THE FIRE THIS TIME

By MARTIN KIMANI

It is Friday, December 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, the various 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.

Martin Kimani lives and works in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Reprinted with permission from the EastAfrican

BURNT FOREST

By ARNO KOPECKY

A few kilometers south of Burnt Forest, the ruins of a village called Kondo were visible from the highway. A group of six young men were picking through the ashes as we drove past; we stopped and climbed the small rise to join them.

They greeted us with open smiles, arms around each other’s shoulders as though we were meeting on a beach instead of a freshly razed collection of homes. They told us they lived in the countryside, gesturing into a green horizon split by thin lines of black smoke.

“Right after Kibaki was announced president, the Gikuyu started burning our farms,” said Kemboi Rutoni, a smooth-faced teenager.

“They called us goats” said his friend, who introduced himself only as Ken. “They’ve always hated us. They’ve always made life hard for the Kalenjin.”

“But we know how to defend ourselves,” added Kemboi. “We came back and burnt their houses, and told them to get out.”
The boys smiled as they recounted using mattresses to start the fires whose ashes lay everywhere around us. Kondo village, they told me, had been a mixed community, occupied by Kalenjin and Gikuyu alike.

“But we only burnt the Gikuyu houses,” said Kemboi. When I asked how it happened that all the rest went up in flames as well, they grew vague and returned to insisting that the Gikuyu had started the whole mess.

“But it’s over now,” said Ken indifferently. “They’re all sleeping up the road at Burnt Forest.”

Indeed they were – not just the former residents of Kondo, but some nine thousand survivors of a violence whose absurdity was matched only by its cruelty. The verdant hills of Burnt Forest have been described as the epicenter of Rift Valley’s recent chaos; the former residents of those hills are now camped in the yards of two churches, a high school and a police station.

We drove past those thousands of hungry gazes, chose a dirt road at random, and followed it into the countryside. Who knew what the sparse canopy surrounding us hid? Hardly anyone was in sight – a family washed their clothes on the banks of creek, eyeing us warily as we passed, but otherwise the landscape was abandoned.

The pitted road wound through the hills, and before long a tractor came toward us, pulling a flatbed stacked with white sacks of corn, bits of furniture, farm tools. Two soldiers sat beside the driver and a dozen ragged Gikuyu walked behind it. We stopped, and two of the men stopped to explain they had just visited their shambas for the first time in over a week. They were bringing back what little was salvageable. But they looked uneasily over their shoulders and soon hurried on to catch up with the guards.

About a kilometer on, the landscape opened on to a flat terrace of torched houses and maize fields. Much of the ground was singed black. Relics of domesticity were scattered about – a red toothbrush, a tea strainer, an English workbook inscribed with the name Lucy – but the predominant feature were the vivid piles of clothing that lay strewn everywhere, as though someone had emptied several wardrobes into the wind.

A man and woman sat beside the road in the shade of a bottle-brush tree. James Mwangi had owned a two-acre shamba of which nothing remained but half a sack of maize; Grace Muthoni, his neighbor, fared only slightly better in salvaging four bags from five acres.

They were both approaching forty and seemed remarkably calm, with the lean, patient mien of people who spend their lives outdoors. The presence of a handful of guards in the immediate area, they assured us, was keeping the neighbors at bay.
“I know every single person who did this to us,” said James, “I’ve shared meals with them.”

The two pointed a hundred meters down the road we’d just driven. Walking back, I smelled the black corpse before I saw it lying on the gravel, face up, the skin burnt off the skull to reveal a terrible grin. Another just like it lay a few feet away, twisted on its side in the tattered cornfield.

“It happened very suddenly,” David said. “The neighbors just started yelling, but instead of words coming out they only screamed.”

The two escorted me to Rurigi high school, where they and hundreds more Kikuyu had sprinted for safety when the attack began. Having herded them out of the way, their persecutors – young Kalenjin men like the ones I’d met two hours before – spent the rest of the night torching their properties and killing whoever was trapped outside. Finally, at dawn, the mob turned on the school itself.

“We were throwing rocks out the windows,” said Grace, “but all of us thought we would die.”

What saved them was a cell phone. One of the people trapped inside had been able to call the police during the night, and they arrived in time to clear the mob and escort everyone to the highway camps at Burnt Forest.

Grace wanted to show us another body nearby, but when we got there nothing was left but a few photographs lying face down in the dirt.

“The dogs must have eaten it already,” she said. She picked up the photos and turned them over. A few showed young men proudly holding up their high school diplomas; another framed a young mother with her newborn baby; one had a family smiling inexplicably in front of a military helicopter that was parked beside their home.

