Sisters at Heart

On Saturday the 23rd of February, 2008, I went to a meeting of women in Kibera, Nairobi. It was in the open, in the field next to the Kibera D.O.’s office. Under a tree, next to a dusty soccer pitch on which a few energetic children were playing, sat some women listening to the meeting’s moderator, Ms. Jane Anyango. They looked like birds of paradise, in the shade of the tree, all bright colours and wraps and headscarves and skirts—laughing faces upturned as they listened. These women are amongst the hardest-hit victims of the recent post-election violence in Kenya; some of their houses have been burned, their small businesses have been disrupted, their sons endangered and their husbands missing. They live where police bullets sometimes fly through walls and strike women dead as they stand ironing clothes, where a police presence might mean a son shot in running battles. These women meet under a tree, out in the open, because they have nowhere else to gather, no shelter in case it rains. They did not even have chairs: they sat on the hard, red-earth ground.

The ladies in Kibera meet anyway, because they are extremely tired of having their lives dictated to, by and for people who do not care about them and do not even know that they exist. Across the street, dusty matatus picked up passengers and scrambled for space, jostling and nudging their way to faster speeds and more passengers. The women didn’t seem to notice: they were so wrapped up in their own affairs, and so determined to succeed that they could ignore the outside world a few feet away from them. They are going to change their lives by themselves, by telling their own stories and managing their own fates. They are tired of being talked for and being talked about, even if they do live in “Africa’s largest slum.” They are tired of being talked about as if they do not have wills, or ideals, or ambitions, or successes. One woman said to us, “People are always saying what poverty-stricken circumstances we live in, and how terrible everything is here. Do they not realise that I worked hard to have that tablecloth on my table, that it is the best that I can afford? I like my things—I worked for them. We don’t want pity, we want work. We want our own things.” They were singing: as we walked up to them, they broke into a song of welcome and made space for us, under their tree. When we left, they invited us back for next week.

A few hours later and a whole world away, we walked up to another group of women, in Nairobi’s green and manicured suburb of Loresho. These women were gathered on a friend’s porch, and gleaming cars lined the driveway and the courtyard beyond, like a praise-poem to Nairobi’s middle class. This group of women have everything the Kibera women want, but they met anyway, too. They met because they are tired of being told what their identities are, whom they should love and hate and want to meet with or date, because of ethnic differences. Some of them went to high school together, some met just the other day, some are friends of friends, or colleagues, or neighbours. Their children play and grow up together. They meet to re-affirm their friendships and to laugh away the silly barriers that the politicians want to erect between them.

These are professional women, highly accomplished and authoritative about it—someone started to say “parting is such sweet sorrow.....” and they all chimed in with the rest of the quote, in fact, with the rest of the whole bit from Shakespeare, as if it was a perfectly normal thing to know. That’s the kind of thing they do, chortling madly all the time, screaming with laughter at the absurdity of thinking of each other as Kikuyus or Kalenjins or Luos, when they had been together a-a-a-al that time, all those years ago and all the long years since. When they were young and mischievous, they had been on a school trip to the Nairobi Show, and they had all abandoned their teacher and turned their watches back an hour so they could argue her down when they came back late.....ati stop talking to my best friend because she’s a Luo? Don’t be stupid, please.

They are having none of it, none of it at all: and as they sniggered and laughed and recalled their old nicknames for each other, the air around them lightened, and relaxed, and made space for everybody. In Loresho, it was a different kind of tree, and a different kind of world, but when we left, they invited us back for next week.

Sisters at heart, these women are: from Kibera to Loresho. Our country would be safe in their hands.

Strangely enough, that’s exactly the kind of person GenerationKenya is talking about.....

http://www.generationkenya.co.ke/

Yes, the GenerationKenya website is "live." Take a look, and be proud of Kenya for a few moments--the photographs of Kenya are especially lovely.


Diary of a Mad Kenyan Woman supports GenerationKenya and is a member of the Concerned Kenyan Writers collective. GenerationKenya is a Kwani Trust research, archive and documentation project. For more information, write to info@generationkenya.co.ke

Opening Doors

It is clear that the time has come for us to no longer simply take Kenya for granted, but to make a case for it. We now have to argue ourselves and our compatriots into the idea of Kenya; to persuade ourselves of, and to think about, more deeply and with more clarity than we have ever had to summon before, the merits of this nebulous thing called Kenya. We now have to fight for it; the honeymoon, such as it was, is over. Before we do that, we had better know what we are talking about. It is important to remember that no identity is fixed, no way of being oneself immortalised in stone. Every morning, when we wake up, each one of us has to remember who we are, and act accordingly, gathering our recollection of self from memories, and dreams, from half-forgotten quarrels and recollections of things overheard, from our yearnings and loves and dislikes.

We piece these little shards of reflected, refracted and remembered things together again every morning, to become ourselves.

In my professional life, I am most often perceived as a Black Woman. This is the mantle I don, whether I will it or not, when I walk out of my house and onto a Toronto street. The fault lines that I hide are comprehensively covered up by my skin: the myriad ways in which I pretend that it is not true that Africans have an abiding contempt for African-Americans (I once had a Nigerian taxi-driver in Washington D.C. tell me, talking of slavery and the Diaspora, that we “sold the ones we didn’t want—it was good for our societies,”); that it is not true that Africans think we have a lock on ‘African-ness”—that we think we are the original Black, we are Mandingo and Shaka Zulu and Othello and we are the soulspring of humanity (I mean the other Lucy), and you had better cherish our rhythms and traditions or we will simply ridicule you back into our version of ‘authenticity’; that it is not true that I find it easier to talk to a white American academic than to a compatriot who cannot read, because Rousseau is important to me and so are Karsh and Van Gogh.

I can sustain the fiction that is not true that I and my interestingly-accomplished friends from the Kenyan and larger African Diaspora secretly think that we are that favoured tenth of which W.E.B. Dubois spoke; it is completely untrue that it works for us to come from dysfunctional and poverty-ridden societies, because we are the obvious choice to (for a profit) interpret and explain and expound on our vexingly incomprehensible and violent African people to a morbidly interested West; it is merely by chance that my friends in Toronto are all white, and very smart, and very well-known. Or they are all well-paid and well-behaved Oreo-cookie/coconut-type people like me (this epithet doesn’t work so well here as I like real coconuts exceedingly well, and even I think Oreos with milk are outstanding.)

None of us can be called poor, although we are virtuously not wealthy, either.

I attempt to inhabit these circles of power in my life as if I am just a passerby, an innocent bystander, and most times, I even believe it myself. I didn’t set up these structures of power, and, although they seem to work for me, I have by no means endorsed them. The closed doors of racism that squeezed open for one brief instant to admit me were not of my crafting, I remark to myself often. It is possible to pretend, if you are me.

I have to pretend all that, and I do it extraordinarily well: I perform ‘Professor Mwangi’ with skill— even if I say so myself-- all the while knowing that I am massaging my own identity, that I am crafting the most plausible “cosmopolitan African” that I can, to maintain myself in my enviable position in the western economy and global marketplace. I am an intriguingly-inflected (because I am a woman, and an African, and I don’t comb my hair, and I tell my colleagues off for their racist behaviour all the time) academic who wields post-colonial theory with some verve, and to good effect. I am able to deploy French post-structuralists and German rationalists and Danish agonists because I have worked hard to acquire these abilities, and I deserve my nothing-to-do-with-being-Kikuyu reward right here on this rapidly-warming earth.

I have Canadian-speaking dollars to spend in Nairobi.

For many years, it did not occur to me that it might be important that I was from Central Province, that perhaps it was not an accident that I did so well in school; that my fortune in having, for a mother, one of the most extraordinary human beings it has been my privilege to know was pre-arranged by historical injustice—none of this seemed important to me, because it did not seem to me that I had been given any Kikuyu-flavoured breaks or Kikuyu-tinged advantages. I firmly believed that I had fought for all of it: that it was mine on merit—the whole shebang.

It was definitely me, by my lonesome, swotting for those O-levels; I was absolutely all by myself when I gave that job-talk at another ritzy U.S. university; I remember eating beans for months at a time because I was so broke when I was a student in Montreal that I had to make a choice between food and electricity (githeri is still githeri even when you buy it in American supermarkets); nobody has subsidised my thoughts when I am able to hold my own in a room full of Ivy-League academics; I was factually and verifiably solitary when I was struggling to write that PhD dissertation—I did it all by myself, in a context in which nobody even wanted to try to spell “Agikuyu.” A doctorate doesn’t come with an ethnic affiliation—it is just one long dispiriting angst-filled scramble to achieve it. I merely happen to be from where I am from, and I just merely happen to own those daming syllables of my name: I am an accidental Mkikuyu.

