Lords of Poverty have fanned hatred in Kenya over the years

from The Nation

It all started before independence when the British stole the land from Africans. Then the Africans who stepped into their shoes did nothing about it, reports Special Correspondent KALUNDI SERUMAGA

Somewhere deep inside a rural forest, young men are preparing for war. In another city slum, a man has just beheaded another who was on his way to work as a loader in the city’s Industrial Area.

In Naivasha, vandals are ripping off the windows and doors left behind by fleeing families. And now, Subukia MP Danson Gachie has combined forces with his Naivasha counterpart John Mututho to appeal to the Government for help: The Anti Stock Theft Unit must act, as cattle theft is simply spiralling out of control.

One thread runs through all these events: Poverty.

Slow genocide

Poverty is the worst form of violence. At its worst, it is slow genocide. For example, the vast majority of Americans still die, not from settler bullets, but from poor diet, disease, poor-on-poor crime, stress-related illnesses caused by predatory lending... The list is long. They still die. In short, they are killed by the condition of being poor.

Girls are worst affected, as poverty exposes them to all sorts of deprivations that lead to temptations and inducements. They fall prey, not because they are weak, but because they are angry, and have nowhere else to vent that anger.

An adult raised in poverty often suffers from a certain sense of shame and anger that they can never quite shake off. Years of “no” and “not enough” force them to ingest a bitter diet of silent rage, frustrations, thwarted dreams, hurtful choices and humiliation as their parents age prematurely before their eyes, and their siblings learn to mask all feelings of disappointment.

It is violence at the deepest psychological, spiritual and emotional levels, long before it becomes physical. I know. I’ve been there. In Kenya.

If Kibera is indeed the world’s biggest slum — I don’t know who measures these things, or how — then it is currently also the biggest single act of violence against African people, carried out over the longest period of time.

The recent magic tricks at the Electoral Commission of Kenya — how to breed votes and then count them in the dark, how to speak out of both sides of your mouth, and other marvels — and the subsequent orgy of blood-letting, have given rise to expressions of grief, shock and anger from the Kenyan intelligentsia, in a way that leaves me truly mystified.

Have they not been paying attention? If money and land meant for the poor can be stolen from them, then why not votes? If it became a four-decade normality for children to grow up eating rotting food from garbage dumps, why on earth should they not share more direct forms of violence with each other?

Having grown up witnessing Kenya’s normalising of the grotesquely abnormal, my only surprise was that these acts — from the rigging itself to the rape, pillage and murder — took so long to reach this particular nadir. Kenya was, and is, an atrocity a long time made, and a catastrophe a long time coming.

“There are no stories in the riots, only the ghosts of stories,” some wise black British woman said of Brixton and Handsworth, a long time ago.

I should declare an interest. Though I spent some critical formative years living both near the top and the bottom of Kenyan society, I’m not a Kenyan. I was a refugee from another atrocity called Uganda, and part of a very politically engaged community that was actively fomenting armed rebellion back home.

Since our flight was political, we came to Kenya with a heightened interest in politics generally and were fascinated by what the Kenyatta and Moi regimes were achieving through “sowing acres of cynicism” (to quote Okot p’Bitek, another Ugandan refugee). They did what Amin and Obote could only attempt through killing fields.

Mwai Kibaki was a particularly interesting study for us. As a graduate of Makerere University, we would wonder whether he participated in politics with Ugandan or Kenyan sensibilities. For me, he answered the question most eloquently, on a tour of (I think) Kamiti Prison way back in the 70s as a Seriously Big Government Man. There had been media talk of increasingly horrific conditions in the prisons, and his visit was supposed to be a fact-finding tour.

At one point, as Big-Man-And-Entourage walked through the prison complex, a prisoner displayed incredible dignity and courage by stepping out in front of him, and trying to hand him a letter sealed in an envelope.

The prison official next to Kibaki intercepted the convict’s outstretched hand, took the envelope and pocketed it. According to the news report, Kibaki paused, watched the entire incident, and then carried on with his “fact-finding”.

Forget about the botched attempts to write a new constitution, forget about the failure to follow up on the Canary Pattni Goldenberg song, forget even about the indignity of a swearing-in at twilight. (Quick question: was that really a Bible he was holding up? It looked suspiciously like a pricey desk diary to me. You never know, given the indecent haste.)

Back to the 70s. As children watching their elders pay a much higher price to be in politics, we felt the prison incident was a most pathetic display of craven indifference.

In truth, looking back, it was at that moment that Kibaki, for me disqualified himself from leadership. It’s just that nobody realised it, or thought about it hard enough. Now look where we have ended up.

Sample this. Jeffrey had two thumbs on his left hand, but in the end, that was not the most interesting thing about him for me. He drove a little pick-up truck for one of the large tea estates in the Limuru area where I went to school, and would often give us a ride back to our hillside campus after we had been running in the countryside.