Grace smiled. “These people are still alive,” she said, “they will be happy to see their pictures.” But she changed her mind as we walked back to the road, or perhaps simply forgot what she was holding. When we reached the field’s edge, she opened her palm and let the contents drop like so many seeds to the earth.

Arno Kopecky is a Kenyan based Canadian Journalist

THE MULTIPLICATION OF VOTES

By ALISON OJANY OWUOR

Another sleepless night since December 30, 2007. The horrifying, horrible denouement of Kenya’s national elections. Woken by blurred figures howling in colourful dreams of unrest. The rain and thunder of remembered speeches pounds my thumping heart.

It is three a.m. A ginger tom cat jumps on my bed, strutting with feral grace, oozes calm. He sits on my chest and purrs. I hold him tight. I imagine the rhythmic sound of his breathing will bring peace… Animals sense fear, some, like these try to appease it.

Soon I can breathe.

My mobile phone has been quiet. It is a cheap one, the sort given away for soapy promotions. I like it; it belongs to a resilient family of identical ones. No text message. A disturbing sort of absence in a night like this. But then a sister rushes into the room. Hiccuping. She has an SMS. It says the Pentagon members, the opposition, have all been arrested; that the police are on the prowl for those who have escaped.

Nausea.

There will be retribution. Death’s extended pronouncement on my country, Kenya. The unexpected expected. There is a point when disbelief gives way to surrealism. In the morning an SMS purportedly taken from the NSIS had been circulating. Sounded ridiculous, as if it should be for a dilapidated Ex-Russian republic where the presidents rename the days of the week after their children and boil their enemies. But so far the absurd script had been adhered to: declare victory for the incumbent, ring the announcement hall with paramilitary men, evict the media representatives and international observers, take control of the national broadcaster, swear in the declared president, arrest opposition leaders, and declare a state of emergency.

The cat purrs. I sob.

This is my country.

Daybreak. Three hours later. News. That last SMS was a rumour. It has been refuted. Small shift in spirit, a feeling like relief. Almost. Peculiar unease. These chants of tribalism, ethnic hatred, the incantation of division that is incoherent. Genocidal accusations are already criss-crossing the land. Dante’s hell on a three month tourism visa to Kenya.

But for the past five years few spoke about psychological holocausts when 90% of the civil service was deliberately packed with people of a shared language, or when transcontinental road arteries became murram tracks because they passed through provinces that had nothing to do with the ethnicity of the Government of the day, beyond being inhabited by to-be-useful-later-voters.

Sins of the fathers.

Must we inherit their pathologies too? Carry out their dead wars? They have lived, their bellies round, chins resting on thick necks, sitting back-left in large petrol guzzlers on their way to board private planes. In our hands they have left their slimy feuds. Fight, they whisper. Here are machetes, grenades and special guns. This is how to behead your friend. It is for the good of the whole. And then they fly away.

The reverence of opportunism couched in the convenient tag of ‘tribal hatred’. Convenient because it means that one set of people can imagine themselves under siege and therefore responsible for upholding despotism, justifying veniality and supporting geriatrics dancing on the mass graves of atavism with crude pomp and circumstance.

And that annoying little man who is sadly, again, official spokesman of facetious excuses made of whiny-voiced conceit. He is not young. Someone should tell him that one day he will die.

In 2007, many of us had come of age, many of us voted for the first time. Waited on long, winding, peaceful lines, a little bemused when we folded our ballot papers. What does all this mean? We had witnessed the 2002 event. Saw what hope could do, what change promised, were impatient to be a part of this grandness.
2007.

This is the election in which the youth who have come of age will have the greatest say. It was predicted. We cast our vote, experimenting with another imagination capable of accommodating the huge dreams in our hearts especially the ones that confirm our unitary identity, Kenya for Kenyans.

We rejoiced when we noticed the toppling of the entrenched gang.

Is this what it means?

God-blessed Kenya.

God has been invoked a great deal in and for this election: Evangelists praying, priests tossing incense, imams chanting, a laibon invoking, the ECK chairman- a man I used to revere, casting Satan out.
Lessons in exorcism.

But after the final count, the miraculous multiplication of votes.

The ominous, diffused adversary roams shopping for integrity, dignity and moral sensibility roams only in individual souls. This night we tallied our dead: Over 300. The official figures. Tomorrow night children and women will be burned to death in a church. Blood on the streets. Choice is not an option when the miracle is for sale.

Kenyans, pray a lot. They also melt quickly before fire and call for peace. But they skid before the idea of justice, avoiding it because it has a way of ensuring that the dead are exhumed. They would much prefer others, ‘the next generation’ inherit their forty year old ghosts. The same generation they tell “You are the future of Kenya.’
What they have not told us is that we may be dead before that future comes.

