it harder and harder to believe that “our man in the house” will feed us all.

And surrounding and threatening all civil order is a generation so cynical, so removed from hope – they either take what they find rummaging around Kenya’s dustbins of possibilities, or create little mafias to strong-arm in places where the long arm of Michuki types don’t care to control.

So all attempts to clear hawkers and plant flowers simply sends crime underground. The biggest joke is: Westlands market has never been expanded – or new markets built. Gikomba, which turns over tens of millions everyday is still as it was. Wakulima market which handles all of Nairobi’s fresh produce – and also turns over tens of millions everyday. All these cannot be expanded. But flowers are planted. So – no room is made for the informal sector to “formalize its business – but it is this in formal economy that has provided most of the jobs in Kimunya’s budget- and it is this economy that is by faaaaar the largest investor and growth machine in Kenya.

The best signifier of the cynicism of this government is Dandora. More young men have been killed by the police in Dandora during Kibaki’s govt than through all of Moi’s years. A young man who looks “cool” and is “confident” is a “suspect”.

Further, the dumpsite is has grown fourfold since 2002 – as Ukoo Flani put it: Safisha Nairobi, Chafua Dandora. There is no policy to deal with it, now it is spilling into a primary school. So the cleaning of Nairobi has nothing to do with creating a well-run city. It is to do with moving the dirt to the people who a guy like Michuki has utter contempt for…

Hawkers have never been given any useful facilities – though they pay millions in fees to City Council – so real “trade” and “investment” – according to Kibaki’s government is Multinationals and titanium and export processing zones – these, we are told will make us rich.

To me it seems that wealth will come to us if that guy who has managed, with no loan, no premises, no toilet – to build world class furniture on the side of the road – the giving room and credit and encouragement to that guy – that is where we industrialize.

That is where all the toy makers from Taiwan came from.

Joe Wanjui – the most comical character of all the comic characters of the Kenyatta mafia generation has been running around saying he is a multi-millionaire because he worked hard and has ambitions (this he tells Nairobi University students). He told a friend who interviewed him that all he (my friend) needs to do is go to a bank and ask for money and build an empire.

Kibaki went to Nyeri to tell his people that they need to work hard like him. Men should stop being lazy, he said. (Even Lucy contradicted him when she heard this)

That he and Wanjui were simply recipients of spectacular success due the connections and power they held – has passed them completely.

These guys are supposed to guide us forward?

That everybody else kills themselves to make a profit but now City Council charges a Stall Owner 8000 bob for their “sign” – to keep the political class creating fat jobs for their buddies escapes them.

As Parselelo Kantai put it: Kenya is a vampire state.

As our wonderful Minister of Justice said “Baringo and Gatundu are the poorest constituencies in Kenya” – she failed to articulate clearly that they are poor because they will be arrested for stealing a mango – but she wants those who steal the taxpayer’s money given amnesty for “returning the money.

There is no way. No way at all.

That Kibaki’s thieves will be arrested by a Kibaki government – because the thieves are part of The REAL Constituency of this government.

All the rest is spin-doctoring.

Another five years of these guys and we will have a war – South Africa style – where the flowery sides of town (5 percent) will use state resources to keep away the 95 percent – South Africa style – where beautiful roads exists where you can be car-jacked 24 hours a day, raped and disembowelled.

Of late most rape cases at Nairobi Women’s hospital are men – who, sometimes have been raped by gangs of men. Crime is starting to show these kind of revenge violence where money ceases to be the primary objective. Meanwhile we are being told about mad villagers. By Uncle Joe.

Over the past three years, a cadre of fat and rich wazees have been financing a “Gikuyu revival” – this looks nice and happy on the surface – but most of its substance is the spreading of hate speech against all other tribes – the idea being that “we” are somehow special and godchosen to lead Kenya – because the rest are crazy or lazy. The “barbarians” need to be kept to their “areas” – while ‘we’ move around with impunity.

There has been an aggressive Gikuyuisation of the Kenya Institute of Education, much of Kenya’s media (KBC, the radio stations of SK Macharia (who have bigger reach in Kenya than KBC) and the Receiver of Revenue: one of these departments decides everything our children will read, the other is breaking tax collection records.

But – There have been massive pressures from the Kenyan public over the past 16 years – in many ways to have a leadership that is accountable to issues.

The implications of all of this are obvious.

Remember also: NARC Kenya does not have money to run next years campaigns. Anglo Leasing was stopped before they could manufacture slush fund – so for the referendum, they used tax payers money. So these billions being collected will be used, and abused, and the bigger threat there is to Kibaki, the more they will abuse this. To keep themselves in power, they will spend it all. But – this will of course means that they will lose the credibility of their support base.

Yes? Maybe: the gamble is: to make the Gikuyu so paranoid about the “beasts from the west” they will believe that this abuse was necessary to prevent foaming tribals descending on the properties of “hard-working and god-fearing Gikuyus” – this is the campaign strategy to keep the Gikuyu masses in the fold – and have a substantial base to build on for the election – for with this, all is needed is kidogo -kidogo from the rest of Kenya.

But – there is a problem. Though the older generations of Gikuyus still have post-Emergency fears for their well being and post-Moi fears and so on. The younger are not quite so “disciplined” – they have no stake in Coffee, or Tea or Milk – no title deeds, and not much fondness for the wazee.

But – the well-travelled, better educated class of young Gikuyus have their heads in the sand. the Kibaki government is good for them: it understands pavement cleaning and flower gardens in roundabouts – and making life good if you work for a bank. That these benefits are every short-lived is not a question. Tukule sasa.

No coalition of visible younger Gikuyus has made their position clear on issues. None is saying anything about the rising xenophobia.

There are some people talking to young people all over the country, to be aggressive about their political demands – but many Kenyan abroad keep fanning the idea of this new uGikuyu – and ignore the fact that is will benefit no ordinary Kenyan, and may lead to blood on the streets.

I believe Kenya has changed more in the past 4 years than in the past 40. For the first time there is powerful public pressure on an antiquated system. In fact, I think that we are nearer getting a reasonably accountable government than we imagine – the acts of this government have the flavour of desperation – they know their time is up and are trying to grab what they can. So the journey is not too long.

I urge all thinking Gikuyus to completely ignore any attempts to fan your tribal pride – this is the single biggest hurdle facing us in building a meaningful government. The purpose of this is to continue to fuck you, and your children and their children, as you have been fucked since 1952.

If Kibaki’s people come back to power, the gloves will be off. Like Moi, they will have so embedded themselves in our national bloodstream – it will be 27 years before their clique will cede power.

Believe the nonsense at your peril.

Uncle Joe said…

Binyavanga a leopard can hide but it can’t hide its spots. I don’t live in an idealistic world. I used to, when I was younger. I now live in a practical world. if you are not the ODM youthwinger that I think you are, why haven’t you criticized the thieves in ODM, the looters and those who made others lie low like envelopes in the past?

Are you blind to some evil or are you blind to all evil. The notion you keep repeating that I am defending my thief is a big joke. So you want me to support another community’s thug… is that what you call justice and progress.
Will Kenya only progress if old people retire and hand over power to younger looters and killers? Is that what you are saying?

You disappoint me wa Mwangi. You disappoint me wa Mwangi. Why don’t you just come with it and tell us what it is you want instead of hiding behind being progressive. If it is indeed true that you are not an ODM youth winger and say Kenya is much bigger than the two. Tell the young people what the options are. Tell them what party you are supporting, who you want them to vote for against the flowerplanters.

I have been labelled as one of those who call people beasts, where is the dynamic thinking you were talking about cant I be a kyuk who loves my tribe. Why does my love for my roots have to mean that I hate others for theirs? Does loving my tribe automatically refer to others as beasts? What dynamic reasoning is this, from what era does this dynamic thinking come from?

it make come as a shock wa Mwangi I am actually younger than you. I grew up in an urban metropolis and attended a national school. I have travelled and seen other societies both within Africa and without and I must say I have never seen anything like this.

You see the truth is you want to see the glass half empty and I see a glass half full. I am being realistic believing we can change things from within as young people but you being the railamaniac I think you are want a revolution with a lynching of all kyuks to go with it .is this what we call progress.

What is wrong with Kibaki planting flowers on roundabouts are you against the beautification of our cities, is it a sin or misnomer? what about the growing economy have you forgotten about that, and the jobs that have been created since?

Why is it you rush to attack and drag people you have never met in the mad (and why are they only from Narc?) Why don’t you tell us of the Kojwanga’s and the stolen clients money, the Ntimamas and the kikuyu blood that flows from his pangas? Have you developed selective memory?

Has the Rwanda experience taught you nothing? Was it only Tutsis who died or did Hutus suffer also? Revolutions don’t work in Africa their results are only bloodshed. So stop being a kyuk apologetic. We have done nothing wrong and don’t need you to speak up or apologize for us. if this is an issues of ideas lets talk about ideas all this talk about tribes is making me sick.

When kibaki was planting flowers was he planting them for Kikuyus only or was he planting them for the nation that is the question I want you to think about?

Binyavanga said…

Nice one, Uncle Joe, Dear Dear uncle Joe: are you so limited in options and faith for our beautiful country that all you can dream is that one is either ODM or NARC KENYA…?

Love it. ‘Reveal One’s true colours’ – proper Kenya politicospeak – my subject is specific: Gikuyu xenophobia which makes one quite able to choose a genuine thieving devil for the sorts of reasons the Rwandese learned were not taking them anywhere; and the Ugandans learned, painfully, were never going anywhere – the idea that one chooses a thief of one’s tribe over sensible person of another is insane – and scary when ordinary educated people start talking like this – the tone and intensity of the dislike and propaganda is worse than it was in 69, and threatens good order in Kenya.

I am not hiding anything bro – the world is much more complex than ODM – a new and somewhat fishy organisation not that different from NARC Kenya, NARC and the rest…same sort.

There is a lot more in Kenya. ODM and NARC are now what we deserve because we are refusing to dream better.

The space is open – but we have inherited habits from the old political system where we imagine the basic options thrust at us are all that can be on offer – the space is wide open. The space is wide open.

The space is WIDE open.

Binyavanga said…

The People I Have Loved

I do not know if I would pick arms for this country; I do not know even whether the flag really means that much to me. All I can commit to: for my life and death – is the people and landscapes (real and metaphorical) that I have loved; those who took journeys and time with me; those who survived hard times; taught me – those who speak my language – by this I mean those who I need not say anything with grammar for them to understand what I mean. Now love cannot arrange itself in clean lines – I have loved from places that do not account for my background or tribe.
These fragile and powerful places can be the beginning of a nation – by consensus.
But hate is mathematical: for when people come under the slogan of hate: such and such people are like such and such – all relationships that derive from this shall be symmetrical. It becomes easy to cut away, end friendships, and kill wives when the symmetry of hate is clear within you.
Maybe this is why it is said by the philosophers of war and nation that nationhood and patriotism is built by blood – against a common enemy: that people of forty languages will quickly become “one” after a bruising ten year war with a foreign “outsider” who threatens everybody’s well-being.
A Nation by blood
Maybe the way our Uncle Joes flirt with this rhetoric is simply because we have never been at war. We have seen, over the past century, time and time again, whole groupings butchered based on words that sound exactly like Uncle Joe’s. The Rwanda rhetoric was about “clearing” or “cleaning” – a distant future dream of a symmetrical time where all over Kenya, atiriri will be sang, and messy other things shall not intervene.
There are positions that can be taken: with trust good faith – and build bridges even when they do not lead to clear progress – because we have only one other option: put a fence around yourself and arm.
Brussels, the city – for five hundred years, spent most of its surplus on the building of fortifications; one after another each collapsing after some conquest or other and rebuilding beginning immediately and more ambitiously. It was the city’s most ambitious project – generations of progress and wealth were sucked up into war and fortifications – and only the late entry of massive Congo money made Brussels rich.
Armed relationships escalate.
The question about ODM right now is meaningless. The government in power in NARC Kenya, and they are asking YOU – to assume that they are valid and viable because the ONLY other thing in Kenya is the Beast from the West.
The idea behind this, of course (Kenyan politics is very crude – it is us who try to put in pethos) – to suck you into the Soap Opera of two players – and escalate the shit, till we are all standing behind walls with machetes and voting cards saying ai even if I went to a National school, those Luos, those Luos, those Luos…and at some point the Luo ceases to become a person.
Anybody questioning NARC Kenya becomes an “ODM Youth Winger”
…and that is a declaration of war. What Uncle Joe said was he is at war. Rwanda is not an example, to him, of how not to do it – it is a territory of “similar examples” to justify his war-like stance.
What is actually being said is: there is no room for other – and we all know, there is no conversation or debate to be had with a youth winger. You either flee or fight. And that Youth Winger you see may be a doctor, a teacher, the guy who saved you from bullies when you were a kid, it may even be a Gikuyu who happens to have a gap he got in a bar-fight. And of course, we are not yet in 2007. In 2007, what would Uncle Joe be invoking to show his fears: for if the Youth Winger is the lowest, most violent of Kenyans, the rung below that is bestial, no longer human. And once people are persuaded that a whole group of such are a-comin’ they are a comin’ to getcha……
Now Uncle Joe has made it clear he is not “fleeing from the beast” so I guess he is “fighting the beast”
So fight, bwana. Fight away. I have nothing more to say to you man. Do your thing.

Meanwhile – let us all remember, all these warlords, ODM, NARC – when the accounting is done – they all own shit in each other’s backyards. You cannot separate the shares of Moi in this economy and the shares of Kibaki. Uhuru and his “uncle” Moi.
They are partners and need to make this temperature so we never realise who the real enemy is. Amazing how the only consensus in this government was when MPs wanted salary increments.
It is all about symmetry: if The Gikuyus can be made to hate; the Luos made to hate, the Kalenjins made to hate – they are easy to manage, and rob. They will defend their mdosi to the bitter end.
Haha. Uncle Joe! I had a good laugh with that one!
What is wrong with planting flowers in roundabouts? It is beautifying the city!
I am stuck everyday in the stupidest jam this side of the Sahara – as the most illogical and beautiful roundabout in Kileleshwa (actually shaped in a kind of wobbly oval) is manned by a very prettily dressed man who knows nothing about flow of traffic and is making empty hand gestures inherited from the colonial era without thought.
And we hoot and bang our heads and forget to stop and smell the beautiful flowers in the beautiful roundabout.
The roundabout is very very beautiful, Uncle Joe – and utterly meaningless – it comes from the mentality of those who were taught in shiny Vaseline colonial missionary schools how to copy and how not to think for yourself. The roundabout has been removed from all urban plans of even stupider governments than ours. I am waiting for them to start whitewashing stones around pavements.
Or build a new matatu rank, like the one in Westlands – that completely forgot to think about the hundreds of thousands of people who would need to cross the busiest highway in Kenya to get to the matatu.
The rank is very very pretty indeed. And very very useless indeed.
And educated people will defend them – because a person of their tribe built them. Na hiyo, as Moi said, ni Maendeleo.

The most comical thing about all this is the children: you will see the children of warlords whose “tribes” are butchering each other, visit each other’s homes, date, marry, party together, go to the same schools and attend each other’s weddings. While you foam at the mouth for your leaders, their children are very happy having multi-tribal sex and fun and compassion even – they can afford it.
And each successive government will need to do exactly the same thing to finance this lifestyle. So long as their loyal defenders continue to carry their flag.
How many of us will stand up to be counted on what we DO not want, and what we DO not tolerate.

A Letter to My Father, and Others

Dear Baba,

This is an odd and public and rhetorical letter, on a subject that recent tradition has asked us to sweep under the carpet. I find myself, at 35, at odds with the tone and nature and political space that is Gikuyu. For the first time in my life, in the Kibaki government, my identity as a Gikuyu has been questioned, I have seen text messages distributed amongst Gikuyus about “beasts from the West” and the like.

You have brought me up to be a skeptical person, a thinking person, a Kenyan first, a Nakuru boy, a person who believes in solid institutions, in building them, and growing them – as you did so well for so many years.

This present wave of “uGikuyu” seems to have sucked up a whole generation of people: who believe that the future of Kenya lies ONLY under a Gikuyu umbrella. To me this seems like crazy and corrupt politics, capitalising on the post- Mau Mau, and post Kenyatta entitlements and paranoias that have been past on from parent to child, often without explanation or analysis – and now what is we have is a vague formless fear of the unknown from the ‘other side’.

Last week, some young man, a university graduate told me that the clashes were about “the KAMATUSA tribes killing the Gikuyus”. Basic information would counter this – but educated people, PARENTS, are passing this bigotry on.

On the other side of our family: from Mum’s side, a genocide happened.

I find I cannot be silent about the politiking and the text messaging xenophobia that has infected, it seems, all sensible Gikuyus. I say this because no prominent people are speaking against this: this insane kitchen cabinet of an insane presidency is using fear to keep Gikuyus on their side, and this is causing serious damage to our place, and the place of our children in a future Kenya. Not even the Moi Kalenjin junta caused so much social and tribal friction, in such a short time. It is now Gikuyu versus Kenya – with yuppies saying Kenya does not know what it talking about because Kibaki has planted flowers in roundabouts.

Like any, many young people, I am at a loss what do or say. We are heading to a very dangerous place, displaying a sense of entitlement and ethnic chauvinism that can only lead to violence – all, its seems, to keep a few people who made money during Kenyatta’s time happy and wealthy.

Some friends of mine have said that we are “owed” because we “suffered” under Moi.

Who did not suffer under Moi?

Many people want to speak of these things and agree there is a problem in bars and huddles and not in public. Few people have this conversation with their parents. In clear and naked transparency. Why?

You did not bring me up to react like this.

I will not react like this. I know how much you have believed and invested in the idea of a functional and forward-looking Kenya. I feel that the Gikuyus who feel this way should make themselves public – it is not an affirmation of anything, no ideology – simply a declaration of one’s loyalty to a good and clean Kenya

Is it not time that right minded people started to speak out?

I am sending this email out to you all trusted friends, with love. Post, and distribute this if you can.

Please forward the question to those you feel want to start a dialogue. What is the challenge of this generation? Why is nobody of your generation making their stand clear? Is this government something to approve of? Are “we” behind this new government?

Am I missing a particular conversation?

Why can’t we name this problem?

How can we stop the hate?

With much love,

Your son,

Binyavanga Wainaina

Death of the Kenya Dream?

Written for The East African (Nairobi)
July 31, 2006
By Parselelo Kantai (posted here with the author’s permission)

AT THE LAUNCH OF LOTTE HUGHES’s book, Moving the Maasai, Professor Bethwel Ogot stood up and declared the Kenyan project dead.

Ogot, the father of Kenyan history and Africa’s most celebrated historian, has spent most of his career writing Kenya into being. When he started out over 50 years ago, Africans were said to have no history. They lived in a continuous unconscious present, a land of perpetual childhood.

He challenged this racist assumption, traced the origins of many of the disparate peoples that occupied the Kenyan geographical space, forged links with the nationalists of the Independence era, promulgated and defended the project that was the Kenyan nation state.

And now here he was in the twilight of his career, presiding over a slice of imported sub-nationalist history.

Ogot’s sentiments reflect something that most Kenyans – especially those marginalised by, and in, the past – know but are afraid to talk about: that the idea of Kenya is a political fiction that will not bear close scrutiny. In fact, the official version of Kenya as born of a heroic armed struggle against colonialism is a narrative that automatically excludes them.

Them: at the top of that list is, in fact, the Mau Mau themselves – the armed strugglers. As Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson shows, the Mau Mau were losers in both war and peace: ‘Kenyatta had been asked about Mau Mau. His answer had been unequivocal: ‘We shall not allow hooligans to rule Kenya- Mau Mau was a disease, which was eradicated and must never be remembered again.’

Independent Kenya was founded on a pact of forgetting the past – the spirit of Harambee. To achieve this, histories both collective and personal had to be swept under the national carpet; questions about how notorious collaborators, torturers from the Emergency era, had come to the centre of power were suppressed.

The drama of forging the nation was a single narrative in the continuous present tense – the narrative of Development. Any invocation of the past brought instant punishment, as the late Bildad Kaggia discovered.

Kaggia was the assistant minister for education and the MP for Kandara in then Fort Hall district. In September 1963, he wrote to the minister of agriculture, lands and settlement, Jackson Angaine, inquiring about the restoration of lands confiscated from the Mau Mau, “the freedom fighters who were then known as terrorists”.

In response, Angaine warned him against disrupting the ongoing government land resettlement programme: “Any attempt to disrupt the present consolidated areas- would lead to agricultural chaos, a grave setback to the economy and be in direct contravention of the spirit of Harambee whereby past differences are to be forgotten.” Kaggia, freedom fighter and detained with Kenyatta at Kapenguria, was persistent. It cost him his job – he was forced to resign over the issue – and earned him a lifelong tag of Public Enemy.

Nationalism was meant to be a transformative project. Like the missionary’s civilising mission before it, it would shake the tribe out of the nascent citizen, feed him on a diet of English and Kiswahili, wean him from poverty and disease. Successful, it would have been glorious vindication of the founding ethos, the national need for amnesia.

It was not successful. In fact, after a few earnest gestures, the nationalists themselves began to actively sabotage their own project. Broke when they inherited the state, they needed to eat. To do so, they formed networks of sub-nationalist privilege that operated on the principle that the tribe – and therefore the tribal patron at the centre – was the unstated vehicle of distribution of public resources. Nationalism became a byword for private accumulation.

ANY CONVERSATION of the past is therefore deeply uncomfortable. It is the closed realm in which the personal stories of an ageing political elite are too closely entwined with a public, collective history. Opening it up would force the wenye nchi into an accounting process that they would no doubt rather avoid (wenye nchi means they who own the country, as against wananchi, people of the country, ie, citizens).

Time is on their side, and history returns the second time as farce. It was perhaps a mark of how mysterious these histories had become – how thick the blanket of national amnesia that covered the past – that, soon after NARC came to power, the public was treated to a series of historical faux pas.

One of NARC’s first orders of business was the search for Dedan Kimathi’s grave – in order to exhume the Mau Mau leader’s remains and give him a hero’s burial. The writer Andia Kisia had a year before written a story with an alarmingly similar scenario. Called A Likely Story, she describes the search for Kimathi’s grave. It ends in farce. While digging around the Kamiti Prison grounds, it slowly becomes clear that nobody can actually remember where Kimathi was buried.