I weave this sort of story for myself—I tell myself these lullabies. And so do all other even partially successful Kikuyus, of which there are many around the world (which is something to celebrate another day), who will not admit that to be a Kikuyu is to inhabit a loaded and favoured category.

Instead, I tell myself that I am just an innately competitive person—a personal trait I deplore, when I remember to—and I just happen to have been extraordinarily lucky at the sorts of endeavours and projects to which I set my mind, because they tend to work. It is mere good fortune that I have all sorts of connections and contacts: I am a lucky person. I just happen to be from the Central Province, ahem!, actually from Nairobi,--my name just happens to be Wambui Mwangi, and it is sheer and flabbergastingly a remarkable surprise that I have recently found out that my father once worked at the highest levels of Kenyan government. It is all a coincidence—I had nothing to do with it. Obviously not. How could I have? I was not a conspirator in my birth; I did not collude with others here not named to add one more oppressive Kikuyu to the Kenyan mix. I just woke up one day, and found myself here, in this skin and with this name of mine. I had one of those mothers who tell their daughters to shut up and just get on with it, get up and go fight life for your place in it, so I did.

Or I thought I had.

As we begin to gird our loins for the long haul, because we Kenyans have unleashed a force we cannot control, and we are in dire peril, let us take a minute to examine ourselves. We are in danger here, but we also have an unprecedented historical opportunity to recreate ourselves in better ways. As we take stock and look around us, and figure out new pathways to each other and to ourselves--in between dodging Mungiki, and the Nairobi Taliban, and figuring out how to navigate our towns and cities and farms anew, and how to craft new forms of speaking to one another-- one of the most important factors in the equation of our future is going to be the capacity of we Kikuyus to question ourselves. I would suggest that it behooves others of different ethnic persuasions to do this too, but in these Kikuyu-battering times, I hesitate to offer this idea—I can feel my mind stuttering over this thought. We are not in a position to demand this of other people, we Kikuyu; we have some logs to remove from our very own eye.

I say “we” with a sense of astonishment: this is not an identity I have ever cultivated. This is not an identity that puts more ugali in my sufuria in the normal course of my life, and I own it now only because other people all around me are dying from it, as if it is an incurable disease spread through fire and the sharp edge of a panga. It is very, very contagious, but I have my ways around it—I have exit and escape options. I’m sure the Canadians will give me shelter if I beg for it, if I abandon my friends and family, as I might have to, one day. I could even get away with claiming to be an Ethiopian—I would be safe as long as nobody asks me for an I.D—I have had this thought more than once, in the last week alone.

Still, I cannot deny that I am a Kikuyu when that is the reason that many people are dead and homeless, unable to get to work or to keep their jobs, spending nights waiting in dread for the gangs or the police; I cannot disavow this violently-granted place in our society when friends from other ethnic groups are finally speaking their truths. My Luo and Kalenjin and Maasai friends are angry about many things I did not know about, and they are angrier still at having to explain them to me now, that it has taken all this terror and death for me to even ask them the question. It is an emotion I can understand—I feel that way about white people a lot of the time. Oh yes, I have had these very thoughts myself: about oblivious white liberals, who want to hold hands and just get along. I have said those very sentences myself—the ones that begin with an indignant “it is not my job to educate you....”

I know well that mixture of contempt and exasperation, that fury-laden lament.

How strange, to recognise those echoes, to come up against a mirror like that. We live and learn.

***

We live, and learn, and grieve some more, and face each new day in ‘fear and sickness and trembling unto death.’ I do not know how much more of this I can bear: how many deaths, how many new tragedies, how many new instances of the unimaginable moral bankruptcy of our leaders I can force myself to accept as part of Kenya, as part of myself. I simply do not know if I can stand another day of this unfolding nightmare.

Yet, through all this, I am aware that there is something here to be fought for, I am aware of a clarion call to stand up and be counted. There is, in Kenya, something struggling for a space, something groping for a chance to speak, like a phoenix waiting to be born from amongst the ashes of our homes, like wildflowers on the graves of our dead. So I will throw my lot in with those people fighting for justice and reconciliation, wherever I find them and whatever their names and places of ancestral attachment might be. I will raise my voice in defence of the truth, and I will offer what I can in the cause of a better tomorrow. I will speak with all the honesty and power I can muster, despite my innate cowardice, which I also discover afresh each day.

Each day my fear is waiting for me to put it on and walk into Nairobi dressed in it.

I will wish, with all the power of my longing, with my fiercest desiring, with all my dreaming and my dreadlocked stubbornness and will, for our voices to be heard. I am an accidental Mkikuyu, but I will fight for the Kenyan corner with everything I have. I am happy, for whole seconds at a time on any given day, to be among a throng of fellow-minded Kenyans, who have decided that we will not give up. We fight, every day here in Kenya, for a remembrance of our better selves, and for a new way towards the Kenyan mosaic.

Join this fight, and let us build Kenya anew. Let us move forward, with principle and passion.
Let us translate our horror into healing, our terror into a new truth; let us show what we mean by The Kenya We Want. I am banking on us, with all the credit I have accumulated in my soul. Let us make ourselves heard: speak with all of your voices and strength. Say: we are GenerationKenya.

Diary of a Mad Kenyan Woman is a member of Concerned Kenyan Writers, a collective formed to use our writing skills to help Kenya in this polarised time. DMKW supports GenerationKenya.

Open Letter to Samuel Kivuitu by Shailja Patel

[This open letter was written by Shailja Patel. I reproduce it here with her permission. As I post this, Nakuru edges towards a state approaching war. To adopt the slippery euphisms of a former U.S. administration spokesperson, "acts of war" (but not war itself?) "have probably been occurring." --W.M.]

AN OPEN LETTER TO SAMUEL KIVUITU, CHAIR OF THE ELECTORAL COMMISSION OF KENYA

Mr. Kivuitu,


We've never met. It's unlikely we ever will. But, like every other Kenyan, I will remember you for the rest of my life. The nausea I feel at the mention of your name may recede. The bitterness and grief will not.

You had a mandate, Mr. Kivuitu. To deliver a free, fair and transparent election to the people of Kenya. You and your commission had 5 years to prepare. You had a tremendous pool of resources, skills, technical support, to draw on, including the experience and advice of your peers in the field - leaders and experts in governance, human rights, electoral process and constitutional law. You had the trust of 37 million Kenyans.

We believed it was going to happen. On December 27th, a record 65% of registered Kenyan voters rose as early as 4am to vote. Stood in lines for up to 10 hours, in the sun, without food, drink, toilet facilities. As the results came in, we cheered when minister after powerful minister lost their parliamentary seats. When the voters of Rift Valley categorically rejected the three sons of Daniel Arap Moi, the despot who looted Kenya for 24 years. The country spoke through the ballot, en masse, against the mind-blowing greed, corruption, human rights abuses, callous dismissal of Kenya's poor, that have characterised the Kibaki administration.

But Kibaki wasn't going to go. When it became clear that you were announcing vote tallies that differed from those counted and confirmed in the constituencies, there was a sudden power blackout at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre, where the returns were being announced. Hundreds of GSU (General Service Unit) paramilitaries suddenly marched in. Ejected all media except the government mouthpiece Kenya Broadcasting Corporation. Fifteen minutes later, we watched, dumbfounded, as you declared Kibaki the winner. 30 minutes later, we watched in sickened disbelief and outrage, as you handed the announcement to Kibaki on the lawns of State House. Where the Chief Justice, strangely enough, had already arrived. Was waiting, fully robed, to hurriedly swear him in. You betrayed us. Perhaps we'll never know when, or why, you made that decision. One rumour claims you were threatened with the execution of your entire family if you did not name Kibaki as presidential victor. When I heard it, I hoped it was true. Because at least then I could understand why you chose instead to plunge our country into civil war.

I don't believe that rumor any more. Not since you appeared on TV, looking tormented, sounding confused, contradicting yourself. Saying, among other things, that you did not resign because you "did not want the country to call me a coward", but you "cannot state with certainty that Kibaki won the election". Following that with the baffling statement "there are those around him [Kibaki] who should never have been born." The camera operator had a sense of irony - the camera shifted several times to the scroll on your wall that read: "Help Me, Jesus."
As the Kenya Chapter of the International Commission of Jurists rescinds the Jurist of the Year award they bestowed on you, as the Law Society of Kenya strikes you from their Roll of Honour and disbars you, I wonder what goes through your mind these days.

