The 2007 Kenya Elections: Implications For The Kenyan "Diaspora"

After years of procrastination, I finally inhaled deeply and took the Kenyan driving test with tens of other people almost half my age. My delayed rite of passage left me with food for thought about the strengths and weaknesses of the so-called Kenyan or new African Diaspora residing mainly in Western Europe and the United States.

Like other rites of passage, taking the driving test in Kenya is a unique and indescribable experience. You have to go through it to know what it is actually like. Although my friends described with laughter the horrors of the process years ago, and although things have significantly changed since the 1990’s when they took the test, the emotions of nervousness and anticipation that all prospective drivers experience have never changed.

So, dear reader, I will not indulge in the details of the actual ritual, except in one. The figure of the Kenyan police officers having a ball as they humiliate mostly young people seeking permission to drive cars the officers will probably never afford. Until this week, I resented the evil pleasure that traffic police officers seemed to derive from the candidates’ fear and nervousness. But after actually standing in the crowd of the hundred or so people seeking a driving license and knowing that the police officers had to deal with similar crowds each day, I actually empathized with the police. I imagined them anticipating the day when the drivers about to acquire licenses would kill each other on the road, only for the same officers to come and collect the mangled bodies and drag the car wrecks to the police station. I realized that I would probably be more abrasive than them if I had to do a similar job to earn the peanuts that the Kenya government pays them and to endure constant mockery from the Kenyan public.

The second and more important impact of these officers – besides the reality check – occurred in the examination room. Between determining if I knew the rules of the road and if I could coherently play with the toy cars on the model highway table, the officer examining me abrasively asked what I did for a living. After a serious of questions that sounded like an interrogation, he gathered that I had recently arrived from the West and was looking for employment. How can that be, when Kenyans were desperate to leave and reluctant to return? he wanted to know. How come I had not married a mzungu? The crowds waiting for their turn at the table denied me the time to explain.

My final contact with the same officer occurred later that afternoon as I collected the final papers required as evidence that the Kenyan government thought me fit enough to use our dangerous roads as a qualified driver. I found him rewarding himself for his thankless work with a delicious-looking meal of ugali, sukuma wiki and chicken, probably his first meal of the day since 8 am that morning. He taunted me by asking if I ever ate ugali, and later remarked to his colleagues that I was a mzungu.

For a long time, I have been called a mzungu or a feminist, sometimes before uttering a word to betray my values or beliefs. I have been asked if I know how to wash dishes, if I can cook, if I eat ugali and other such questions that are more telling than the actual answer. Less than 10 years ago, I would be offended by such comments and would go on the defensive by displaying my credentials of Kenyanness, until I noticed that most of the questioners were young men raised in the plush areas of Nairobi, whose mothers rarely worked in the kitchen because two people had been employed to do the work they were now pretending was the organic role for African women. The realization made me retort angrily to such stupid comments and questions about my authenticity as an African woman.

But this time in the police office, I was not even angry. I simply did not care. I left the police station, relieved at having survived the ordeal, and wondering if the police officer really knew what I knew about the wazungu. Having lived abroad and read about the atrocities that Europeans and Americans meted out on the children of Africa for the last five centuries, I would not be so callous as to call any person of African descent a mzungu, even a personality as ambiguous as Clarence Thomas, Condelezza Rice or Kenya’s own “Sir” Charles Njonjo. And so I chose to assume that this police officer, like many other Kenyans, had not really come to grips with the impact of racism and colonial rule. Had none of the Kenyan returnees ever told him what horrors we get to see and hear about during our sojourns in the West? I wondered to myself. And even if they have not, does he know or has he forgotten about apartheid in South Africa, the genocide in Rwanda instigated by racist ideology, or even closer to home, the atrocities suffered by Kenyans under colonial rule which must be recorded in the police archives?

Sadly, I knew that the answer was no. The conversations about racism that I have with Kenyans who have lived or traveled usually revolve around the quirky stories about instances in which whites display their ignorance, complete lack of courtesy and apparent lack of consciousness about the contradictions they pronounce in the same sentence. Several times, some of my Kenyan acquaintances have betrayed some pride in having survived as the only black on a brief visit to a predominantly white evangelical southern town. They push aside the fact that the soil they stepped on was probably drenched in the blood of black Americans, hence the skewed racial dynamics that allows them to be the solitary black in a sea of white faces. When I have ventured to discuss the gruesome history that black Americans have endured, my compatriots wince and I withdraw the subject. I appreciate that such topics cannot be broached in a casual, friendly atmosphere, especially when children are around.

If Kenyans who live or have lived in the West find it difficult to discuss amongst ourselves our awkward position in the United States, it is unlikely that returning Kenyans describe their harrowing experiences to their loved ones at home. When we come home, we want to forget that we are sometimes used as poster children for racial diversity in order to counter the efforts of black Americans to seek justice and reparations. We want to push aside the humiliation we feel at seeing Mugabe’s face being splashed all over the TV screens as the prototype of African leaders, or at seeing the faces of the poor, hungry and displaced whose dignity suffers an additional blow from TV cameras and pop stars invading their privacy. And so we boast about better opportunities, and occasionally seek brief intimacy with “authentic Kenyans” who take us to joints which we considered beneath our dignity before we first hopped on a plane headed for the Western hemisphere.

Meanwhile, Kenyan scholars abroad write un-insightful pieces that cover whole pages in the Kenyan press, offering advice on what the people at home should do during the upcoming general elections, or providing details about their amicable encounters with one of the presidential candidates. The financially inclined establish companies promising to encourage the investment of the Kenyan “diaspora” in their home country. The rest of the Kenyans abroad without such goods to offer simply endure their rare holiday in several years, and then return to the West with haste that the people we leave behind are quick to notice.