He lived in the tea plantation, but not in a house. His home was a large garage next door to a tractor. He lived there with his wife, kids and possibly his mother. During the day they would just slide the huge door open and leave it that way like some large gaping wound.

As we walked or jogged past, you could see them all gathered inside, going about their domestic business as if on a cinema screen.

One day, Jeffrey drove us much higher up the hill, where one had a clear view of much of the valley below. He was really talking to my classmate Karim Walji, but I remain grateful to him for the education he gave us.

Using large, lonely trees, hillocks and dips in the valley as landmarks, the three-thumbed man, living in a mzungu’s garage on his own ancestors’ land, listed for us the families and clans that once owned the endless carpet of green.

“Where did the people all go?” Karim asked him. I don’t think he bothered to answer, just wore a waning smile.

As somebody who had been smuggled across a border on the back of a pedal-bicycle to a new and more “stable” country, I felt strangely disturbed.

But I understood that smile, and the inability to say more — our parents seemed stuck in that mode — but I was scared at how normal this dispossession had become. At least we were fighting those who had evicted us, not living in their garages. But now we were living in Kenya, where the abnormal was normalised.

“Don’t go to town today. They are rounding up Ugandans.” This was regularly heard advice in the Ugandan exile community, as Kenyans pointed us out to their police.

A night or two cleaning their police cells or a well-deployed bribe was what was needed to keep you from joining a refugee camp population.

On reflection, it made sense for people oppressed by their own police force to be more than happy to point out other more appropriate victims to the same police.

Refugees have no permanence, no power to come back later and retaliate. They are perfect victims, and probably helped deflect police attention from the native poor. Now, the displaced and poor find themselves the new targets, but without the help of the police. If you kill a cop, ten will come back; if you kill a child of the rich, your fellow poor will be offered reward money to find you. If you kill a fellow poor “non-you”, you have found the perfect victim.

How else are the poor who are schooled in 40 years of systemic violence expected to communicate except through violence? On whom are they to vent their rage except another guaranteed to have no power to retaliate with greater force?

Those who escaped the poverty also took the internalised violence with them. Having perfected the skills of managerial service provision, the Kenyan middle classes have moved to dominate managerial positions in media, finance, NGO ... virtually all sectors throughout the region, where they have acquired the reputation of being the most cut-throat, ruthless, backstabbing, neurotic and yet efficient “boardroom-wallahs”.

The crisis that is Kenya today comes largely as a result of the Kenyan intelligentsia’s abject failure to come up with viable alternatives to this mess. Those in power never had answers, and are not interested in looking for them.

Like Uganda, the creation of Kenya was an act of theft and murder. Anyone managing it is simply perpetuating those crimes. Those in opposition had a responsibility to come up with something better. But did they? With my two teenage brothers, I wandered the Nairobi streets amid the August 1982 mayhem, walking from Eastleigh through Majengo then downtown, up to Hurlingham and back, as Kenya Air force mutineers used their Land Rovers to wrench the metal grilles from shop fronts and then say “chukuwa” to the waiting looters.

There was a lot of shouting of “power”, but no answers about poverty, certainly not for the half-naked man lying in the street at their feet, body ashen grey from the blood loss occasioned by the open wound in his head. He was nobody’s concern. He reminded me exactly of another half-naked dying man I had seen years before as a child in Kampala. He had been attacked by a mob. Or shot. Nobody was bothered. People just walked past. He was also lying in the gutter, also bleeding from the head, also barley twitching as he drew his very last breaths. Their ashen greys were a perfect match.

A couple of years later — against well meant advice — we saw the would-be Mwakenya rebels hitch their doomed wagons on the notoriously unreliable star that is the National Resistance Movement, leading to many bitterly spat words of anger and disappointment.

Following coup plotter Hezekiah Ochuka’s forced return from Mwalimu Nyerere’s Tanzania that ended in “the rough hand of the noose around his neck”, one would have expected the “revolutionaries” to have learned a few lessons about African presidencies.

Instead, wishful thinking and infantile prescriptions prevailed, while prisoners wrote unopened letters, and tribesmen were hoodwinked by an Emperor that it was their son’s turn, yet they gathered far away from the rivers of their ancestors.

Still, grownups danced in the footsteps. And this is where the recent deaths were foretold.

There is a lot more that needs to be heard about why the “revolutionary” Yoweri Museveni chose to congratulate Kibaki at the expense of the “socialist” Raila Odinga, and why Raila seems completely unsurprised by this turn of events. In those 1980s, a good friend of mine (Ugandan, resting anti-Obote guerilla) found this whole tragedy perfectly summed up in advance, while on a necessary visit to a Nairobi public toilet. There was clearly no toilet paper, he narrated, so somebody before him had used their finger to clean their behind, and then wiped it on the toilet wall.

On closer inspection — my friend is insatiably curious, no matter the circumstances— he realised that this person had used excreta to write “Uhuru”.

The idea, I think, not the person.