Do you think of the 300,000 Kenyans displaced from their homes, their lives? Of the thousands still trapped in police stations, churches, any refuge they can find, across the country? Without food, water, toilets, blankets? Of fields ready for harvest, razed to the ground? Of granaries filled with rotting grain, because no one can get to them? Of the Nairobi slum residents of Kibera, Mathare, Huruma, Dandora, ringed by GSU and police, denied exit, or access to medical treatment and emergency relief, for the crime of being poor in Kenya?

I bet you haven't made it to Jamhuri Park yet. But I'm sure you saw the news pictures of poor Americans, packed like battery chickens into their stadiums, when Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. Imagine that here in Nairobi, Mr. Kivuitu. 75,000 Kenyans, crammed into a giant makeshift refugee camp. Our own Hurricane Kivuitu-Kibaki, driven by fire, rather than floods. By organized militia rather than crumbling levees. But the same root cause - the deep, colossal contempt of a tiny ruling class for the rest of humanity. Over 60% of our internal refugees are children. The human collateral damage of your decision.

And now, imagine grief, Mr. Kivuitu. Grief so fierce, so deep, it shreds the muscle fibres of your heart. Violation so terrible, it grinds down the very organs of your body, forces the remnants through your kidneys, for you to piss out in red water. Multiply that feeling by every Kenyan who has watched a loved one slashed to death in the past week. Every parent whose child lies, killed by police bullets, in the mortuaries of Nairobi, Kisumu, Eldoret. Everyone who has run sobbing from a burning home or church, hearing the screams of those left behind. Every woman, girl, gang-raped.

Do you sleep well these days, Mr. Kivuitu? I don't. I have nightmares. I wake with my heart pounding, slow tears trickling from the corners of my eyes, random phrases running through my head:

Remember how we felt in 2002? It's all gone. (Muthoni Wanyeki, ED of Kenya Human Rights Commission, on the night of December 30th, 2007, after Kibaki was illegally sworn in as president).

There is a crime here that goes beyond recrimination. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolise. (John Steinbeck, American writer, on the betrayal of internally displaced Americans, in The Grapes of Wrath)

Haki iwe ngao na mlinzi....kila siku tuwe na shukrani ("Justice be our shield and defender....every day filled with thanksgiving" Lines from Kenya's national anthem)


I soothe myself back to patchy sleep with my mantra in these terrible days, as our country burns and disintegrates around us:

Courage. Courage comes. Courage comes from cultivating. Courage comes from cultivating the habit. Courage comes from cultivating the habit of refusing. Courage comes from cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one's actions. (Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese Nobel Peace Prize winner).

I wake with a sense of unbearable sadness. Please let it not be true.....

Meanwhile, the man you named President cowers in the State House, surrounded by a cabal of hardline power brokers, and a bevy of sycophantic unseated Ministers and MPs, who jostle for position and succession. Who fuel the fires by any means they can, to keep themselves important, powerful, necessary.

The smoke continues to rise from the torched swathes of Rift Valley, the gutted city of Kisumu, the slums of Nairobi and Mombasa. The Red Cross warns of an imminent cholera epidemic in Nyanza and Western Kenya, deprived for days now of electricity and water. Containers pile up at the Port of Mombasa, as ships, unable to unload cargo, leave still loaded. Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Southern Sudan, the DRC, all dependent on Kenyan transit for fuel and vital supplies, grind to a halt.

A repressive regime rolls out its panoply of oppression against legitimate dissent. Who knew our police force had so many sleek, muscled, excellently-trained horses, to mow down protestors? Who guessed that in a city of perennial water shortages, we had high-powered water cannons to terrorize Kenyans off the streets?

I am among the most fortunate of the fortunate. Not only am I still whole, alive, healthy, mobile; not only do I have food, shelter, transport, the safety of those I love; I have the gift of work. I have the privilege to be in the company of the most brilliant, principled, brave, resilient Kenyans of my generation. To contribute whatever I can as we organize, strategize, mobilize, draw on everything we know and can do, to save our country.

I marvel at the sheer collective volume of trained intelligence, of skill, expertise, experience, in our meetings. At the ability to rise above personal tragedy - families still hostage in war zones, friends killed, homes overflowing with displaced relatives - to focus on the larger picture and envisage a solution. I listen to lawyers, economists, youth activists, humanitarians; experts on conflict, human rights, governance, disaster relief; to Kenyans across every sector and ethnicity, and I think:

Is this what we have trained all our lives for? To confront this epic catastrophe, caused by a group of old men who have already sucked everything they possibly can out of Kenya, yet will cling until they die to their absolute power?

You know these people too, Mr. Kivuitu. The principled, brave, resilient, brilliant Kenyans. The idealists who took seriously the words we sang as schoolchildren, about building the nation. Some of them worked closely with you, right through the election. Some called you friend. You don't even have the excuse that Kibaki, or his henchmen, might offer - that of inhabiting a world so removed from ours that they cannot fathom the reality of ordinary Kenyans. You know of the decades of struggle, bloodshed, faith and suffering that went into creating this fragile beautiful thing we called the "democratic space in Kenya." So you can imagine the ways in which we engage with the unimaginable.

We coin new similes:

lie low like a 16A (the electoral tally form returned by each constituency, many of which were altered or missing in the final count)

We joke about the Kivuitu effect - which turns internationalists, pan-Africanists, fervent advocates for the dissolution of borders, into nationalists who cry at the first verse of the national anthem .

Ee Mungu nguvu yetu
Ilete baraka kwetu
Haki iwe ngao na mlinzi
Natukae na undugu
Amani na uhuru
Raha tupate na ustawi.

O God of all creation
Bless this our land and nation
Justice be our shield and defender
May we dwell in unity
Peace and liberty
Plenty be found within our borders.

Rarely do we allow ourselves pauses, to absorb the enormity of our country shattered, in 7 days. We cry, I think, in private. At least I do. In public, we mourn through irony, persistent humour, and action. Through the exercise of patience, stamina, fortitude, generosity, that humble me to witness. Through the fierce relentless focus of our best energies towards challenges of stomach-churning magnitude. We tell the stories that aren't making it into the press: the retired general in Rift Valley sheltering 200 displaced families on his farm, the Muslim Medical Professionals offering free treatment to anyone injured in political protest. We challenge, over and over again, with increasing weariness, the international media coverage that presents this as "tribal warfare", "ethnic conflict", for an audience that visualises Africa through Hollywood: Hotel Rwanda, The Last King of Scotland, Blood Diamond.

I wish you'd thought of those people, when you made the choice to betray them. I wish you'd drawn on their courage, their integrity, their clarity, when your own failed you. I wish you'd had the imagination to enter into the lives, the dreams, of 37 million Kenyans.

But, as you've probably guessed by now, Mr. Kivuitu, this isn't really a letter to you at all. This is an attempt to put words to what cannot be expressed in words. To mourn what is too immense to mourn. A clumsy groping for something beyond the word 'heartbreak'. A futile attempt to communicate what can only be lived, moment by moment. This is a howl of anguish and rage. This is a love letter to a nation. This is a long low keening for my country.

Shailja Patel

Generation Kenya

GenerationKenya: Arise
Part One

Once upon a time and long ago, in 2007......

Before we Kenyans pulled the roof down on our heads, before we shook the foundations of our home—before the elections of December 27th, 2007, some of us had a wonderful idea. We had noticed that Kenya’s 50th birthday in 2013 lay not too far in the future, and we had further noticed that Kenya had many Kenyans to be proud of. Turning fifty is a big deal, we thought, and so is being Kenyan. We thought we would combine these two thoughts... and the project GenerationKenya was born.
GenerationKenya: A Celebration.

A birthday present for our country; a taking-stock of ourselves. It’s the thing to do, when you are all grown-up: we thought 50 was quite grown up enough. It is a whole half century, although it is short when you consider that it is one in which we have after all had to learn new languages, new ethos, new ways of learning, new roles, new modes of transportation, of existence, new food, new relationships, new names and new roads of fate’s beckoning: it has been an ordeal, but we’ve somehow come through it. So, GenerationKenya, let’s see what we’ve done.

Our achievements, our aspirations, our struggles, our challenges: and, always, our triumphs. Our stories: told by ourselves. Our images: seen by ourselves. We Kenyans: for us, by us. GenerationKenya was conceived in joy, and hope and pride. It is a plan to profile, in fine art photographic portraits and superbly written text, the lives and accomplishments of Kenyans born since 1963. For those Kenya-challenged, that’s the date of our Independence. From Britain; remember? From our fear of ourselves. From our appalling tendency to let white people tell us what to do. We were free: we had Independence. The Independence of thought, of being, of becoming. We became Kenya, properly, post-colonially speaking, in 1963. We are proud of it.