Kenyans residing in their homeland benefit little from their brothers and sisters abroad besides money and patronizing advice. They are still subject to the press whose umbilical cord remains strongly attached to Euro-America, and their brothers and sisters languishing in Euro-America are unable to sever it during their brief visits home with plastic smiles on their faces. In the absence of truth, Kenyan journalists unashamedly run to the World Bank for comments about Kenya’s economy, forgetting that Kenya only began to emerge from the disastrous effects of SAP’s once it reduced its borrowing from Western donors. The journalists regularly consult the British High Commissioner for comments on local affairs, as if Kenya is Britain's back yard. Recently, Kenyan women candidates went to seek help at the residence, not office, of the US Ambassador to Kenya, an event that would shock many black Americans and would leave citizens worldwide wondering if Kenya is a sovereign country. On second thoughts, they need not wonder too long. A country in which men have abandoned their humanity to prey on women, a country in which the so-called men have as their models their former oppressors,  leaving the women with no recourse than to seek safety in foreign embassies, hardly merits the designation of a sovereign country.

Encouraged by the caricatures of black culture marketed by American media moguls that black American communities are now struggling to tame, young urban Kenyans are increasingly aspiring for a career in the local hip hop scene. And this, as one Kenyan parent lamented, despite the fact that they can barely sing and have little to sing about. I recently faced the awkward situation of explaining to a curious Kenyan teenager that the ghettos are not as fun as the rap stars make them out to be, and of finding out that his favorite star was Eminem.

The assault of Western culture on our autonomy is visible in the heated political scene as we approach the general elections this week. Right now, Kenyan politicians are talking of implementing affirmative action for women and “positive discrimination” to resolve ethnic disparity, yet the implementation of these policies is more problematic than they understand or are willing to let the people know. Affirmative action, for example, has failed to resolve America's racial disparities in education and other areas because it was hastily adopted to stem the rise of black nationalism and of healthy historically black educational institutions during the 1960’s. Kenyan legal scholars in the US would be more helpful if they exposed the Kenyan populace to the insights on the success and limitations of affirmative action that scholars such as Prof. Lani Guinier of Havard University and Profs Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado and Kimberle Crenshaw have tackled, rather than offer sentimental advice on multi-party democracy in Kenya.

The talk of “positive discrimination” is more tragic, because the term emanated from the French who used it as a synonym for affirmative action in a derogatory, rather than optimistic manner. Until the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, the French elite termed affirmative action as “positive discrimination” in order to portray it as a violation of human rights of Europeans and an Anglo-Saxon concept to solve racism which was supposedly non-existent in France. Under Nicolas Sarkozy, “discrimination positive” differs little from George Bush appointing two black secretaries of State to further America’s imperialist policy.

The greatest help that Kenyans could offer their compatriots is not in money or patronizing advice, but informing us of the hurdles we expect to face should we uncritically adopt Western policies to solve uniquely Kenyan social problems. This was the legacy of African soldiers who fought in European wars in the early half of the 20^th centuries, and later of African students who returned to vigorously participate in the independence movements. These students had met with members of the original African diaspora in cities such as Paris and New York. In the meantime, personalities such as W.E.B Dubois, Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X increased our insight about the mechanisms of racism and slavery, helping African intellectuals to understand the impact of colonial rule on our societies.

The best contribution that Kenyans abroad can offer their compatriots at home is to continue this legacy already began by our predecessors who traveled to the West. Money and flashy lifestyles are not, and can never be, a substitute for the truth. And this truth is so badly needed as Kenyans prepare to go to the polls on Thursday this week. The voters will be choosing between two unattractive options. One is offered by Mwai Kibaki, an emotionally reserved leader who tells us to work but offers no vision or inspiration that would let us know what we are working towards or working for, and who is surrounded by arrogant elites raised on the culture inherited from the colonial days. The other option is offered by Raila Odinga, a flamboyant populist who is too steeped in American campaign tactics and donor money for comfort.

Whichever of the two wins, Kenya will be the ultimate loser unless we are able, as many Kenyan observers at home have urged, to pick up the pieces as if the campaign chaos was a temporary dialectic in the larger revolution towards a self-sufficient economy and towards less materialism and better regard for the most vulnerable in our midst. Since this truth becomes most apparent when we set Kenya against the background of the global environment, Kenyans residing abroad are probably the best placed to be the eyes and ears of our beloved nation and continent.

If they really love our country and our continent, these Kenyans must endure the thankless task of telling people at home that the global cultural and economic challenges require vigilance of Kenyans now distracted by petty but deadly inter and intra-ethnic rivalries. They must urge their compatriots to read the sufferings our ancestors and their children now known as African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans, in order to see that placing our trust in Western ambassadors and donors for direction is like expecting ravenous lions to lovingly raise antelopes. They must admit that they attend historically white universities and teach African studies because the original black diaspora, whose history is written in blood and sweat rather than in the search for better opportunities, put up the spirited struggle for their dignity and that of all people of African decent. Economic remittances and teaching African studies to white students are not as useful to people at home as telling them the truth about where Kenya – and Africa – stand in the global landscape that continues to exploit and insult us at every turn.

Though our words may be treated with skepticism at home, we must continue to tell the truth, and we must accept that the reward for this perseverance may not be harvested in our lifetime but, as is the case with Fanon,  a generation after we have joined our ancestors in the next world. Until that glorious day, let us prepare to tolerate, empathize with and speak the truth to Kenyans who do not appreciate the implications of calling their compatriots wazungu.

In my case, I chose to empathize with the police officer in question simply because I had little choice and I gained the perk of passing the exam. The next Kenyan man who insults me without realizing that he is also insulting himself might not be so lucky. I’m thinking of adopting a Lucy Kibaki style slap as an appropriate means to bring them back to the real world.