New York Times, Op-Ed Contributor
No Country for Old Hatreds
By BINYAVANGA WAINAINA
Published: January 6, 2008
Nairobi, Kenya
THIS thing called Kenya is a strange animal. In the 1960s, the bright young
nationalists who took over the country when we got independence from the
British believed that their first job was to eradicate “tribalism.” What they
really meant, in a way, was that they wanted to eradicate the nations that made
up Kenya. It was assumed that the process would end with the birth of a
brand-new being: the Kenyan.
Compared with other African nations, Kenya has had significant success with
this experiment. But it has not been without its contradictions, though they
had never really turned lethal until now.
Our Kenyan identity, so deliberately formed in the test tube of nationalist
effort, has over the years been undermined, subtly and not so subtly, by our
leaders — men who appealed to our histories and loyalties to win our votes.
You see, the burning houses and the bloody attacks here do not reflect
primordial hatreds. They reflect the manipulation of identity for political
gain.
So what was different about this election? What brought Kenya’s equilibrium to
an end?
Five years ago, we voted for a broad and nationally representative government.
Inside this vehicle were the country’s major tribes: the Luo, the Luhya, the
Kikuyu, many Kalenjin — all the people now killing one another.
We wanted this arrangement to quickly introduce a new and more inclusive
Constitution, deal firmly with corruption and start a process of defining the
nation in terms that include everybody.
Tragically, President Mwai Kibaki instead steered a course away from the
coalition and cultivated the support of his Kikuyu community. He did a good job
rebuilding the civil service and managing the economy, but he did it within a
framework that was not sustainable.
When it came time to conduct our most recent election, Raila Odinga had built a
movement on the back of President Kibaki’s betrayal of the spirit of 2002. His
political party, the Orange Democratic Movement, was the big ethnic tent
similar to the one that had first brought President Kibaki to office.
On the day we cast our vote, we thought that our optimism and desire for an
inclusive and broad government would prevail. Instead, three days later — after
reports that votes were being “cooked” in Kikuyu strongholds, after skirmishes
in the room where the results were being announced, after the news media were
ejected — Mr. Kibaki was announced the winner and a haphazard swearing-in took
place. And Kenya exploded.
Mr. Odinga and President Kibaki are not really ethnic leaders, but in the days
since the disputed election they have stoked tribal paranoia and used it to
cement electoral loyalty.
Mr. Odinga and his fellow party leaders are now determined to avenge the wrong
they believe they have suffered. Sadly, this leadership now appears to believe
that the violence spreading across the country might be a valuable bargaining
chip.
My further suspicion is that Mr. Odinga wants to sell to Kenyans and the world
a sort of Ukrainian “people’s revolution” — where protesters take to the
streets and change the order of things, and are seen to be throwing happy pink
petals on television, so America can say, ah, the people have spoken.
But rather than matters leading to a popular but peaceful uprising against a
flawed election, we are likelier to suffer an escalation of retaliations and a
descent to that special machete place that nations rarely recover from.
Yet all is not lost. Nations are built on crises like this. If there is such a
thing as Kenya, it should be gathering energy right now. Two leaders can sit
down, form a power-sharing agreement and put together a system to handle
elections and transition. A Constitution that names and recognizes the tribal
nations within our nation, that decentralizes some power and that includes us
all in the process is possible.
For 40 years we have been dancing around each other, a gaseous nation circling
and tightening. The moment is now to make a solid thing called Kenya.
Binyavanga Wainaina, a writer in residence at Union College in Schenectady,
N.Y., is the editor of Kwami?, a literary magazine.
www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/opinion/06wainaina.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
i.e. a call for federalism to take root in Africa -- js.
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