What I don’t know, the Washington Post doesn’t know even more

by zunguzungu

The Washington Post headline yesterday was “Ethnic Fault Lines Emerge in Kenya’s Post-Election Turmoil,” which was about as predictable as getting wet in a rainstorm. Not that the headline is wrong, exactly. No one would deny that “tribalism” has, in an important sense, emerged as even more important in the last few days than it had been previously, and it’s been around for a while. And I’m not in any position to really know what’s really going on down there. But then, neither do they. No one really has a sense yet of what’s happening. Yet even when the situation on the ground is totally unclear, even to the participants, the Western media triumphantly pronounces the ultimate root cause of all this earthshaking to be “tribalism.” And we get profoundly misguided maps like this one.  Well done. That and $1.06 will get you a Canadian dollar.

The trouble is, what really is “tribalism” and why does it “emerge”? This choice of words is not coincidence: like global fault lines, the headline implies, which might be submerged and invisible but are always waiting to create destruction and turmoil (and never go away), Kenya’s tribal divisions are taken as the alpha and omega of Kenyan politics, always there and always a handy explanation for people that don‘t have time for complex history. My guess is that the casual reader will come away from this piece with two main impressions: 1. Africa is a violent and scary place, and 2. The source of this scary violence is tribalism. This perception, I would venture humbly, is wrong, and pernicious to boot.

It is wrong because ethnic and tribal divisions are not just there but are part and parcel of the socio-politico-economic structure of a community, and they “emerge” for very locally specific and explicable reasons. In Tanzania, everybody knows what tribe people belong to, but more in the way that Americans tend to know what ethnic background a person might be from their name. Is your name Kennedy? Well, someone in your family tree was probably Irish. Is your name Kimaro? You’re probably Chagga. But you will look in vain for periodic explosions of tribal unrest in Tanzania even though there are tribes; there has been violence, but it has taken a different shape, and it has a lot to do with Julius Nyerere’s struggle to “swahilize” the country and make people think of themselves as Tanzanian instead of Chagga or whatever. The TANU people had their faults, certainly, and there are other criticisms to be made of them, but the political decisions they made were such as to make “tribalism” the kind of issue it is in the United States (after all, when people were skeptical of John F. Kennedy’s “Catholicism,” they were talking in the same kind of code language (papist=Irish) as people use today when “urban” means “black”) but not the way it is in Kenya.

In Kenya, on the other hand, the first president’s policies were all about tribalism, and the Kikuyu people’s standing in the country is a little bit more like the Tutsi in Rwanda. Now, tread cautiously; I almost deleted that sentence, since I’m afraid that people won’t get what I mean, and a lot of really uninformed comparisons to Rwanda are getting tossed around already. And like my imaginary “casual” reader of the Washington Post article, I am afraid that you, my very real reader of this humble blog, will misunderstand what I mean because what I say will inadvertently (or advertently, you decide) lead you to a particular conclusion not necessarily defensible. What I don’t mean is that genocide is inevitably nigh, because just like tribalism wasn‘t just there in Rwanda, it isn‘t just there in Kenya. Lets start with Rwanda: the Hutu power killers in Rwanda were not mindless tribalists but ruthless politicians who did what they thought they had to do to hang on to power. The genocide came in response to many factors, but a major one was the fact that an army of Tutsi exiles based in Uganda were very successfully invading Rwanda, and all indications were that the largely Hutu government would eventually fall to them. In response to that threat, when the president who had been willing to negotiate died under suspicious circumstances (which are still not clear), the hardliners (the “Hutu power”) within the government took over and put in motion a highly organized campaign to purge the country of Tutsi who they feared would collaborate with the Tutsi invading force. But while they targeted Tutsi at large, they also targeted political activists and anyone else they saw as likely to be a threat to them, and this is my point: tribalism didn’t create the political situation, the political situation created the tribalism. And the story goes way back. If the Belgians hadn’t needed a class of Rwandans to collaborate with them in the colonial state, and hadn’t created ethnic pass cards to identify exactly who was and who wasn’t Tutsi and Hutu, the Hutu government that took over wouldn’t have been able to use the Tutsis as a scapegoat for the various failings of the postcolonial state (instead of eliminating the ethnic pass cards, they enlarged the tribalist system of governance). And if they hadn’t made the Tutsi population into a scapegoat as a way of unifying the Hutu majority behind them, the Tutsi exiles in Uganda might not have become as militant as they were, and if those Tutsi invaders hadn’t made liberating the country from Hutu power their stated reason for invading, the Hutu power might not have been so quick to see political dissidence as a product of ethnicity, and they might not have chose to use genocidal tribal warfare as a means of hanging onto power. But they did, and an absolutely staggering number of people were killed by a carefully organized and planned program of ethnic purges. It was not at all a reversion to “atavistic” or “primitively tribal” ethnic hatred or any other of the intellectually lazy stereotypes Western newspapers used to mask their lack of interest or knowledge, it was a project of violence by which an endangered government bolstered its power, by forcing Hutu citizens to prove their loyalty (and their Hutu credentials) by killing whoever the Hutu power government told them to kill, and killing them if they didn‘t.