To the question—“you got your independence, what have you done with it, these last fifty years, you Kenyans?” GenerationKenya’s answer is “We have produced these people here, our sons and daughters, in whom we are well pleased.” See? All of them, Kenyans, real ones: born since 1963. They have done us proud. We shall tell our children about them—these are GenerationKenya. These are our message to the future, scripted in blood, and bone, and effort. In the best of us, and in our minds’ visions of Kenya, crafted with love.

Those of us who didn’t have a choice about believing in Kenya, because we found it here when we were born—this is GenerationKenya. Those of us for whom our parents’ ethnic prejudices and dislikes seemed impenetrable, archaic, a hangover from not-yet-Uhuru—this is GenerationKenya. We who today fall in love with, and fight with, and plan with, and argue with, and work with other Kenyans, and do not care where their parents are from—this is GenerationKenya. We are, because we believe: we wanted to show that.

After a nation-wide nomination process in the print and broadcast media, (and of course on the internet as well, because GenerationKenya exists in the diaspora and in ether), a panel of judges would select the finalists, and the celebration would begin: Happy Birthday Kenya.

Let’s preen and gleam and glory; let’s see who we have become, let’s see what prizes we’ve won (again) what mountains climbed, what raging rivers we’ve forded, again. We have done all this, and more. Let’s bathe and swim and rejoice in ourselves, let’s immerse ourselves in inspiration; let’s frolic in the dew of our dawn. Because we are Kenyans, born since 1963, and we’ll take anything on, with aplomb and daring. Despite those stupid red European lines on a map that only mockingly claimed—in Berlin, back then, when they drew the maps at that conference, they laughed-- we were a people, we had made it.

As 2008 is the year of Kenya’s 45th year of independence, in 2008, we would profile 45 of these superb and inspiring Kenyans—remember, born since 1963. In 2009, our 46th year, there would be 46 portraits/profiles, and in 2010, 47 such Kenyans, and so on until 2013, when, all told, there would be a complete set of 285 of these magnificent, successful, over-achieving people of ours,--these our Kenyans-- from all over the country and the world and all walks of life, all shades, all colours, all faiths and all persuasions. All Kenyan, and all framed and ready to be shown to other Kenyans as a set, as just one of the many reasons we Kenyans like so much being ourselves. We like being Kenyan. These 285 people are ours: see what we have become, we Kenyans.

We would put these into the Kenya National Archives, for posterity, for those future selves and descendants: curious, seeking, Kenyans who wanted to know “what did they do with their Kenya, those early twenty-first century types? Who were they, and what did they do?

Answer: GenerationKenya. Archived, indexed, and ready to be remembered in five years, in fifty, or in five hundred: for as long as forever and global warming permits. Born since 1963, and Kenyan, and proud: GenerationKenya.

That was all before the December 2007 elections.

Then, suddenly frighteningly, unimaginably, it was January 2008. Kivuitu and his cronies and his puppeteers happened, Kibaki thanked us for having voted for him, a nd the pangas flashed in angry nights lit up blindingly by burning hopes and lives. Democracy had lost, and the madness took over, and the men who had done this smiled on.

‘The past is another country, and anyway, the wench is dead...’

End of a dream? Perhaps.

Or perhaps—not.

There is a choice to be made, here.

Let’s think about this.

***

GenerationKenya, Arise
Part Two

I am drowning in voices. They are all mine. No, none of them are. They won’t stop talking. I think they’re crying.

--This last weekend, I was in Eldoret. The internally displaced Kenyans, almost all Kikuyus at the Cathedral I visited, are camped out in the open, in the cold. They gave me messages for Mwai Kibaki: “When you get back to Nairobi, tell Kibaki.....” As if I have dinner with him. As if my existence matters more to him than theirs.

--I met Bishop Korir. It is his church that is the shelter. Do non-Kenyans understand what I mean: can they read between the lines like we can?

--That night, it rained in Eldoret and I remembered that one of the men sleeping out in the open, in the camp, had told me that he knew the names of the people who had destroyed his home and looted his life and threatened to kill him. He recited them, like a poem he loved, like a Bible verse: Tito, Odero, Bernard, Ogola and the guy who owns the butchery. He had told the police this. Tito, Odero, Bernard, Ogola and the guy who owns the butchery walk freely, still, he said. It was strange; he laughed when he told me all this. I noticed his teeth—how evenly spaced, how tidy and punctual and white. I wanted to count them. I have become obsessed with numbers, with counts and counting, with tallies and totals: a new Kenyan disease.

--A man called me from Kamoi. Help us, he said. We are in danger, here. He thought he was going to die soon. He thought the man who had stolen his seven cows would come back to kill him, in case justice prevailed and he, this now-refugee man, wanted his cows back. Insurance policy: kill the claimant. The man from Kamoi told me this, as he counted off his stolen property to me on his hands.

--I transcribed an interview from one of the survivors of the church that was burned, with children and adults inside. She could not sleep, she said. The child she had been carrying on her back fell off amidst the burning rubble, as she was running away, and she hasn’t seen her baby since. I thought my words would desert me. All my languages fled. I was left with nothing but ashes.

--Two nights ago, I watched the election of the Speaker of Parliament. It was very high quality theatre. What nice clothes our politicians have. My words did desert me, then, and I could only count to 207.

--There are multiple bodies in the Kisumu mortuaries—they died of bullet wounds. They were shot in the back; they had been running away. What do you cry with when the tears are finished? What is the collective noun for corpses unecessarily dead? A shame of bodies, a tragedy of deaths, a graveyard of hopes? What is the number that the mind can count but the heart cannot?

--Jaza Lorry is sending supplies to those in need.

--Peacenet performs daily acts of grace, miracles of humanity, small and immense. Peacenet knows Kenya. I never thought I could find bureaucracy noble. They count sheets, and mattresses, and sacks of flour to save lives, they hold sporting events, to remind us of when we knew joy, they number our ways of being united —do you see; we can count when it counts?

--Women from Karen, Nairobi, are feeling the pain of their poor (times two) sisters in Kibera. They wanted to lay flowers at the gates of Parliament in honour and remembrance of the women raped and killed in the violence. They were not allowed to do so. A security measure, it appears. It still counts.

--My friend has emptied his bank account sending supplies to strangers in the Rift Valley. He counted and added, and balanced it all out, and their pain was worth more than his money. Are you wondering what ethnic group he’s from? Me too. I’ve never known—I’m not that good with surnames and he has always been just my very good friend, with the strange garden. And now you are asking: are you sure he’ s a Kenyan? I’m asking, too.

--ODM41 was painted in red paint, or blood, on the doors of the ex-homes of those displaced. We say that Kenya has 42 ethnic groups. That’s everybody else at war against the Kikuyu. Kenyans count when we should not, as well.

---A Somali woman I know, a long-time guest of Kenya’s kindness, broke into tears trying to explain to me what Kenya had meant, what our peace had symbolised for her. She lives in Eastleigh. Our dream used to count for them, as well.

---The brother of my heart did not go back to his job in New York after Christmas. This is his home, he said, his Kenya: he will not leave us like this. We count those who stood up to be counted, here.

--Yesterday, a policeman shot an unarmed young man who fell to the ground. The policeman walked over to this man, and kicked him. Then he walked away and fired into the air. Then he went back to the man he had shot and kicked him again, twice, thrice. The man later died. Mark this for later accounting.

--Mungiki is on the move, they say, pangas sharpened and alert. Accounts to be settled in blood. Have you heard that Kenyans have their own version of the Taliban? We are such competitive people; we couldn’t even let the Middle East have some violent people of their own, without muscling our own violence and madness-hyped nomenclature into it.

--It occurs to me that I could have said that differently: I could have spoken objectively about the discursive economy of violence underpinning the deployment of socially constructed identities; about the ways in which local contestations appropriate the semiotics of global conflicts; about micro-strategies of resistance and refusal; about the corporeal inscriptions of cultural contestations; about the emerging recombinant constellations of social ordering; about power and the modalities of its disciplinary impositions; about the signs and signifieds of the fragmented discourses of belonging—I could have done, with footnotes. I simply choose not to. That is not the language I wish to speak, here. I wonder what has happened to my mental abstraction, I count the distance travelled in my head. How far is the distance to betrayal? How many the miles, between Kenyan hope and Kenyan horror?

--Kenya, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways....

--A police bullet killed a ten-year old boy named Ahmed. His mother wept as she told of his special manner of calling for her. My nights are full of smoky dreams and running wild-eyed boys—too many to count and whose anger is beyond measure.

--I met a Kalenjin woman in Eldoret, who wept with the passion of Buddha because she could not save her neighbours. She saw a small Kikuyu child thrown into a fire. She is teetering on the verge of madness. She cannot bear to think, she cannot bear to exist as herself, so she drinks herself to blankness, instead. Accountable losses, unimaginable pain.

