Class and Kinship in Kenya's Killing Fields

It is easy – indeed tempting – to dismiss the violence that has engulfed Kenya in the last one month as an unfortunate, though not totally unexpected, resurgence of African atavist ontological disposition. Many analysts, particularly in the West, have argued that even though the breach of peace and mutual existence was triggered off by the stealing of the presidential election by the incumbent, what followed had nothing to do with electoral fraud in particular and politics in general, but an excuse by neighbours who have lived in an artificial harmony while harbouring pathological disdain for each other based on petty nationalism to settle scores with each other. This could be true. But only partially. The stark reality is that the crisis in Kenya has exposed the class tensions that have been peppered over for over more than one hundred years.

In May 2000, The Economist newsmagazine treated the world to an edition with a picture of a young man uneasily holding a rocket propelled grenade launcher, commonly known to guerrillas only as RPG, on his shoulder. His picture filled the whole map of Africa accompanied by the issue’s title: ‘The Hopeless Continent’. With this one stark phrase, all of us Africans, from diligent farmers along the Nile Delta to cattle breeders in Botswana, from dutiful fisher folks around Lake Victoria’s Kano Plains to merchants at Nigeria’s Kano Market, were summarised and relegated from the ranks of civilised humanity to one single, dishonourable reality: self-destruction.

The same publication admitted in one of its January 2008 editions that Kenya represented hope for Africa. What hope? Sadly, this hope was equated with a vibrant Stock Exchange, fast food outlets in every corner of central Nairobi, thriving casinos, manicured golf courses and booming tourist industry. Ignored were the facts that two-thirds of Nairobi residents occupied only eight percent of the city’s land, living in informal settlements; that more than 63 per cent of Kenya’s urban population had no access to clean water; that two out of every three Kenyans survived on less than a dollar a day; and that a few own huge tracts of idle land while the number of squatters and landless labourers continue to swell.

Virtually bypassed by the benefits of prosperity and modernity that is enjoyed by the North, Africa survives and exists on the fringes of global economy and global politics. It is no wonder that while election observers from the European Union, the Commonwealth, the East African Community and the local observer team were in agreement that Kenya’s presidential elections were stolen, the West has insisted that this being Africa, the subversion of people’s will be ignored for ‘the sake of the country’s unity and stability.’ This is a euphemism for ‘our strategic interests, our investments, our holidays and safaris are more important than your democratic rights; so shut up, trust and obey.’

Once undisputedly regarded as the repository of culture, the cultures of African people are also fast being relegated to the margins as the MacDonald culture, fiercely promoted by the cinema and television, takes over. This erosion of Africa’s culture is being seen as a good thing – integrating Africa into the global society – that must be encouraged. However, this integration is not being accompanied by the material conditions that sustain such avarice and ostentation. No wonder in Kenya, like would happen elsewhere in Africa, when the protests erupted it was the fast food stores, video libraries, electronic shops and supermarkets that were first targeted in the urban centres. Among the rural communities, it was eviction of ‘foreigners’ from the land they occupied.

While most of the people in industrialised countries are affluent, most of the African people are impoverished, under-nourished, illiterate and without decent shelter and clothing. While the economies of industrialised countries of the North are strong and resilient – and therefore offering hope and security to the populations of these countries – those of Africa are mainly weak and vulnerable – and therefore offer nothing but despair and defencelessness to the African people. While the countries of the North are in control of their resources and destinies, those of the South, more so Africa, are vulnerable to external factors and lack in functional independence and sovereignty. This is the context in which we should understand the attachment to land in many African countries like Kenya and Zimbabwe. Ownership of land, however tiny, gives a sense of security and independence.

We can not contextualise the mayhem in Kenya without appreciating the Kenyan National Question. Kenyans are not polarised because they belong to different sub-nationalities. They are because they relate differently to the country’s resources and productive forces. At the centre of the National Question is land. It is instructive to observe that the epicentre of the clashes was the agriculturally-rich Rift Valley region. This was no accident. Rift Valley is the most settled region of Kenya. It is also in the Rift Valley where communities like the Maasai, the Pokot and the Nandi have unresolved grievances over land ownership centred on historical injustices traceable to colonial occupation.