In short, my point is that the genocide in Rwanda didn’t have to happen, but it happened because, at every stage, various actors chose to use ethnicity as their mode of conducting politics, the way anti-immigration fervor in the United States gets heightened every time a Republican (or Democrat, to be fair) wants to make a name for himself as a real American by frightening my grandmother into believing the Puerto Ricans are coming to Philadelphia to commit crimes. At each stage of this process, “tribalism” means something slightly different, in the same way that “Irish” has meant some very different things at different stages of American history, a process having everything to do with politics but not, ultimately, the cause of those politics. Other examples that spring to mind are the way Saddam Hussein used the Sunni-Shia division to create a class of loyalists that he could rely on to keep the rest of the country in check, the way that de-Bathification and de-Saddamification tended to dispossess and impoverish those very people, and incline them towards “ethnic” violence. It didn’t have to happen; it happened for a variety of very contingent reasons.

Or the way that people in Western Sudan now identify as “Arab” or “African,” when all of them are Africans and all of them are Muslims and none of them have spent any time on the Arabian peninsula. It makes sense now (in a way that it didn’t two decades ago) because of how the anti-Khartoum rebels in the Darfur region were targeted in ethnic terms, how the Khartoum government gave the “Arab” janjaweed carte blanche to attack and despoil the “Africa” people who were the source of the rebellion’s strength. But once you’ve made ethnicity into a battle line, and stamped it with blood, you can’t talk it away. Everyone in the region understands that, and particularly since the West wants to help “Africans” against “Arabs” and the Khartoum government wants to help “Arabs” against “Africans,” people on the ground figure out very quickly which category they can and desire to belong to and then, hey presto, those categories are real. It’s a very rational calculus, and the fact that people who were neither “Arab” nor “African” a few decades ago identify as such now isn’t an indication that those people are delusional or misguided, but that political battle lines have been drawn in those terms. The Janjaweed were largely pastoral people whose animals no longer have sufficient land to graze in (for a variety of complex reasons), so an alliance with Khartoum makes sense. The farmers who have been preyed on by the janjaweed had very good reasons to side with the rebels who initially had so much success in opposing the Khartoum government: the Darfur region has been neglected by the state for a very long time and economic conditions have gotten quite bad. Now they have very good reasons for appealing to the West as “Africans” being attacked by “Arabs”: the West dislikes “Arabs” and likes to help “Africans.” And the Khartoum government, by the way, benefits from being seen as intransigent in the face of demands by Western imperialists like the US who want to meddle in the business of everybody: by allying themselves with Arabs and Muslims (instead of “Africans“), they draw attention away from the fact that they are just another despotic regime struggling to maintain control by any means necessary (this is one explanation of the whole teddy bear named Mohamed fiasco).

To go back to Kenya, I hope the dire comparison examples I’ve chosen give an indication of how scary the situation might get, and why. Tribal divisions aren’t just there; they get produced by political violence, and the kind of violence that’s going on right now across Kenya is going to mark that country’s politics for years to come. The violence didn’t start because of ethnicity, it started because the ruling class transparently obstructed the democratic process and, from the perspective of the people living in a slum like Kibera, prevented the election of a populist politician that they hoped would allow them to enjoy the “matunda ya uhuru“ that a small group of Kenyans have disproportionately monopolized. It seems pretty clear that Kibaki and his cronies were not merely criminal in rigging the election, but were stunningly obvious and clumsy about it, and that makes a lot of people angry. This is not to say that Odinga would have won in a fair election (since it is seldom that only one side cheats), but what one can say for sure is that the electoral process wasn’t just given a black eye, but looks to have been decapitated. The government is deeply corrupt, but who’s going to believe that it’s possible to pursue political change via elections now? Who’s going to believe that its possible for progress to come by peaceful methods after even the United States has tried to legitimze a transparently illegitimate process? Who can be surprised that people who watched their votes get trampled on have concluded that peaceful politics are not working and have turned to violence? People who are starving don’t have much to lose by attacking people who do, so who can be surprised that slum dwellers have taken to burning down shops and stores? I’m not trying to justify or condemn the violence of course; it’s impossible for someone in my position to even know what‘s really going on out there. But there are better explanations for why some Kenyans are attacking other Kenyans than by trotting out tired and racist analagies with plate tectonics. Using geology to explain Africa tells us everything about the journalists in Washington and nothing about Kenya.

