The truth about the beliefs and perceptions of the majority of Kenyans is not to be found in erudite forums and debates such as this one. To really understand the Kenyan mind, one needs to visit the marketplaces and the pubs in ethnically homogenous regions of this beautiful country. A recurring theme in many marketplace and bar-room debates is the need for ‘foreigners’ who have settled in other people’s ‘territory’ to learn to respect the ‘indigenous’ people. In this view, the ‘foreigners’ must not compete for political power with the ‘locals’, and whenever a national issue requires a vote, they must vote with the ‘host’ community or face dire consequences. Below, I suggest a radical measure to deal comprehensively and transparently with the hidden and overt prejudices that fan periodic eruptions of ‘political violence’ in Kenya.

Views expressing a preference for ethnic homogeneity may be forgiven if expressed only by ignorant village folk. Unfortunately these views are held by individuals who are expected to be opinion leaders in their communities, and actively reinforced by the most educated and urbanized Kenyans. It must also be noted that this is view prevails not just in the Rift Valley, but across the entire country. Sayings such as ‘blood is thicker than water’ have taken on new meanings, often suggesting exclusion of ethnic others and the promotion of narrow supposedly ethnic interests that often benefit only a few (mostly) political elite. This reality raises fundamental questions about the honesty behind public protestations of patriotism and Kenyanness, particularly when many proponents of these divisive perspectives are received as heroes in their communities.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this thinking seems to suggest that what needs to be done to rid this country of the periodic orgies of bloodshed associated with electioneering and politics would necessarily include radical legislative measures.

If Kenyans prefer ethnic homogeneity, then a law should be urgently enacted in parliament barring anyone whose ethnic origin cannot be traced to a particular area from vying for a post in that location. Everybody should be compelled to contest electoral posts only in the areas from which they can trace their ancestry. Thus, all elected leaders in Central Province will only be Kikuyu, in Western, Luhya, in North Eastern, Somali, and so on. As to what to do with relatively de-ethicized urban centers like Nairobi, this question would be left to the proponents of this ethnocentric thinking to resolve as they partition the country into ‘comfortable’ ethnically homogenous zones. Such a law would protect innocent voters from the ambitions of foolish Kenyans who still hold that democracy means that one can contest a post anywhere, every vote counts, and that the winner is decided by the vote. As this is indeed the current practice in most of this country, such legislation would only be formalizing what many Kenyans think is the best approach.

Indeed, the law should go further and enact a form of governance that does not require people to vote directly for the national leadership, because this is another area of contention. When the so-called foreigners vote for a candidate of their choice who happens not to be the favorite of their ‘hosts’, it often results in animosity and chaos. Therefore, legislation that ensures that a president or prime minister is elected or selected far away from the voter would safe-guard the poor citizens who go into polling booths thinking that their vote is truly free of coercion and strikes a blow for democracy.

These suggestions are not just the idle musings of a disturbed mind. They are informed by opinions and activities that have taken root on the ground. The country has already been secretly zoned into tribal enclaves, and the enclaves have identified their champions and leaders who are busy fighting for their ‘rights’. Indeed, at every constitutional review attempt over the last fifteen years, intelligent debate on devolution has been contaminated by a pedestrian definition of majimbo whose very thrust has been ‘our region for our people’, and assertions that ‘outsiders’ must go back to their ‘home’ areas.

Pretending that a different course is possible would be a waste of valuable national time that could be spent more productively pursuing real development and change in the lives of individual citizens. A solution such as that proposed above would go a long way in eliminating the use of elections and politics as an excuse for murders and rapes that has been deployed since the advent of multi-partyism.

Legalization of our secret prejudices would thus expose the criminals among us who take advantage of politics and elections to commit heinous crimes that are then labeled ‘political violence’ and left unpunished. In one fell swoop, we would have addressed the twin issues of violence and impunity, and hopefully Kenyans would become more honest in their speech and intentions.

Finally, this move would expose the true nature of the Kenyan Republic, and invite those like myself who disagree with this sort of arrangement to actively seek another place to call home.
Attempting to deal with this ogre of ethno-political balkanization in conventional ways of exhorting patriotism and nationalism will only end in more loss of life and property, since the citizens would remain deluded that they can practice their freedoms of association and assembly anywhere in this land.