--Maina Kiai was booed by Kikuyus in the IDP camps when he insisted on the principles of justice and democracy. Kikuyus hate him. Muthoni Wanyeki has received death threats. Kikuyus hate her, too. That’s what happens when you fight for Human Rights in Kenya. All of us will be held to account.

There is a choice to be made, here.

Let’s count up and weigh our options.

****

Generation Kenya, Arise
Part Three.

We have a country, or not. We believe in justice and peace and democracy, or not. We believe in Kenya, or not.

The question is really whether those of us born since 1963, those of us born into the independent republic of Kenya, believe in our shared destiny, our collective promise, our knowledge of wrong and right. Do we?

There is a choice to be made, here.

Choose now, and choose well:

Kenya vs Chaos

Democracy vs Dictatorship

Justice vs Oppression

Equality vs Ethnicity

There is a choice to be made, here.

Choose. Choose with your heart, and your mind and your soul.

***

GenerationKenya, Arise
Part Four

We have made our choice.

GenerationKenya: For Justice, for Peace, for Kenya.

It is no choice at all. GenerationKenya lives on.

We will be starting the process of nomination soon, to remind us all what leaders should be, what Kenyans can be, and what it means to believe in Kenya. Watch this space, and join us.

GenerationKenya is a Kwani Trust Research, Documentation and Archive Project, whose purpose is to document and showcase Kenyan achievements and Kenyan lives. Join us at http://www.generationkenya.co.ke/.

Kwani Trust’s blog is www.kwani.org/blog

Diary of a Mad Kenyan Woman is a member of Concerned Kenyan Writers, a coalition whose purpose is to use our writing skills to help save Kenya in this polarised time.

A Simple Story

I am in Nairobi watching a television show about repentant looters in Mombasa—a place called Bangladesh. There are worries amongst those who’ve already consumed their ill-gotten gains; a few sacks of flour, or some bottles of beer, perhaps; they’re wondering how to get these back to their proper owners. The bedrock sweetness of Kenyans vanquishes me, again. We are so hopelessly romantic, I am helpless against the tide. The other night, I watched some of the most cynical and ironical of people, men and women whose pens drip acid at will, warriors of the word, all. They were standing in lamplight and singing in harmony the national anthem of Kenya whilst holding hands: it wrings my heart, still. They made me sing, too, of course. I had forgotten that I knew all the words.

We deserve better than the leaders we have.

This on NTV: “ karua na kalua wararua kura za rukia wa karura kuria “ Say it quickly. The tongue-twister was the story. Only Kenyans know why this is so funny; and only Kenyans know why it is not.

I love our ridiculous humour. The thing of it is, one of the reason Kenyans are so special – yes I know we’re supposed to have climbed down off our high horse of Kenyan exceptionalism since we’ve just had a meltdown and a mighty pride goes before a fall and all, but old habits die hard—is that we’ve never met a people as funny as ourselves. I mean, we find ourselves ridiculous and absurd; we can spend hours cracking each other up by how hysterically laughable we are. We have never taken ourselves too seriously, which is an endearing trait. Even when we’re boasting, we’re sort of laughing at ourselves for boasting so blatantly—I think it is what kept us sane all those years, or at least sane-seeming, which is sometimes just as good.

We cannot be led by men who do not believe that Kenya exists.

Yesterday, I met a man who knows Matatus. He studies them; their lore and their lyrics. He knows which ones play what kinds of music at what time of day; he’s thought about the different philosophy of space that Matatu drivers have—did you know they had one, that there is an intricate epistemology of speed and space and road-use that the matatu-drivers have developed? Space is time and speed is money—Hegel could never have thought in four dimensions like that nor could the French post-structuralists. Here I go, boasting again. Yesterday, a woman saw matatus engaging in their gravity-defying manner as usual and she said “I hate matatus. Thank god the matatus are back.” What’s funny is that we all know what she means.

We cannot allow our country to be defiled by these men.

I heard about this man who went about and collected imperilled Kikuyu families and installed them in his home. Eighty families in all. He saved their lives as if that’s what he had been born to do—he didn’t even stop to think. He’s a Luo. I would never have thought to mention that to anyone at all. My mind had not grown that tendril until just two weeks ago, and now I have a thicket of them, a growing collection of weed-thoughts. Like that monstrous water hyacinth on Lake Victoria, which moves and breathes and chokes the lake and the lives around it. We have ravening parasites amongst us, and the most dangerous ones are not plants: they walk on two legs.

We really cannot allow Kenya to be hijacked like this, by mind-terrorists who do not care if our dream shrivels and dies in the sun, like Langston’s raisins.

Look, it’s really very simple. We voted. We own this country. The person who gets the most votes according to the rules, wins. That’s all. That’s all we want. For everyone to play by the rules, because they are our rules: We made them, we own them, and we own this country too. This democracy is ours. We are the People. That’s all.

These men, these alleged leaders, do not get that part. At all. They do not get it.

We must drive this lesson home. We, the Kenyan people, own this country. It is ours to rule, not theirs. We, the people, are Sovereign. Our rules obtain, our will is paramount--we are Kenya. It is quite simple.



Diary of a Mad Kenyan Woman is a member of Concerned Kenyan Writers, a coalition whose purpose is to use our writing skills to help save Kenya in this polarised time.

"Bear Witness"--Kenyan Pundit

[The following comes from Kenyan Pundit, who has given permission for me to reproduce it here--w.m.]

Dear all,

A bunch of us have come together to set up a website to document incidents of violence etc. during the crisis (and soon to follow - information about ways to help on a micro-level). The website is still very much a work in progress and will be updated as we go along. We believe the number of deaths being reported by the government, police, and media is grossly underreported. We also don't think we have a true picture of what is really going on - reports that all have us have heard from family and friends in affected areas suggests that things are much worse than what we have heard in the media. We also (in my idealist world) hope that we can begin to put names and faces to the people who have lost their lives in this mess.

What's the point of all this you might ask? Well, Kenyans have demonstrated their capacity for selective amnesia time and time again. When this crisis comes to an end, we don't want what happened to be swept under the rug in the name of "moving forward" - for us to truly move forward, the truth of what happened needs to be told - Ushahidi ( http://www.ushahidi.com/) is our small way of contributing to that. We will be relying primarily on input from guys on the ground (NGOs, individuals, journalists), so please circulate this widely to your networks and help us witness.

Asanteni,
Ory Okolloh (aka Kenyan Pundit)

"I was near to die...I was dead."

If you’ve watched CNN in the last twenty-four hours, you will have caught this victim of the post-election violence in Kenya speaking his truth. He was near death: in fact, he had already died. I am not sure why this particular mind-bite should stand out from all the other images that I have seen on television, in the newspapers and on the streets here in Kenya, but it did. I have been wondering what he meant, that he had died, he had been dead. I’ll never know, exactly, what this poor man meant, but his words are echoing in the sore places of my entrails like the sound of a warning bell dying away, like the last notes of a sad song at sunset.

The sharp edge of the panga had come down twice on his head, he said, but most of the damage had been done to his hands, which had been hacked at repeatedly. His hands. He works with them, or used to. What is this language? To target the very part of the body that is used to create value, that is the labouring instrument, is to say to this man that you may not work. You may not do what you used to with your hands. Your hands offend me, I shall cut them off. And kill you also. This manner of speech is strangely redundant.

I was watching CNN as opposed to Kenyan television channels because I wanted to see what the world was saying about us. The world is saying that Kenyans, who had been on the brink of one of the most astonishing democratic transitions witnessed in Africa, degenerated, very conveniently for the West’s stereotypes, to a “business as usual: chaos and anarchy right on schedule” version of the African story. These broadcasts are brimming with just barely-suppressed glee at being able to say that tribal violence is tearing the East African nation of Kenya apart, long regarded as an exemplary bastion of stability in the region. We have confirmed some cherished stereotypes and validated many racists worldwide. In addition to everything else, really, those of you with young children had better start thinking about how, if we survive this, you are ever going to be able to explain what you did with your Kenya. What will you tell them?

Will you tell them: well dear one, your uncle’s neighbour cut off his colleague’s hands because that colleague’s father was from a village about fifty kilometres away from where the president’s mother used to live? Will your mouth be able to form an explanation for your children, or will your words burn in your throat with the acid of futility and choke you, right there, right there in front of your child’s frightened eyes? Will the taste of shit in your mouth cleave your tongue to the roof of your mouth? We are creating a stain of corpses on our psyches, we are defiling our very future. We have leapt ahead to ambush our history. We have roped our children into a ponzi-scheme of danger and desolation.

We will have to tell these children “We were near to die...we were dead.”

Let us stop this.