Fact proved as strange as fiction. In the event, a highly political event graced by Cabinet ministers, nobody could remember where he was buried. His bones have never been recovered.

Then a man was brought in from Ethiopia and presented to the public as the disappeared Mau Mau hero, General Stanley Mathenge. That act in itself, taking a survivor out the national closet – with all his pent-up secrets, his 50 years of anonymity – seemed to confirm that NARC’s victory over 40 years of Kanu rule was the key to opening up the past.

It was not to be. After a few nervous days in which he was presented to the public and then to his family (who tearfully embraced him) “General Mathenge” couldn’t take it any more. He revealed that he was actually Lemma Ayanu, an Ethiopian peasant farmer.

In perhaps an even more comical display of national amnesia, he was dispatched to the national laboratory and DNA-tested, then swiftly sent back to Ethiopia. The results were never publicly released, a little detail that betrayed the fact that the soul of the new regime was still as paranoid as the old one. And as if to emphasise that NARC was largely a collection of the same old wenye nchi in populist disguise, the promised exercise of opening up the past through a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was quietly dropped.

But still. The fact that at least three books touching on Kenya’s colonial experience have been launched in Kenya in the space of 18 months would seem to suggest a limited admission of the need for a national conversation on the past. The launch in Nairobi of Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson, The British Gulag by Caroline Elkins and Moving the Maasai by Lotte Hughes would not have been possible under either Kenyatta’s or Moi’s Kanu.

All these books are loaded with the seeds to plant Kenya’s fraught and tragic histories firmly in the present. They are, each one of them, highly successful experiments in a kind of forensic investigative history. They name names, they profile victims, they point accusing fingers.

In my heated imagination, I envisioned the wenye nchi scampering around for places to hide, hastily launching cover-ups, Commissions of Inquiry. Instead, the expected swords turned to ploughshares, only furrowing the ground of a dormant nationalist imagination. Among the invited guests to her book launch, Caroline Elkins had included the vice-president and the First Lady, both of whom declared the books tremendously useful, in the way that you would describe returned museum artefacts.

What had happened?

Two things, it seems to me. First, the nationalist moment has passed; the fervour with which the past could be used to flay the skins of the saboteurs of nationalism no longer exists. The past has lain under the carpet for so long, it seems to have rotted away and died. In its place is a growing sub-nationalist culture, in which the survivors of colonial injustice seek to point their victimhood in a more profitable direction: British courts and British society, both of which are writhing in the guilt of their imperial past, and which can be forced to pay for past sins.

Both the Mau Mau survivors and the Maasai activists are planning on making claims against the British government. In Andia Kisia’s A Likely Story, historical documents are missing. The protagonist, a man driven to frenzy by his search for the truth, soon discovers why. There is an official who is eating them. He catches him at it.

A similarly Kafkaesque culture of denial, disappearing and forgetting – as Maasai activists discovered when then lands minister Amos Kimunya told them to come back in 900 years if they wanted to reclaim their stolen lands in Laikipia – simply means that confronting the Kenyan state within the bounds of litigation and democracy is an exercise in futility. The Kenyan state only reacts to the vocabulary of mass mobilisation and violence. The Maasai discovered this quickly, when they demonstrated in 2004, attempting to reclaim Laikipia.

The second thing that happened is this: the books, all of them, are pointed in another direction. Their vitriol and indignation is part of an essentially British conversation about its colonial past. On the right of that conversation are those claiming the intrinsic good of Empire – its bequeathing of modernity to erstwhile savages. On the right are the likes of Hughes, Anderson and the American Elkins, who have uncovered British colonial frauds and crimes – the colonial swindle of the Maasai that paved way for British settlement in the White Highlands; the concentration camps and hangings that silenced the Mau Mau during the Emergency. Crimes that shatter the strangely enduring myth of “Empire as a good thing”, making British imperialism look like Nazi Germany.

In between right and left is, however, where the games begin – the contested territory of agency. Who speaks for the “subject races”, yesterday’s “savage natives”, today’s victim claimants? It is, as the writer Michela Wrong recently commented, ironical that the attacks on colonial infidelities and atrocities – on the white administrators who presided over the colonial project in Kenya and elsewhere – are coming from white Westerners:

We are white Westerners, which means that however we may empathise, however vicariously angry we may grow as we pore over old documents, ours remains an essentially intellectual interest. It wasn’t our ancestors who found their paths barred by prejudice, their lives shaped by laws and taxes devised by Africa’s uninvited guests.

It is a question fraught with Africa’s post-colonial contradictions. The collapse of the nationalist enterprise devalued such former prestige projects as research and, as said earlier, effectively silenced its more intrepid practitioners: the men and women detained and sent into exile for asking the most basic questions. The vacuum left has been filled by researchers in Western universities.

Their interest – in the subjects and the subject matter – may be intellectual, but that should not be confused with a benign interest. The territories they now possess are today in their way as valuable as imperialism’s most prized overseas possessions at the height of colonialism. And that doesn’t just refer to funding opportunities. By occupying this intellectual territory, Western academics in African studies departments are also managing perceptions – perceptions of what Africa is and how it can be engaged with.

People who import their histories are doomed by the failure of their own imaginations. Constantly acted upon, they will struggle with a lack of self-belief, and play out whatever roles are assigned to them without ever quite understanding their place in the world. This is the true meaning of “Third World”, the writer VS Naipaul’s “half-made places” that have failed to imagine themselves into an existence beyond the assignations of their former conquerors. The repossession of this territory is the new frontier for the African intellectual.

(c) Parselelo Kantai

The Rule of Law (you say you want it?)

From:
To: KCL SS&PP Students (University of London, King’s College)
Sent: Tuesday, August 29, 2006 4:30:37 PM
Subject: DVD & video borrowing restriction

Dear all,
Please see the dull but important message below, which will principally
affect users at the Maughan Library.

************

Dear student,

We have recently implemented a borrowing restriction regarding the ISS
DVD/VHS collection.

In compliance with the Video Recording Act (VRA) 1984 the British
censor must classify (U, PG, 12, 15 or 18) every video or DVD
distributed in the UK. It is an offence (under Section 9) to supply a
video or DVD that hasn’t been classified unless it lies within a very
narrow class that escapes classification entirely. This class includes
sports and educational DVDs. ERA recordings (off-air) are also exempt.
Not all foreign imports have been classified, though those that have
had a theatrical release already will certainly have been rated.

It is also an offence to supply a DVD/video that does not feature the
correct certification labels (Section 13). No foreign imports will have
UK markings. Under the Act, the word “supply” is carefully defined and
it includes “letting on hire” or loaning, even for no reward.

Therefore, having consulted with the KCL Legal Compliance Team we can
no longer allow unclassified videos or DVDs to be removed from the
building (except for classroom teaching on prior authorisation).
However, they can be issued for viewing in the Library & ISC itself.
This use apparently escapes the statutory definition of “supply”. This
category of DVD and video now features a red reference card stating
where the item can be played as well as a short loan label, with the
last loan period ending at closing time.

We particularly wish to avoid any embarrassment or arguments at the
main counter and security gate so we would appreciate your co-operation
in this matter.

———————-
Information Specialist – Social Science & Public Policy
Information Services & Systems
King’s College London
Franklin-Wilkins Building
Waterloo Campus
London SE1 9NH

Tusker Beers and Daddy

My oh my, I have not blogged for the past two weeks. It is because I have been actually trying to get my running going (not going very well I must say), working and writing, all which has left me absolutely exhausted and strangely blog-mute if you know what I mean. My life on the road continued this past week when I flew to Nairobi for the weekend. Now I am in Cape Town for the first time in my life. More on that later.

Nairobi. You know you are in Kenya when the first conversation you have is on politics and for this year, precisely what are the odds of this politician or that one rising to the presidency during the 2007 elections. Politics in Kenya is nothing more than a long-running soap opera. In fact, if there is one thing that more democratic government and a free press have brought Kenyans it is a great improvement in the quality of entertainment. Kenyans speak of their politicians with the kind of affection you might have for Jim Carrey. Except that these are Jim Carreys whose comedic qualities carry a certain tragic tinge to them. As in there is a painful price to pay for your laughter. I kept hearing the same phrase of ‘so and so politician is powerful, but he is less powerful than he was last year’ over and over again, and I thought of how often I have heard it without quite understanding what it means in essence. Where does power dwell in Kenya, the president’s power for instance? This problem was subjected to the Nairobi political classroom otherwise known as the bar.

No, I suggested between sips of cold Tusker beers, it is not in the guns since at any one gven time there are only a few of the 30 million Kenyans who are directly threatened with violence from not opposing whatever nasty measures our presidents have foistered on us. Of course the threat of that violence in the ‘bad old days’ was probably enough to stay the tongue and actions of most citizens who were in opposition. But then what was it that bound that enormous coercive apparatus to one man? Was it just money, patronage and fear?

No, I actually think that President Moi’s and Kenyatta’s power was nestled in fatherhood. We called them, in one nauseating praise song after the other, baba wa taifa (father of the nation.) That is what they were; those were not just idle words. Where else would power nestle and operate out of in Kenya if not from the depths of family power relations. The country is too disparate, its history of centralised state administration too brief and fleeting and the state’s means of violence quite modest at best. There was no history of a Kenyan nation with its narratives of a leadership whose legitimate position was traceable to a history peculiar to that nation. The British ruled us under the pretext of civilising us, improving our lot and old-fashioned violence. What about those who took over after them, especially in State House, what soil would they seek to plant their ‘power’ over people? I think it was quite simple really. Power or influence or control, whatever word you want to use, is encountered first and foremost in the home. Daddy and mummy have it, you know it from the first moment your mouth seeks a milk-filled breast and when your father unleashes a little violence your way, or perhaps your mother’s way just to show who is in charge. That was and is the case for every single Kenyan community.

Our presidents without fail justified their position, and the liberties they took with our freedoms and bodies, on their taking over the British mission to improve our ‘traditional’ selves and since they could not depend on the same soil to plant their power seed as had been planted in Britain, they took on the mantle of Father. The one power relation that every single Kenyan understood and had experienced from his earliest age. They were the kings and we were their children. That is why they managed to rule over us so successfully for so long.

Many of the cries for comment from the ever-silent, sphinx-like Kibaki, are really just calls for Father to speak. Many of us are discomfited by the silence emanating from where previously authority was nestled. We wonder why he is not in control. We begin to admire Moi with the benefit of hindsight. And always as we reminisce selectively, we marvel at how much he controlled, how he never suffered fools, his mastery over us. My suspicion is that Kibaki’s essential problem is that he is too lazy and aloof to play Father and therefore his power seems to be rooted in little other than our collective memory of serekali (government) and his ability to seem slightly above the bottom of the barrel crab war that is the soap opera of Kenyan politics. I will come back to this later, I am being rushed out of the room. Now I am off to the Cape Town waterfront for the first time.

Land, the eternal Gikuyu conversation

I am in Nairobi for a few days from London and just came from a ride to Athi River with my mother who is purchasing some land there. We were accompanied by my uncle, the cliche family rogue, who knows every single trick Nairobi has to part you from your money by means fair or foul. For the hour it took to drive there through heavy traffic and a seriously torn up road, we had the same conversation that we have shared since I can remember: land or to be more specific, how to acquire it and make a profit off it.

Plots were pointed out and owners identified. We had debates on the depth of the water table, the route a new trunk road will take vis-a-vis said plots of land and the provision of electricity. Prices were bandied about and expected returns in the coming years. Both my uncle and mother seem to possess a vast catalogue of information on land and its price. So there were comments like, ‘just behind those shops, an acre used to cost 10,000 shillings in 1983-85 and you can’t get one now for less than a quarter million.’ Followed by exclamations of surprise and frustration at not having spotted such obvious opportunities and pledges to never again allow such profits to slip through the fingers.

The particular land that we were driving out to contemplate is close to Daystar University. I stood admiring its look, the view and suchlike, while my uncle kept muttering that it was fat. Fat, as he explained, refers to land fertility and also suggests potential financial gains from owning it.

We had bypassed many students walking the muddy road to the Mombasa-Nairobi highway and I offered one a ride into town. As is usual when I meet a university student, I wanted to know what she was studying, quality of lectures etc. But my mother and uncle had a quite different take on what to talk about with a stranger. They asked pointed questions about student accommodation, entertainment, health provision and others in a similar vein. By the time we got back into the city, it had become clear that building self-contained hostel space, a pharmacy, a pool hall and a restaurant catering to students were promising business opportunities. The price of her accommodation was revealed in addition to her transport and entertainment costs. After we dropped her off, all mention of the beauty of the views had been replaced by strategies to ‘do some business’ on the land.

In London or New York or wherever else I have lived, I never had these types of conversations with anyone. I am sure that the British can probably relate in regard to home ownership but it struck me that this conversation was different. Perhaps I am being ignorant but I think that it was a typical Gikuyu form of dialogue. Property and its acquisition form the common ground, the public space even. And to own it is a sign of some kind of virtue. How else to explain how few conversations I have overheard since I was a child that were not anchored by some form of financial consideration.

Imagine how many millions of similar conversations are held every year and the enormous ambitions they give rise to. Gikuyu land hunger has acquired sinister overtones in different parts of the country. The image of voracious locusts springs to mind when I recall some complaints I have heard. Yet it strikes me, that kikuyus – whether wa-sapere or not – have this search at the heart of the way they regard the good life. Only property owners get a certain respect that a majority crave. The method of acquisition is less important, in fact it might be completely irrelevant since there is a sentiment I believe of the world being a tough competitive place in which victories are counted one property at a time. Imagine how many millions of similar conversations are held every year and the enormous ambitions they give rise to. Gikuyu land hunger has acquired sinister overtones in different parts of the country. The image of voracious locusts springs to mind when I recall some complaints I have heard. Yet it strikes me, that Gikuyus – whether wa-sapere or not – have this search at the heart of what they regard as the good life. Only property owners get a certain respect. The method of acquisition is less important, in fact it might be completely irrelevant since there is a sentiment I believe of the world being a tough competitive place in which victories are counted one property at a time.

We’re going to get you simba, we’re going to get you! MUHAHAHA, MUHAHAHAH, MUHAHAHA!

“This is the plan: we will import 135 wild animals from Kenya, or 98% of the total, thus leaving behind only 3 old lions. Then we ship our haul to Bangkok where we will hang them from the rafters and slowly stick hot pins into their paws while depriving them of sleep. We’re going to get you simba, we’re going to get you! MUHAHAHA, MUHAHAHAH, MUHAHAHA!”

Forget corruption, forget political murders, tsunamis and terrorist bombings, there is a new scourge in Kenya: animals are suffering. The speak-to-power members of our ‘civil society’ are as ever ready to step to the breach and put a stop to injustice wherever it rears its ugly head. Word on the street is that in the past few months there have been night vigils held outside Hotel Intercontinental in Nairobi to protest against the sending of Kenyan wildlife to Thailand. Those Thais, you just know that they spend most of their time in Bangkok twirling their little brown thumbs and laughing maniacally as they invent unusual new tortures. Their record speaks for itself. In August 2004, for instance, there was an international uproar – at least among animal welfare groups – when 3 out of 115 orangutans died of pneumonia in a Bangkok zoo. Earlier, 32 ‘frightened, wide-eyed baby orangutans, many hugging each other’ were found in the same ‘cramped private Thai zoo’ (see story here). The zoo owners have much to answer for. There were clearly Crimes Against Primates being carried out on the premises. It might even have been that the 32 babies were being raised to become fighters in Bangkok’s famous orangutan boxing. The cruelty. Oh, the sheer mad, evil genius of it all.

They came to Nairobi in November to hoodwink us. Taking time off from his busy schedule of trying to deal with a small constitutional matter, declining national life expectancy, hunger, terrorist attacks, widespread crime, official corruption and a failed state just north of the border, our president took time to engage in the sophisticated arena of international geopolitics. Signing a solemn Memorandum of Understanding with Thai Prime Minister Thaskin Shinawatra, President Kibaki earned Kenya a cool 80 million shillings in return for sending the wild animals to a private zoo in Thailand. What was Mr. Shinawatra thinking? I mean c’mon. Clearly, his ambassador to Nairobi had not informed him that MOUs are really not the way to go in State House. But that is a matter for another discussion.

I demand that we require the Thais to sign and ratify the UN Convention Against Torture before Kenya sends animals to them. We do not want any more Abu Ghraibs after all. Imagine, if you have the courage, what fiendish plots our elands, dik dik and hippos could be subjected to. It makes me quail, yet I want to be true to my optimistic nature.

I have a dream that one day my nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all elephants, orangutans and little black boys are created equal.” I have a dream that one day on the pavements of the Intercontinental, a great cause shall come to fruition: that the bad people who like doing bad things to wildlife will stop and be good and do good things. I have a dream that one day, one day, that I too shall drive a four wheel drive jeep to the national park, and that there, waiting with open arms, will be a Maasai warrior who shall join with me in sustainably loving nature. From the slopes of Mt Kenya to the palm trees of Lamu, I dream that this land will be emptied of its detritus of selfish humans who have transformed an oasis of noble beasts into a desert sweltering with the rot of poaching and tourism. My friends, I have a dream that our apes, fauna and snakes will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their hides or the texture of their scales, but by the amount of conservation funding they attract to our shores. I have a dream today. By any means necessary. Yeah.

Signs that the Devil roams among us and that the Kenyan nation shall be born in church

A word of advice from the get-go: enjoy your beer now and wear your mini-skirts often because such joys – if that is what they are to you – might not last long.

Let me explain by introducing my new favourite pastor, Rev. Dr David Githii, head of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA). He argues that Kenyan government buildings harbour many satanic symbols and that Kenya is a country reeling under ‘the great influence of devil worship’. He was recently quoted in the Standard saying that “the two snakes at the entrance to Parliament, the huge Masonic star at the entrance to the High Court, the frogs and tortoise signs in the High Court must be demolished.” Presumably because they are signs of the devil. Nor did his investigations into the insidious nature of Lucifer stop there. It turns out that Kenya’s national rallying call, harambee which means pulling together, is actually a religious invocation: Haree means hail, while Ambe is a Hindu Goddess (ahem, a mere 2 years ago, when in high school, we used to call parties harees, as in ‘we are off to haree at carni’. Little did we suspect that we were deep in the Gujarati). It came into usage in Kenya courtesy of the Indian coolies who built the Kenya-Uganda railway and would chant the phrase as they toiled under the gaze of man-eating lions. Some of the symbols that have come under suspicion for promoting devilry and general evil include ‘a compass and square on the grilles at the entrance to St. Andrews Church, Masonic coffins on the church’s 30 windows and celestial globes on stairs leading to the main sanctuary.’ (See more here) Other symbols on the chopping board are the old church’s spiral which is a spear on top of a hut.

Rev. Githii’s faction has been opposed by one made up of some of the more prominent business leaders in the congregation who according to the press contend that ‘the targeted symbols and designs have been in the PCEA churches for more than a century and were simple Scottish internal decor engravings and patterns on stained glass windows with links to Freemasonry but not necessarily satanic.’ This faction, perhaps unknowingly, is clutching to the legacy of the Overseas Presbytery of the Church of Scotland which for almost half a century (until 1956) run the affairs of the church and only relinquished direct control in 1975 when the first African senior minister was installed. The glass stained windows that are the subject of Rev. Githii’s righteous wrath are a tangible connection to the colonial ‘history’ of the church. The faction that supports their maintenance shall eventually lose because it is unknowingly in the path of a historical tsunami.

In the past, I have argued on this blog that African Christianity is approaching an epochal break with its European roots. The separation of the moral domain of the Kenyan and of the European is the fundamental moment in decolonisation. It should not be a surprise that it is taking place within the church; an institution built on the possibility of transcendence much more so than any secular decolonisation idea. You are more than the sum of your parts in the church. In a moment you can be made whole: transformed from sinner to believer, from sickness to health and witness the dead brought to life. Whether this is true or not matters less than the extent to which it is believed.

During the brief encounter between the peoples in Kenya with European colonialism, there were periodic attempts to spurn the ‘white man’s ways’. Whether it is the Mau Mau or Lukas Pkech, a young Pokot man who was a follower of Elija Masinde’s Dini of Msambwa and launched an armed rebellion against the British, religious belief has been ground zero in taking on the European yoke which crucially has been based far more on notions of moral superiority than on the Maxim gun.

The Rev. Githii’s of the world are going much further than Pkech who said ‘don’t listen to this man, he is our enemy. Haven’t we a god? We pray to you Jehovah. Who is Jesus? The wazungu say he is god but how could he be if he died?’ (quoted in Bethwell Ogot’s amazing essay in Mau Mau and Nationhood) Today’s rebels are not merely dissenting against colonialism, which is history anyway, they are remaking a moral house from the foundation up. This necessitates that they strive against the latest notion of European moral superiority: secular humanism. And they are taking this fight to the heart of the enemy. In May, while in the United States, Reverend Githii severed his denomination’s relationship with the National Capitol Presbytery and the Presbytery of Detroit over their ordaining of practicing homosexuals. He spurned the $300,000 in funding that his church receives from the PCUSA writing, ‘we find it unfortunate for you to question the inspiration of the Bible as the Word of God. This contradicts the message that the Western missionaries gave to us when our people first heard the gospel from them.’ In 2003, his counterpart in the Anglican Church, Bishop Simon Oketch, was almost beaten up by two Church of England colleagues on a London street. He had infuriated them over his uncompromising opposition to the appointment of the gay American pastor, Rev. Gene Kelly, as Bishop of New Hampshire. The Nigerian Anglicans, the largest congregation in that church followed suit by breaking longstanding links with the mother church in a rejection of its prerogative over them. Homosexuality is only the lightening rod. All manner of progressive civil freedoms will come under attack, most focusing on gender roles and sexuality.

There is irony in this. The western church has allowed the mores of secular society not because of reaching an enlightened understanding but by trying to stay relevant to a largely apathetic western public. Only in those areas where it retains a conservative ‘reactionary’ character has it thrived. The African church, rather than rebelling, seems to be saying, ‘you the progressives are the ones who are rebels who must be cast out of the house of God.’ This is a message that is gaining resonance in Africa where the church is growing faster than almost any other part of the world outside Mongolia. The explosions of sectarian violence worldwide leaving people in need of belonging and security; the march of democracy, which will reduce the power of the authorities to call the tune; and the proliferation of the means of communication will all combine to shrink the secular space and enlarge that of the believer. The nation, throughout all the countries in Christendom, has been erected on the foundations of the church. It will be no different in Kenya.