*Dr Lukoye Atwoli is a Consultant Psychiatrist and Lecturer at Moi University School of Medicine www.lukoyeatwoli.com

Writing more than twenty years ago about Idi Amin’s Uganda, Ali Mazrui observed that

Everyone was talking about the tyrant. I suggested that more people had died in the second half of the Amin years as a result of anarchy than as a result of tyranny. Many of the killings were not orchestrated orders from the top. Soldiers perpetrated them in night clubs, at road-blocks, in the villages. Yet the cases due to anarchy were not conspicuous political significance. They were cases of a basic moral collapse among those who wielded weapons.

While the labels of ‘anarchy’ and ‘tyranny’ do not apply to the Kenyan case, Mazrui’s underlying argument does. Much of the attention of the media, civil society and donors has focused on the behaviour of elites in the run-up to, and the aftermath of, the 2007 elections. Too little time has been spent examining why it was hundreds of ‘ordinary’ Kenyans, be they police, members of militias or simply members of the public, perpetrated acts of violence against other Kenyans.

Until sustained fieldwork or investigations are undertaken during which the motivations and actions of perpetrators of the violence of 2007-8 are discussed with the perpetrators themselves, then any inferred motives remain mere speculation. However, recent research into participation in civil wars suggests that any attempt to impose upon a wide and diverse body of individuals singular explanations for their actions is myopic. Participants in political violence, such studies suggest, act for very many more reasons than simply their membership in particular social groups. Indeed, there can be as many combinations of causes of violence as the number of individual perpetrators. Identifying just one cause of the violence, be it corruption, ethnicity, inequality, demography or political ideology, is unlikely to capture the complexity or reality of the nature of the violence witnessed after the 2007 elections.

Any debate about political violence and its prevention in future must go beyond a simple discussion of formal politics and state institutions. The emphasis given to the prevalence of violence within the realm of high politics misses a broader point about the prevalence of violence within society more generally. To return to Mazrui’s arguments about Uganda, he said that in the aftermath of Idi Amin’s downfall, ‘we were not, as yet, thinking at all about how to deal with the society’s moral collapse. We kept on thinking about how to deal with bad governments. At some stage one has to begin to worry about alternative ideas for the self-discipline of the country.’ While again Mazrui’s exact terminology may not sit comfortably in this case, his argument should provide cause for thought on the part of any individual interested in contemporary Kenya.

Put simply, Kenyans have become accustomed to endemic social and political violence. In the weeks and months prior to the 2007 elections, significant violence occurred on Mount Elgon and in Molo. Similarly, the state and Mungiki became embroiled in a bitter conflict in Nairobi and its periphery. Yet such incidents were generally treated as localised phenomena and caused little of the more general introspection and alarm that greeted the violence that was to come. In this way, the public reaction to the pre-election violence of 2007 resembled that to the long-running insecurity in the borderlands to the north and west. Incidents of violence there are given barely a second thought by most residents of the more densely populated areas of the country’s highlands. They do, however, worry a good deal, and have reason to, about the high rate of violent crime. In 2004, Kenyans respondents to the Afrobarometer were more fearful of crime than any of their counterparts from 14 other countries. Kenyans (with Zambians) were the most likely to have experienced property theft. Moreover, after Nigerians, Kenyans were the most likely to have experienced physical violence. That violence is often suffered in the home and frequently in the form of sexual violence. According to Kenyan government statistics published in 2003, half of all Kenyan women were thought to have been victims of sexual violence during their adult lives. And violence is clearly visible in other social settings, such as schools, which experienced their most recent bout of recurrent rioting a year ago, and universities.

Generally considered to be distinct from one another, these different forms of violence need to be considered collectively alongside political violence if Kenyans are to enjoy a more peaceful future. Derived from a range of historical causes, which certainly include colonialism, violence has become a well-established means by which power and authority in Kenya is contested in a variety of settings. That it should have been used to dispute or assert the claims to presidential office is not then surprising. Efforts to prevent future recurrences of political violence must then also address the wider prevalence of violence within society at large.