It was in the Rift Valley where British settlers alienated huge tracts of land from indigenous Kenyans (paying a mere 10 cents per acre to the crown, not to the owners). It was in the Rift Valley where the Maasai community were duped into signing a 100-year agreement with the British in 1904 and denied a hearing by Kibaki’s government (a successor to the colonial administration) in 2004 when the agreement had elapsed. It is in the Rift Valley where the Pokot were forcefully pushed out of their communal land.

As the struggle for independence ensued and the colonial rule looked destined to a sad chapter of history, a new ruling class with interest in landed property was quickly recruited from amongst African collaborators. With the help of the colonial state, the new gentry quickly occupied land belonging to entire communities – that had been herded into detention camps and concentration villages – and were awarded titles by the colonial authorities. Upon the attainment of independence, the new rulers could not relinquish their claim to these lands but came up with a scheme of settling the new landless in former settler areas (which had been alienated through force or treachery). This led to non-acceptance of the large Kikuyu populations from Central Kenya settled among the Nandi, Maasai, Pokot and other communities in the Rift Valley. The area has since been a powder keg and this is not the first time it has erupted. Instances where the land issue in Rift Valley has threatened Kenya’s unity include early 1960s when a former legislator, Jean Marie Seroney, shook the country with what he called the Nandi Declaration calling for the region’s autonomy and expulsion of ‘foreigners’. Other major clashes over land occurred in 1991/92 in response to clamour for the re-introduction of pluralist politics, in 1997 and 1998. There have been similar land-related skirmishes along the Kenyan Coast, even though the history is slightly different from the Rift Valley.

Going back to the issue that triggered off the chain of ugly events – fraudulent presidential elections – is in order. The incumbent Mwai Kibaki was trailing Raila Odinga by more than one million votes according to the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) print out at 4:07 a.m. on December 29, 2008. The latter had 3, 734,972 votes against the incumbent’s 2, 269,612. It was at this stage that the ECK and Kibaki’s Party of National Unity (PNU) did a quick calculation and arrived at the number of votes to add to Kibaki’s credit and how much to debit from Odinga to enable the former catch up with and overtake his rival. That day, results that had apparently been received the previous day but their release held waiting the ‘opportune’ time were altered (sometimes more than once) and released to close the gap. Later in the day, the ECK announced results from 176 out the 210 constituencies placing Odinga at 4,046,010 votes ahead of Kibaki’s 3,760,233. Barely two hours later the Chair of ECK shocked the Kenyan nation when he announced results from 189 constituencies with Odinga leading with 3,880,053 votes against 3,842,051 for Kibaki. The art of counting backwards had been introduced!

Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) party as well as various observer teams have detailed how the vote was stolen. What has not been talked about is why Odinga had to be stopped at all costs from assuming the presidency of the Republic of Kenya. It is safe to assume that if was any of his other five opponents that had won the elections, Kibaki would have no problem handing over to them – but not one Raila Amolo Odinga. The reasons for this may be found in the platform of his campaign and his personal history.

Odinga’s campaign was anchored on five planks: addressing economic and social inequalities; devolution of power and resources from the centre to the regions in the context of subsidiarity; eradication of corruption and administrative injustice; state provision of basic social services; and pursuit of a progressive Pan- Africanist and Foreign Policy. In a country where neo-liberal policies have found a very fertile ground, it was quite brave for Odinga to declare from the rooftops that he was social democrat and would faithfully pursue a social democratic agenda.

The first line of attack was that Odinga was trying to introduce communism through the back door. Scaring mongering that provision of free basic social services would mean increased taxation also did not wash. Kibaki’s supporters finally latched onto the pain factor – land. They demonised devolution of power as a recipe for dispossessing the Kikuyu people who had settled in the Rift Valley and elsewhere. This worked for members of the Kikuyu community but not other Kenyans. It is therefore not surprising that members of Kikuyu community from rural areas, regardless of whether they lived in their ancestral regions or not, voted for Kibaki to a person. Only young urbanised ones were able to see through this diversion.