That Rev. Githii is willing to take aim at a national symbol such as harambee is proof that his campaign shall not be limited to dissing the western church. Rather than participate in direct politics, the Kenyan church shall eventually absorb politics into the moral space that it is busy carving. Its strictures on the private will be so much stronger than the ideas that maintain the public sphere, creating an immense pressure – and possibly even violence aimed at unbelievers or the immoral etc. What now only seems to be a campaign for souls will eventually colonise increasingly larger parts of the public sphere. The fact that the ‘centre’ – the collection of individuals and institutions that define national power – is so ideologically feeble and so dependent on western aid and political ideas will only hasten this process. Like Archbishop Rowan Williams who could only look on in helplessness and surrender as the Nigerians and Kenyans threatened to tear the Anglican Church to pieces over the issue of homosexuality, the Kenyan ruling classes will come to mime the moral positions advocated by the most popular of the churches. I say enjoy your beers and mini skirts for the moment because they may not be with you in similar form for very long. Already, sectors of the government are taking a harsher line on drinking and other ‘sin’ products all in the name of public safety and health. But it will soon become noticeable that as bars begin to close ever earlier, churches will stay open later.

In time, this trend will probably make for an intolerant and constricted social space, but one that will for the first time create the basis of a politics connected to the moral lives of a majority. Through fire and brimstone, laws and regulations that reduce all manner of secular freedoms – that I for one enjoy – a nation shall begin to take shape. Or at least that is what I hope.

The Love Affair Between the Maasai and the English

Colonialists like their savages savage in a romantic mould. There is a streak of masochism in having your material world dismissed by people who have little but vanity and some sick cows. Colonialists want to believe their subjugated people were worth conquering…they are also good for a shag now and then says AA Gill in the London Times to much hilarity…more>>

Persona Non Grata: Kenyan Athletes After Helsinki

Qatari citizen Saif Saaeed Shaheen (formerly known as Stephen Cherono) reacts to smashing the world record and winning the 3000m steeplechase at the 2005 World Championships. I do not care if he is a citizen of the moon or Qatar, there is nothing better than seeing a Kenyan on top of the world.

President Kibaki recently urged Kenyan athletes to resist the temptation to change their citizenship for money. This is a statement that can only have come from a man with a obstinate Panglossian ‘all-is-well-with-the-world’ streak. The sad fact is that talent or heroism are under-appreciated and downright dangerous qualities to have in Kenya. Kibaki is a leading member of a ruling elite that has consigned talent and integrity to the rubbish heap even while he admonishes those who would rather go where they are more appreciated and respected. And the Kenyan public, bunch of innocents that we are, ever blaming the government for our every national shortcoming even as we look to its for every solution, only notice these athletes every four years at the Olympics. They give us a brief glow of warm pride and are soon forgotten along with their achievements and the challenges that they face. When is the last time that you heard that a civic group of any kind had gathered to honour one of our athletes? How many products are endorsed by them, what schools and streets named after them? The real question I am asking is this: what is heroism in Kenya and how, if at all, is it linked to our national life?

Diary of a Mad Kenyan Woman has recently blogged about David Munyakei the whistle blower who alerted the country to the Goldenberg Scandal and how he has since been forgotten by the public. WM says it so much better than I could:

Who are we that we glorify and protect the avaricious, the gluttonous, and the ostentatiously, graspingly corrupt, the liars and the tyrants (why isn’t Moi in jail?). Who are we that we do this in order precisely to make the shabby, cringe-making, shame-amplifying nature of our complete disregard of those who guard and rescue and restore our sense of self more marked by contrast, more significant by difference? Just so we can underline the dichotomy, in case someone had missed it? To sum: you need to f**k Kenya up, not pluck it out of the lion’s jaws. This is the correct trajectory to follow to fame and fortune; failure to which, you will not even be a footnote in history.

As a career and lifestyle choice, I highly recommend that you strike OFF your list the idea of doing something good for Kenya, since we Kenyans assure and guarantee you that no good deed done for us will ever go unpunished.

This then is the world of the Kenyan hero: either forgotten or destroyed.

Many Kenyans are clamouring to vote with their feet, they want to leave that little paradise we call home. And the runners, like the doctors, the nurses and the thousands of Green Card Lottery applicants, want to step out too. It is at this precise moment when the exit door is beckoning that their international accomplishments have fallen.

When the rhetoric of Project Keenya was strong enough that its disconnect with the lived reality of many Kenyans was not readily apparent, our runners made off with gold medals galore. But since the late 1990s there has been a wholesale collapse of the idea what we are in a collective vehicle called Kenya whose destination shall benefit us individually.

This project I have argued in the past was merely an extension in blackface of the colonial desire to civilise and develop the ‘savage’. Its collapse was inevitable and there is a Kenyan being born from its ashes who is more competitive, self reliant and skeptical of the government and its nonsensical postures and actions. It is only when faced with Kenyan athletes cutting and running that there is a sudden surge of concern and a recognition of their worth. As is usual the government’s position can be trusted to be stupid. Sports Minister Ochillo Ayacko speaking about migrating athletes said, “we will declare these athletes as persona non grata and cannot permit them to enjoy facilities available in the country while they compete against us at World championships.” Eh, these facilities of course being the government constructed hills and trails of the Rift Valley. If you are a European tourist you are welcome to come and run up and down whatever you wish, but dare you be an ex-citizen who wants to do the same…

Watching the Ethiopian athletes power ahead in Helsinki and at the 2004 Olympics, I felt that they were running from a psychological and emotional space that their Kenyan counterparts have not occupied for a long while. And there will be no getting back to that place soon since we must first elevate talent and achievement to the highest dais of our national life. For this to happen, the moral state of our communities will have to be revitalised beyond the church step and into the home and all those other ordinary folks’ spaces. But this is a discussion for another day I suppose. For now, I am sad that those Kenyans who competed in Helsinki did not do better but glad that the negative commentary about the performance might be making us ask tough questions about what our country does to its best and brightest.

P.S.

(Shaheen or Cherono is just a small tip of the iceberg. Beyond the athlete is Dedan Kimathi still in a Kamiti Prison grave, Pio Pinto, David Munyakei broke and close to breaking and numerous others. Kenya produces heroes as a kettle will release steam to relieve the pressure of boiling water. Our heroism, like heroism anywhere else, is the product of adversity; therefore our heroes by the very actions that elevate them often incur injury. It is in how we deal with these injuries that the esteem we hold them in is revealed. Also revealed is what we think of ourselves since the hero at hand has only become so presumably for our collective benefit: they have borne a load greater than themselves and by doing so have relieved us of an unpleasantness that was ours. To ignore the hero, to leave them by the wayside is to deny the existence of a collective self to which the hero sacrificed himself. If Kenyans ignore or do not care for a Kenyan hero, then there is no such thing as Kenya outside of a geographer’s map.)

The Mythology of Project Keenya

Binyavanga Wainaina is back, this time with a rant on this blog’s favourite subject, Kenyan or African nationhood.

Most mythologies of nationalism cannot stand the scrutiny of logic. This is why one party states, and KANU (Kenya’s former ruling party) youth wingers and the hundreds of choir masters whose career consisted of composing praise songs for leaders existed: to cajole, beat, legislate what we would never have naturally chosen if we used our common sense.

So what was Project Keeenya? We were told that the colonial infrastructure (designed and perfected to benefit a few white settlers and their dogs) would remain pretty much unchanged – so it was the responsibility of us citizens to reformat ourselves and fit into that tiny little box. So for forty years we sang KANU ni baba na mama, and bent and twisted and rearranged, and studied with feet dipped into icy water, and headstands and parents allowed their children to be beaten into submission in school so we could fit inside this Kenya.

The Applications, by Karanja wa Njama is a short story which was published in Kwani 3. It is about a woman, Faith Karoki, who lives in Buru Buru, and who was brought up to believe in Project Keenya. They said if you work hard in project Keenya you will build the nation and build your life. In the 1990s, when project Keenya revealed itself to be a massive illusion, she went mad, and stopped applying herself.

Extract from The Applications:

“During the same period, Mrs. Karoki had also found reason to savage and throw away all the books she had collected all her life. Ngugi wa Thiongo, her Christianity in Africa series, A Long Walk To Freedom, Watchtower magazines and numerous Mills and Boon paperbacks all found their way to the garbage dump. She got rid of her bed, and laid her mattress on the floor. Only her fire and brimstone, King James Bible remained, with its cover etched in blood red, set in the deepest black.

Lying on her mattress one afternoon, she felt an impression on her back. Muttering, she upturned the mattress and stumbled on the few truths she’d been looking for all these years. The All-Purpose Letter Writer edited by Keith Johnson contained samples of letters that Mrs. Karoki found useful. The book, which had pages missing, still held letters on money matters, accommodation and other miscellanies.

After flipping idly through the book, Letter Placing An Order, Letter Complaining About A Service In A Stronger Tone she came across a Letter Citing Grievances In a Marriage (Unofficial). Excitement engulfed her as she recognized the couple. It was Esther, her college roommate who had moved to the UK with her British husband about 10 years ago. Mrs. Karoki couldn’t remember Esther’s husband’s name. The letter gave her no small amount of satisfaction as it was evident from the words that the marriage had since broken down. Of course it was Esther! The polite timid English manner was, of course, the only way Esther could speak to her husband. He was, after all, English. The words dimmed in front of Mrs Karoki’s eyes, which filled with sudden tears like when she read the Bible.

55 Plum Road
LONDON
SW3 8YT
14 August 19-

Esther Wilkins
Forms Ltd
27-76 Bridgeweather Road
LONDON
EC1 3SD

Dear Lawrence

Marriage Certificate No U6677

I am writing to complain about several grievances I have of our ten-year marriage. Granted that I moved to your hometown of my own volition some of our problems I firmly place on your shoulders…

At this point Mrs. Karoki was so overwhelmed that she carefully tore the letter off the page and decided to reply immediately without reading the rest of it:

Dear Esther

He! You remeber our life of eating mnocttyledons and beans. What happend to mbari cia Steven and uria twethaga Maria. Ari from coast when we were at the Teaching College. Have you seen my son Kandle Kinuthia there with two small boys. I hope you well tell my where all these peolpo went. Where the connection was between mbari cia Steven and Dorcas. Kairitu kau gaciaratwu nuu. Ona hidi ndathiaga bus station iu etagwa atia. Ati Machako onaogo tii nyadike. We were with mutumia wa binamu …

At this point she became so exhausted she put away the letter to continue another day. It was better to read what everyone had sent her, she thought guiltily. She discovered the book held letters from many people of her past, in varying emotional states. Some of her friends like Margarita were in debt and others like Mrs. James Ngoga were rich. It was fulfilling to hear from so many people at once. She decided it would be nice to write back to all the people she had known, with advice on how their wishes would be granted. So as she continued to build the mosaic in her room Mrs. Karoki wrote over 1000 applications for her friends. They were all addressed to God.”

““““““`
At the school where she taught, nobody noticed:

“At Buru Buru Primary School where she taught, no one really minded the new and improved Mrs. Karoki after a month or two. She stopped going to school to teach and only appeared now and then to wander around the empty school fields, talking to the crows and the kites that wheeled in the sky. When it rained she could be found sitting in empty classrooms in the evening, hours after the children had left.

This went on till a new headmaster was appointed to the school under the new Board of Education Application Rules and he chased her away from the school. He also declined to forward her name to the Ministry of Education when they asked for a new salary roster. An efficient cog at the Ministry however automatically added her name to the list, tsk tski-ng with annoyance at the oversight. Karoki Faith he wrote, and Mrs. Karoki continued to draw a salary for exactly five years, when she achieved the optional retirement age of 50 and got her pension. Mr Karoki bribed several individuals for the pension to be paid out. Mrs Karoki did not bother with the money for the next two years. Money was one of the foreign and hostile smells around her.”

Like many in Kenya in the 1990s, Mrs. Karoki found refuge in God, and while the thin crust of privilege fattened itself, fangs latched onto out tax, our institutions, our schools and hospitals and graveyards, we slowly started to rebuild ourselves. I come from a generation of Kenyans very unlike Mrs. Karoki, or Mr. Kibaki.

I expect nothing.

Those people were subsidized into existence, they were scholar-shipped, and fast-tracked and Africanised. They were the shiny vaseline faces of progress, polished by Carey Francis and they were doomed to failure. Mrs. Karoki was so well-drilled to be what the good Fathers suggested, she was incapable of finding ways and means to thrive when her comfort zone had crashed and burnt.

So, we took to the streets, and prised Kenya open. We installed a glass wall in parliament and in state house, and watched the comedy. We discovered that our smooth, educated political elite are only smooth when the presidential press Unit has edited them. Mostly, they behave exactly like Redyculass satirized them.

Now we have them naked. They have lost the power of secrecy, we can see their dripping fangs; their opinions about ordinary wananchi, their treatment of freedom fighters, and presidential chauffeurs are wa-pumavu: we can see the sheer, shameless selfishness of their cause. And in a way it is terrible. In another way it is the best thing to happen to Kenya since independence. They have been rendered meaningless. The entire government and its sycophants and allies and friends are a source of mirth. There is nothing they can do to seem credible. you see, they studied under the School of Governance invented by the British and fine-tuned by Kenyatta and bankrupted by Moi. They are overseeing their own demise, while thinking their baby-faced Saint Mary’s sons will inherit Kenya.

So Project Kenya is dead … what happens to us? Well. I live in South B. We have our own security, our own residence association, our own garbage collection. For the past twenty years Kenyans have build their own institutions to help manage our lives. Academies and churches, SACCOs and boreholes, generators. Rents in business premises in Eastleigh are now higher than city centre. Our leading poets do not come from Kenyatta university or Nairobi campus or Makerere. They come from Dandora and Mathare and California.

Nairobi University has become a institution from a bygone age. To pay an official visit to a department a visitor needs to written permission of the vice-chancellor. Nairobi university behaves as if it was still in the 1960s when the whole of Kenyan literature was their department, when newspapers said The University. This year we had the privilege of hosting Ayi Kwei Armah. Professor Kimani wa Njogu spent weeks seeking the permission of the Vice Chancellor for Ayi to speak at Taifa Hall. A dean was not enough and getting to see the VC was more difficult than entering State House. Eventually permission was granted, and days before Ayi arrived, we found out that the literature department could not host Ayi for tea at their offices because that needed us to ask for a different kind of permission from the vice chancellor. So Ayi spoke at Taifa hall, straight from his hotel, and was whisked back to his hotel afterwards.

Super Mum: The London Years

Read on for more on the ‘brain drain’ and the peerless mama mbugua…and then go to this link for another story on her.

Nursing a problem

Salil Tripathi

Tuesday August 9, 2005

Guardian Unlimited

Charity Kirigo worked long hours as a nurse at the national hospital in Kenya, finding it extremely difficult to make ends meet.
A mother of three, she did not see a bright future for her children if she stayed in Kenya – so she applied to the NHS, which was looking for nurses.

“Salaries in Kenya were very little,” she said. “Everyone had to have some side business – selling cotton wool, cooking, doing some other work at home – and it was very difficult to make a living. I had to take action.”

Ms Kirigo came to England in 1995, just as staff shortages were beginning to hit the NHS. Between 1990 and 1997, the number of people coming into the nursing profession in Britain fell from 18,980 to just over 12,000.

Nurses recruited from abroad accounted for 26% of the 16,000 nurses registered in 1997, and five years later that figure had grown to 43% of the registered total of 37,000.

Many came from the Philippines, South Africa and India. Even though the number of African nurses was relatively small, it nevertheless represented a large proportion of the health workers in their countries.

Life wasn’t easy for Ms Kirigo when she came to Britain, but she had access to a superior infrastructure and modern techniques.

She had to endure some humiliation from patients, who questioned her competence because she had come from Africa, but she saved enough money to send her children to university and to buy property in both the UK and Kenya.

Last year, Ms Kirigo moved back to Kenya. “I had a target to help my children get a good education,” she said. “Once I knew they could stand on their own, I decided to go back.”

Now in Nairobi, she is working to raise £437,000 to set up a telephone-based counselling service, HIV Helpline, to offer advice to families living with HIV, and plans to recruit 20 workers.

Her story humanises the debate about healthcare professionals in Britain. It shows what is happening at the micro level at a time when the macro outlook appears so dismal.

Nevertheless, organisations such as Save the Children are critical of the influx of nurses from developing countries.

“Many African countries have limited funds available for health,” Mike Aaronson, the charity’s director general, said. “Vulnerable children suffer disproportionately when these services are failing. It is shameful that many poor countries are spending millions of pounds training nurses and doctors to prop up the NHS.”

The crisis is acute – around 36 African countries do not meet targets of one doctor per 5,000 people, according to the World Health Organisation.

Even in non-conflict affected countries such as Zambia and Ghana, there is only one doctor per more than 10,000 people, while disparities are evident within a country such as Kenya. In Nairobi, there is one doctor for 500 people, but in Turkana district the ratio is 1:160,000.

Aware of the criticism, the NHS has adapted a code of practice that bans it from actively recruiting staff from developing countries. But it needs workers – and thousands of people living in poor countries want to work in a better environment.

It is true that Africa’s health sector needs more resources, but those resources will not become available by preventing skilled workers such as Ms Kirigo from coming to Britain.

What’s often left unsaid in this debate is the role of emigrating British nurses. That poses the moral dilemma that if a UK-trained nurse is free to leave for the US, Canada, or Ireland (the three most desired destinations) – and even beyond, to the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand – why shouldn’t Ms Kirigo and her compatriots come to Britain?

There has been a remarkable increase in the number of British nurses moving overseas. More than 2,000 left for the US last year, a quarter of the 8,000 who left the country overall. In 1997, the number of nurses who went overseas was half that.

Overseas recruitment is not the only reason African health workers leave their home countries. For many, there are simply no available jobs.

“When I was studying in Kenya, we were absorbed automatically,” Ms Kirigo said. “Now there are more nurses than the country needs or can pay for. If all the Kenyan nurses who work in the UK were to return to Kenya, there won’t be enough jobs for them … I am not betraying my country.”

Forcing people to stay at home will not work. As Kwadwo Mensah, Maureen Mackintosh and Leroi Henry write in The Skills Drain of Health Professionals from the Developing World, a paper published by the UK charity Med-Act: “Coercive measures to prevent departure work poorly; worse, they can intensify pressures to leave.”

There are inequities in this dilemma, but remittances partly mitigate the situation. According to the World Bank, migrant workers send more than $90bn (£44.7bn) to their home countries, the second-largest source of funds for poor countries after foreign direct investment. It is a significantly higher amount of money than that provided by development aid.

Health charities acknowledge the power of remittances, but remain critical because such flows go direct to families and do not replenish the loss suffered by the state in providing the subsidy in the first place.

With that in mind, the economist Jagdish Bhagwati, of Columbia University in the US, says states should tax their citizens who work and live abroad – something the US already does.

Several charities have argued that the UK should provide financial restitution and fresh development aid to Africa so that it can bolster its health sector. However, developing a grand plan would take time.

That is why individuals such as Ms Kirigo are so important. Granted, all emigrant health workers may not return home, but their remittances lift their families out of poverty.

What can be done about the skills gap? “Skilled Africans are going to emigrate. I would propose a Grey Peace Corps, where our ageing and early-retired skilled professionals can be tapped for two and three-year stints to work in Africa,” Dr Bhagwati said.

“While Africans, whom we must train in vastly increased numbers at our universities, will work here, our people must work in Africa until the need for skills can be met meaningfully.”

• Salil Tripathi is a London-based writer who specialises in Asian and international economic affairs. The article can be found here.

SocietyGuardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

Nairobi Woman Made a Slave, Police Investigator Says

By Jim Mbugua
For the Daily Nation

(See end of post for more information)

A Nairobi doctor and her husband are under investigation for making a woman a domestic slave in their household, the police said in court papers.

The victim worked 15-hour days six days a week, was locked in the Golf Course residence performed nearly all the domestic chores and was only allowed limited contact with guests to the home.

No charges have been filed.

Both the police and the prosecutor’s office in Nairobi declined to comment beyond what was in the public affidavit for a search warrant filed earlier this month in Kibera District Court.

The couple could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.

According to police constable John Twende, the victim’s story started in Ogembo, Kisii where she supported her three daughters by working as a caregiver for the doctor’s mother.

In early 2003, she was asked if she would consider moving to Nairobi to work for the Osogo family.

The woman agreed, hoping to raise enough money to send her daughters to school and provide better housing for them, according to the court documents.

The Osogos agreed to pay her Kshs 2500 ($33) a month, take care of all basic living expenses and buy uniforms and books for her three daughters who attend a government school in Ogembo town.

They also said they expected her to care for the couple’s young son during daytime hours, the court papers said.

The Osogos arranged for the victim to accompany the doctor’s mother on a trip to Nairobi. The mother stayed for six weeks while receiving medical treatment.

Soon after the victim’s arrival, she told police investigators, she learned that the doctor did not intend to fulfil promises made as terms of employment. The doctor was pregnant, and the victim said she was told she would also have to care for the baby after it was born.

She told investigators she was expected to do all the domestic housework and cooking, and was given explicit directions on how to perform each task.

Her workday began at 6 a.m. and ended about 9 p.m., she said, according to court papers.

Although she had Sundays off, she was still expected to prepare meals ahead of time for the family. The salary was inconsistent, ranging between Kshs 500 and Kshs 1200 a month, she said.

The couple told her that if she refused to comply, she would be forced to leave their residence, arrested by local policemen friendly to the Osogos and returned to Ogembo without a job, documents said. “None of the terms of the employment … (was) honoured.”

She was socially isolated, the papers said, and told not to socialize, and that she could be fired for visiting friends.

On Sundays, she sometimes went to church with the couple, and was introduced to a man at church who agreed to act as a mediator to negotiate for better working conditions.

In September 2004, the negotiator wrote the couple a letter, saying he was concerned about the victim’s employment status.

The couple told the victim “to pack her belongings and directed her to leave their residence immediately,” court papers said. She was given an envelope with $3500 cash and a one-way bus ticket to Ogembo.

