Koigi wa Wamwere is a tragic figure. He suffered under the Kenyatta and Moi regimes for speaking for justice and government accountability, spent years in and out of jail in detention, on trumped up charges, as well as in exile. At the height of his career, he was one of the "seven bearded sisters" known for their radical thinking and outspokenness. Most of all, he is the son of Wangu, a humble woman who took on the Moi regime when she affirmed one of the most fundamental and powerful forces in the world: the love of a mother.
On the other hand, Koigi wa Wamwere's performance in recent years seems to going on a different tangent. Koigi wa Wamwere perplexed observers when he ran for presidency in 1997, and surprised many when, as an assistant minister in Mwai Kibaki's first government, he seemed to support press censorship. During the run-up to the constitutional referendum last year, he shared a platform with Moi in opposing the ratification of the new constitution.
But Wamwere has managed to keep himself politically relevant by popularizing and opposing what he calls "negative ethnicity." Politicians quote him, and newspapers give him column space in which he elaborates on this term. The latest such column appeared yesterday, announced by a dubious title that says that Wamwere does not "weep for the Ocampo Six but the [sic] spell of negative ethnicity they have cast on the nation."
I say "dubious" because, why does the question of weeping or not weeping for the Ocampo Six arise? If there is any weeping to be done, it is for the loss of Kenyan lives and dignity during the post-election violence, and for the apparent evidence that our politicians don't mind sending us down that road again. Kenyans have been singing again and again that we need to keep the issue of the trials in perspective by maintaining the focus on those who were killed, maimed, impoverished and traumatized by the violence; not on the political careers of members of Kenya's immoral elite. And so by just mentioning weeping for the six suspects, Wamwere legitimizes the ethnocentric sympathy which he would like his readers to believe he despises.
It therefore should come as no surprise that Wamwere's article is fundamentally ethnocentric. Ethnocentric not so much in the sense of the belief that one tribe is superior over others, but ethnocentric in the sense of using almost exclusively the lenses of tribe to view what is primarily a political and moral problem. In the name of mourning the division of Kenyans on ethnic lines, Wamwere elaborates on narrow, parochial tribalist thinking without offering an alternative to counter it. Kikuyus and Kalenjins, he tells us, are being organized into the "collective defense" of Uhuru and Ruto respectively, which the two characters hope to use to propel themselves into power while expelling Raila out of it. Wamwere blames Ruto and Uhuru for turning the issue into an anti-Luo movement, but later adopts the very same framework to isolate "Luo leaders" whose absence from Ocampo's list Kalenjins and Kikuyus are "unable to comprehend." As if that is not enough, Wamwere sees the ICC summons primarily in terms of the windfall Raila might obtain as a Luo leader, but also cautions that Raila's "loss of the Kikuyu and Kalenjin in Rift Valley is near-total."
Here is where the ethnocentricism lies: first, did Raila ever own the Kikuyu and the Kalenjin in the Rift Valley, so that he should now "lose them"? Are those Kenyans there to be owned? Secondly, if Wamwere is decrying the practice of electing leaders solely on the basis of ethnicity, why then turn around and triumphantly declare that Raila will not get ethnic block votes? Thirdly, but more disturbing, is the fact that Wamwere has chosen to look only at ethnocentric responses to the ICC summons, yet Kenyans have responded to the same as victims, civil society and concerned citizens. Many Kenyans, especially victims of the violence, are glad that finally some leaders are being held to account for some of the crimes which Kenyan politicians have inflicted on us since independence. That is why almost two thirds of Kenyans support the ICC process. Those are too many Kenyans to reduce to three tribal blocks which see the trials only in terms of ethnic mathematics.
Wamwere and the politicians he criticizes for being ethnocentric are strange bedfellows because they all see the political violence not as crimes, but as windfall from which different politicians stand to benefit. The Kenyan press has notoriously covered the trials in terms of Ruto's and Uhuru's political fortunes, enjoying the masculine bravado in the spat between Uhuru and Raila. This latest essay by Wamwere appears in two full pages which the Saturday Nation has dedicated to the political capital that presidential hopefuls could gain from the ICC trials. One frame carries photos of four potential presidential candidates and brief outline of what the cases mean for each one of them, and opposite it is the report on the prayers in which clerics equated the Ocampo Six to the biblical Shadrack, Meshack and Abednego and to freedom fighters. Even the church leaders are sleeping in the same ethnocentric bed in the name of not taking sides, and having forgotten that the trials are about crimes against "the least of these." God has never claimed to be neutral, as the clerics would have us believe; God has always been on the side of the orphan, the widow and the alien. God has always been biased in favor of the oppressed and the vulnerable.
Wamwere's analysis is also not at all edifying because it give readers details of ethnocentric logic but nothing to counter it. Saying that one hates something does not provide an alternative to it; similarly, lamenting ethnocentrism does not necessarily mean that one opposes it. It would appear that this is yet another case of benevolent tribalism, in which one uses tribalist lenses but distinguishes oneself by virtue of one's good intentions, and in which tribalists are everyone but oneself.
Kenya needs more than eulogies about hating tribalism or critiques of politicians playing tribal cards; it needs radical social change to build a nation in which crimes are punished no matter the status of the individual, where all Kenyan citizens are equal before the law, government policy and development, and where the same citizens are propelled not only by patriotism but also by a deep moral sense of what is right and wrong, by intelligent and historically grounded political sense, and by profound love and concern for fellow human beings.
Wamwere's essays confirm Amilcar Cabral's argument in his famous speech on "The Weapon of Theory," that one does not "eliminate imperialism by shouting insults against it," and that ideological deficiency has been the undoing of liberation movements in Africa. Wamwere's failure to provide ideas or theory with the potential to help Kenya become a human nation would explain his ambiguous career as a politician who was initially considered a radical. He is a tragic figure who fails to be nationalist despite his nationalist intentions. To adopt Cabral's words, Wamwere is a revolutionary without a revolutionary theory.