Enough!

Now look what we’ve done, we Kenyans. Just look at us. It is a bloody disgrace—no, I’m not swearing, I am offering a precise description of the situation on the ground. Bloody and Disgraceful. We are now calling for our International mummies and daddies to come and save us, because we cannot understand how it is that we are laying waste to all we hold dear, and we are still tut-tutting and clucking and wringing our hands while our country burns. Much worse, we have decided that the only two people who can save us are the precise two men whose overweening ambition and horror of unemployment have led us to this despicable pass.

Let us at least have the courage of our venality; let us look at ourselves squarely in the face and say “we screwed up big time, and we knew it all along, we did it knowingly and now we have to suck it up and deal with the results of our mistakes.” Let’s get a grip, guys. We really cannot go on much longer with these protestations of horrified incomprehension when all along bloggers, intellectuals, human rights activists and my next-door-neighbour’s little girl have all been warning us of the dangers of ethnic fundamentalism. The warning signs have been there—we have allowed our own dialogues to become replete with snide sub-texts and codes: we have become expert at fingering Luos, Kambas and Kikuyus with phrases and allusions calculated to inflame. It really doesn’t help us at all at this time to resort to coy references to violence “against members of a certain community” when we all know for a fact – take a deep breath and say it out loud – that Kikuyus are being killed and attempts being made to ethnically cleanse them out of areas across the country because of the perception that they are responsible for election results which in charitable moments can only be called exceedingly dodgy. Let’s just say it right out.

Kikuyus are being killed and are facing danger of yet more violence, because the rest of the country thinks that the people of Central Province will not only not vote for anyone who isn’t one of ‘them,’ but will also under no circumstances respect the rights of others to so vote for someone else. Young people are incensed and have been rendered violently irrational by the failure of their leaders and elders to consider the collective good as opposed to their bank balances. These young people are enraged, and so am I, that the people of this country count for so little that the greed of a few can negate the desire of the many. We have interethnic face-offs in Nairobi and bullet-ridden bodies in Kisumu; churches have been burned out with people in them in Eldoret.

I am travelling across the country with a driver whose name begins with an “O” and because we are deep in PNU country, I am systematically torturing myself with thoughts of what would happen to him if ‘my’ people decided to retaliate for acts of violence against them in the rest of the country. How is it that there is such a space in my imagination, in my country, after I saw with my own two sceptical eyes last Thursday the enormous patience and trust that the people of Kenya were willing to invest in the democratic process? I was there myself, going from polling station to polling station, to record this moment, this ridiculously awesome expression of the popular will. I saw them: the grandmothers and the dreadlocked young men, the mothers with children strapped to their backs, the guy in the wheelchair, the wide-eyed schoolkids watching their elder brothers and sisters exercise their constitutional rights. I saw them, and rejoiced. I was crafting judiciously preening sentences about our organic democratic traditions when the Electoral Commission of Kenya stumbled, slid and fell all the way into its own private Idaho—and left us with a hydra-headed mess.

In the past ten days, I have passed through Nakuru and Naivasha and Eldoret and Eldama Ravine, I have been to El Molo and Burguret and Chavakali; I’ve probably travelled in five of our eight provinces, and experienced a good 25% of the road surface of Kenya—isn’t it strange how certain numbers take on a potency known only to Kenyans? I have been watching the television and listening to an interesting cross-section of our leaders and opinion makers: we all seem to think that unless Raila and Kibaki get together and make nice, the rest of us are doomed to go on senselessly butchering each other without fear or favour, no scratch that: with ultimate fear and delicately nuanced favour. Somewhere along the lines of: you-must-have-voted-for-the-person-I-did-not-want-to-win-so-die.

It bears repeating that biased preference is the essence of democratic right—you can vote for whoever you want to vote for, even if the cumulative effect of this democratic right in Central Province looked somewhat like the hypnotised members of a cult were voting for their messiah; nevertheless, you should be allowed to do that and live to regret it at leisure. This is democracy: we’re allowed to be myopic and fearful like that, as long as we do it democratically and peacefully. What is of more immediate concern here are the numbers of extremely angry and disenfranchised young men who are even now desperately foreshortening their own futures and possibilities by plunging themselves into bloodletting and unspeakable criminality.

How have we produced this population of Kenyans so estranged, so alienated from a sense of collective hope and a progressive trajectory that they are willing to burn to the ground this national edifice we call our home? I begin to suspect that it might have something to do with the ways in which we treat our people as if they are disposable nappies....first we crap all over them and then we throw them away. Or, first we work them up with visions and dreams of a utopia denied them only by the holding of office by the ‘the other side’ then we slyly make insinuations of how much easier life would be without ‘them’ and then we give them a little nudge and say “oh look, there goes one of them now. And who left this panga lying about in the open like that, all nice and shiny and sharp?”

And then we exclaim in shocked horror: oh goodness, me! However could this have happened? Oh please, please, well, gracious me, whatever shall we do?

On the other hand, whatever can Kikuyus think we are about, saying complacently that “we” won the election when even Europeans who can count are quite able to figure out the implications of votes which add up to fifty thousand and are transmuted into seventy thousand by some mysterious Kikuyu alchemy? It boggles the mind, the sheer bare-faced effrontery of fraud meant to thwart the popular will and carried out in naked defiance of international observers and Kenyan media. We may not have universal education yet, but a good number of Kenyans can count for themselves with a fair degree of confidence in their own tallies. What on earth do the people of Central Province mean, dancing about in the streets like that with joy, when it is evident to anyone who believes in this country that uchawi numbers are self-evidently not a cause for celebration? There’s hubris, and then there’s Central Province. I am fairly sure that it didn’t help matters. No one has won here, folks. We are all our own victims and our own oppressors—and some of us are guiltier than others.

The drunken man in a bar in a PNU stronghold who leeringly raised his glass to me in celebration of the government being “ours as usual” should, as he nurses the inevitable (and I hope excruciating) hang-over, ingest with his Panadol the human costs of maintaining the feudal principality of Kikuyustan--especially when other people would rather live in Kenya. Where does he think he will flee to, when the flames of discontent spread, as they inevitably will unless we come to our senses? Amongst the many things that should stop the down-swing of that upraised panga is the fact that our neighbours in the region are deeply inconvenienced by our violent naval-gazing proclivities. It will probably serve us right to be in the position of receiving humanitarian assistance from countries we have regarded with pitying superiority up to now. Perhaps we will then understand that refugees are not lazy people on the dole; they are innocents trying to save their own lives. The measure of our neighbourliness is about to be put to the test as Kenyans attempt to escape our home-grown stupidity by running across the Ugandan border. It is to be hoped that our generosity towards our neighbours has in the past been of an order sufficient to compel them to look compassionately on our compatriots. Perish the thought—Kenyan refugees and internally displaced persons of a magnitude sufficient to necessitate Red Cross concerns of a humanitarian crisis in the unfolding.

Enough. If we are to sink with the ship, let us at least not pretend that all along we thought it was only a spring shower that was brewing, and not a furious tempest. Self-truth is a good platform to stand on and from which to survey this mess and decide what to do next. Enough pretence.We cannot bleat on endlessly about the wonders of our economic growth when most Kenyans have yet to see the evidence of such growth. We cannot leave people out in the cold whilst we luxuriate in the warmth of our riches and then, to add further insult, disingenuously ask them why they don’t come into the light of the fire when we know we’ve barred all the possible means of access beforehand. We cannot solicit and accept people’s trust and their goodwill and then expend this capital in ways unworthy of ourselves. We, above all, cannot disclaim responsibility for our own careless rhetoric and propensity for exploiting base fears and misperceptions by our current shocked protestations of incredulity. We did this—let us fix it. All of us: not just those two job-seekers who seem to care much more for their careers than for the people of their country. Let us fix this mess—each of us, with whatever means of communication, persuasion and rationality that we can muster. Let us stop this senseless tragedy now. Speak out and say: Enough.

After the Ballot: Coming to a Donation Box Near You

I am intrigued by the recent proliferation of web-based giving and I have been keeping a curious eye on sites such as Kiva.org and Heifer International, in an attempt to understand what is going on. A few days ago, I found the Guardian Unlimited’s new idea: Katine. You can read all about it here. I was somewhat displeased, to say the least, to find that the Guardian thinks this Ugandan village exists in a time-warp. Indeed, Guardian readers are invited to lift these poor suffering villagers out of the Middle Ages into the twenty-first century by their generous donations. I could not make this up if I tried and so I left two disobliging comments and called it a frustrating day. Yet, even as I ranted and raved at the Guardian Unlimited’s dangerous flights of fancy, it occurred to me to wonder why I bothered—there are many less complicated and more effective ways of torturing myself. For example, I could read about elections in Kenya, more on which below.

