A cliché interpretation of the Kenya post election violence is that Kenya has two "tribes": the rich and the poor. That interpretation is cliché, because while it does reflect the economic reality of Kenya, it does not explain the political and cultural reality that the poor were in solidarity not with the poor across Kenya, but with the rich of their own ethnic groups. During the violence, the poor killed each other in accordance with the schemes of the rich.
The implied explanation by the middle class of this discrepancy is that that the poor lack the education to see that the inequality is more political and economic than ethnic. But again, this rationale failed to hold during the post-election violence, because even though intellectuals maintained that the violence was rooted in economics, we could still predict tribe by whether an academician thought that Raila had been denied a victory he had won or whether one thought that Kibaki had legitimately won the election. When I argued that the question of the results should be separated from the question as to whether people deserve or not to be killed because an election was botched, my critics in academia concluded that I was speaking from my ethnic affiliation.
I don't think my critics were tribalist or ethnic chauvinists; I just think that the atmosphere was too toxic for any opinion, including mine, to be entirely rational. The campaigns had transformed the elections into a life and death issue, such that one side - which I took - felt they would be exterminated if Kibaki didn't win, while the other felt that Raila's win was a democratic achievement which no price was too high to assert. But despite the ethnic affiliations influencing my interpretation, I used theory to back me up and the least I expected of my critics was that they tackle my reasoning before they made conclusions about my ethnic sympathies.
In retrospect though, I now see that it was foolish to make such an argument when tempers were so hot and blood was boiling. In my defense, however, I plead that I was simply naïve about the political context in which the violence had erupted. I had moved back to Kenya just three weeks before the elections and after a seven-year sojourn in America and Europe, and so I did not understand how deeply political opinion was intertwined with ethnicity.
But that is water under the bridge. In any case, I got wiser and declined invitations to publish academic articles on what had happened. I still believe what I said in my blog then; I just think that had I understood how ethnicity in Kenya works I may not have said what I said when I said it, or at least I would have framed it differently. But more than that, I believe that being Kenyan, or a Kenyan academic, does not necessarily qualify me to make expert opinions on Kenya. Africa has suffered over the ages from authoritative assessments made by Westerners who have little knowledge of Africa but who do not care because in their view, Africans do not deserve a systematic study of their societies since the color of Africans' skin explains everything. By contrast, I believe as human beings, Kenyans are complex people with complex histories that should be discussed with the intellectual rigor they deserve, not simply on the basis of the national or ethnic affiliation of the academic.
I have therefore learnt that philosophical positions or extra-ethnic factors can be so intertwined with ethnicity that it is difficult to separate the two sides. Ethnic parochialism is like a tumor which entrenches itself so deep in an organ of the body, that recklessly cutting it out could destroy the organ - or the organism - all together. But the fact that removing the tumor may be a deadly enterprise does not stop the tumor from remaining distinct from the healthy cells; it just means that the surgeon has to be skillful in removing the tumor without endangering the patient's life. Like surgery, the task of thinking through ethnicity and the violence without being romantic about ethnicity having nothing to do with the violence is a very delicate one. Mahmood Mamdani demonstrates as much in When victims become killers: Culture, nativism and genocide in Rwanda, observing that one can predict ethnicity by those who believe that Hutu and Tutsi are colonial constructs that should be done away with, and those who believe that the two groups reflect the reality of injustice and inequality. That means, Mamdani argues, that the ethnically polarized thinking must be understood as a reality with an internal logic, rather than dismissed as a mere political creation.
*
Once we accept that ethnic divisions that feed animosity and violence can indeed be rational, we would be radical and deliberate in creating and building ideas that would give us a common ground. I suggest that one way to do so would be to lose ourselves of our fear of cultural alienation. Right now, Kenyans are so afraid of Westernization that we would rather kill each other than receive the insults that p'Bitek's Lawino hurls at Ocol and his urban girlfriend. Yet the post-election violence has shown that holding onto cultural authenticity in the name of resisting colonial pressure to abandon our cultures is as suicidal as a woman remaining in an abusive marriage because she does not want to break the Bible's command against divorce. If Africans in the diaspora were able to retain their heritage despite slavery, those in the motherland need not describe Westernization in Africa as an apocalypse. The real apocalyse is not lack of culture - although such a phenomenon does not exist since human beings are necessarily cultural. The real apocalyse is lack of freedom and dignity. It is poverty, ignorance, disease and violence.
That means that we need to rethink - or at least nuance - the Kiswahili proverb "mkosa mila ni mtumwa" (the person without a culture is a slave). The fact that Africans were kidnapped and shipped to foreign lands where their names were changed, their psyche interfered with so much that they suffered from an inferiority complex, and where they no longer spoke the languages of their motherland, did not stop them from being African or retaining their African roots, nor did it stop them from fighting against slavery. More importantly, they were not slaves because they had "no" culture; they were slaves because Europeans captured Africans and sold them in America. They would not have been slaves if there were no Africans to betray and kidnap fellow human beings for sale, if there no ships to transport those Africans to the Americas, if there were no masters with whips, or if there were no laws that severely punished slaves who escaped or planned to escape. And even all that oppression was not enough to stop the enslaved from wanting to be free.
Consequently, the saying - or at least the way it is used - is actually demeaning to Africans because it suggests that we willingly abandon our culture and make themselves slaves. The saying suggests that it is us, rather than those who exploit Africa's resources, who are the agents of our own enslavement. I once gave a lecture on neo-colonialism in which I had to repeatedly state that we must name the agents of our oppression. Europeans came to Africa, Europeans and Arabs sold Africans as slaves, and Europeans colonized us, and Europeans in the Americas benefited from and enforced slavery. There were personalities and policies which entrenched colonialism, such as van Bismark who hosted the conference which partitioned Africa in order to pacify his European neighbors, or Charles de Gaulle who made a mockery of independence when he organized a referendum and punished Guinea for voting against cooperation with France, or colonial collaborators and post-independence neo-colonial dictators. There was the Mau Mau, but there were also homeguards; there was Lumumba and Sankara, but there was also Mobutu and Compraore. In other words we must be clear, precise and articulate in naming who, how and when we suffered. But despite my efforts, a student said "our culture was stolen from us," and when I asked "stolen by whom," I was told that we must desist from hating whites.
*
Kenya is not a country of two tribes; it is a country of people, human beings, who are proud but also hurting from the trauma of exploitation and misrule for over a century. We a people who must face the challenge of naming the monsters that send us at each others' throats, and the process of that naming is more complex than dismissing ethnic parochialism as a creation of politicians. We must admit that we are sometimes so afraid of being seen as cultureless (which in fact is our reputation amongst our neighbors). We must admit that global capitalism and colonial history have ruined our souls and dehumanized us, so that we see our energies as labor for others and investments for ourselves, rather than as work that nutures the soul. We see education as certificates for the market rather than an opportunity to become better human beings.
Most of all, we must train ourselves to be proud of being African and to believe in African unity and Ubuntu. We must craft a national ideology and philosophy and stop hiding behind the excuse colonialists drew the borders that made Kenya and that Kenyans do not think as a nation. We may not have chosen to come together, but we can choose to remain together. We may not be nationally conscious, we can be. There is nothing natural in nationhood: nationhood is a choice we make and a goal we commit our energies to. If we are not a nation, it is because we have made that choice by not committing our intellect, creativity and soul to becoming a nation. And one of the results of that unfortunate choice was the post-election violence.
