KIMbia Athletics

Peter Vigneron, in Kenya for the next few months on behalf of the KIMbia Foundation, sent us this dispatch. It’s a thoughtful, well-informed look at some of the historical factors behind the recent troubles in Kenya, and how those historical antecedents are likely to continue to affect attempts at political reunification.

In Kenya, the coalition government survives day to day. Last Friday, Vice President Kalonzo Musoka just nearly fooled Prime Minister Raila Odinga into speaking first at a peace rally, suggesting that Odinga should introduce Musoka and President Mwai Kibaki as his superiors. Constitutionally, Odinga and Kibaki are supposed to be equals. As Vice President, Musoka’s role in government is to assume presidential duties if the real president dies, and then only for 90 days until an emergency election can be held. His status is so clearly and indisputably inferior to Odinga’s that the controversy might be amusing if it had not headlined the nightly news each evening this weekend. As such, it strikes a sadly Orwellian chord to this Western observer.

Meanwhile, 150,000 Kenyans languish in refugee camps–and for some, “languish” is probably the wrong word. Non-refugees have been found sneaking into the camps, people looking for government handouts and lured by rumors of impending land grants to refugees. Stories have circulated of families selling their property and heading to the camps to get in line for those grants. So maybe 149,000 people are languishing in refugee camps, and the rest are laughing all the way to the bank.

It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of land to Kenyans in Rift Valley and Central Provinces. “As agriculturalists,” anthropologist and rebel leader Jomo Kenyatta wrote of his Kikuyu tribesmen in the 1930s, “the Gikuyu people depend entirely on the land. It supplies them with the material needs of life, through which spiritual and mental contentment is achieved…The Gikuyu consider the earth as the ‘mother’ of the tribe[.]” A Kalenjin would almost certainly say the same. Kikuyus and Kalenjins are farmers, as Kenyatta notes, and so depend almost exclusively on what their farms produce. A family without land does not eat, does not live.

This is why, like many famous ethnic conflicts in world history, Kenya’s post-election violence had very little to do with ethnicity. In the 1960s, after Kenyans fought and won their independence from British colonial rule, Kenyatta, now recast as the nation’s first president, awarded large plots of land in Rift Valley Province to his Kikuyu tribesmen, who bore the brunt of British oppression and savagery during the Mau Mau uprising, and who had suffered the greater indignity of losing their property to British settlers throughout the first half of the 20th century. It is unclear if Kenyatta believed he was righting historical wrongs or just bestowing patronage on his Kikuyu supporters, but he couldn’t have been surprised when the Kalenjin community reacted poorly to sharing their ancestral homes with new neighbors. In the 45 years that have followed independence, a low-grade land conflict has simmered in the Rift, and the post-election violence of January and February is the latest chapter.

It might be useful here to consider the use of the word “genocide,” which was bandied about at the height of the violence, especially after dozens of Kikuyus were burned to death while taking shelter in a church. In genocides, the object is generally murder. In Kenya this year, the object was land reclamation, which makes the killing that occurred ghoulishly purposeful, but not genocidal. It is perhaps for this reason that the number dead, usually estimated at around 1,200, is dwarfed by the number of Kikuyus initially pushed from their homes (over 300,000), and the number of those who still find it unsafe to return (150,000).

And in the midst of this conflict, now generations old, we find the current power-sharing debacle between Kibaki, a Kikuyu who brazenly tried to snatch December’s presidential election from his Luo challenger, Odinga. Luos, traditionally fishermen from Kisumu, have no particular affinity for land, and the Luo-Kikuyu violence was strictly borne of hatred for Kibaki and his abuse of the democratic process. Kalenjins have no particular affinity for Odinga, except that he opposed Kibaki and offered to decentralize the government, which many Kalenjins interpreted as their long-awaited opportunity to assume greater control of Rift Valley and drive their neighbors back to the ancestral Kikuyu land at the foothills of Mount Kenya, in Central Province. For the time being, Kibaki and Odinga are sharing executive power, but badly. Neither the hardliners in Kibaki’s camp, like Musoyka and Justice Minister Martha Karua, nor Odinga—a hardliner himself—will likely compromise well enough to run the government, which is already deeply corrupted and inefficient, and so it seems only a matter of time until the whole thing collapses once more.

And still—the refugees. Compounding the government’s ineptitude is a legitimately complicated and serious refugee crisis. For decades the only stable and peaceful nation in East Africa, Kenya has never had its own refugee problem, and Kenyans are rightly clamoring for a return to normalcy. The government is under enormous pressure to move the 150,000 displaced Kenyans out of tents and into permanent homes, but cannot decide where those homes should be. Parliamentarians from Rift Valley argue that most refugees shouldn’t return to the Rift, where the land conflict would be renewed, and yet haven’t offered a way to determine which Kikuyus were driven off land given to them illegally by Kenyatta and which were driven off land they purchased legitimately. Disallowing all Kikuyus from returning to their homes seems like a massive perversion of justice, but allowing them all to come back seems like a recipe for disaster, revisited. Worse, it certainly is not clear whether resettlement away from the Rift will do anything more than alienate a new generation of Kikuyus, who will feel that their land was stolen by the government, as the Kalenjins felt in 1963, and still feel today.

The government appears to have adopted a third solution, however. Over the past two months, construction crews have been feverishly building big police stations in the worst-affected areas, evidently hoping that the imposition of law and order will keep Kalenjin-Kikuyu tensions from re-igniting. It is not a particularly good solution. In some areas, the Kalenjins who died during the clashes were shot by police, not by Kikuyus, and there exists a hard-bitten distrust of the police in several North Rift communities. Worse still, land conflicts have a way of outlasting the original disputants, sometimes for thousands of years. Too often, an escalation in force by one side—and today Kalenjins do not believe the police to be impartial—triggers an escalation in violence.

On the other hand, any government’s first priority ought to be the safety and security of its citizens. Perhaps law and order could be an partial or interim solution to this decades-old conflict. In the long term, though, it is hard to be optimistic for a real peace: Kenya’s land dispute is not particularly different than any of the world’s other famous land disputes—in Palestine, Kashmir, the Balkans. Kenyatta should have known better.