The larger question, as far as the Guardian goes—which isn’t very far--is really one of the place and purpose of western philanthropy in Africa. Thoughtful Africans, in East Africa and elsewhere, have concluded that aid dollars demand too great a price in African dignity and autonomy and it has been argued that the aid industry serves to excuse African governments from many of their responsibilities towards their own people. Moreover, policy making becomes skewed, as priorities are determined by donor countries and organisations – it is their money, after all, if one ignores the tiny details of the continuing saga of colonial grand larceny—without reference to those most likely to be affected by such policies. We all understand this, and we even understand that just as the original version of colonialism was ably supported by the civilising and Christianising mission, so also the contemporary corporate and political predators are well-served by an aid industry which pretends there are no political foundations or power dynamics involved in any of this; that wars, poverty and disease are simply African conditions existing without known cause or culpability; that it is a mere accident that best paid members of this industry, grass-roots credentials notwithstanding, are likely to be white; and that several decades after these schemes were introduced for our ‘development’ one needs a microscope to find signs of progress.

Given all this, critics of these philanthropic development efforts say, it behoves us as Africans to check the mouths, teeth and dental records of these gift-horses very carefully. Better yet, reject the ‘gift’ and think of another way. I understand this viewpoint, and I want largely to agree. Ever since MMK of the much-missed “Bullets and Honey” blog came up with the ‘dollar a day’ label for us, no further explanation of the peculiarly distorting effects of the aid industry has been necessary. I too, am tired of being from the begging-bowl people. I too, think supporting entrepreneurship is a good idea. I, too, think that harnessing the energy and creativity of Africans is a much better thing to do than parachuting externally-designed schemes and projects into long-suffering African communities who would be forgiven for supposing that all white people everywhere regularly drive around in white four wheel drive vehicles with improbable acronyms stencilled on the doors. I too, would like to get out from under this infantilising burden of perennial rescue missions. Really, I just want to tell the lot of them to eff off.

Here’s the problem, though. The part of me that dearly wants to tell the patronising, condescending, pitying, self-indulgent, largely ignorant and frankly annoying western do-gooders that they can shove their plans and projects up the nearest sweet-spot is forced to stop and recognise that I am not about to go and build a school in any rural community anywhere in Africa anytime soon. There we have it: I am not about to do it, and I am not planning on doing it, and they—aforementioned condescending, pitying, etc.-- are. Were I a mother with school-age children in one of these communities targeted by the aid industry, then, what would be more compelling for me—a principled objection by a fellow-African who makes much more money than me but isn’t inclined to share it, or a scheme to build clinics, schools and etc. proposed by foreigners who moreover have the money to back it up? This is not rocket science: principled objections do not pay rents or school feels, ever. Choosing between my principled zero dollars, and the patronising million dollars doesn’t even take a second’s thought—Show Me The Money.

This rock-and-hard-place business is intolerable, and it is our own fault. Here we Kenyans are, for example, on the verge of undertaking one of the most closely watched elections in African history, and our considered response is to regress into ethnic factions whose rhetoric is so predictable as to be actively boring. I’ve blogged about this already and bring it up here only because the irony struck me quite hard: on the one hand, I am arguing with the Guardian’s editors about their incapacity to accord Africans their full historical standing, and on the other, I am treated to the spectacle of Kenyans who seem all set to ignore and in fact to destroy the benefits of precisely this historical standing. It is not that I think that ethnic identities are anything other than fully contemporary—I do not subscribe to the notion that these are remnants of history mistakenly hanging onto the present. They are as current as the upcoming Safaricom IPO, undoubtedly, but how useful are they as frameworks through which to view our collective future? If we continue along the present trajectories of fragmentation, there will not be much to celebrate in January of 2008, whoever wins, and then we really will need rescuing by the four-wheel-drive civilising-mission types. Should we ask the Guardian to turn its attention to Kenya when it has finished in Uganda?

It is astonishing that the mere prospect of an election can cause Kenyans to drop the ball in this fashion. People, here’s the thing: all things considered, each of the three presidential candidates is more than qualified—they all obviously have the experience and the will to do the job. ALL of them—we would be fine with any one of them, if only we can get round to forcing them to behave like presidential candidates and not like contestants for a high school beauty pageant, complete with associated pettiness and triviality. Kibaki is all for laissez-faire capitalism and economic growth, Odinga is concerned about social justice and redistribution, and Kilonzo Musyoka has positioned himself as the perfect compromise between the former two positions. These are all perfectly legitimate political positions, and what the rest of us have to do now is decide which platform works best for our interests.

One of the dirty secrets of politics is that major parties or candidates really cannot afford to be too radical in any direction; the campaign bombast and thunder have more to do with speaking to crowds than with serious policy intentions. Case in point: Kibaki’s free-school scheme, which his own civil servants keep telling us isn’t going to be nearly the manna-from-heaven that we would suppose it to be. It is not that I am picking on Kibaki as having singularly unrealistic election pledges, but rather that as he recently was heard to tell others not to engage in unrealistic political pledges, he should himself perhaps take the log out of his own eye. To weigh his idea against the education platforms of the other candidates would mean that we engage in a serious debate about realisable goals and ambitions, consider the probable sources of funding, discuss whether this is a good use of our tax shillings or not, and make a decision based on the unglamorous calculations of planning, pragmatism and profit, whatever we consider a ‘profit’ to be.

I am aware that this is much less exciting than the dramatic battles between good and evil that the candidates and their supporters are attempting to present to us—being irrepressible drama queens, the lot of them. The current hysteria over the ethnic foundations or support base of this one or that one are worrying only because the self-interest of the political actors threatens to overwhelm their common sense—it works for them to declaim and denounce and declare in full throat. It doesn’t work for us, and their self-inflicted absence from rationality is no reason for us to play along. Their talent for theatre is neither here nor there: our ambitions as a people are. If we are not able to comport ourselves with the degree of gravitas and maturity that we should expect of ourselves, the Guardian Unlimited and its friends will be happy to lift us out of our degenerate, quaintly archaic, pathetic and suffering medieval ways. These are the choices: grow up fast and get a grip, or surrender to our dollar-a-day fate. Bono for President, anyone?

"Kwa Kabila, Mimi ni Mkenya"

To save everybody the trouble of forensic sociology, my name is spelled "Wambui Mwangi"--no prizes for guessing where in Kenya my family is originally from. I am writing as a Kenyan blogger, to other Kenyan bloggers, because I have become somewhat alarmed at the increasingly strident voices of ethnicised identities in the Kenyan blogosphere, in discussions of the upcoming elections presidential elections. To the extent that I believe that Kenyan bloggers constitute one of the most promising hopes for a re-energised politics of equality and progressive debate and productive mobilisation, I would like to raise my voice in caution: replicating worn-out and dangerous tropes of ethnic identities on the internet surely cannot be good for our collective future. Bloggers will be guilty of a trahison des clercs of a magnitude, in venality and future guilt, to rival that of which Benda wrote--we are, whether we will it or not, the public intellectuals of our age and knowledge and we are the voices of our people on this stage of ether and binaries. Although, as any student of these matters will unhesitatingly agree, ethnic identities are neither immutable nor particularly “authentic” in the first instance, it is hard not to feel pressured to be "Kikuyu" when other Kenyans (who surely have better things to do) insistently tell me, or imply through their writing, that that is the most interesting fact about me, which would be tragic were it to be true.

In turn, I do not take unanalysed measures of other people’s alleged crowd-filling capacities nor their hypothetical violent tendencies to be a particularly insightful way of thinking about my compatriots—albeit I will grant that I have the luxury of a calming and sobering distance as I am not in Kenya at the moment. It is precisely this distance that highlights how limited, in range and social vision, discourses grounded in identities constructed on putatively “primordial” ethnicities really are: the whole thing is a tremendously unwise diversion of energies badly needed elsewhere, on other matters and other emergencies.

Global warming, global capital, a militarising and radically militant world, melting ice-caps, diasporic migration flows, unchecked corporate greed, absurdly-rationalised wars, continuing colonisation of intellectual production and forums, embarrassing political performances, disgraceful income disparities, devastated societies, disaffected youth, all-too-speakable rapes and depradations, growing genocides, continuing hunger, illiteracy, disease and poverty and other weighty and pressing matters, at home and in the larger world, urgently need the attention and actions of all Kenyans. We short-change ourselves, and the rest of the world, if we remain mired in the petty wastelands of ethnic identity.