The woman called the mediator, worried that the Osogos might try and get her arrested by their friends and not knowing where to turn for the remainder of the money they owed her…

The story above is actually about a Kenyan woman who was cruelly and illegally exploited by her middle class employers in Washington State (United States). The Herald reported on the FBI’s investigations into her ‘enslavement’ and I was struck by how exactly the circumstances matched those of my recent post on the Nairobi housemaid. The post and the story are exactly alike except that I have replaced American references with Kenyan ones. Though housemaids are often treated much worse than this in Kenya, there are no investigations into the problem by the police or the media.

The London Visit is at the Heart and Soul of Kenyan Politics

The British government has banned Transport Minister Chris Murungaru from stepping on UK soil. Joining him are a senior security official, a high-ranking civil servant at the AG’s office in a list including up to five ministers whose visas to Britain may also be revoked.

Though much of the coverage of this story has revolved around the diplomatic implications of the ban, let not the level of emotional and psychological anguish that a Kenyan politician feels at being unable to visit London be underestimated. From shopping at Harrods to strolling in the manicured lawns of their children’s boarding schools in the English countryside, access to the ‘mother-country’ is considered by Kenya’s political elite to be a key signifier of ‘making it’. Many own property in London – the abovementioned security official and civil servant for example reportedly own homes in the capital – and it is a favourite stop to bank suitcases of cash illegally procured from the public purse.

Since the Lancaster House conference, a series of three meetings in the early 1960s in which Kenya’s constitutional framework and independence were negotiated, the trip to London has always determined the trajectory of a political career in Kenya. With much of governing consisting of a slavish aping of colonial rule, the Kenyan politician requires psychological top-ups every once in a while. He visits London to be reminded of how high he has risen in the world: the distance he has put between himself and the dusty village he was born in and the mean streets he lords over.

The Kenyan politician exists in a tortured state when it comes to Britain, or England to be more exact. He loves all things English from the part of his personality that is aspirational. He grew up seeing the mzungu (the colonial settler or official) as a symbol of power and privilege, and more often that not was led into nationalist politics by a rarely stated or even conscious desire to one day follow suit. His lowly station in relation to the mzungu naturally made him burn with a resentment that was only compounded by his envy. The fruits of his success are not only wealth, but include the same paternalism and petty brutality that the British colonialist displayed toward the Kenyan. For the British to revoke Murungaru’s visa is to humiliate one of their political offspring; it is to arouse a similar anger among Kenya’s rulers as they would feel toward a deadbeat father.

The Slavery in Our Midst: The Nairobi House Maid

There is much I could say about modern-day slavery in Mauritania, Niger and Sudan. But let me instead turn to the dirty little secret that so many of us Kenyans know but maintain a studied silence about. Yes, I am talking about the lot of the ‘mboch’, the housie, the maid, in good old Nairobi. It is common knowledge that many housemaids in genteel middle class Nairobi are never paid a wage; it is their parents, or ‘auntie’ who receives the pittance that they are owed every month. Anyone who has lived or visited the city for any length of time also knows that it is not uncommon to have ten-year olds doing the washing, cleaning and cooking for an entire family while enduring a steady diet of slaps and kicks. And I do not exaggerate when I point to the high frequency of maid rape in many households. If you ask your typical Nairobi ‘babi’ or middle class boy what his first sexual encounter was, he will spin a tall tale about the ‘older girl who lived just up the road’. Wrong. The first encounter, and the second and the third, is more often than not with the maid. She is shared among the boys in the house, their friends in the neighbourhood sometimes and very often the man of the house who after dropping off the kids and wife to school in the mornings, will sneak back for a quick one. This sexual access is usually procured forcefully with the implicit threat that for the maid to resist will result in instant dismissal. Here’s a little clue for HIV/AIDS health workers who decry the transmission of the disease from philandering husband to wife: it is the maid who is at the centre of a domestic sexual web that runs through the sons and their father, not to mention any other lovers she may take. This is of course not to blame her, it is to recognise that the helplessness that attends many maids – relentlessly mistreated, isolated from friends and family, and economically disempowered – exposes them to the malign actions of a class of people whose upward aspiration is often marked with a immense contempt for their ‘inferiors’. What dirty little secrets I am airing, and it is the most delicious post I have written in a while. When I have levelled contempt at the babi – a category that I unfortunately fall into though in traitorous fashion – I have only spoken about the public arena. But it is in the home that the moral contracts that underlie Kenyan life can be seen most clearly. Observe and recognise the pervasive violence, the disregard for the rights of the individual and the abiding conviction that might makes right. It is the oppressions in our homes that have made it impossible for us to consistently and successfully fight the oppressions of the dictators who have sat at State House or the injustices of the state. We moan and groan about the burdens of colonialism when right in our homes, or those of our friends, we have a cosy little ‘memsahib and bwana mkubwa’ system on the go.

To extend this washing of Kenya’s dirty laundry in public where it belongs, here is a chat room exchange on this issue. I will share just a few of the disgusting entries:

“nani hapa ashaimanga mboch wao cause it was so sweet mpaka even though i lost my uvirgo to her.” (who here has eaten (had sex with) a maid cause it was so sweet even though I lost my virginity to her)

“Am sure the rest of the people who did what you did aren’t as proud…how did u even start…yaani how did u even get hard in the first place….mboch….have integrity bana.Ama u can’t vibe a gal? Sweetie hebu mweleze huyu ndugu asiwe kama dude…”

“Lets cut to the chase people…how many here have done their mboches? (pop, is that ur hand i see raising?)”

“hehehehe…i think it is sweety! i think it is!”

Are Ordinary People as Stupid as Their Leaders Believe?

 

Recently, an old friend who lives in New York told me that he wanted to leave because he was convinced that he was in a fascist United States. A participant at a writing seminar handed me an essay to review in which she likened George Bush to Hitler and the people who voted for him as brain-washed ‘Jesus freaks’. An acquaintance in London informed me that citizens who were anti-EU integration tended to be racists and those flirting with fascism. What the three had in common was a sense that they belonged to a natural ruling class that had been spurned. This, I think from personal observation, is part of a growing trend in which political elites the world over are increasingly vocal about ordinary citizens being puppets to demagoguery, stupid, unsophisticated and therefore not qualified to make democratic choices.

In Africa, we often hear that democracy cannot flower because of the lack of education and an excess of ‘tribalism’. In Europe, the EU’s political honchos rejected the French and Dutch ‘No’ vote to the EU constitution as an indication of voter ignorance. To those democrats in my old city of New York, the election of George Bush signalled the rise of an ‘overweight, over-consuming, racist, ignorant and Christian fanatic’ who was going against his interests which should have been represented by enlightened, cosmopolitan and egalitarian liberals. Typical of this attitude is Michael Gronewaller who had this to say after the election of Dubya:

I really think the problem is that we as liberals are in general far more intelligent, well reasoned and educated, and will go to astonishingly great lengths to convince people of the integrity and validity of our fair and well thought out arguments. The audience, in case anyone has been paying attention, isn’t always getting it! I suspect the problem is not the speaker – it is most of the audience. Our problem with getting our message across to people outside “the choir” is our understanding of the intelligence of our greater audience.

Everywhere you turn, ordinary voters are subject to this type of withering contempt by their supposed betters who when they do meet in the conferences that I deride so much in these pages, wax poetic about all manner of rights and oppressions. But this is only conditional on the ‘oppressed’ agreeing to be led and indeed dictated to by them. In Kenya, I have often written about this ‘babi’ class – what we used to call a petit bourgeoisie except it is now united in “fighting” capitalism rather than serving it – and its aid-dependent links to the metropole. The American left, in the form of Michael Moore, has been ruthlessly and hilariously picked apart by Christopher Hitchens (see ‘Unfairenheit 9/11: The lies of Michael Moore’). In Kenya, the old men of the nationalist struggle, tied helplessly to colonial conceptions of tribe and modernity, have never had anything but contempt for ordinary people who they assume are existentially tied to tribal Bantustans and in need of modernising. Their inheritors, mostly esconded in the aid-funded civil society, talk a more radical game of ‘people power’ but are characterised by a complete democratic alienation from most Kenyans and a politics that owes more to the ideological divides in Europe and the United States that it does with their own country. It is these camps that are fighting over the bone of ‘good governance’; both desperate for the approval of the West’s political masters who are themselves increasingly out of touch with their own polities. What we are left with is a permanent game of musical chairs where the televisions are filled with besuited types from New York to Nairobi speaking to and for each other while the rest of us sit by the sidelines enraged or not giving a hoot.

The Tragedy and Puzzle of the Massacre in Northern Kenya

 

While the headlines are dominated by London’s terrorist attacks, Kenyans have been grappling with the massacre of over 80 people in Marsabit in north-east Kenya. Local press coverage has been extensive reflecting the empathy that I believe most Kenyans feel for the victims and survivors of these attacks. However, little has been said about the alienation of the northern region from the rest of the country; the government’s continued use of colonial emergency laws to govern; and the link between pastoralism and violence. The northern provinces have always been a great mystery to the majority of Kenyans; they are in very real terms not part of the country’s mainstream political conversation. The solutions that the government is peddling – such as its collaboration with its Ethiopian counterpart in hunting the killers who they contend belong to the Oromo Liberation Front – are difficult to assess since so little is known by most of us about the political and economic realities on the ground. If history is anything to go by, the Kenyan government’s ‘law and order’ operations have always come at a high cost to innocent bystanders as it pursues the old colonial logic of collective punishment. My hope is that we shall learn more about the way our fellow citizens in the north live – and die unfortunately – so that we can react with a greater empathy and understanding about what role our political community plays in their lives for ill or good. Condolences to all who lost their loved ones.

Martin Luther King and Hope

I have just watched a BBC program called ‘Days That Shook the World’ which today explored the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. Whenever I have encountered MLK in the media, I have always come away newly struck by his power and the hope that he faced the world with. I was not born when he was killed, and am far too prone to indulge in a kind of cynical politics that never survives a single sentence he uttered. I went looking for what I think was his greatest speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”, which was made the night before he was murdered by James Earl Ray. Listening to it, I am left to wonder about what place hope has the collective of individuals and communities that are Kenya. It makes me ponder what social spaces we own that allow us to create transcendent communities in the sense that they can exist in a spirit of fairness and justice despite all the obstacles in our paths. It is quite soppy to write in this fashion but as always, after listening to MLK I felt deeply the suffering and hope that attended black people in their awful march through American history. It gave me a sense of the scale of the revolutionary triumph that the Civil Rights Movement represented. And the extent to which in those years – and perhaps even in these – black people became a community made holy by its being larger than the sum of its oppressions and disadvantages. If only I could dare hope that Kenya too is marching in similar fashion through its dark days but toward brightness and with hope a constant companion. I suspect this is the case or at the very least I pray it is.

Listen to Martin Luther King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”

THE PAIN MACHINE: The Collapse of the Gikuyu Social Contract

This is the beginning of an essay that I am writing for publication and that I felt driven to post before its completion in the hope that it would elicit stories that confirm or contradict it. I will post the complete version in the coming months – probably in late September – for now please forgive its roughness.

I do not remember exactly how old I was when my parents separated and later divorced, but I vividly recall the panicky sense of impending change and guilt, suspecting that it was all somehow my fault. While in primary school, the years between six and twelve, I felt like I was the set of the popular American TV show, ‘Little House on the Prairie’: like the Waltons, my schoolmates all seemed to belong to happy-huggy families whose only dilemmas were how to deal with dad’s cute and inconvenient eccentricities. My parents’ decision to part ways seemed logical; after all, their own parents were estranged as were a large number of their siblings. My family seemed to be in a giant Jerry Springer moment that would never end; my father did a disappearing act and my mother took center stage. The men around me became increasingly alienated from their families, their absences became longer, their drinking grimmer and somehow they all seemed to get poorer. Let me risk the leap from the personal to the political: at its most fundamental, my family’s experience arose from a collapsing Gikuyu social contract. The aim of this essay is to connect the private and public spheres in Gikuyu society. Though it focuses on a single ethnic group, I hope that this will allow for greater analytical depth and provoke a discussion of family in our many communities, ethnic or otherwise.

I grew up watching American television shows that were family based. Whether it was JJ in the ghetto, JR in a Texas ranch or black dwarfs playing orphans adopted by affluent white families, the theme was constant: difference didn’t matter since family could bear and thrive despite all challenges. These shows deified the individual, so any rapture to family boundaries created by the pursuit of self-interest – the source of the drama – rarely lasted more than a show before they were emphatically redrawn. These families not only reflected American piety, they were visions of a powerful social contract that has been a cornerstone of homo sapien life for thousands of generations.

Growing up, the immediate physical space around us is the site of both love and antagonism – hugs and spankings. We have an innate sense of its limits – observe how we react to someone who squeezes into a near-empty elevator, we either consider it threatening or alluring. When two people marry, each reorders their personal space to accommodate the other – a contractual agreement is forged. Consequently, boundaries to outsiders are established even as responsibilities within the family are assigned. Though environmental factors have dominated human evolution, in the last ten thousand years, as communities have grown and technology developed, social forces have taken a front seat. In this regard, my family’s present shape has been most influenced by British colonialism and Christianity, a combination that has brought little harmony or stability.

It was not always that way – I have grown up on stories of noble sacrifice, wise patriarchs, and gutsy women. But even if these were myths, I think that my family’s disintegration is indicative of a crisis that has gotten progressively worse during the last twenty years of the twentieth century. The roots of this crisis stretch as far back as the 1920s. Many Gikuyus are often the first to laugh at the stereotypes other Kenyans foster on them. They regard with rueful pride a reputation for being individualistic, grasping, conniving, driven, entrepreneurial and migratory. To them, the actions that give rise to such a reputation are appropriate responses to the challenge of living and thriving in Kenya. But such conclusions are self-deluding. This family crisis has actually led to a fatal undermining of the community’s vaunted business acumen and sabotaged political aspirations by limiting its ability to treat coalitions as win-win arrangements.

With each passing year since primary school (I am now in my early 30s), it has dawned on me that the wholesome image of family harmony and progress that I thought was common outside our home was in fact a hoax. I was on the receiving end of a massive Gikuyu public relations effort – it was OK to be estranged, abused, beaten, stolen from and exploited by your relatives provided you never let on. Though fathers were steadily coming home at a later hour and given entirely to conversations relating to the latest epic beer fest, they were still the ‘man of the house’. They were invested with the family’s dignitas and were its public torchbearer. Mothers, I suspect, did not mind this arrangement provided the men stayed out of their way. These women were engaged in an extraordinary effort to keep up with the Kamaus when it came to educating the children, ensuring a move into the right neighborhoods and acquiring a shamba. Only rarely have I encountered a middle class Gikuyu woman with a single source of income.

The decline of the economy in the 1980s that started as a trickle and accelerated to a full-fledged recession in the 1990s, was applying the squeeze to ‘man of the house’ ideas. It was tough to pose as the provider and protector when faced with the sack, as corporations downsized and government largesse was no longer directed to Central Province. The resident Gikuyu in State House during the 1960s and 1970s was no more. To make matters worse, the 1982 coup attempt had prompted President Moi to regard Gikuyu money as a threat he was now committed to neutralizing. For all the heroic bar tales and secret mistresses, the middle class Gikuyu man was caught between the rock of a failing economy and the hard place of declining political backing. It had not always been thus, as I shall explore shortly, but the main rub in the situation was the reaction of women who took it on themselves to maintain the façade of harmony and family progress. It was in this period that most families splintered and the PR gloss slipped enough for me to hear lurid tales of secret families, alcoholism, depression and disunity.

What has happened to cause so many marriages to end in disarray? Why is it that so many fathers no longer feel it incumbent upon them to financially and emotionally support their offspring? The stories of violence in the home, alcoholism, child abuse and absenteeism seem to be increasing, even as NGOs established to educate and empower proliferate. Perhaps the culprit is patriarchy as some have suggested. They argue that the solution is the empowerment of women in the home and in society. There is much truth in such a view, but it can sometimes be so ideologically blinkered as to miss a darker reality. Patriarchy is a strict contract that clearly proscribes the roles of men and women. Its representations of ‘man the hunter’ and ‘woman the homemaker’ are based on expectations of the former protecting and providing, while the latter nurtures.

In today’s Gikuyu family, women increasingly fill these roles. The man, when he is present, is divorced from the challenges facing the household not only because of economic hardship, but because patriarchal norms no longer hold. When the wife assumes the role of protector and nurturer, driven by necessity and ability, the man’s sole purchase is his physical strength and a hazy memory of the ‘good old days’. Thus ‘man of the house’ status is often established through violence and bluster (often in bars). Concubines provide a shot of potent maleness as men who haven’t been home for a week court them assiduously. With them, he feels powerful and necessary: buying the drinks, paying for the apartment… Unlike the family contract, this one is secretive, limited and reassuring as long as the mistress does not develop expectations of commitment. What we are dealing with is not patriarchy, but the collapse of it. These are its death throes, but its ultimate demise will be long in the coming and may not be replaced by equality. As long as Gikuyu society maintains a patina of patriarchy while the reality shifts drastically, the result will only be increased family dysfunction projected onto the economic and political stage.

Why are there such few manufacturing businesses founded and expanded by Gikuyus who are reputed to be amongst the country’s savviest entrepreneurs? The rich guy of the 1970s remains much the same: he maintains sole proprietorship, has shrinking assets and few ideas on how to forge ahead. It is arguable whether even in the golden age of the 1970s he was ever really a genuine businessman considering how dependent he was on political patronage to loot assets and establish monopolies. The main problem today is this: It is foolhardy to enter a business or political bond with a person who is unable to maintain family obligations. If a father resists his duty to his offspring, what are the chances that he will respect it in business or politics? Theoretically, the legal system is supposed to uphold contracts in the public sphere. But when the courts and the legislative are in disarray, as is the case in Kenya, the need for extralegal norms becomes crucial to maintaining binding agreements. The Kenyan Indian community, for instance, is famous for leveraging family ties in business. Yet it is rare to hear of a court action between Indian partners due to the contravening of a contract. In the majority of societies, whose formal legal systems are weak, family is the glue that holds together enterprise.

In contrast, the middle class urban Gikuyu suffer from a shortage of trust and an excess of cynical self-interest. The pooling of money for a common goal is often rued, as tales of successive treasurers making off with the cash abound. Even churches are in on the racket if the proliferation of wabenzi preachers demanding cash donations is any indication. One result is that businesses remain small since to expand them would force the owner to invest some level of autonomy to partners or employees. Investments are often capital intensive and short-term: today it is seatbelts for matatus, tomorrow tires from Bangkok and next week, mercury from Tanzania. Patient effort to master a trade and develop skills is rare since it would demand commitment, a word that has become anathema to many.

What relationship does enterprise, which is by definition the acquisition and expansion of property, have with the family? To mark personal, family or tribal territory involves a demand for ownership. Territorial claims have historically involved land since continued access to it determines our survival. From these claims has emerged the concept of private property. Even if the individual cannot by tradition own property, it is probable that either his family or tribe does. Social contracts police the members’ relationship to property. They also enable risk and initiative since individuals can – within reason – predict the conduct of those around them. The explosion of Asian wealth in the last three decades has largely been due to family businesses operating in societies whose legal and political structures are not wildly dissimilar to Kenya’s. When dictatorship, corruption and poverty are about, as they have been in all the Asian Tigers, it is family that becomes the vehicle for people’s aspirations.

The Gikuyu family has strayed from this model and now has the opposite tendency to undermine cooperation and trust. Its male members are increasingly likely to assert the primacy of their personal space in opposition to that of the collective. Of course being in a family does not mean completely abandoning privacy and self interest. But surely the tales of abuse, separation, divorce and abandonment so common among the Gikuyu indicate more than an average level of individualism. Rather they reflect a wholesale abdication of social responsibility that will become clearer when I later explore pre-colonial institutions such as riika (age groups) and ahoi (the landless) to demonstrate how bonds of kinship have changed for the worse. The reason I have focused on business enterprise to such an extent is because of the central place it occupies in Gikuyu self-identity. But the impact of the crisis in the Gikuyu family is not limited to entrepreneurial effort, it extends to politics. Winning electoral contests in Kenya demands a willingness to build multi-ethnic coalitions given the loyalty ethnic considerations command at the polls.

A social contract beset by selfish individualism and untrustworthiness is a weak foundation on which to build a winning political movement. Moi’s attempt to woo Gikuyus by promoting Uhuru Kenyatta in the 2002 elections almost succeeded, as many turned to KANU despite years of its authoritarian rule and the bitter lessons of the 1992 and 1997 polls. Nowadays, many Gikuyus favor a retreat from the multi-ethnic coalition that ensured Moi’s defeat in 2002. The reason? That other member of the coalition, in particular the Luo political elites, insist that the terms of the agreement to unite be upheld. They expect the Gikuyu elite – now visibly in power – to keep its word and honor the Memorandum of Understanding – good luck, I say. The leadership is merely the tip of the iceberg: most middle class Gikuyus support backing away from the agreement. They need to ensure that their patronage systems make up for the lost time of the Moi era and something as flimsy as a principle is unlikely to sway them. It may sound stodgy and old fashioned, but honor really does begin at home. It is not a good portent for the rest of the country that so many Gikuyus have abandoned family commitment; the odds are low that they consider promises to faceless, distant groups to be binding.

Like the family public relations effort that I experienced in primary school, Gikuyu politics are mostly the politics of empty symbolism. A dozen promises are issued and a relentless busyness is evident in every corner of government, but none of this should be confused with actual effort which demands too much unselfish commitment. Even as they cynically gut the MOU, the Gikuyu middle classes that once again reign supreme politically, are paranoid about the motivations of other tribes – particularly the Luo. Often in their conversations, I have heard Luo politicians such as Raila being assailed as ‘too ambitious’. Never mind that a Luo politician has never held power in Kenya and that Luos since independence have twice united with Gikuyus, to only receive the short end of the stick in the final reckoning. Often, some of my relatives express fear of Luo violence against Gikuyus should Raila or one of his ilk become president. Digging from their inexhaustible store of experience, which they always do with a heavy sigh of regret, they reveal to me that the Luo have a penchant for tribalism in the workplace; that Kisiis are primitive; Luhyas are confused; coastal people lazy; and Kalenjins stupid. Hidden from this litany is a Gikuyu sense of personal entitlement to privilege at the expense of everyone. For the sake of psychologically coping with the alienation from family and community, a sense of victim-hood and moral rectitude is vigorously developed. Like every paranoid, Gikuyu fears are often a reflection of their own conduct. Being cynical demands you suspect others of similar qualities since it is difficult in that state to perceive cooperation and good will as anything more than a cover for sinister designs.