Sins of the father.

This afternoon when my phone beeps I receive an SMS message in praise of the man who was sworn in as president. Proof of anointing. It also contains vile words for the opposition’s leader. What do they call him, that beast from the west? I guess by default that includes me. We share three languages, he and I.
Barren speeches.

“Thank you all for voting me in.” How to violate a new generation with words. The economist. He used to be my hero, used to make me proud of being Kenyan. That was before he made me understand that under his plan, because of the nature of my last name, I am an ethnic statistic susceptible to violence, unworthy of making decisions about the destiny of my country and therefore unqualified for employment reserved for his special 90%. And because I am invisible to him, there is no realm where a simple dialogue with my small hopes for Kenya can take place.

SMS to a Kenyan God: Isn’t it in Dante’s Inferno where there is a vile hell reserved for those who steal the dreams of children?

I can hope. Can’t I?

Alison Ojany Owuor is a young published poet who has presented her work in different public forums. She got her voters card and also graduated from college late last year. She is looking for three things: meaningful work, Kenyans who are of the ethnic group Kenyan, and hopeful imaginings in red, green, white and black.

No Country for Old Hatreds

BY BINYAVANGA WAINAINA

This thing called Kenya is a strange animal. In the 1960s, the bright young nationalists who took over the country when we got independence from the British believed that their first job was to eradicate “tribalism.” What they really meant, in a way, was that they wanted to eradicate the nations that made up Kenya. It was assumed that the process would end with the birth of a brand-new being: the Kenyan.

Compared with other African nations, Kenya has had significant success with this experiment. But it has not been without its contradictions, though they had never really turned lethal until now.

Our Kenyan identity, so deliberately formed in the test tube of nationalist effort, has over the years been undermined, subtly and not so subtly, by our leaders — men who appealed to our histories and loyalties to win our votes.

You see, the burning houses and the bloody attacks here do not reflect primordial hatreds. They reflect the manipulation of identity for political gain.

So what was different about this election? What brought Kenya’s equilibrium to an end?

Five years ago, we voted for a broad and nationally representative government. Inside this vehicle were the country’s major tribes: the Luo, the Luhya, the Kikuyu, many Kalenjin — all the people now killing one another.

We wanted this arrangement to quickly introduce a new and more inclusive Constitution, deal firmly with corruption and start a process of defining the nation in terms that include everybody.

Tragically, President Mwai Kibaki instead steered a course away from the coalition and cultivated the support of his Kikuyu community. He did a good job rebuilding the civil service and managing the economy, but he did it within a framework that was not sustainable.

When it came time to conduct our most recent election, Raila Odinga had built a movement on the back of President Kibaki’s betrayal of the spirit of 2002. His political party, the Orange Democratic Movement, was the big ethnic tent similar to the one that had first brought President Kibaki to office.

On the day we cast our vote, we thought that our optimism and desire for an inclusive and broad government would prevail. Instead, three days later — after reports that votes were being “cooked” in Kikuyu strongholds, after skirmishes in the room where the results were being announced, after the news media were ejected — Mr. Kibaki was announced the winner and a haphazard swearing-in took place. And Kenya exploded.

Mr. Odinga and President Kibaki are not really ethnic leaders, but in the days since the disputed election they have stoked tribal paranoia and used it to cement electoral loyalty.

Mr. Odinga and his fellow party leaders are now determined to avenge the wrong they believe they have suffered. Sadly, this leadership now appears to believe that the violence spreading across the country might be a valuable bargaining chip.

My further suspicion is that Mr. Odinga wants to sell to Kenyans and the world a sort of Ukrainian “people’s revolution” — where protesters take to the streets and change the order of things, and are seen to be throwing happy pink petals on television, so America can say, ah, the people have spoken.

But rather than matters leading to a popular but peaceful uprising against a flawed election, we are likelier to suffer an escalation of retaliations and a descent to that special machete place that nations rarely recover from.

Yet all is not lost. Nations are built on crises like this. If there is such a thing as Kenya, it should be gathering energy right now. Two leaders can sit down, form a power-sharing agreement and put together a system to handle elections and transition. A Constitution that names and recognizes the tribal nations within our nation, that decentralizes some power and that includes us all in the process is possible.

For 40 years we have been dancing around each other, a gaseous nation circling and tightening. The moment is now to make a solid thing called Kenya.

Binyavanga Wainaina, a writer in residence at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., is the founding editor of Kwani?. This piece first appeared as an Op-Ed contribution in the New York Times, January 6th, 2008. Genocide Watch have a PDF version

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