By Frank Furedi
BACK in the 1970s, when Eldoret in Kenya was a relatively sleepy town, I was struck by the frontier-type mentality of many of the people I encountered there. Individuals and families came to this part of western Kenya to start a new life, and to try to make their fortune.
This had been the case in Eldoret for a long time. During the colonial era, the town was settled by groups of Afrikaners who had ‘trekked’ there in 1908. In subsequent decades, landless Africans also made their way to Eldoret and the surrounding area. Many of these African settler communities — in Burnt Forest, Kipkabus, Timboroa — provided the backbone of the Mau Mau movement in the region, which fought against British colonialism in Kenya. They were also pioneers looking for their ‘Kenyan Dream’.
Unfortunately, in post-independence Kenya, access to opportunities and resources have tended to be mediated through ethnic networks and affiliations. Land grabs are frequently organised by local politicians who mobilise people on the basis of tribal affiliation. That was evident 30 years ago — and its tragic consequences are clear today after a mob burned down a church in Eldoret, leading to the death of 30 people fleeing political violence.
News reports about the current political crisis, following the disputed elections in late December, appear to be unusually ill-informed about what’s going on and what issues are at stake. Many reports claim that the outbreak of political violence and tribal unrest came like a bolt from the blue in an otherwise model democracy.
A commentator for the New York Times says ‘Kenya’s disaster seems to have hit like a tornado out of thin air’. Another writer says the ‘recent bloodshed is all the more tragic because Kenya has enjoyed economic progress and has avoided the sectarian violence seen on much of the African continent’. This kind of naive and ill-informed prognosis is testimony to the power of historical amnesia. The truth is that the clashes in the Rift Valley are only the most recent example of ethnic clashes over the ownership of land.
Public life has been dominated by the politicisation of ethnicity, since the nation won independence in 1963. Consequently, elections are perceived to be a contest between different ethnic groups, the outcome of which will decide which community gets access to resources.
Clashes during the elections of 1992 and 1997 left hundreds of people dead. In 1992, according to some estimates, as many as 779 people were killed and 50,000 were displaced. A report on these events published by the National Council of Churches of Kenya blamed high-ranking Government officials for orchestrating some of the violence.
Many of the clashes occurred in places where conflict is unfolding again today. For example, now, as in 1992 and 1993, one of the worst affected areas was Burnt Forest.
Today, as in the past, the focus of the deadly conflict is the attempt to gain access to resources — and most importantly land.
Back in the 1990s, outbreaks of violence did not arouse much interest or handwringing in the West. So what is new today?
The missing links
One reason why the current debate is so ill-informed is because it is not really about Kenya. In recent times, many Western experts and commentators have lost the capacity to analyse and interpret events in Africa and Asia by using conventional political concepts. Instead, conflicts tend to be interpreted through a new model that was constructed during the post-Cold War upheavals in the Balkans and Rwanda.
This new view of conflicts is based on a disoriented Western imagination, which discusses political violence through dramatic and sensationalist metaphors, such as ‘holocausts’, ‘genocides’, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘mass rape camps’. Consequently, when it comes to violence in Africa or Asia, genocide has become the default diagnosis of events. From the Congo to Darfur to Kenya, bloody conflicts are recast as harbingers of holocaust.
Through today’s promiscuous use of the term ‘genocide’, conflicts become transformed into morality plays about human destruction. Western reporters see only a sudden, inexplicable outburst of violence and overlook the structural causes of crises in the Third World.
Many African politicians have learned to talk the talk of Western media outlets and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and now try to use this language to secure an advantage in a conflict situation.
It is worth noting that the communication strategy of President Kibaki’s election campaign was directed by Mr Marcus Courage, an Old Etonian public relations consultant who had previously served as an adviser to the Make Poverty History campaign. Courage helped to promote Bob Geldof’s Live 8 campaign in 2005. Is it really surprising that Kibaki speaks in the language and tones of a humanitarian aid worker? Indeed, it was Kibaki who advised the world media to think about Rwanda when they watched the violence unfolding.
Sadly, significant sections of the media were all too happy to embrace this talk of genocide. Quite quickly, relatively unorganised and chaotic gangs of youth were labelled as militias and old-fashioned land grabs were recycled as ethnic cleansing.
Kenya has more than its share of problems, and the current crisis may well unleash a protracted period of violent upheaval. Competing groups of corrupt political cliques, who have usually managed to cobble together a political deal in the past, may not be able to do so now.
But it is precisely because the stakes are so high that the last thing Kenya needs is for its problems to be transformed into a Western fantasy about ‘another Rwanda’.
Kenya was not a beacon of democracy or a model of economic stability before the December elections. And nor is it the dramatic setting for a Rwanda-to-be after the elections. All that has happened is that one group of corrupt politicians overplayed its hand, got a little bit too greedy, and forced its opponents to react on the streets. The writer is the author of 'The Mau Mau War in Perspective'
source: http://www.eastandard.net/news/?id=1143980231&cid=15
No comments:
Post a Comment