I have made harsh claims, but merely reciting the litany of problems afflicting Gikuyu society fails to uncover their roots and is not of much use in developing solutions. As I mentioned previously, my suspicion is that the present situation has its genesis in the early twentieth century when the ‘White Highlands’ were born. The adverse effects of this period on the sociopolitical and religious life of the Gikuyu, coupled with the travails of the Emergency period in the 1950s, and increased urbanization thereafter, laid the foundation for the present situation.

(c) MMK

Handy Advice if You Are About to Apply For a Food Aid Job

A few years ago, I read Michael Maren’s The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity and it fundamentally changed my attitude to aid. The book should be required reading for every literate person and I highly recommend it. Peter Uvin’s Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda is just as important a read. Uvin demonstrates how NGOs and other aid organisations contributed to the strength and survival of a Rwandan regime that turned genocidal in 1994. Last, but certainly not least, is Graham Hancock’s Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business which is the classic in this small, but critical genre. Below is a speech by Michael Maren delivered to a group of Cornell University graduate students who were preparing to work in international development during the early 1990s.

The Food-Aid Racket

by Michael Maren

As you prepare for and look forward to careers in international development, I am compelled to issue a warning. With the hindsight of someone who spent five years in the development business, I’m going to tell you that the development industry hurts people in the developing world. Its greatest success has been to provide good jobs for Westerners with graduate degrees from institutions like this one. I don’t expect that any of you will take my advice and start looking for careers elsewhere. AndI’m in no position to criticize you for going ahead and working in development even after you hear me out. You see, I had a pretty wonderful career in the aid business. I can’t remember ever having more fun. In fact, I was having so much fun that I didn’t want to stop, even after I realized that our programs were hurting the very people they were supposed to help.

In 1980, when I was twenty-five years old, I was hired by Catholic Relief Services (CRS) to administer food-for-work programs–programs that feed people in exchange for their work on local development projects–in Kenya. I was given a beautiful garden apartment in a nice neighborhood in Nairobi, a brand-new Land Cruiser, a great office, and almost a million dollars in a U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) grant to oversee the programs. As I began the job, shiploads of U.S. government surplus rice were leaving a port in Texas and heading to Mombasa. Meanwhile, CRS notified the country’s parish priests and government officials that this rice was available. All they had to do to receive it was fill out a one-page application describing their proposed project and specifying the number of “recipients”–the number of the project’s workers who would receive sacks of rice in exchange for their labor. Thousands of applications were submitted.

I took some of the U.S. AID money and customized the Land Cruiser, adding extra-large fuel tanks and a really nice stereo system, and then I set off across Kenya to inspect the proposed projects. It was a dream come true. I was driving absolutely free across one of the world’s most beautiful landscapes. I was so awestruck by my own good luck that sometimes I’d stop in the middle of a huge empty wilderness, or beside a herd of giraffes or elephants, and just yelp with delight.

I was having so much fun running around starting food-for-work projects–water projects, agriculture projects, forestry projects–that I completely overlooked the most obvious problem: I knew nothing about agriculture, forestry, road building, well digging, dam building, or any of the projects I was approving. But nobody seemed to care. Only once did anyone in authority at CRS ever go and look at a project. When I’d return to Nairobi every few weeks, my boss, who let me work completely unsupervised, had only one question: How many more recipients did you sign on? More recipients meant more government grant money, which meant we could buy more vehicles and hire more assistants.

When I slowed down for a moment to consider what was happening, it became clear: aid distribution is just another big, private business that relies on government contracts. Private voluntary organizations (PVOs) such as CRS are paid by the U.S. government to give away surplus food produced by subsidized U.S. farmers. The more food CRS gave away, the more money they received from the government to administer the handouts. Since the securing of grant money is the primary goal, PVOs rarely meet a development project they don’t like.

Of all the aid programs, those involving food delivery are especially prized by PVOs because they generate income, are easy to administer, and are warmly received by the public. Yet most food aid has little to do with need and everything to do with getting rid of surplus food. Kenya was not a country facing starvation when I worked there. Many of the projects I started were in the rich agricultural land of the central and western parts of the country. In fact, around the world, only about 10 percent of food aid is targeted at emergency situations. PVOs publicize situations such as the one in Somalia in order to raise money from the public, but most of their work is done in areas where there is plenty to eat, because there are simply not enough starving people to absorb all of our surplus food. Also, it’s easier to distribute large quantities of food in more developed areas.

Harmless as this might at first sound, sending food to areas where there is already food creates serious problems. It decreases demand for locally produced commodities, subsidizes the production of cash crops, and fosters dependence among those who receive the aid. Since PVOs can only operate with the approval of the host government, they typically end up supporting the government leaders’ political goals, rewarding the government’s friends, punishing its enemies, and providing fodder for a vast system of political patronage.

That’s exactly what happened in Somalia, where the government and the generals had been playing games with food aid for more than a decade before the Marines arrived. I was working for U.S. AID in Somalia in 1981, when we started pumping food into that country. It was clear to many of us, even then, that the program was working to prop up a corrupt dictator and turn nomads into relief junkies. Refugees poured over the borders and into camps, where they were fed day after day, year after year, by PVOs, while little effort was made to break their growing dependence. In 1987 a World Food Program report stated that Somalia had actually produced a surplus of food that year, yet PVOs continue to distribute free food and collect U.S. government money for administering the delivery. Inevitably, indigenous food-distribution networks withered and died. The country’s economy adapted to foreign aid–not to production. Meanwhile, the PVOs and corrupt government officials got fat and rich.

No one questions private voluntary organizations. Not the U.S. government, which needs to get rid of the food and wants to keep its aid bureaucracy functioning. Not the host government, whose officials often profit from the aid racket. Not the public, which sees aid workers as so many Mother Teresas. And not the press–especially not the press–which has, in recent years, become an integral part of the aid system.

The press’s role in that system is to convey to the West the PVOs’ view of Africa. And because the distribution of food aid is first and foremost a business, it is not surprising that the priorities of aid organizations dominate the West’s image of the continent–an image of helpless nations in need of our support.

This is not a new phenomenon. Aid workers are simply the latest in a series of recent western vanguards in Africa, each of whom put forward the image of Africa that best suited its own interests. The first Europeans to form a vanguard in Africa were the naturalists. Because of them, early European views of Africa emphasized the continent’s natural history. Later, as missionaries began to outnumber explorers, Europe began to see the continent through the eyes of those who were out to save its soul. And as Europe developed political and mercantile interests in Africa, merchants and traders were at the vanguard. At that time, Europeans were concerned with turning Africans into loyal subjects, workers, producers, and citizens of empires. No one really worried about feeding them.

Historically, the press has been willing to uncritically accept whatever image of Africa the western vanguard has been selling. In the case of the PVOs, the press has bought their line because reporters are as dependent on aid organizations as the organizations are on them. It would have been impossible, for example, for the press to cover Somalia without the assistance of PVOs. There’s no Hertz counter at the Mogadishu airport, and no road maps available at gas stations. If a journalist arrives in Africa from Europe or the United States and needs to get to the interior of the country, PVOs are the only ticket. journalists sleep and eat with PVO workers. When they want history and facts and figures, they turn to the PVOs. In press coverage of Somalia or almost any other crisis in Africa, it is always the PVOs who are most often quoted and are regarded as the neutral and authoritative sources–as if they have no vested interest in anything but the truth.

A typical example of the connection between journalism and the aid system is this analysis from a February 22, 1993, story about Africa in the New York Times:

The greatest danger now to Mozambique’s tranquillity, almost everyone agrees, is Mozambique’s tranquillity.

Lacking scenes of carnage and starvation to disturb Western television audiences, Mozambique is having trouble competing for attention with Somalia and the former Yugoslavia.

The article goes on to quote numerous CARE officials whose primary concern is to raise more money to give more aid to Mozambique. The article never considers any alternatives to aid. No aid worker raises the possibility, for example, that Mozambique’s economy might improve if the country focused on exporting goods. No one mentions that in the absence of carnage, Mozambique might be a good place to invest. No one is talking about creating permanent employment for Africans. The only discussion is about raising more money to send experts there and preserve the jobs of expatriates and create more jobs for graduate students from programs like this one. The people who are called upon to diagnose and comment on Africa’s problems are the very people who stand to profit from the diagnoses.

I know that you don’t want to be part of this problem. You’ll tell me that you can change all of this, that you want to work within the bureaucracy to reform the bureaucracy. But in a couple of years you’re going to be in Ouagadougou or Gaborone making a very good salary. The years will pass and you’ll find yourself with two kids in an expensive private school in New England, and you’re going to have perfected skills that aren’t very useful outside of the Third World. You’re going to think about quitting, about raising hell, but you won’t be able to. Because by then you, too, will have become part of the never-ending cycle of aid.

Harper’s Magazine Foundation 1993
Harper’s Magazine
August, 1993

Go to
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363604,00.html
to read Choking on Aid Money in Africa by Erich Wiedemann and Thilo Thielke in Der Spiegel.

Some Combative Comments On ‘Those Who Would Steal African Humanity’ Post

I thought that some of the comments made about my last post, Live8 and Those Who Would Steal African Humanity, were provocative and fun. It proved to be quite unpopular with some readers, which is all good but I am anxious to hear what Africa means to you.

It seems to me that Africa is more an idea than a place for Africans and non-Africans alike. It has never really been a place as much as it has been a type of darkness, a nightmare, a project and a cause. Of course there are many in Africa who are poor or starving or are the victims of horrific political violence, but these afflictions only confirm what has been thought of Africa since the period of slavery and colonialism. When King Leopold II of Belgium murdered over 10 million Congolese between 1880 and 1920, effectively halving the population, he claimed to be saving them from their wretchedness and poverty. I mention this not to claim that this is the goal today, but rather to emphasize that Africa as a hell has been an old idea that was used enthusiastically to dominate and exploit its occupants. Now it is an idea being trotted out in the very countries that just a few decades ago ruled it: this time to save us.

See I did not grow up in Africa. I grew up in very specific places: Ngummo Estate, Mombasa, Lenana School, Kibera and Westlands. I became African only at specific moments, most very rhetorical and sentimentalised. The Nairobi I consider my home town is full of poverty, but that is only one aspect of it. In the worst slums are flexible, assertive and innovative people. The demands of life are too urgent for anyone to seat around and wait for Geldof’s consciousness raising. Nairobi, outside of its growing NGO aid junkies, is not waiting for Geldof’s or the West’s attentions. Everyone is trading, making use of every shred of skill and effort that they possess. Trading, dealing, morphing into whatever ethnic, religious, sexual, national being that will confer the most advantage at particular moments. Nairobi, I find despite its crime and poverty, is innately a hopeful place. So many of my relatives have migrated there with nothing but an address and are now working and producing wealth for themselves. They would appear to be poor, and believe themselves to be so, but they are building lives and their hopes rest on their own abilities and not the government or the donors. If anything, the government is their constant roadblock: they encounter it at every turn with its corruptions, red tapes and oppressions.

Anonymous said…
While we wait for the revolution to be televised, what harm is there in getting a few dollars that we would never have seen anyway?

MMK said…
Ah yes, why not indeed get the aid cash and run? Because there is nothing for free. An entire generation of Africans has grown up begging and I think this has killed much greatness and potential. Aid is pennies on the dollar when compared to the money that a people with a sense of ownership over their lives would make. Just look at the flow of remittances by Africans outside the continent and those sending money from the cities to the rural areas for instance, it dwarfs aid flows by several factors.

Anonymous said…
An interesting perspective. Would it be better if the west just left Africa to its own devices? I thought part of the G8 aims is to enable fair trade by lifting the west’s imposed restrictions and opening the markets for African produce.

Not Glossy said…
Insightful commentary, thank you. It would appear though that celebrities have all the answers for us (everyone)… and thus we have no need for thought or even true debate.

Fred said…
MMK, I’ve read some of your stuff and watched your BBC debate today with the other Martin of Save the Children. Yes, you have a point. Of course we have to live with the fact of life, that there is no such thing as free lunch. Yes, it’s about music, exhibitionism and megalomania – but it is also about harnessing non-official Western resources and tapping on what they love best (e.g. music) for a good cause. They might as well do the same for gay rights, gender parity, and climate change so if they choose to do it for Africa, why is it a problem? It may be a simplistic approach, but it is welcome. It should be part of a concerted effort. It would be foolish to consider this as a panacea. Africans should also put pressure locally on their politicians like Biwott and Uhuru to give up part of their ill-gotten and unfairly acquired wealth, including cash stashed abroad in banks and investments not to mentions the thousands of acres owned by the Kenyatta family and generations of white settlers like the Delamares. OFM, Lecturer, CU.

andy said…
This is wonderful writing. It reminds me of the people who I met when I went to Africa in 1989. They were (and are) people of wisdom and immense capability that we in the west should learn from. They were they kind of people who could face and solve problems. At the time they were standing up against apartheid (and for a new future). Now they are leaders in the new South Africa. I just wish I could get on a plane and go spend more time with them. I think I visited your blog once before and didn’t make it back. This time I’ll mark the spot and be sure to return again.

el pupo said…
just a note to say I *love* your blogging.

owukori said…
The West has appropriated everything African for the past 500 years – now as you say even Africa’s problems. Excellent post and look forward to more

Anonymous said…
Am I missing something here? Pennies on the dollar are better than no pennies at all?
Arguably it would be better if Africans took control of their own affairs and created great potential. Newsflash – they have failed to do so for the past 30-40 years! So while we wait for the revolution, we will gladly accept the few pennies that your revolution has failed to supply. Who has chosen to get the fish instead of learning to fish?

Anonymous said…
Africans do not hold the exclusive rights and monopoly suffering and exploitation. It is interesting to see Africans argue for their place in this category given the fact that they have failed spectacularly to address their economic, social and political status in the past 30-40 years.

andy said…
Interesting anonymous comments…
1. The “failure” that you speak of really involves a relatively short period of time, considering that it took the Western world centuries to develop the political economies that you see today.
2. The “failure” dates back to just after the end of the colonial period. Are you thinking, “Look what a great and wonderful boost that colonialism gave to Africa? Why didn’t you make more of it?” Perhaps you don’t understand African history, or you just think African history is a subset of Western history (sort of a poor, handicapped version that is embarrassing the rest)?
3. You say Africans have failed to take control of their own affairs but ignore the point: that the West has never released control to Africans. That’s the point here (the control is tightening further).
4. You speak of spectacular failures, but in fact there are many spectacular successes in Africa. Those should be brought to light, though people who wallow in ignorance seldom learn anything that is uncomfortable or truly new.

dt said…
Great article!
Reading the comments thus far, perhaps the greatest challenge faced by the continent both from within and without is the tendency to lump all the countries together rather than address each country in its individuality. Even when Africans themselves speak, they speak as though they are a whole. You don’t hear such grouping coming from other continents. Singaporeans refer to themselves as Singaporeans not as Asians or South East Asians. Same goes for a British. He/she refers to him/herself as a Brit not as a European, or an indigene of the European continent. Last I checked not ALL African nations are poverty stricken with children dropping dead from the commonest causes. People talk of the ‘African problem’ the solution seekers in turn mouth its corollary the ‘African solution’. Africans themselves commit the same error in judgement; Africa is not one country for crying out loud! Perhaps what we really need is a great lesson on the axiom ‘every man to himself/every country to herself’ Perhaps if each man was left to his demise, he would think up the best means for his survival. With regards to your insightful piece, may I add that no one has stolen Africa’s humanity. It is us who handed it to them on a silver platter by the vice of not understanding the why’s of our very own existence. After all, like the old saying goes, “When you fail to think, someone else will do it for you”

MMK said…
It was a lot of fun going on the BBC and I offered up a much harder position that I usually adopt because I felt that a sceptical African voice was needed on the day. When I arrived at the studio, I met with Wangari Maathai – the Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize laureate – who is a wonderful person but who sadly was mouthing the same old begging sounds that every prominent African seems to make automatically.

DT – You could not be more correct. Africa is not a single country. But it is taken to be a blank slate on which anyone can write whatever they wish. The aid mongers, the West and our governments have mostly preferred to treat Africa as a space of unceasing suffering and helplessness. This is what keeps the monies flowing.

Andy – Ah, yes, the historical perspective is crucial. Just reading history, of whatever region, it becomes clear that war and corruption have been the rule rather than the exception and that the development of prosperity and peace has been a lengthy road.

Anonymous said…
Let get real, spheres of control are multifaceted; those spheres were most African governments have the ability to affect the have failed in a spectacular manner. You know the classic comparison case, the one between Ghana and Malaysia; you know the one about them being practically identical in all economic/health indicators in 1958 when they acquired independence from the same British government. The same economic/health indicators are not remotely comparable now 40 years later. One country has made huge economic gains while the other is still wallowing in abject poverty and is considered a success case when compared with its neighbours. I will let you guess which country is which. Maybe while you’re at it you can explain how the English never let go of the reigns of power and that is why Mugabe is busy laying millions of his fellow country men destitute by flattening their homes, the Zimbabwean form of ethic cleansing, perhaps those evil colonialists have been running round the country side in Darfur killing and raping. The Belgians are the ones that run amok in Rwanda and murder close to a million folks. Hey, it was those evil westerners that emptied the state coffers of most countries in Africa in the tune of billions of dollars. Those animals, they just gave Museveni the right to go over the Ugandan constitution and give himself one more term as president. These animals they are relentless, they made Mswati of Swaziland want to spend money on a presidential plane that was more than the countries budget on education. See, you understand that these Africans are innocent hapless children who despite their best efforts can not make any positive decisions, the west has robbed and beaten them into murderous, thieving but well meaning people. Like Children who have no understating of consequences of their actions these Africans can not be held responsible for failing to make any positive change in those little things they could change.

lex said…
Your argument is nothing but a string of eloquent self pity. Whilst it is obvious that Live8 or a decision to abolish debt will not make Africa’s plight disappear, the Western attempt should not go unwelcomed. Yes, there is no such thing as a free meal, but this constant banter about the thievery of ‘African humanity’ clearly reeks of a wounded pride. Whatever the West may have done in the past, its current attempts with Live8 can only be seen as a positive. Allowance for support nurtures the path to recovery – your desperate grip on all the suffering and struggle that has happened only adds to its suffocation. And all for what? To fulfil some arrogant self indulgent fantasy about overcoming the apparent ‘inverse inferiority’?

MMK said…
Lex – Methinks you misunderstand what I am trying to say. If anything, I am railing against the self pity of those in Africa who come to the West cap in hand attempting to parlay African poverty into an opportunity to gain Western charity. Their efforts are mirrored by a self serving aid industry and the appetite to turn the African into a cause and nothing more by a growing stable of rock stars and politicians. I am not about wounded pride, but I also know that pride is an absolute requirement if Africans are to triumph over their problems. I see this pride everytime I am home and I see it compromised and attacked daily by the beggary of our leaders. Surely Lex, you can join me in recognising that at the end of the day Africa’s march to wealth and stability will come from African effort. Live8 and similar efforts are an attempt to get around this fact. What recovery is this that you speak of? Aid has been in the card for decades, always with new strategies for “accountability, transparency and results” but this has never worked. The only wealth that has been built by aid has been among aid workers and local political elites. The poor, if anything have grown in number. So should I be grateful for this latest effort?

Critical Mass Vancouver said…
I think “Make Poverty History” is a pretty arrogant catchphrase. But there is so free lunch, and idealism is not stupid. All energy is of the sun, literally, and it never stops. I don’t think that honour is really such a wonderful thing. I don’t think that we do much useful by speaking of people in anti-democratic situations as a ‘nation’. I don’t know much about Africa except imperial history and genocide history. My part of the world, in Vancouver unceded Coast Salish Territory, the Aboriginal people were very rich because it is very green and rains a lot. I don’t think that Africa is really such a poor place. So much wealth flows from there and many believe it is the cradle of humankind. But it is a truism from the TV that there are starving babies in Africa which everybody already knows about OR nobody can do anything about it anyway. I wish your criticism was less about a media personality of this single unified/disunified entity called Africa whose honour and ownership of the problems have been besmirched. I think it should say that this is another straightforward attack under the deception of aid. It is about disempowering billions of people. Or it should be more positive and say that we should not be so simplistic and not assume the stupid things the Rock Stars say for the cameras, but every bit counts and lets make work what we have. Get specific and get less media spectacle more community. Anyway I just worry that while you are speaking truth to power you are not contradicting the worst part: that nothing can change. They kill optimism by overusing it and invoking it in a way that, beyond the shallowest sense, will evaporate under the weight of reality. You kill optimism by mostly being critical of their naive idealism. Let’s focus more on the Fair/Free Trade issues rather than the charity. Debt cancellation is not Charity but legally required in the case of onerous debt [that debt, which is in many cases the type of debt in Africa, where a dictator or other unaccountable ran up the bill and now the majority are expected to pay for what wasn't their will]. I think it would be great to be more critical of specific western colonial nations and get them to change their policy. Like American Drug companies or European Manufacturers that suck out raw materials and keep the value added activity in Europe. But I know almost nothing about this stuff, solidarity is a good thing but a locals need to lead. I think that the rock stars can perhaps be reformed to see this. There are no limits to their ignorance because of how they are sheltered on a pedestal. But mostly they are just trying to help and if someone with a more thoughtful program asked them they would prefer to help with that. It seems that the Live 8 is somewhat ‘better’ than the 1980s version which was only about aid, not the debt and fair trade. Those are facts that are already known in the television sphere. Why not pin that tail. Is it really such ‘progress’? Or is the assumption still about a kind of charity superiority racism as you contend. Anyway, good to see a thoughtful blog, keep it up!

Z said…
How can you condemn people for trying to create a fairer world? This isn’t about charity, it isn’t about ‘saving Africa’ it’s about extending a hand of friendship, not laying claim to Africans problems but recognising them and saying you’re not alone. People are tired of giving aid, seeing that it makes no permanent change, Live 8 is about changing trade laws to help, instead of hindering African economic growth, not just aid and debt relief. From where I was standing, I thought the point was to tell the world the truth, educating people, showing them just how complicated the whole situation is, am I wrong? There are people who want to give money for their own sense of moral self-righteousness, that’s true. There are also people who just want to help, people who’ve done their share of soul searching, triumphed over their own demons, and in the end just want the people of, not just Africa, but anyone else who’s ever suffered for whatever reason, to know that whatever you think of the rest of the world, some people in it actually give a shit. Stop being so damn cynical and realise that some people just want to help, even if they can’t or don’t know how, when something like this happens they go along with it and they do whatever they can to support it, just because it can be interpreted as ‘an exercise in white, Western megalomania’ doesn’t mean every person in that crowd is there for their own self gratification, like I said, some might just happen to give a crap as well.