Limiting our possibilities to these simplistic ethnic trajectories is hardly creative, and, as a social project, it seems to me to lack, sadly and overwhelmingly, both ambition and critical edge. It really seems ineffably silly to sit around fighting over breadcrumbs, when we could be talking about how to build the bakery with our already-more-than-adequate skills. We have highly trained economists, surgeons, advertisers, farmers, internationally acclaimed writers, artists, activists, lawyers, cobblers, environmentalists, architects, nurses, fishers, scientists, plumbers, business people, contractors, computer geeks, poets and priests; and an energy and a capacity to improvise, adapt and accomplish that is unmatched—what are we waiting for? It surely cannot be the case that the clear imperative of this Kenyan promise, this energy, this undiluted global competence and fluency and savoir-faire is to be sacrificed on the altar of…what? Being from—or having parents from, or grandparents from—say, Machakos, as opposed to somewhere else? We need to think ourselves bigger and better than this.

To the extent that I am convinced and therefore insist that the ethnically-evocative sound of my own name cannot begin to encompass me or to comment on my abilities, I do not subsequently see how it is possible to suppose that this relentless peering into our furtively constructed respective genealogies provides a useful lexicon to describe our collective possibilities—as Kenyans. It does not. Not by a long shot: ethnicity of whatever type is assuredly not the most interesting fact about anyone else either, at least not from the point of view that insists on our assuming our proper position in the world and in the human conversation. Moreover, it feels like treachery to the democratic spirit and libertarian vigour of bloggers. I am alarmed.

I say this with a full awareness of how easy it is to pooh-pooh these social identities when one enjoys the dominant identity oneself, however contested or, in my case, just unwelcome and mostly distracting. It may be much the same ease of infuriating detachment that causes me to splutter whenever a well-meaning white person assures me that he or she is “colour-blind” when this is not a biological condition. It is all very well and gracious not to notice these markers of identity when you are yourself the “norm” or at least inhabit the privileged category, and it is tantamount to asking the other parties to exhibit a nobility and purity of intent conspicuously absent in yourself, whilst at the same time not volunteering to redress the matter of the current imbalance, nor the effects of past injustices. This would be simply and inarguably a denial of the structural inequalities that exist and would further therefore be constitutive of an insulting ahistoricity, and all-round obliviousness, besides. So let me say, for the record, that yes, Central Province, its inhabitants, its economy and its societies have been unfairly privileged at the expense of other Kenyans, in one way or another, for several decades now—which is a fact that any Kenyan of good will should be ready to acknowledge.

As I was born there, not just in Central Province but even worse, in Nairobi, and--if we are going to be specific, in the maternity ward of Nairobi Hospital itself, where I no doubt I received special treatment for a variety of reasons, one of which was possibly my aforementioned nominal Kikuyu-ness,--then of course I partake of whatever advantage this implies—access to many of the best schools, the added onward nudge of the silent Kikuyu nod, etc. The whole shebang. I do not see that this has left me materially significantly better off than if I were someone else—“being Kikuyu” has never paid a single rental bill that I recollect, nor has it played much of a role in whether I get research funding from various institutions or not: except in this sense of deep structure in which we assume that I was able to show up to get educated and thus get opportunities to apply for the grants because my family were in central province and thus had easier access to the sorts of social resources that allow for one to get an education and travel abroad, etc. Deep Breath.

I quite see all that. I also see that my protestations of level playing fields aside, the fact remains that I have done quite well, and even I am not so arrogant as to suppose that I accomplished it all by the labour and sweat of my own prominent brow. I had, and continue to enjoy, tremendous amounts of help, some of which is probably the un-stated benefit of never having to worry about variously assorted and rampaging Kikuyus taking away my opportunities. I have made out like the proverbial bandit, from this perspective, by dint of involuntarily being in the Kikuyu “club,” such as it is. But then what is to be done about all this, apart from my wringing my ridiculously ineffectual hands? I do not see my personal angst providing a practical perspective on the matter now or at any time in the future—especially when my most significant milestones were achieved in global contexts. Nobody much cares whether I am Kikuyu or not, for the purposes of my job or my capacity to survive—most people in the world do not even know what this means, and most people in the world certainly do not care even a bit. I cannot imagine a more laughable facet of myself to put forward for consideration, in any professional context or international gathering. Having said all that, yes I can see where the injustice of past ethnic determinism in Kenya bites deeply and continues to rankle, and, from this perspective, my own capacity as a Kikuyu to transcend my ethnic shackles is therefore neither here nor there.

Surely the beginning of an answer, at least for the purposes of this impending Kenyan presidential election, is a firm commitment to support whichever candidate has the best plan and the most persuasive rationale to lead us forward in, at least, the fields of the environment, education, health, IT, distributive social justice and the economy. At least. Surely the thing to do is to push a political agenda in which we compel the candidates to debate the issues: what is the best plan, why, where is the money coming from to fund it, and how do we maintain economic growth and attend to matters of social justice as well? Nina maswali:

Who will best protect the freedom of the press and of speech, defend the independence of the judiciary, enlarge our public sphere of debate, appoint and promote to political positions or to the civil service on merit and without prejudice? Who has a plan to make Kenya rich—I mean actively wealthy, not rich in “natural resources” and good ideas-- and what data are they using and which expert opinions for these plans? Who knows how to address the “Kikuyu Problem” without freaking Kikuyus out or insulting anybody else? Who can talk sensibly about these things, so that we can begin to get over them and move on?

What are their views on gender equality, on globalisation, on the situation in the middle east as well as on the situation in North Eastern Province and in Kibera? What is our advisable stance on U.S. and European policies? What do we think about events in Nigeria and in South Africa? In Somalia and Ethiopia? What about foreign investments? The Chinese? What are our views and consequent probable actions about the tragedy in Darfur? What are we doing to ensure that we do not encourage mini-Darfurs and mini-Rwandas in our own midst? Who has a foreign policy that clearly articulates our interests in the region as well as internationally? Who has shown us that they care about the health and welfare of people who live further than five hundred kilometres in any direction from where they were themselves born?

Does whoever it is know about bloggers? Does whoever it is understand the importance of the Kenyan Diaspora to the Kenyan economy? Has whoever it is got a policy on this? What are the plans for the salvage of the Lake Victoria ecology and other embattled eco-systems, what is going on with tourism, why are the snows melting on the mountain tops, how many trees does any future government hope to plant, where are we on Kyoto, how many new schools do we plan to build, what is our current AIDS status, what is the plan for expanding the services of the health care system---WHO HAS A PLAN? Who has thought about these things, planned for them, explained them to us and presented their priorities for our consideration? Let us all vote for whoever that is, and let us by all peaceful means available to us insist on our politicians, in the meantime, getting a grip on the most important issues and speaking to them, that we may, in turn, judge them on relevant qualifications and attributes, when we—peacefully--vote.

It is not going to matter much whether the phonetics of your name hail from Bungoma or Lodwar or Kinoo if we are all slowly frying to a cancerous crisp because of global warming, if our coastal communities are threatened with being swept away by floods we do not understand, if malaria is working its way further up the highlands than ever before, if we’re going to be destabilised because our neighbours are engaged in armed conflicts, if ecosystems and structures on which vast numbers of us depend for our survival are being daily expunged and if we collectively face prolonged food shortages because we have destroyed our own seed banks and other genetic legacies through inattention and irresponsibility. Farmers have been killing themselves in large numbers in India and in Iraq because of a prior misguided reliance on genetically modified products into which they were cruelly manipulated—do we have a plan in place to insure that this does not happen to us? Or should I start thinking about investing in special coffins for our agricultural compatriots? Did the Tsunami have our finely-nuanced understanding of shadings of loyalty and ethnicity—did it care about our carefully coded ethnic slurs and divisions? Do we imagine that the monstrous corporations even now eyeing our natural resources can tell the difference between one indignant African and another? No really; do we think they give this any thought at all? Some re-prioritisation is in order here, methinks.

I will not care, in this dismal and abysmal future, whether it was Mr. Musyoka, Mr. Kibaki or Mr. Odinga who was on duty when we crashed and burned; it hardly matters when we are all going to be victims of the most spectacular failure of the imagination since the last one, if we do not get our collective act together.. We simply do not have the time for all this ethnicity crap, injured historical sentiments aside—we’ve got several crisis situations looming ahead, as well as a multiplicity of dazzling opportunities and arenas for global and local expansion and income-generation across the board. We fail to grasp the global context, and to both address it and take advantage of it, at our own immediate and inescapable peril; this global context does not deal kindly with the results of internecine and reactionary quarrels amongst ourselves. If we are not on the bus we will get left behind. There is no more disabling condition than our fondness for bizarre modalities of social organisation and for unproductive ways of existence—we need to redress past injuries promptly and judiciously, face up to present global realities and dynamics, and get on with it. Eyes on the prize, jemeni!