Despite the tone of this piece so far, returning attention to the grassroots provides reasons for optimism as well as alarm. Policy-makers and representatives of civil society should speak to the thousands of Kenyans who chose to not participate in the violence of 2007-8. It is easy to lose sight of such individuals in the rush to establish what happened in those tumultuous weeks. Yet it should not be forgotten that unknown numbers of Kenyans chose not to take up arms against their neighbours and offered assistance of all kinds to those in peril. By a whole range of actions, from donations to the Red Cross through to providing shelter to those made homeless, ordinary Kenyans acted in a fashion that should shame their political leaders into constructive measures to avoid a repeat of the bloodshed in 2012.

*Dr. Daniel Branch is an assistant professor in history at the University of Warwick. He is the author of the forthcoming Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization, which will be published by Cambridge University Press later this year. He is currently writing a political history of post-colonial Kenya, to be published by Yale University Press in 2011.

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The handover of the names of the suspects behind Kenya’s post-election violence to the International Criminal Court (ICC) opens an uncertain chapter in the country’s history of political violence. This development has generated a vibrant debate among Kenyans: What should accountable politics look like? What is the role of transitional justice in getting us there? Under what conditions might the current turn of events contribute to the country’s long term stability?

This forum offers a space where concerned Kenyans can come together with a range of experts, scholars, practitioners, and commentators to discuss fundamental questions about how Kenya got here, and the strategies necessary to move the country forward. This essay provides an overview of recent debates on violence and accountability in Kenya and summarizes the first set of contributions to this forum.

Any policy aimed at addressing Kenya’s current crisis necessarily assumes the existence of a clear understanding of what caused the violence in the first place. While some scholars explain the recent cycle of violence as a manifestation of the negative side of electoral democracy, where elites fight over control of the state in a context of zero-sum politics, others emphasize the trend of informalizing violence, where elites set up, control, or manipulate an alternative security infrastructure (which, among other things, can be deployed to coerce opponents). Others still find these explanations incomplete, and instead cite structures of inequality, with a particular focus on grievances over access to land and resources. Many of these explanations privilege the agency of the political class in manipulating ethnic cleavages.

Daniel Branch’s essay in this series disagrees with many of these accounts’ focus on elites, as they insufficiently interrogate the agency of ordinary Kenyans in the violence. Normalization of violence, Branch argues, is evidence of a society’s shifting moral landscape: Kenyans increasingly accept violence in a range of arenas as a means of exerting authority. Elite manipulation of that violence to reduce electoral uncertainty forms only one expression of a wider social phenomenon. Branch’s conclusion points to a question that continues to be debated in response to violence by state agents: is there moral and immoral violence? Or is it the case that (as with the dichotomy of political and apolitical violence that Branch finds unhelpful) in time the distinctions dissipate?

Daniel Waweru’s essay also discounts many of the common accounts for the post-election violence, and offers in their place an explanation based on the permeation of the majimboist ideology outside of the political class and into the community. This view carries implications for what is politically feasible in the current considerations of accountability and constitutional reform: Waweru argues that while President Moi informalized violence during his reign as a strategy of strengthening the ethnocentric majimboist fringe, his exit from power terminated state sponsorship for the majimboist project, leading Kalenjin opinion leaders to be more radicalized, and their project of ethnic cleansing more ideological and popularized. Consequently, the very majimboist elites who must come into the political fold for there to be effective constitutional reform in Kenya are the same ones who would be marginalized in processes of accountability. In what appears to be a variation of the ‘peace v justice’ debate that has characterized Sudan, Uganda and elsewhere, Waweru argues that Kenya can have either reform or accountability, but not both.

Nonetheless, Gabriel Lynch’s essay argues that both accountability and reform are essential for Kenya, although she sees little evidence that the state will act differently from previous episodes of violence. Highlighting that reforms to date have been largely superficial and procedural with little focus on how complex issues coalesce, she offers three concerns on which the state must focus: the presidency and its zero-sum politics, impunity and the informalization of violence, and the politics of ethnicity. Further, she points out that the manner in which Kenyan (and African) politics are framed and understood – as ‘good’ citizen v ‘bad’ politician, for instance – misses the different meanings of history, incentives and reciprocity in political processes.