Anonymous said…
A quick reminder for our Anglo-Saxon musicians and politicians: HISTORY MAKES POVERTY, union jackasses-

http://www.philosophyfootball.com/view_item.php?pid=262

Babylon System is the Vampire!

Why OGs and mababi, two generations of the African elite, are under attack

When I attended primary school in Pumwani in the early 1980s, babi was a teasing term for a softie: a spoiled kid who couldn’t hang. In the intervening decades, a babi has become a detested and shunned individual who cannot participate in most public spaces in Nairobi. His presence is experienced by most as an imposition, an invasion by a Babylon system that dirties all it touches with its contempt, sense of entitlement, foreign airs and corruption. To put it simply, a babi is a child of the OGs: the original gangsters who took over the reins of the colonial state in the 1960s and their hangers-on. While crime is widespread, to be identified as a babi marks you as a target for hyper-violent criminality; the failings of the political system that gave birth to him shall be visited on his flesh.

The Kibaki administration, the Official Opposition and the foreign-funded civil society are all mababi. While they are busy arguing about corruption, the constitution and speeches by Edward Clay, they have not noticed that they are speaking to themselves. People are hearing the political chatter, but listening is an act of faith that would be naïve given what has happened in the last two years not to mention the preceding forty. Many are realizing that the system has never worked for them. In fact, the problem is not that it has failed but that it was never designed to deliver. Those occupying the higher reaches of the state have not noticed that politics are moving out of the political arena. The people – that featureless mass perpetually invoked by the babi system as the recipient of its political efforts – have checked out of the building. But in many African countries, they have only been inside the national building for brief periods of postcolonial history.

Mababi cradle their drinks in expensive restaurants, often discussing, amid the sounds of tinkling glasses, mwa-mwa-mwa kisses and modulated Spanish music, politics. They tend to demand a return to a clean, green, criminal-free capital city – an Eden that only they, and the colonial settlers before them, ever occupied. Their concerns are reminiscent of colonial settlers who sipped sundowners during Empire’s high noon and complained that the city had gone to hell, that the Africans were becoming more criminal by the day. Can it not be asked whether the mababi are the colonialists of the 21st Century?

Their parents’, the OGs’, takeover of the colonial reins was a cosmetic change – the barest mention of words like revolution or struggle produces an uncomfortable shuffling of feet, clearing of throats – never meant to address the state’s toxic relationships to the many publics of the newly independent colony. The mode of OG governance was classically colonial: divide and rule, patronage, brutality and relentless speeches urging the ignorant rural folk to modernize and develop. They took over and whitewashed the colonisers civilizing mission: a confused, racist attempt to subjugate the ‘savages’ presumably in order to save us from ourselves.

Modernization and development in the OG dictionary have meant ‘come with me on a merry run-around where I pretend to do stuff for you while I pad my bank account with your taxes’.

It is true that the nationalists in their heyday captured the imagination of many people. Unfortunately many of them secretly aspired to be like the White dude they saw during a Speech Day in school. And so many of them became not the connecting voices of their different peoples, but the bridge between the village and the European metropolis, the commodity brokers who sold their people short. They turned their faces to London, Havana, Moscow or Washington; anywhere, provided it was not the smoky huts in which they were born. But they still sought to brandish those poor, church-attending relatives as a political base in order to get hold of the Governor’s Mansion or State House as it is now known.

The initial strategy was to shout down imperialism, flirt with socialism and declare that as panafricanists, they now represented all Africans. Simultaneously, switching from the language of revolution, they used their smooth talk to assure the colonial powers that it would be business as usual after independence. They were everything to everyone: fellow revolutionaries to Fidel Castro and Malcolm X; visionary leaders to many Africans; and business partners to colonialists.

The OGs in the next twenty years after independence engaged in an orgy of thievery. Its dire public cost was only relieved by infusions of Western aid, commodity exports and the fading memory of colonial administrative know-how. It is during these years that they gave birth to the mababi. Though OGs remain in control of the higher terraces of the state, their babi children are attempting the second inheritance. Where the former used nationalism and panafricanism to satisfy a hunger for power, the latter are using ideas from conferences held in Beijing, Davos and Monterrey. The cry is no longer yesteryear’s Viva La Revolución; it is now the Western liberalism of the UN’s Millennium goals, NEPAD, Feminism, Human Rights and Environmentalism. To mababi, the state is theirs to inherit. They are already working hard to create the impression that they are the representatives of – you guessed right – the people. They point an accusing finger at the OGs for bad governance – as if the opposite has ever been true in most of Africa – and conveniently forget that it is a sin to disrespect their parents. The citizen’s role in this plan: help the mababi clean up the OG system.

As the African publics endure insult heaped on injury, the numbers who still believe that forming legal parties, voting and raising kids to do well in exams can change the rules of the game shrinks. Increasingly, the view that it is not the rules of the game that are wrong but rather the entire class of people who dominate it is gaining a foothold. It is those who hold this conviction and have turned to crime that should concern everyone whose lifestyle seems babi-like even if they are not well connected members of this small tribe.

Adherents of the growing outlaw culture in Nairobi have a code that utilises violence above and beyond the call of criminal duty. When a babi is targeted, he commonly experience the whack of the pistol butt across the face, a humiliating undressing after a car jacking and unprovoked stabbings or shootings. The victim is held in such scorn that the assailants believe he deserve no humane consideration. Many innocents have been victimized and even the babi is often not personally guilty of any crime. But because so many have turned their back on the political process, and on the laws it is meant to create and enforce, they regard those on the wrong side of the babi divide as fair game.

To those who experience the quiet desperation of trying to survive in Africa – despite some personnel changes at State House – further talk of reform is a mockery. The only way out of this impasse is to ruthlessly limit the state’s functions and resources. Its reach should be shrunk to the point that there is little incentive for the OGs and mababi to control its coffers. The only institutions we need as people of initiative and industry are the judiciary, the legislature and law enforcement. Demands for privatization, decentralization, low taxes and the retreat of the state from the economy will not be bywords of a neo-liberal agenda set in Washington. Rather, they will be the start of a much needed and long-awaited process of decolonization. Africans do not want promises of better governance by the same old crowd or its anti-corruption rhetoric or seminars lecturing us about sustainable development. We want to be left alone by a vampire state and its little vampire children who never saw a con they didn’t like, a donor they could not kneel before and a poor person they couldn’t pity, hate or fear.

Diary of a Mad Kenyan Woman

I have just run across this blog whose first post blew me away. The Mad Kenyan Woman asks: Theoretical Economies: Does Africa Have a Consciousness? Her answer is provocative, mind enlarging and, I must warn you, will make you wish that you had eaten more fish as a kid.

My Granpa Went to Burma and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

Have you ever wondered why the British have so much concern for Africa and Africans that they would launch commissions of inquiry into the continent’s troubles? Well so have I, which is why an upcoming Oral History conference on ‘changing memories of World War Two’ offered me a glimpse into the heart of British charity. This is the advertisement for the conference:

A range of presentations from across Europe, Asia, Oceania, and Latin and North America will address the War’s consequences and legacy in the memories of participants and for successive generations. These presentations are organized into two major themes which reflect the ways in which the War continues in many countries to play a part in historical consciousness and everyday life. ‘Remembering, forgetting and silences’ explores individual memories in relation to dominant discourses, identity, myth and intergenerational transmission. The second of the two themes, ‘Using memories of war’, includes reminiscence as a therapeutic intervention and the ways in which the media has shaped recollections of the War.

That is right. Africa and Africans were somehow not a part of that war’s consequences and legacies. Yet the King’s African Rifles suffered many thousands of dead and maimed in the Burma, Abyssinia and Somalia campaigns. Then there were the taxes and other privations that Africans had to suffer as their colonial rulers fought a total war. This is not a rant to demand ‘inclusion’, a term that I detest with every cell in my body, it is to note that even as the British establishment crows about 2005 being the ‘Year of Africa’, they nevertheless maintain boundaries between the native and the master in their national myths. There is plenty of print and conferencing available when you die of hunger, HIV or just plain old atrocity, but not when you take a bullet for King Georgie. The thanks must flow in one direction only: Africans must kneel before the British in gratitude at Blair’s Commission and Bob Geldof’s pronouncements. But they, oh no, they will not acknowledge that at the hour of their greatest weakness, some darkies stepped in and did a job.

Pity is the worst thing in the world. When you are pitied and helped out of pity, your life is often taken off your hands. Pity degrades and kills everything it touches. And that is what we have become, a pitied people who come on hands and knees begging for more pity, nay actually, it is worse than that, we now demand pity as a human right!

I have fired off a deceptively ‘calm’ email to the organisers and hope that they will fall for the trap before I launch some brimstone their way.

Having said all that, I am embarrassed at how poor my education in history was in Kenya. I did not for example know that almost every Kamba male who was not handicapped was recruited into WW1 service; or that so many died and suffered (45,000 officially and 200,000 unofficially); or that many campaigns were won through the tenacity and courage of African soldiers. They may have been fighting in an absurd war given that they were the colonised fighting to keep others from being colonised, but courage should be acknowledged and applauded wherever it rears its head. The recruitment of the King’s African rifles who numbered over 120,000 in WW2 brought many people from incredibly diverse backgrounds together. They took to speaking English, Lingala, and Swahili as common languages, creating the templates for the nationalist politics that followed and led to the formation of the continent’s governments. The salaries they were paid sparked an economic boom after the war and tied a large proportion of the people to the cash economy. The war also radically changed the colonial notions of the African person. After the high fatality rate of WW1, recruiters had a tough time trying to attract Africans to join up. Few now know that the colour bar was dropped in 1939 to enable readier military recruitment.

Growing up, I was always taken with the bronze three-man statue on Kenyatta Avenue – can you picture it? The guy with a stick is a carrier, in the middle is a KAR rifleman flanked by an Arab rifleman. They appeared so strong and firm, which I suppose is the whole point of the thing. And the stories from the wars are gripping. Kenyan and Tanzanian beef for example fed the million men on the allied side stationed in the Middle East. Then here comes the King’s Africans Rifles, who when they were not putting down rebellious types on home soil, found time to ship to Burma and face down Japan’s crack troops – called the white tigers – in the ‘valley of death’. Then there are characters like Color-Sergeant Kumani of the 1st Battalion, King’s African Rifles who on October 7, 1914 won the Distinguished Conduct Medal in a battle at Gazi for his bravery ‘in leading his company in a charge after all his officers had been shot down, and drawing off the enemy’. Why did he do it? Why did he run into enemy fire when his white officers fell?

My late grandfather was a medical officer during World War 2 and I remember him being called daktari by everyone in Wida, Kiambu. I wonder what he experienced in Burma. What he felt travelling so far, treating gaping wounds and doses of the clap, losing friends to an early death for a cause that was not theirs. He was such a bunch of contradictions: charismatic, kind to me, brutal to those he did not like, clever, seductive, funny… He was a full person, but I regret that I was too young to talk to him about the things that I have since learned about his time ‘over there’. Beyond these personal asides, I am as always struck by the power of learning history. And have developed a conviction that to be ignorant about history is to be an intellectual cripple: driven only by the demands of the present and yet unable to understand from whence they come, and therefore ultimately meeting the future unarmed and more naked than need be.

Maybe I am wrong and my high school history education was superior. But I was too sleepy to care during those hellish afternoon double lessons with this teacher we called Rook. He would stand in front of the class like a peacock, chin up, hands on hips, and would authoritatively repeat the textbook on your desk to a letter. The moment I set eyes on him, a wave of sleep would overcome me. I always thought he should have come with one of those ‘do not operate machinery after ingestion’ warning signs. Yes, perhaps it was all Rooks’ fault.

Mass of Appetites: A Nairobi Bar Horror Story II

Below is a slightly different and longer version of Mass of Appetites. I hope you enjoy it, despite it being quite rough, and that you feel driven to add a paragraph, a photo, whatever, in the comments section. I will look through any such contributions and consider how to work them in. I like the idea of monster stories occurring in familiar spaces where people behave unexceptionally yet co-exist with horror.

Mass of appetites
It always buys rounds
Eating, guffawing
Patting the distension, wiping grease off bulging, sagging cheeks
gorging
Holding forth, fat soft paws gesturing
They reach for the girl
who imagines she will survive the eating
you are a ngood gaw
the appetites breath is hot and wet
eyes: beady, sunken, gleeful
happy
I may nget this one

The Mass of Appetites is always on the make, out on the town most nights of the week, like a shark that cannot stop swimming and hunting for a single moment lest it drown. His German automobile turns into the bar parking lot slowly, ponderously, with the drivers behind him hooting their exasperation. Appetites drives carefully and his car is always very clean. It has one of those pine tree air fresheners dangling from the back mirror alongside a small smiling green troll doll bought on a trip to Dubai last year. The inside of the car is immaculate and the outside polished to a dull sheen.

He looks for the parking space that will afford the most people a look at his car and is willing to wait interminably for one to free up. He crouches in his seat, taking in the sights, with his soft paw-like hands holding onto the velvet-bound steering wheel. When the watchman informs him there are open parking spaces further down, he chooses his response carefully from his two-item menu: threaten or cajole.

He takes in the other cars in the lot which are mostly Toyota Corollas bought from Dubai, the unmistakable mark of the striving classes. In the old days the ladder’s steps were: servant quarter in Golf Course, house in Buru Buru, a plot in Githurai, house in Plains View and the final move to Kileleshwa. Now it is about modes of transport: mathrees for a few years, the Shuttle, a used Nissan Sunny, new Corolla, used BMW then finally the Mercedes Kompressor. They will never rebel he thinks with an amusement laced with contempt, they will only keep switching their modes of trajectory to account for every national failure. Finally parked, he heaves his distended belly out of the car by first putting both small feet on the ground then with a grunt rising. He maintains surreptitious glances at the car, nervous that it will be stolen and also curious what everyone thinks of it.

Appetites ambles into the bar, beady eyes darting in all directions as he seeks friends and targets. His eyes take in the girls barely out of school, judging the firmness of thigh, the weight of buttock and most importantly the state of finance. He can guess within a few hundred shillings how much everyone has in their purse or wallet. Pocketing, he fingers a wad of notes with one finger and then subtly rubs it against his penis which is already semi-engorged with possibility.

As he walks toward fellow appetites with whom he’s done ‘Tender business’ in the past and who he calls his friends but secretly loathes, he notices a girl, dressed in a tight black dress that hugs a curvaceous body, who is eyeing him with what she imagines is a knowing eye. A frission of excitement runs down his sweaty back. She is the best kind – the ones who imagine that they KNOW, who want to eat into his wad, to use him. He chuckles inwardly knowing that he is unusable and cannot be lied to because he has achieved the exalted state of decadence which is the truest form of freedom. It does not matter that she has coupled hundreds of times or has a boy she loves and comes to this bar only for the money, he can smell the remaining strands of innocence woven into her firm youthful flesh. She will not know that when he heaves his hairy thighs off the bed with his fang dripping semen, he will have pulled them out of her and transformed her into the undead.

He calls for a triple shot of Johnny Walker Black and three kilos of roast meat – fuel for the hunt – while loudly ordering a round of drinks for the table. Miming conversation with his fellow Appetites, who do not mind since they too are busy, he sweeps his eyes across the room taking in the men this time. He wonders whether they present any competition for his mission. He casts around seeking those that appear to be in love wanting to watch them for little lapses that betray the futility of their attempt to find happiness. Spotting one such couple seated with the girl in black he notes the boy’s eyes occasionally glazing over as they covertly take in the sight of strangers’ thighs and arses. Soon the girl will be ready for Appetites when she finds out that her beloved, but slightly disappointing boyfriend is pawing her sister or sleeping with her best friend. He has seen betrayal a thousand times, but gets a delicious charge each time.

The girl in black gets up to go to the bathroom and Appetites, now in full Nosferatu mode, eyes her proud back which tapers to a point before her hips and buttocks explode outward and then settle onto thick hard thighs and thin calves. She walks slowly, uncomfortable in heels that are a bit too high for her, tottering and parting her way through the crowd with a subtle caress here and a hip nudge there. She will do, oh yes, there will be a feeding tonight. But first he must seek that dark, strong thing deep inside him that attracts his prey as surely a flame draws a fly to its destruction. He has never put a name to it, but knows that it emerges in the presence of Black Label, a wad of money, noise, low lights and innocence.

The meat arrives and he reluctantly invites the other Appetites to partake as well. They fall to it with unembarrassed relish. Tearing, guffawing mirthlessly, wiping grease off bulging, sagging cheeks and holding forth on “prots in Dadora”. Appetite matches them bite for bite, caressing his pot belly to summon the confidence monster who must emerge soon if the girl is not to fall to one of his companions. Here she comes.

She is heading for her table but her eyes are fixed on the table of Appetites, aware that they are rich and on a hunt. She thinks herself their equal in worldliness, confident that her beauty which she has used to toy with many men could see her through an encounter with any of them. Appetite watches her amused glance and snickers inwardly knowing that like everyone uprooted and thrown into the thousand universes that are Nairobi she belongs to many and yet to none – she longs for anchor and is seeking it without recognizing her desperate need. She has one of those new fangled rasta hairstyles which at first puzzled Appetite who had only ever seen them in pictures of Bob Marley and Dedan Kimathi. He has since come to associate them not with political struggle but with a process of self manufacturing that is a response to any one of a thousand traumas of an upper-middle class family tumbled to genteel poverty.

Such girls always tell teary tales of the mistakes Daddy and Mummy made as the to-be-rasta attended some fancy private school and then went abroad to find Me, he feels a surge of hatred. They make for the easiest prey. He knows how to lay a trap that allows them to feel the greatest degree of freedom even as the noose tightens – it is how they prefer to be ambushed. His first move must confirm her opinion of him and then there will be nowhere to go but up, all the while borne by her pleasant surprise.
‘I’ve been looking for you, Needs, do you know why?’
‘Yes, you seek flesh. You want to love me and you resent me for that.’
‘But there are also other things that lie beneath the flesh that are desirable,’ he breathes underneath his words. He is playing with the flame, trying to get as close to the edge as possible. The eating will be sweeter if he has voiced his true intentions and she, already caught in the web of the undead, freely offers herself.

A passing waiter with a tray of samosas and sausages walks by. Appetites motions to him and orders five of each. He watches Needs nibble at her sausage fastidiously, careful that she should not ruin her carefully applied makeup. Her face is round with wide eyes that are extraordinarily far apart so that she wears an expression of permanent surprise. Her smile is an attempt to communicate certainty where there is none; it twitches slightly at its widest point. The skin on her neck is darker than that on her face due to the use of Ambi skin lightening cream, her body not as youthful as it seemed at a distance. Appetites notes the careful disguise with distress, perhaps she has no strands, maybe she is empty of the sweet marrow. He falls to the remaining snacks, shoving them into his mouth and swallowing without chewing. Needs recoils inwardly, suddenly aware that she is in the presence of a great hunger.
‘What is it that you do for a living?’ she asks.
‘You are curious? I am an in-between; I exist in the cracks to smooth them over. I detect needs and fill them while keeping a few of them for myself. And you?’
‘I told you that I was the daughter of Fallen Success. That means that I spend my time caressing entitlement, in expectation of victory.’
As they have been talking, her hand has been inside her large leather purse stroking the spine of a book as if a genie will fly out of it and rescue her.
‘Which book is that you are reading?’ he asks. The dark thing always wants to know such details, there is no better way to divine the state of the inside.
‘The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho,’ she answers.
He shudders with excitement, she is his. It is the final proof that she is desperately trying to hold onto a moral universe – she is ready for the nail.

Appetites and Needs are in the German automobile heading to his lair. They are silent, listening to a CD of sighs and moans that Appetites is playing at a high volume. The lights of other cars do not seem to reach into the cab and he is driving very slowly. Needs looks around the interior and notices little carnations strewn carefully about, the kind used for funeral wreaths.

They drive on a dark road winding through a forest, past a great housing estate that now lies empty and silent, past vast horticultural farms, coffee and tea plantations, herds of emaciated cattle with no minders and beach hotels whose windows are giant Trojan condoms – they have not seen a single car or human being for the past hour. The music this time is a steady murmuring that is getting louder with every passing mile. She notices that the road is widening and is running downhill.
‘Where do you live?’
‘At the end of this artery.’
They drive past dark silent mansions whose large gates – on which symbols in a strange language are wrought in grey steel – have been half torn off their hinges.
‘Where are we, who lives in these houses?’ she asks with trepidation, she is realizing that there exist paths whose existence she had never even guessed at.
‘Mimicry used to live here behind gates of nihilism that as you can see were no match for absurdity when it came to take them to the end of the road.’
Needs is starting to listen to the voice beneath his words, feeling the presence of the dark thing. She glances sideway at Appetites and sees that he appears bigger than he did when they left the bar. He is sunken into the leather seat and his stomach has grown so large that it is pressed hard against the steering wheel which he clutches loosely with hands sprouting rough black hairs. His eyes are shut not looking at the road ahead and she can no longer feel the motion of the car.

‘I’ve changed my mind about visiting the end of the road, please take me back home.’ Her voice trembles. He does not reply for long minutes, but instead fiddles with the radio which starts emitting a low keening noise that steadily rises in intensity.

The road has by now become a steep decline and the trees bordering it rustle agitatedly. The moon, so prominent when they got in the car, is nowhere to be seen and yet there is an eerie light that seems to emanate from the earth itself.

Appetites is in a trance, knowing that the dark thing is now in full control, the hour of feeding is well nigh. It caresses his sex, stilling him, burrowing deep into the folds of his stomach and emptying it in preparation. The trees outside the car are now in frenzy, bending over the road almost as if they wish to peer into the car. The radio is now emitting a wailing noise.

Needs is whimpering.

They approach a large black gate decorated with naked steel statues that spell out ‘Etats house’. It opens with a great creaking sound that can be heard over the radio’s deafening wail. Appetites has expanded even more and is now pressed hard against Needs side.

‘We are here: the end of the road.’