In any case, my fear and the fear of a lot of people is that when the ruling class is seen to be Kikuyu, the rage that impoverished and disenfranchised slum dwellers feel towards the wealthy and franchised members of the community will take a tribalist form and that if shop owners and businesspeople see themselves as threatened by ethnic-based violence, they will retreat back into ethnic enclaves, and the walls marked “tribalism” will get higher and higher. Tribalism has always been a part of Kenyan politics, but the dictator that succeeded the first president (Moi) was not Kikuyu, he just cozied up to the largely Kikuyu power brokers that have been running the country since independence. And the Kibaki people are not merely Kikuyus, though Kibaki is; ethnicity is just a part of the complicated alliances and web of negotiated power sharing arrangements that define how politics work. But when street politics take a “tribalist” turn, things can get very, very ugly, very fast, and it‘s a one way street.

To make another analogy, violence was worst in Iraq when Sunni and Shia lived side by side, and now that those neighborhoods have become solidly identified as Sunni or Shia (or, to put it another way, “ethnically cleansed“), statistics on ethnic violence might seem to indicate that things are getting better (this is why the Bush people don‘t get laughed at when they say that the surge is working). But a political solution only gets more and more remote as the lines between ethnic communities become more firmly drawn, as the walls get higher, and the trail of blood gets longer. And all indications are that something like this is happening right now in Kenya, where Luo and Kikuyu have always lived more side by side than one would think from the newspapers, but are unlikely to do so safely in the future. The newspapers say at least a hundred people have been killed, but that’s basically the number of bodies that have actually been counted; since it is safe to say that no fewer than that number of people have died, the number of actual dead is probably much, much higher: not only have shoot to kill orders by the police been reported, but the open displays of police brutality on CNN, when put next to Kibaki’s decision to make celebrating the new year his first order of business, suggest that authorization goes to the top. And the violence is terrifyingly widespread, not just in the slums of Nairobi as one might expect it to be, but in cities that have no such history of violence.

The point is that its hard not to think that an awful lot of irrevocable things have happened in the last few days (and this, really, is just my speculation and my fear). It probably means something different to be Kikuyu today than it did a week ago, and something different to be Luo. In exactly the way that tectonic faultlines do not shift, faultlines between ethnicities have changed and deepened and if “buried” tribal tensions have emerged, then a lot of dirt that had been laboriously poured into the huge ditches separating different ethnic groups has been excavated. Kibaki came to power promising to restore democracy, promising to be a one-term president, and promising to unite the country, and his decision to hold on to power by any means necessary hasn’t just made democratic reform seem hopeless, but its brought back the bad old days of the first Kenyatta administration. It seemed pretty unlikely that Moi would give up power in 2002, but he did, and a lot of doors that seemed then to have been opened sure look now like they’ve slammed shut.

It should also tell us something that the USA State department was so quick to support Kibaki, when they seemed in 2002 to be supporting the process of establishing real democracy. Maybe they just wanted a different despot in power, someone who could with continue business as usual, but do it with the fig leaf of elected legitimacy. That fig leaf is gone, and Kibaki’s junk is now in full view, so while there are some indications that the US state department has backed away from its early stance, its not clear that this means anything but an attempt to back away from the nakedness of Kibaki‘s power play. And its not clear that it matters, anyway; as with the pathetically bungled attempt to install Bhutto in Pakistan, the days when the West could dictate who occupied state houses in Africa is pretty much gone, and what matters now is what Kenyans do. And I sure as hell don’t know what that’s likely to be. But I hope I don’t flatter myself in asserting my ignorance to be slightly less pernicious than whoever wrote that headline.

Addendum:  I’m usually no huge fan of the beeb, but this article had its head largely screwed on straight, I’m shocked to be able to say.