Despite Lynch’s scepticism, the handover the Waki envelope to the ICC has generated a vibrant (and hopeful) discussion on the importance of historical clarification and transitional justice in general, and of prosecutions in particular. However, the Kenyan media is dominated by confusing descriptions of which mechanism is legally feasible or politically desirable. What happens when many Kenyans appear to prefer the ICC and have no trust in a national process; international NGOs prefer a domestic process because, they argue, Kenya has the institutional capacity that can deliver justice with some modifications (although an equally persuasive explanation for this preference from international NGOs may be the general reluctance among many ICC supporters to see the Court in yet another African case); prominent ODM parliamentarians declare their intention to actively sabotage efforts for domestic prosecutions; and cabinet members from both parties argue that the only way is a domestic tribunal because to do otherwise would imply that Kenya is a failed state? Which of these interests should matter more? Who decides? Is it possible for this discussion to emphasize objectives of accountability, leaving processes as secondary considerations?

In all the confusion, another important discussion is glossed over, as Tim Murithi emphasises in this forum: he makes intelligible the reasons why Kofi Annan handed over the envelope to the ICC prosecutor. While the three ministers who went to Geneva have oscillated between shock at an Annan ‘betrayal’ and (reluctant) praise of Annan’s ‘patience’, it remains unclear why Annan acted as he did. Murithi argues that Annan passed the envelope to the ICC because the coalition seemed oblivious to the fact that their disinclination for accountability placed Kenya in a high risk category in the framework of the Office of the Special Advisor of the UN Secretary General for the Prevention of Genocide. In their vacillation between doing nothing, paying lip service to prosecutions or expressing preference for a Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, political leaders exhibited a lack of political vision for meeting the justice needs of victims, thus forcing Annan’s hand.

In thinking about lessons that we can draw from the past violence, the essay by Wanjiru Kamau-Ruternberg analyses how the performance of gendered violence in the form of forcible male circumcision plays into ethnic politics. She argues that circumcision offered a framework for Mungiki violence against Luo men because it was embedded in a narrative of feminizing ethnicities; a narrative was alive in the discourses of Kenyatta, found confidence in the period of the draft constitution referendum, and was ironically embraced by Raila Odinga himself. In this atmosphere, where the feminized could be violated, it was only a matter of time before the gendered ‘ecology of violence’ expanded to include feminized Luo men.

Sisule Musungu’s contribution focuses on the way forward. His summary of a 2000 report on possible future Kenyan scenarios emphasizes the need to avoid the maintenance of the status quo – what the project terms the ‘el nino’ scenario – as the outcome of such a scenario can only be fractured decline. He argues that, much like the late years of the Moi era, Kenya has reached another crossroads, and it might be time to dust off and reconsider the discussions that inspired change a decade ago.

Even so, the possible political outcomes from the current crossroads are not obvious. Might Kenya be the case where the heretofore weak ICC ‘deterrent’ argument gains relevance? For instance, to what extent are shifts in Kenyan political and ethnic alliances a response to a credible threat of prosecutions? Does the potential involvement of the ICC (and the subsequent excitement about prosecutions) have the capacity to de-ethnicize and de-collectivize the post-elections violence, to recast blame from communities to individuals in the political class? Or would prosecutions be inadequate for the multifaceted forms of violence experienced in Kenya? Beyond the ICC, how adequate or appropriate are the proposed transitional justice measures for the Kenyan context? What are the competing interests in Kenya’s project of political reform and accountability, and whose interests are likely to triumph?

These and other questions will be tackled in future essays in this forum. We welcome your reflections and contributions.

*Lydiah Kemunto Bosire is reading for her doctorate in politics at the University of Oxford, with a research focus on transitional justice in Kenya and Uganda. She is also the co-founder of Oxford Transitional Jusitice Research (OTJR). Previously, she worked at the International Center for Transitional Justice, the WHO and the UN.

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