Appetites puts both his feet on the black gravel and with a heavy grunt of effort heaves his bulk out of the automobile motioning to Needs to follow him. They are outside a large mansion with every light blazing. Fused within its granite walls is wet blonde hair that emanates a strong smell that seeps into Need’s every pore. She staggers into Appetites’ arms knowing that in them lies certain destruction, but it is the only place that appears familiar and therefore comforting.

They descend a winding staircase, the steps illuminated by a milky, glowing substance. On the walls are a thousand portraits of old men in Makerere graduation gowns. Their faces wear expressions of heavy resignation battling pride; their fingers clutch their diplomas tightly like a drowning man clutches at a straw. Fallen Success. Needs is in the house that she has been trying so desperately to run from, she was always headed here. She feels an enormous weariness.

Appetites savors these moments before the feeding when he sees the target face-to-face with itself. He is fully engorged, but cannot remember when he has ever felt hungrier. If only the other Appetites could see him now, descending lower than they have ever dared.

A low keening sound fills the hallway through which they are walking. It breaks into song, a disjointed rap tune issuing from a child’s throat.

Ahhhhhhhhh, squat, squaating, birthing.
Prowl, sprawling
I am a savage
Spear chucker
Right inside you
Chucker chuckling
Position clear
No instrument required by law to be stamped
Can be accepted
Unless it is stamped with the required
Sufficient stamps under the stamp oathing
Roader roading
Insides chuckling
Spear hurting
Savagery ceasing

Needs lies on the bed watching the ceiling on which fat snakes in pinstripes, red shirts and green ties wriggle as if in a pit of pain. They are hissing at her … hissing her name over and over. ‘Needs, Needs, Needs daughter of Fallen Success,’ they say. They are celebrating her homecoming to the end of it all; to that place the ordinary world pretends does not exist.

Appetites is asleep on his feet. The dark think unfurls, its one unblinking eye fixed on Needs. From this eye comes a drop of a bloody liquid whose scent is like rich, wet loam soil.

Needs watches the fang approach flanked by two thin hairy thighs above which swings swollenness containing filaments of writhing, suffering innocence. She parts her legs already feeling her filaments struggling to get out, to free her of their tenuous hold. Appetites does as instructed and perches above her directing the fang between her legs, its breath against Needs thick thighs is hot and moist. It writhes towards her. She screams.

The African and his Dangerous Loins

The piece below was published in the East African in the Fall of 2004. It is about a London conference that featured all the hypocrisies that I have been ranting about for the past week. It will be followed by a return to the The Matrix Redux: The African Version – stuff that is a bit lighter once this rant on donors and the aid-consuming elites leaves me, to return soon no doubt.

You’ve been hoodwinked. You’ve been had. You’ve been took. You’ve been led astray, run amuck. You’ve been bamboozled. — Malcolm X

African loins are dangerous to their owners and to society at large, especially when they pair up. At a late 2004 UN conference on reproductive health held in London – with the ominous sounding title of Countdown 2015 – African sex came under the spotlight for its almost unmitigated dangers. Speakers held forth on its unfortunate tendency to transmit lethal infections and failing that, to result in numerous babies who, contrary to popular belief, are actually destructive beings that impoverish their parents and undermine national economic aspirations. Countdown 2015 ended with the unanimous recommendation that Africans should make capacity building efforts empowering them to sheath their weapons of mass destruction in latex. Outrage was expressed that while facing the twin dangers of disease and babies, Africans are faced with the disadvantages dealt them by a destructive colonial legacy and the continuing neo-colonial attentions of the West. It was thus confusing in the extreme when this august body of scholars, reproductive health professionals and officials from African governments and NGOs concluded that Africans had a right to free condoms and healthcare paid for by those same Western nations.

The overarching goal of the conference was how to provide free sexual healthcare to the world’s poor by 2015. Its various motions lived up to the worst stereotypes of NGO-speak: impenetrable, pedantic and cursed with a hopeless idealism. Participants argued that unless all women and men have access to free contraception of their choice, it would be impossible for hunger, war and pestilence to be eliminated in Africa. The pressure civil society, which many attendees claimed to belong to, exerted on local governments and donors would result in funding being made available for contraceptives that would then be delivered by NGOs. The small talk back at the delegates’ $300 per night hotels was all about empowerment and the possibility of getting invited to the next conference at some exotic locale. Uplifting stories of poor folks’ ability to cope with privation were shared by our learned friends who spoke in hushed tones accompanied by furious little nods acknowledging the dignity of ‘the people’. I wondered whether the irony-free demand that rich nations were obligated to pay for the care of poor Africans was made in cruel jest or was evidence of an astonishing naivety. It also made me curious about the wider role that donors and NGOs and the so-called civil society play in Kenya.

Most of those attending the conference were united in the opinion that the industrialized West has an obligation to provide contraception and health for the African poor. In numerous speeches, the recipients of this aid were tagged as partners or even clients – in the case of NGO service provision – but there was little doubt that they exist downstream from the expertise and the money. They were relegated to a helpless, but dignified victim-hood beyond their ability to relieve save when their capacity receives attention from the NGO-donor crowd. So it was that speaker after speaker asserted the right to free condoms to be as fundamental as that of free speech.

Of course the glaring difference between the two is that while you can fight your government for the license to vote or speak your mind, you cannot marshal much of an argument if faraway governments do not safeguard your loins. Can Africans really enjoy rights based on Western charity? Is it possible that donor states are generous enough to provide free health and contraception to billions outside their boundaries? Common sense would provide answers that are resoundingly negative. But such conferences are not exercises in common sense, they are attempts to de-politicize African poverty so that it can be managed by a section of the upper class sustained on donor patronage and with no popular mandate.

It calls itself civil society. Even when it employs political language, for instance in railing against what it asserts is neo-colonialism or the devastating legacy of colonialism, the higher aim is to engender guilt in the liberal West and ensure the continued flow of donor money. Sections of this civil society – many who were present at Countdown 2015 – periodically make headlines for holding lively demonstrations against multinationals, regarding them to be at the forefront of a homogenizing globalization of capital and Anglo-American culture. The language employed is that of a class war whose European frontlines have since been abandoned by its originators – the revolutionary left. The paradoxical result is that NGOs funded by pro-globalization agencies such as USAID and DFID end up lauding poor Africans for being the ‘resistors’ of an ‘evil’ capitalism. Some are clever enough to spot the irony in this arrangement and usually extol themselves for being transgressive: ‘we take their money and then work against them…’ being a typical argument. One of the major reasons for these tortured exercise, which I will return to later, is the need to argue the need for social welfare programs. By identifying the source of the deepest structural problems to be Western, and thus making the case for where responsibility lies, they ensure that monies to apply band-aids will be available. Concurrently, they (rightly) assail African governments for lacking the capacity to implement these programs thus opening the path to their taking the lead in administering aid.

Countdown 2015 was billed as a follow up to a similar effort in Cairo a decade ago. Before then, population control was the rage in development circles. Policymakers regarded the birth rate in Africa – rapid compared to that of industrialized nations – as a leading cause of poverty. Kenya, if you will cast your mind back to the 1980s, had the distinction of being the world’s leading baby factory. Aid experts and the organizations they supported locally made strident efforts to communicate the dangers of the birth rate outstripping economic growth, which they concluded would inevitably lead to national destitution. In the two decades prior to the Cairo meeting, a top priority of international development organizations was to drastically slow population growth.

But the connection, whether real or imagined, between such a Malthusian outlook and the policies of countries that pursue forced sterilizations and compulsory abortions to control population growth proved to be a public relations disaster. It required a shift in tack. After Cairo, and prominently so in London a few weeks ago, the old population control ideas have now been repositioned as a human rights issue. This is partly for PR value, but is also an acknowledgement of new possibilities for expanding their domain introduced by the willingness of the donors to now countenance democratization with the fall of the Berlin Wall. When the Cold War was underway – with Moi as a valued client of the West and thus above criticism on his human rights record – NGOs had been forced to steer clear of ‘political’ issues.

In the 1980s, the fight against KANU’s dictatorship democracy was mostly led by clandestine movements like Mwakenya together with a small scattering of individuals and aboveground groups such as the Law Society of Kenya. By the early 1990s, as Western patronage for the regime retreated, the political space available to the opposition broadened. It now stretched beyond covert efforts and developed into a broadbased pro-democracy movement that enjoyed the support of a majority. So much so that the American ambassador, Smith Hempstone, now became a proud member of an opposition that only a few years earlier he would have demanded to be dispersed violently if need be. With this momentous shift, donor money was soon funding the now-familiar civil society programs in democratization, voter education etc.

Considered in hindsight, it would seem that the focus on babies was only incidental just as the present one has little to do with creating a vibrant democracy. The problems addressed by the local development enterprise must accord to donor priorities just as its programs must take the shape of the available funding. Ideally, it keeps its language abreast of political developments to the extent that its aforementioned limitations allow. The more it succeeds in taking the rhetorical lead in solving or framing local problems, the greater the legitimacy won; this is valuable currency in the world of conferences and proposal writing. Possessing radical bona fides helps, especially when earned by stances that are no longer perceived as a threat to donor interests.

If they cannot get their hands on a hero, it suffices to reach for legitimacy with a garbled radicalism characterized by vague leftist terms and positions. Success in this exercise confers a two-fold advantage. First, it sells better to those remnants of the Western left who regularly staff donor agencies. Secondly, it accords the particular NGO or individual a good position from which to challenge the government’s adequacy thus ensuring that donor funds are increasingly directed away from it and to NGOs that are by leaps and bounds taking over the governance of the country.

Kenya’s self-identified civil society, like other sections of the country’s elite, has arrived at its lofty position by being a go-between. Its A-game is to scrap for the right to represent the public to foreign interests and vice versa. The public has problems – big ones, while the foreigners have a guilty conscience to assuage or geo-political goals to achieve by dishing out cash. That is why it is not surprising when civil society’s members join the Cabinet and effortlessly abandon the positions they fought for in the past. To either camp, ordinary Kenyans are the bait that provides a house in Lavington, cocktails in Westlands and air-tickets abroad for these bigwigs.

According to one of the reports handed out by the conference organizers, participants decided on a worldwide program to guide national-level policy making for the next 20 years in all countries that signed up. Given that many African governments have abdicated a substantial part of their mandates to NGOs and donors, after years of being browbeaten and allowed a sense of entitlement to foreign aid, they will surely sign up. Once they do, and with their policies ‘guided’ by external actors, will there be any need for democracy as citizens are relegated to passive charity recipients and not the ultimate guides of national policy?

But it is not only the paternalism evident at the conference that was so objectionable, it was also the poverty of the idea that reducing our birth rate is a necessary step to building a prosperous society. Once in a while, I inadvertently have a conversation with a Western layperson that imagines Africa is overpopulated, and that this is one of the causes of its extreme poverty. Their solution often goes something like this: if you have fewer babies, there will be better schools, a less burdened health system, more food to go around…etc. Save the Children adverts of starving children begging for a Westerner to ‘adopt’ them for $12 per month would then cease according to this view. I was surprised that the learned and supposedly informed health professionals at the conference shared this outlook.

The reason they ignore the growing body of statistical and anecdotal evidence that contradicts Malthusian policies toward the poor is that they must keep up a relentless drumbeat of negativity to keep their programs going. It does not matter that over a dozen studies, including one by Nobel prize-winning economist Simon Kuznets, oppose the overpopulation consensus so evident at the conference. Rarely do findings demonstrating that faster population growth is not associated with slower economic expansion make their way into conference speeches. Africa actually needs more people and a higher population density. For example, Hong Kong, though it has forty times the density of China, has still managed to build a vibrant enough economy to provide a comfortable existence for most of its citizens despite most of them having been dirt poor fifty years ago. This is repeated in all of the Asian Tiger economies. Even the NGO outcry about the growth of slums, brought on by rapid urbanization, rather than being a universal evil has been a crucial factor in the growth of capital and wealth in every industrialized country during the last century.

Limiting the number of babies, or having more capacity building conferences, will not make for more wealth or less misery. The solution lies in stopping government from its perpetual beggardom and from having its policies guided by donors and the civil society NGOs they fund. That the government is the biggest employer, spender and consumer of national resources, while it prostrates itself to the donors, means that its bankruptcy of ideas and lack of sovereign will is communicated to an inordinately large percentage of the social and economic life of the country. At present, this state of affairs faces little opposition. The very rich who it would be thought have an intrinsic interest in limiting the role of government in socio-economic affairs do no such thing despite such oversight usually resulting in higher business taxation and regulation. It is because that 50-year old guy with a Pajero is too often the one who, as part of the political elite, has made money on fraudulent deals in the ministries. Reducing the reach of government would reduce his ‘opportunities’. Thus his sense of relief now that donors are back to providing government with budget support after they had turned to the NGO sector as the preferred deliverer of services during the late 1990s. Alas, this state of affairs had even forced him to ponder dropping the businessman moniker and writing up a proposal to launch a charity. For their part NGOs welcome donor funding, but try and make the argument that government is too corrupt to take a lead in delivering aid.

The fight against corruption has only incidentally to do with its effects to these two groups, rhetoric notwithstanding. It is just another way that civil society haves wage war against the political elite have-mores. Both groups will deliver Kenyans to the bidders, and will continue doing so by fighting turf battles that the public assumes represent their interests – if these are served, it will only be incidentally.

What is not accounted for so far in this essay is the game on the donor side. Are the monies promised for condoms or commissions launched to investigate yet another African crisis motivated solely by liberal guilt or traditional geo-political goals such as that of expanding the donor country’s sphere of influence? Toward what are Kenyans being guided? The briefest answer is thus: to a world where democracy is good only for making limited service choices and the public has scant chance of fundamentally re-orienting its political sphere. Keenly awaited political goals such as most of those included under the human rights banner will, by virtue of the depoliticised approach to them and their spearheading by foreign funded bodies, replace an organic political dispensation with a global one. FGM will be eliminated, women freed from patriarchy and older people from ageism by agents drinking from the same fount, many who do not understand the grand vision that will be realised should their particular campaign reach fruition.

The result will be a legal and moral code that is everywhere similar, one characterised by its contempt and enmity to the political life of the multitude of publics around the world. The only difference between Missouri and Nyanza will in be their menus and traditional dances. Culture will be robbed of its animating power, robbed ultimately of the dynamism arising from difference and expressed as political opposition. An ostensibly neutral body of law which will be nothing but an enthronement of the powers that be will hold politics at bay for it is only in that domain that the public can express its will. But is it so bad to have this project succeed is the obvious challenge to the negative tone of this article. Would not a universal human rights regime and a technocratic management of social welfare be preferable to the deluge of crises that is our lot? Perhaps so, but this vision will never be realised.

We are caught in the march of history without being its beneficiaries. The donor monies from up north will always be too scant to fundamentally solve our poverty-induced problems. Funding will actually shrink with time, as it has been doing since the end of the Cold War. Yet our ability to generate entrepreneurial capital remains stunted by the statist instincts of civil society and the political elites whose hold on the levers of government – or their NGO alternates – are the key to their sustenance. What is being created is a new management system. The old one managed the war against communism. This one must cap the violence that may emanate from disparate and opposed political voices, which could threaten the security of the West – whether via increased illegal immigration or the creation of environments that generate anti-western terrorism. The system should appear to have all the working parts of a democratic polity: government, opposition and civil society. The rhetoric issuing from it will be stridently pro-people, while its proponents will wax lyrical about the universal goals and responsibilities of Humanity; anything to keep you engaged with the donor world and away from thinking or acting parochially, tribally, by sex.

Kenya, and countries like it, will remain in a state of suspension between implosion and sputtering progress, between crippling poverty and an over-taxed, over-managed petty capitalism. Being suspended in this miserly, degenerate state will be an invaluable benchmark for those other parts of the world whose production of capital is increasing rapidly. We shall comfort the despairing in those places for we are incalculably worse off. Our role is to be the other, except not a threatening other thanks to the management system. We will be pitied, provided with charity and used as the backdrop for societies whose nihilism has grown apace with its riches, and that is now in need of moral crusades that will not upset its applecart. We are consigned to be the blackspot that must be stopped from spoiling everyone else’s party and that allows for the modest appeasement of Western conscience.

Some Reactions to ‘Confessions of a Middle Class Kenyan’

I just read these comments on the Confessions of a Middle Class Kenyan post and thought that they were so passionate, they needed to be better displayed.

Anonymous: I stopped being guilty and apologetic for being a middle class Kenyan along time ago. Human beings are about interests and interests first. The difference between an action that is immoral and one that is evil is if the interest is broad and long term or if it is narrow and short term.The guy in my village defines his interests in term of his ethnicity and therefore he acts as such. Being middle class and cosmopolitan I define my interests in terms of class as opposed to ethnicity. So then, which interest serves Kenya better? I don’t particularly like poor people however, it is in my interests that there are fewer of them so that they leave me be to enjoy my life. I personally am tired of the b.s that middle class conversations about morality for moralities sake. The morality has to be discussed in terms of interests and the players and roles they play. This I believe is a lot more interesting and a better framework for addressing that, which ails us.

Deno: As a middle class Kenyan myself, I have to concur with our smug obsession with socially extricated from what is the real life of the AVERAGE Kenyan. We talk about it lots; it bothers me that the talk never goes beyond superficial concern. These ‘class tensions’ are exacerbated by languages evolving and growing within each class, languages whose sole intention seems to be exclusion. I think the first stop (as with any therapy session) is we sit down and speak the same language till we unearth the conflict. I may be slightly obsessed with blogging, but I really think that dialogues like these are the beginning of such a ‘therapy session’ for Kenyans. The goal now is to get a more diverse group of Kenyans blogging, since as Arunga correctly noted, most of your readers, if not all, are members of the Kenyan middle class.

Akinyi J. Arunga:
Deno, I recently began to listen to the music of Kalamashaka, and other underground Kenyan musicians and they are having the dialogue. It is just hair raising to hear the lyrics of their songs, they are literally fermenting a revolution and the rest of us are oblivious. If you are not familiar with K-Shaka… that is where the true politics of the mwananchi is done. All these things are expressed there, the treatment of Hawkers, the legislation of massive wealth acquisition by politicians, and the deep cry of the youth in the poor neighbourhoods, saying they are living the consequences of these things, and yet when they even sing about their plea, the MCs in the middle class radio stations will not even play their music, unless they sing about girls’ booty… That stuff can make you cry. It is detailed, it is potent, it is true and it is Kenya, the Kenya that we have refused to engage with. We buy tomatoes from the woman on the street, but never yell out in outrage when the NCC askaris, crush those tomatoes and throw her in their truck. It is as if she has no children to feed, to cloth, to educate and shelter. It is as if we conveniently have amnesia of the convenience she offers us on our way from work, being able to pick nice fresh juicy tomatoes for a fraction of what the cost at uchumi, where we have no time to go in the rush hour as we are trying to run and catch the Mathree home. But then we can hold conference after conference about poverty reduction and Millennium Development Goals… lofty things that give us power, since we assign ourselves the task to achieve them, forgetting that each of those Kenyans just like you and I, is precisely trying to achieve their his or her own realistic development goal, but get robbed blind, beaten abused (Do you know how many times the Markets have been burnt down?)… so that that power they have to do it for themselves is transferred to the people with better English, so that instead of innovating, being creative and excellent, people are now leaving school to get jobs at NGOs so that they can help Develop their fellow Kenyans! BTW, for offering convenience at better prices than other traders, people in the U.S become millionaires (See Wal-Mart); that is their reward… But in Kenya Alas!

Confessions of a Middle Class Kenyan

I have spent the last few hours listening to audio tapes of James Baldwin and Malcolm X, reading of the anti-slavery exploits of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry and reading the last letters that his fellow raiders wrote just before they were led to the gallows. I have done this as a result of a question that has been on my mind for at least a year, a question that has refused to let go: what are we and what is wrong? This I ask about my home Kenya: why is there a profound sense of dislocation between the majority of people and their government? Why are we beggars? Why is there so much violence in a country that prides itself for being peaceful? Why, I ask trying to avoid despair, are we not equal to our problems?

I have wondered what constitutes knowledge, what role I have to play in the Kenya that is or possibly could be. And I have concluded with some reluctance that I was raised to be a ruler, a governor and civilizer of the savage. That I, and the middle classes that birthed me, struck a great bargain on that day when Kenya won its independence all those years ago: to continue that moral mission that Britain set itself, to govern and civilize the native. We have become a pustule, an encroaching and violent class that with charity on our lips criminalises, exploits and yes, oppresses those who are not like us.

I have often written of it in the past especially in a March post called Babylon System is the Vampire, here and here. But until now, I have not come to grips with the moral vacuity of the class that dominates the state or terms itself civil society. We are mercenaries for hire, ready to do whatever bidding any foreign donor desires. We hate the poor, with their smells, strange accents and backward ways. Of course we never admit this since we prefer to hate them as we speak of their dignity and their ‘authenticity’, and even drop our Christian names to be more Afrikkkan. Yet we hate them for being lost – at least according to us – and even more because despite their inferiority in our eyes, they are the only meal ticket we have.

They annoy and embarrass us with their circumcisions, their patriarchy, their unreconstructed tribalisms, and their bible-thumping ways. We fear them as criminals – we quake at their approach at the traffic lights. Yet we feel a need to be joined with them because we know that we lack something that we suspect that they have. We middle classes have become obsessive seekers of authenticity, listening to Fela Kuti, being BLACK, taking on WHITE RACISM and praising tradition. Yet we are alienated here in our air conditioned cars and gated suburbs where we live on the money we earn being the purveyors of mercy (NGOs) or the enforcers of progress (Government and Development).

We are Soyinka’s tigers, ever proclaiming our tigritude. But hating doing this all the while for we know that what we are is a posture, an attitude aimed at the European who is at the centre of all we do. If he has a welfare state, so must we. If he is into environmental rights, so must we be. We mime like parrots except our mimicry is garbled and has no clarity; our works can never equal those of the European because we are infected with the lethal mediocrity bequeathed to us by our ancestor: the settler. We have the laziness and decadence of the slave owner. The language fails me because we have perverted it. When we say unite, we mean unite in obeying our dictates. When we say we are for freedom, we mean we are for our freedom to be in charge. When we argue that capitalism is right, we say it because we are charged to say so by our foreign sponsors. We cannot be capitalist because we do not respect the property or the person of the average Kenyan. When we say we are against capitalism, similarly, it is because we are miming attitudes suggested to us by a West/East/South/whatever that promises us some prestige and money. When we talk of our development partners, we are talking of our beggary. When we talk of security, we do not care about the insecurity that has been the lot of most Kenyans due to our actions, our stealing and let us never forget our killing. When we say up we mean down.