But the biggest worry for the ruling elite was Odinga’s anti-corruption stance. On September 22, 2007, he declared that there would be no blanket amnesty for former heads of state and that both former President Daniel Arap Moi and Kibaki would be called to account personally for their improprieties. This announcement came barely two weeks after it had been exposed that Moi and his family had stolen public money to the tune of Kenya Shillings 130 billion (US$ 2 billion) and stashed offshore.

Wielding of or proximity to state power has been the main avenue of primitive accumulation in Kenya. All those who lay claim to being indigenous bourgeoisie in Kenya trace their wealth and status from state connections. On this score, concentration of power at the centre has been particularly beneficial. Odinga’s devolution, anti-inequality anti-corruption package was therefore seen by the captains of politics and industry as going against the natural order of things.

Odinga’s personality and history did not help him either. From the onset of the campaign, Odinga did not refer to himself as a candidate. He simply declared himself “The People’s President.” Odinga cannot claim membership among the proletariat. He is not a peasant either. Nor was his father, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. In fact, although born to a simple school teacher, Odinga grew in relative privilege as his father abandoned teaching when he was still in his early teens, built a business empire and quickly plunged into nationalist struggle for independence. Odinga Senior was so passionately anti-colonialism, anti-exploitation and charismatic that it was almost automatic for him to be named Kenya’s Vice President at independence.

The senior Odinga was anti-imperialist. During the struggle for independence, he opposed the exploitative economic system the colonialists had erected. The colonial government accused him of being a communist to which he retorted:’ “communism is like food to me.” He was quick to establish Kenya nationalist movement’s fraternal links with the then socialist bloc and as a result, many Kenyans benefited from educational scholarships. Among the beneficiaries was Raila Odinga, who studied mechanical engineering in the then German Democratic Republic.

But Raila Odinga began charting a path for himself much early in life. As a student in the then East Germany, he took the initiative to establish an international office of the opposition Kenya Peoples Union (KPU), a left-leaning opposition founded by progressive nationalists and headed by his father. He was later to be independently involved in a number of underground political initiatives, including the still-born Kenya African Socialist Alliance – the effort made Moi rush a law to parliament to make Kenya a de jure one-party state. But many Kenyans only came to know Raila when he was arrested after a 1982 abortive military coup against Moi’s government and charged with treason. The charges were withdrawn after six months due to lack of evidence but Moi went ahead to detain Odinga without trial. He was to stay behind bars for close to six years before he was released and detained again only five months later. In total, Odinga has served a total of nine years behind bars without trial and spent a stint in political exile.

Having failed to tame Odinga, Moi tried to work with him in a courtship that culminated in Odinga becoming the Secretary General of the then Moi-headed Kenya African National Union (KANU) party. Six months later, Odinga was out of the party and had taken with him the majority of the party’s stalwarts. KANU was left a shell that it still is. Odinga then teamed up with the then opposition chief Kibaki on a platform of change to hand KANU a humiliating electoral defeat. The change never arrived and less than three years down the road, Odinga had mobilised Kenyans to humiliate Kibaki in a referendum vote over a new constitution.

Odinga was the only serious presidential candidate that was seeking a parliamentary seat from a metropolitan constituency (the rest only felt safe in their rural bases among people from their ethnic groups). He represents a parliamentary constituency whose bulk of voters are slum dwellers from one of Africa’s biggest slum settlements. Odinga is one of the few politicians who feel at ease in a slum beer hall as he does an exclusive members’ club. He would meet a foreign dignitary in the morning, be at the soccer stadium terraces in the afternoon and attend a burial fundraising gathering in the evening. The fellow is at home in designer Western suits as he is comfortable in a Swahili kanzu or Nigerian agbada.

To look at what is happening in Kenya purely with an ethnic lens is blur one’s vision. That is not to say that ethnicity is a non-factor. However, ethnicity is drug that the ruling keep administering to their victims to cloud their vision. It is escapist. I did not see Kikuyu residents in Nairobi’s exclusive Karen suburb hack their Luo or Kalenjin neighbours with machetes or worse still shoot at each other, even though the majority of them own guns. However, in the informal settlements, neighbours turned against each other. Why, because they believe – wrongly of course – that their neighbours are beneficiaries of the skewed resource distribution and since they cannot reach the culprits, they can settle accounts with their “representatives.