By our nature, at its most fundamental, we are liars. We lie to ourselves more than to anyone else. We mime nationhood when what we have is rip-off-hood. Our nature is to be corrupt because we are corrupted. We owe no allegiance to anything other than our self perpetuation. We do not believe in sweat or in the property that results from it. We do not seek excellence or innovation or competition, goals that are intuitive and instinctive to most honest people seeking to live well. We believe that we are owed the world, but have never put in a single decade of real effort to earning it.

The only safety for Kenya is for us to be boxed in, to be ushered off the stage or at the very least constrained. That is why I believe that our greatest aids in our vulturehood – the state and the development industry – must be curtailed, cut down to the smallest proportions. Everything our state has touched it has destroyed or stolen. But we shall not do this voluntarily; we shall fight to the end knowing that to curtail the state is to destroy our access to other peoples’ efforts and winnings. And that is why we have become targets of a growing violence and hatred that if you have not noticed, I announce to you now.

Politics has moved out of the political arena. It is now in the car jacker’s slap and the random killing. Observe the crime wave and understand that you are seeing the beginning of a culture that we have begotten: the democratisation of the crimes we have been committing against people for four decades and that are the fount of our privilege and power. We shall be its targets because this crime wave covets what we have, as we have coveted the land of the Taita or the Maasai; it shall rip what it wants from our tight grip just as our GSU and police and Provincial Commissioners and District Officers have ripped what they desired from the hands of millions.

When Baldwin warned of a ‘fire next time’ all those decades ago, he was warning not just the White people who refused Black folks the vote and lynched them, he was warning all those who would dare compromise others’ humanity. He was warning the middle classes that sprang up all over Africa and continue to this day to act like the mkoloni and who thwart the best efforts of people to just live.

After this rant, let me please beg you to ignore it if you will but read Chapter 3 of Franz Fanon’s ‘Wretched of the Earth’. It is the most incisive study of the middle classes in the former colonies. I will post it on this blog.

Kenyan Election Monitor Claims UK Vote Rigging

As the hapless Brits head to the polls today, I have decided to represent Kenya as an election observer just in case the Labour Party or its Conservative and Liberal Democrat rivals should decide to rig the results. Tony Blair has been looking particularly dodgy and given to the sweats when interviewed on TV, looks like a man who has something up his sleeve. Michael Howard, the leader of the Tories, other than looking like a smile has been curved into his face by a plastic surgeon, has been going about with the slogan “are you thinking what we’re thinking?” What exactly is her referring to? Then he has repeatedly stated that Blair should expect a surprise tonight. Sounds to me like the fellow has cooked up a few results, aye?

During my rounds of the polling stations, as I have kept close watch for evidence of fraud, all I have managed to notice is a completely disinterested public. Most, I bet, had a tougher time choosing a lunch-time sandwich than a candidate. And those are just the ones who did vote. No conversation I have heard throughout the day and during the last few weeks has indicated that today’s exercise holds out any possibility of ushering in significant changes. It feels as if people have given up, they are too busy avoiding speed cameras, cursing at late trains, wondering whether the NHS will kill them or a binge drinker will puke on them. So in best election observer fashion, I did a little research on the history of the vote in these Empire-loving Isles.

An Itty Bitty History – see, it’s even in small type

Before the First Reform Act of 1832 parliamentary representatives in the towns were chosen only by local freemen or the council. In the counties the vote was restricted to 40 shilling freeholders and MPs needed to own land. A mere 2% of the population had the vote before 1832 and a mere 3% following the reform.

The Reform Act meant that the position of property owners and some tenants as voters was secured. In the counties, 40 shilling freeholders, £10 per year copyholders and £50 per year leaseholders had the vote while in the towns, householders with a £10 income benefited. It was a measure that favoured the middle class as groups other than the landed entered parliament. The working classes were not to gain from it and continued agitations that led to the Chartist movement. It is interesting to note that in the 1850s, only one out of six adult males had the vote in Britain.

The Second Reform Act of 1867 ensured votes for town workers, some tenants and lodgers. The vote was extended to all male householders in towns and to country householders whose rental was at least £12 per year. Lodgers paying £10 per year for unfurnished rooms also qualified. It meant that many urban male workers could now vote.

The Franchise Act of 1884 extended the vote to agricultural labourers. This meant that for the first time, the vote was not apportioned according to property ownership. But women remained disenfranchised.

It was not until Lloyd George’s prime ministerial period and the 1918 Representation of the People Act gave the vote to all men over 21 years and to all women over 30 years. The Suffragettes, activists for the women’s vote, had seen their work ‘helped’ by WWI since it was difficult to claim women were inferior after they had been forced to take on many jobs previously only undertaken by men.

In 1928, under the Franchise Act, nearly all men and women in the country over 21 years got the vote. At last the sentiment underlying the vote was that every adult was an equal member of the polity and had a right to similar democratic rights and responsibilities.

Phew! That reminded me of the horrific history lessons I used to have during hot afternoons in high school, wondering when the teacher would get to the intrigues I knew history to be filled with. Unfortunately, every teacher except Mr. Oyuga would just drone on endlessly meaning that I ended up sleeping most afternoons for six years!

Well, I must be off to the polls now. I am sure there have been shady goings on about town while I’ve been blogging away. I shall report on some of the more interesting results. Stay posted…

Cucu’s Farm

Just thought I would put up one of my favourite images. This is one of the the oldest structure on my grandmother’s farm: the boy’s hut. It is where I would stay whenever I went to visit her during the holidays. The walls on the inside are covered with old newspapers and pictures from ‘laddie’ magazines collected in the 1970s. Isn’t it beautiful? 

Mass of Appetites: A Nairobi Bar Horror Story

I was wondering what to post and then thought of Buffet Park in Nairobi, which is a collection of bars and nyama choma joints in posh Hurlingham. I spent a number of entertaining evenings there this past December and was struck by a sense of being in a space built to accommodate appetites: intense longings and ambitions for position and power. You could tell from the way everyone’s eyes constantly scanned the room rating, dismissing, pleading and dissecting all. Whatever you had done during the day established your position in Buffet Park at night, and perhaps the reverse is true as well. Daytime victories in business, government or politics were reflected in nighttime winnings of sex, food and attention. Two sides of a coin. So I started thinking of a man who has been at this for a while, whose spirit is corrupt during the daytime and how he would behave at night. I called the guy Mass of Appetites and wrote this very short horror story about him. Enjoy the experiment, if you can.
MMK

The Mass of Appetites is always on the make, out on the town most nights of the week, like a shark that cannot stop swimming and hunting for a single moment lest it drown. His German automobile turns into the bar parking lot slowly, ponderously, with the drivers behind him hooting their exasperation. Appetites drives carefully and his car is always very clean. It has one of those pine tree air fresheners dangling from the back mirror alongside a small smiling green troll doll bought on a trip to Dubai last year. The inside of the car is immaculately cleaned and the outside polished to a dull sheen. He looks for the parking space that will afford the most people a look at his car and is willing to wait interminably for one to free up. He crouches in his seat, taking in the sights, with his soft paw-like hands holding onto the velvet-bound steering wheel. When the watchman informs him there are open parking spaces further down, he chooses his response carefully from his two-item menu: threaten or cajole.

He takes in the other cars in the lot, which are mostly Toyota Corollas bought from Dubai – the unmistakable mark of the striving classes. In the old days the ladder’s steps were: servant quarter in Golf Course, house in Buru Buru, a plot in Githurai, house in Plains View and the final move to Kileleshwa. Now it is about modes of transport: mathrees for a few years, the Shuttle, a used Nissan Sunny, new Corolla, used BMW then finally the Mercedes Kompressor. They will never rebel he thinks with an amusement laced with contempt, they will only keep switching their modes of trajectory to account for every national failure. Finally parked, he heaves his distended belly out of the car by first putting both feet on the ground then with a heavy grunt rising. He maintains surreptitious glances at the car, nervous that it will be stolen and also curious what everyone thinks of it.

Appetites ambles into the bar, beady eyes darting in all directions as he seeks friends and targets. His eyes take in the girls barely out of school, judging the firmness of thigh, the weight of buttock and most importantly the state of finance. He can guess within a few hundred shillings how much everyone has in their purse or wallet. Pocketing, he fingers a wad of notes with one finger and then subtly rubs it against his penis which is already semi-engorged with possibility. As he walks toward fellow appetites with whom he’s done ‘Tender business’ in the past and who he calls his friends but secretly loathes, he notices a girl, dressed in a tight black dress that hugs a curvaceous body, who is eyeing him with what she imagines is a knowing eye. A frission of excitement runs down his sweaty back. She is the best kind – the ones who imagine that they KNOW, who want to eat into his wad, to use him. He chuckles inwardly knowing that he is unusable and cannot be lied to because he has achieved the exalted state of decadence which is the truest form of freedom. It does not matter that she has coupled hundreds of times or has a boy she loves and comes to this bar only for the money, he can smell the remaining strands of innocence woven into her firm youthful flesh. He likes to be the final nail in the coffin. She will not know that when he heaves his hairy thighs off the bed with his fang dripping semen, he will have pulled the last bits of innocence out of her and transformed her into the undead.

He calls for a triple shot of Johnny Walker Black and three kilos of roast meat – fuel for the hunt – while loudly ordering a round of drinks for the table. Miming conversation with his fellow Appetites, who do not mind since they too are busy, he sweeps his eyes across the room taking in the men this time. He wonders whether they present any competition for his mission. He casts around seeking those that appear to be in love, wanting to watch them for little lapses that betray the futility of their attempt to find happiness. Spotting one such couple seated with the girl in black he notes the boy’s eyes occasionally glazing over as they covertly take in the sight of strangers’ thighs and arses. Soon the girl will be ready for Appetites when she finds out that her beloved, but slightly disappointing boyfriend is pawing her sister or sleeping with her best friend. He has seen betrayal a thousand times, but gets a delicious charge each time.

The girl in black gets up to go to the bathroom and Appetites, now in full Nosferatu mode, eyes her proud back which tapers to a point before her hips and buttocks explode outward and then settle onto thick hard thighs and thin calves. She walks slowly, uncomfortable in heels that are a bit too high for her, tottering and parting her way through the crowd with a subtle caress here and a hip nudge there. She will do, oh yes, there will be a feeding tonight. But first he must seek that dark, strong thing deep inside him that attracts his prey as surely a flame draws a fly to its destruction. He has never put a name to it, but knows that it emerges in the presence of Black Label, a wad of money, noise, low lights and innocence.

The meat arrives and he reluctantly invites the other Appetites to partake. They fall to it with unembarrassed relish. Tearing, guffawing mirthlessly, wiping grease off bulging, sagging cheeks and holding forth on “prots in Dadora”. Appetite matches them bite for bite, caressing his pot belly to summon the confidence monster who must emerge soon if the girl is not to fall to one of his companions. Here she comes.

She is heading for her table but her eyes are fixed on the table of Appetites, aware that they are rich and on a hunt. She thinks herself their equal in worldliness, confident that her beauty, which she has used to toy with many men, will see her through an encounter with any of them. Appetite watches her amused glance and snickers inwardly knowing that like everyone uprooted and thrown into the thousand universes that are Nairobi she belongs to many and yet to none – she longs for anchor and is seeking it without recognizing her desperate need. She has one of those new fangled Rasta hairstyles made of artificial hair. This strange combination at first puzzled Appetite who had only ever seen locks in pictures of Bob Marley and Dedan Kimathi. He has since come to realize that they have nothing to do with political struggle. They are a flag for a painful process of self-remanufacturing, a response to any one of a thousand traumas faced by the child of a middle or upper-middle class family that has tumbled to genteel poverty. Such girls always tell teary tales of the mistakes Daddy and Mummy made as the to-be-Rasta attended some fancy private school and then went abroad to find Me, he feels a surge of hatred. They make for the easiest prey. He knows how to lay a trap that allows them to feel the greatest degree of freedom even as the noose tightens – it is how they prefer to be ambushed. His first move must confirm her opinion of him and then there will be nowhere to go but up, all the while borne by her pleasant surprise.

‘You are a ngao and you need to imbibe liquids’
‘Yes, I need absorption because I am fleeing from the center – centrifugal as they say’
‘I do not know you, but I think that you are more centripetal – that you are seeking the center’
‘I guess so but what do you intend to achieve by these means of disturbance, surely not twinning?’
Ah, she has moved too fast, resisting even before he attacks. Vulnerability. Appetite is listening beneath her words, seeking food for the dark thing. And it is stirring, detecting that as confident as she sounds and looks there is a wistful undertone that betrays a need of something soon to be determined.
‘In the beginning was nursery and the sound of gasps and grunts when your Mummy left the house, then came primary school when you heard the impact of hand-cheek collisions. You need to know you were the critical element in the causation, it was your fault,’ he breathes as he opens his legs slightly wider so that she is standing between them.
‘What is your name and why are you here seeking to still your misery?’ Her question betrays her ignorance; does she not know she is conversing with desire?
‘I am Appetites son of Starvation.’
‘And I am Needs daughter of Fallen Success.’
‘You seek a port and slavery’
‘Perhaps I do, though I dare say that I believe it to be open sea and freedom’ she retorts with spirit. He feels a surge in his loins as the dark thing arrives in its full magnificence, it has not been this excited in months!

He loudly orders a round of drinks. And then slowly, as a hunter will part the reeds before delivering buckshot, he brushes a sweaty hand against her hip awaiting her reaction. She eyes him, eyes full of questions and suddenly turns to walk away leaving appetites staring at her receding back, the excitement in him battling with hatred. His companions are in full stride talking of plots and deals, and fat man versus fat man politics. They feed on so little he thinks; money to them is the thing. They want prestige and to be feared. How petty when there are souls to be taken and broken, do they not know how much energy there is in a human body that is expended at the moment of death? Appetite has learnt over millennia that there are many deaths and that he can draw succor from all of them. He ambles towards her, using his belly to push his way through the crowd.

‘I’ve been looking for you, Needs, do you know why?’
‘Yes, you seek flesh and what lies underneath it. You want to love me, and you resent me for that.’
‘I know exactly what you mean, you are perhaps wise.’
Appetites likes the way it is going.

(c) MMK 2005

The Vampire State and the Moral Dimensions of Kenyan Citizenship

Kenya is many things and many peoples, a dizzying blend of communities and individuals; not a single entity with a common understanding of itself. A friend of mine recently asked: How does Kenya arrive in your village, at your doorstep? As a friend or a foe? In the case of the Pokot, or the Digo, the Mitumba dealer, the Hawker, the people of the Northern provinces or a Somali-Kenyan in Eastleigh, Kenya is an attacker.

The government’s innate drive is to consolidate its powers through relentless centralisation. In its every action, whether to build schools or to suppress free speech, the goal is to make government the fount toward which all our efforts and hopes are ever directed. Small arms programs, presented as security measures, are in fact a way of disarming peoples who do not recognise its right to police them. So too the refusal for Kenyans to bear arms legally, a stance that has more to do with ensuring State House’s peace of mind than it does fighting criminals who already possess illegal weapons anyway. We have even heard of a colonial law, the Chief’s Act, being proposed to improve security. By John Michuki no less, who during the Emergency was nicknamed Kimondero or the crusher of testicles.

MPs meanwhile have gained a 120 million shilling campaign fund, as part of the Constituency Development Fund, and yet I recently met a Turkana guy who let me know that his MP will not visit their constituency because the road is too rough for his new car! Already the CDF is nothing more than a sinecure for the MPs’ relatives and friends. Wouldn’t it be better for taxes to be cut on the basis that Kenyans know what best to do with their money? Tax money is not government money, it belongs to people who have worked their fingers to the bone to earn it only for it to be handed to a fat cat who will not even visit his constituents.

There is a desperate need for a politics of small government in Kenya. The state does not need to only be reformed, it needs to retreat from entire swaths of Kenyan life so that being a citizen – which the majority of political publics in that country desire – is on the basis of attraction and not force. This state governing us does a bad job not merely because of the greed of its leaders but because it was never constructed to do what it promises. Every aspect of government from marketing boards, parastatals, the policies in the North, hawkers and development to national parks and their animal and human inhabitants emanates from colonial Kenya. And the reason for their creation in the first place – all those years ago – was two-fold: to advance uncompetitive, racist and mediocrity-loving settler interests and to dampen African agency or resistance to colonialism. What has replaced these goals is also two-fold, to advance elite and urban mwa-mwa-mwa interests (you know of what I speak: the babi three-cheek kiss) and to keep the wider country politically and economically immobile so that the status quo is not threatened. There can be little doubt that the end of colonialism came, really, as an administrative change-over. Thus the cry for yes to privatization, lower taxes and limited powers, without which Kenya will only become a poorer, more brutish place, is not a slavish miming of Western economic liberalism, it is actually a full-blooded call for decolonisation. There is no other path that I can see to Uhuru, to freedom – as a people and as individuals.

Then the next question that must be asked is whether there is a moral dimension to Kenyan citizenship. In no language other than English and Kiswahili can you say Kenyan citizen. Corruption, which is the popular enemy of the day, implies that there is something to corrupt. Yet well-known politicians who are known thieves and even murderers are widely voted for and considered leaders. To the supposedly politically sophisticated Nairobi elite, this smacks of ignorance. But not really. It is more a lack of loyalty to the centre. Nairobi and the government is where you get things for yourself and your people, whoever those are. There are no moral claims it has on you outside of some rhetoric directed at NGOs and donors. So that to the people who are stealing, and the vast patronage network that looks to them, there is nothing to corrupt for they have imputed no purity or moral validity to the state or the nation. The pressing issue then becomes how will Kenya, the nation not the country, and the state acquire a moral dimension so that even as we ponder citizen rights, we are ready to acknowledge obligations? How to meld all the political communities, which include tribes, ages, regions, urban groupings and classes, into a single moral entity?

These are the two issues that Kenyans need to engage with: the nature of the state and the moral calling of nationhood.

My thoughts on the latter have been drifting for the past year to the idea of transcendental spaces. Social spaces which by their nature urge a person to extend beyond present limitations to become ‘better’, that mold a common identity on the basis of faith and hope. You guessed it: I have been suspecting that the moral citizenship that we seek will come via the church and the mosque. I shall get into this more as part of a discussion. But let me finish by saying that what Kenya needs is not a new constitution, we need a covenant between ourselves and our government. There is a difference between the two, but I shall stop there …

ab&h
Please read this op-ed for a perfect illustration of the Kenyan state as vampire.

The Honesty of Marathon Running: Paula Radcliffe Takes on Susan Chepkemei

I am just watching the London Marathon which unsurprisingly is entirely focused on Paula Radcliffe who has won after pulling away from the pack on mile 5 and relentlessly piling on the pressure since. Susan Chepkemei is trying to keep up and not being quite able to stay with it. Of course I am pulling for her as a Kenyan and also because I had the privilege of meeting her in August 2004.

She told me how she had broken the world half marathon record in Lisbon three years previously. She won that race by 30 seconds and told of how she had doubted she would even finish due to the fast start and her not feeling well! That she went on to destroy the field is a testament to her courage and to the combative spirit Kenyan runners possess. I had always thought that world beaters, winners and record holders start out their endeavors as winners. So it was a surprise when Susan related how much of the race had been run with nary a thought for the record – she just wanted to salvage her pride by not backing away from the challenge.

Running is war. A war that ruptures muscles, destroys pride, dissolves knees. It is a sweaty, smelly war: Radcliffe for instance squatted to empty her bladder mid-way through the race! Then, in a moment that is a priceless lampooning opportunity, this is what she said about the incident on a BBC interview: “I think I need to apologise to the nation for having to stop like that but I was losing 10 seconds every time my stomach cramped up.” “It was a similar problem to Athens but there was no danger of me being glycogen-defeated again. I knew if I stopped I would be able to get rid of the cramp and concentrate properly again.” Apart from the humor though, imagine the desire for victory it takes to squat for a pee with millions watching and a nation’s hope on your shoulders.

Running at a championship level comes down to honesty. When the pain is increasing with every step and your opponents rhythm hints at yet to be tapped reservoirs of strength, you must be honest about who you are. The pain and pressure strips away pretence and those that manage to hold onto them rarely become champions. If Kenyans like Susan have such honesty, where did it come from? It is certainly not drawn from the country’s elite of robber barons and their hangers on. It does not come from any aid or development policy. Nor from foreign knowledge. Sitting with Susan at the posh Java Coffee House in Adams Arcade, surrounded by mwa-mwa-mwa kissing Kenyans and expats, no one seemed to recognize her. She is probably better known in Europe than she is in Kenya, especially middle class Kenya. And I think this is because Kenyan runners are drawing on sources of inspiration and belief that are anathema to what the country has become. The runners are honest, disciplined, tough, organized and talented. The country’s leaders and the class they are drawn from (see my March essay: Babylon System is the Vampire!) are dishonest, brutal, disorganised and need no talent to maintain their mediocrity and robbery.

The results of the race: Radcliffe in 2.17:42 followed 5 minutes later by Romania’s Constantina Dita. Then came Kenyans Susan Chepkemei, third, and Margaret Okayo.

I will make another entry shortly on the men’s race and Martin Lel who won by running a personal best, meaning that he run the best he has ever done when the pressure was at its highest. Why is he not a hero in Kenya?

The New Beggardom: Kibaki Catches a Cold

Have you guys read of the Kenyan government’s flailing during the Nairobi donor meeting on Monday April 10, 2005? Kibaki rolls in for the meeting an hour late saying that he has been delayed by a cold. The excuse struck me as having such a childish and chastened noisemaker-in-primary school note. Of course the dude went on to talk the usual nonsense of how the government was doing its level best to fight graft and had effected economic recovery successfully. Just tell that to the hawkers chased off the streets or the used-cloths (mitumba) dealers whose taxes were raised 200% a month ago. Of course after the meeting at 5-star Safari Park, the whole sorry bunch, beggars and none do-gooding donor do-gooders, after making noises at each other, all took off for their shared digs in Lavington.

Go here for the story:
http://www.eastandard.net/hm_news/news.php?articleid=17763

Mkokoteni

The Essence of Nairobi: Effort, Entrepeneurship, Patience.