At independence, Kenya, like the rest of Africa, inherited an edifice that promoted heavy dependence and corruption, both on the economic and political fronts. On the economic front, the country inherited an inordinately backward economy based on subsistence farming dominated by the peasantry and cash crop production and export, revolving around three crops (coffee, tea and pyrethrum) and almost solely in the hands of alien commercial farmers. Small-scale commodity production dominated by a backward-looking, highly superstitious peasantry that was emerging from the nightmare of decades of oppression and dehumanisation; this was the predominant character of Kenya’s rural setting. The vast majority of the population was helplessly underdeveloped economically; their agriculture fragmented into tiny plots, each hardly sufficient to support a single household.

For any meaningful development to occur, it was necessary and urgent that this problem be tackled as a matter of priority. Instead, however, the newly installed leadership relied on Western “experts”, whose experiences were wholly metropolitan and whose background was entrepreneurial. In other words, Kenya’s leaders sought the solution to these urgent problems from business manuals and Harvard-trained economists seconded by the World Bank, IMF or bilateral “development partners”, rather than from the reality of the situation. The end result is that the new leadership succeeded in perpetuating the colonial division of labour where Africa extracted and exported (unprocessed) primary commodities and imported and consumed manufactured and processed goods.

The decision making processes that govern the international flows of goods, services, knowledge, finances, capital and technology are controlled by the major industrialised countries of the North and by the international institutions under their tight control. Kenya – and the entire African continent – is placed in unfavourable and therefore hopeless position in the global economic system. The country is linked economically mainly to capitalist economies of the industrialised Europe – both a legacy of slave trading and colonial pasts sustained by the relative economic strength of Europe and a consequence of development strategies adopted by post-colonial leadership. The West, and particularly Europe and the United States of America, are therefore as much interested parties as are our leaders. Is it any wonder that the EU, U.S and other major Western nations have been more concerned than our “African brothers?”

On the political front, the new post-independence leadership inherited a state that was monstrously oppressive and that was designed to serve the interests of colonial oppressors; a state that was not geared towards the improvement of the people’s social welfare and the country’s economic progress, but the one which coerced them into accepting and submitting to colonial subjugation so as to produce, through forced labour and other coercive mechanisms, for the metropolitan economies. It was a state that was designed to instil fear, subservience and diffidence in the people by destroying their self-esteem through dehumanising and degrading treatment. This has become painfully manifested when state security apparatus are shown in television footages shooting dead unarmed demonstrators in one corner of the country while virtually escorting weapon wielding gangs in another corner of the country according to what they perceive be the preferred side of the leadership.

Since Ghana’s independence in 1957 unto the time of South Africa’s liberation from apartheid in 1994, many painful and largely unsuccessful attempts have been made at trying to put the economies of the fifty-plus African countries on the path of independent development and politics on the road to democracy and realisation of human dignity. In virtually all cases, these attempts at socially and economically altering the state of existence have met immense internal resistance and external obstacles. As has already been observed, the economies of newly-independent African states were weak and fragmented, mirroring centuries of colonial subjugation and exploitation. Industries and physical infrastructure – road, energy and communication – were virtually non-existent. The infrastructure for developing human resources through education and training was also grossly inadequate. Education, literacy and skills development levels were pitifully low.

Add to these economic and social deficiencies the spectre of an exponentially rising population and rapid urbanisation and the picture becomes clearer. As people flocked into cities, municipalities and other urban centres in the hope of securing a better life, pressure on public utilities and welfare services began to overwhelm the authorities, which had neither the administrative capacity nor the wherewithal to respond to these public needs.

Raila Odinga promised Kenyans that he would address the foregoing. He articulated it in the people’s language and they understood him. Even though he might have been playing a populist game, Kenyans took him seriously. They decided to give him a chance. Kibaki stole the chance. Kenyans revolted. All the grievances were recalled. Now Kenya is a country openly at pains with itself. Only fundamental re-engineering of Kenya’s politics and economy will heal the wounds – not peppering over our inequalities, our ethnic differences, our exclusionist politics and our self-deception.