It Couldn't Happen Here

Kenya is a fabulous country. Whilst I can’t claim to know a huge amount about it on the basis of a 2 week holiday and some friendships with Kenyans dating back to university, I can sing its praises. It seemed to be filled to the brim with confident, humble, entirely gorgeous people (seriously, I have never met a Kenyan who was not physically gorgeous. Even the men. Which, what with homosexuality being illegal in Kenya, could lead to a lot of sexual frustration for those people who are good with colours).

So when the whole country seemed to turn to shit a few weeks ago, I was more than a little surprised. After all, this is a nation with a mix of Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Pagan believers. In other countries (Sudan for example, or Somalia which borders Kenya) this has been a sure-fire recipe for bigotry, intolerance, and civil war. In a moment of drunken candour, I asked a Kenyan gentleman named Bough to explain just why Kenya boasted such stability when other African countries were degenerating into civil wars fought by followers of Religions that battle in the name of peace and brotherhood. Bough told me that any disagreements were regarded as either personal or family affairs. Religion didn’t enter into it, and was universally regarded as a private matter. For someone brought up in a family who loudly proclaimed Africa to be a continent full of savages, this was a pleasing confirmation that everything I had been told by my parents was horseshit.

And even now, as we’re told that Kenya has turned into a land where children are thrown back into a fire to die because they are of the wrong ethnic group, religion doesn’t seem to be the divisive force behind such horrors. Rather, we are told, the divisions run along tribal lines. Though it’s not yet been said directly by the media, the implication of “Bloody Africans; always ethnically cleansing each other for belonging to the wrong tribe” has been fairly strong; Rwanda and Sudan keep getting mentioned in the same breath and we’re invited to draw our own conclusions.

For those of you who haven’t been following this story, Kenya had an election in December of last year. The incumbent, President Mwai Kibaki, seemed to be heading for defeat at the hands of Raila Odinga. I’m not totally sure, but I think this would have represented the first time an incumbent president lost a contested election. It seems Kibaki was uncomfortably aware of this too, and at the last minute there was a sudden and not-at-all suspicious surge in the number of votes for Kibaki. Pressure was also put on the Kenyan electoral commission to declare Kibaki the winner, even though the result was still uncertain. Unsurprisingly, Odinga was less than pleased with this and accused Kibaki of rigging the election. It seems that Kibaki regards the presidency as his right, and Odinga has responded with populism and demagoguery. Chaos and death then ensued, although a semblance of normality now seems to be resuming.

Now maybe this is just my left-wing sensibilities talking here, but I get the overwhelming sense from most reports that we should be viewing this through colonial eyes; in other words, what can one expect from a country that haven’t yet learned how to do democracy properly. It’s not that long ago that Kenya was run by a hugely unpleasant dictator, Daniel Arap-Moi. So who is surprised that a tin-pot nation has a tin-pot election which has led to political stalemate and (rather more importantly) rioting and death?

Yet it’s not so long ago that we saw another disputed election where supporters of the gentleman who lost waged a bitter battle to reclaim what they said was a stolen and unfair vote. It was an election that resulted in a polarised and divided nation. Although it didn’t lead to the rioting we’ve seen in Kenya, it had exactly the same effect on the politics of that country; everything came to a grinding halt. I am of course talking about the election of pretzel swallowing, speech mangling half-man half-chimp gruppenfuhrer, Dubya.

In the coverage of the Kenyan election, we are hearing a lot about tribes. “The dispute is basically on a tribal basis” we are told. “The Kikuyu tribe have done well under successive Presidents, and the other tribes feel oppressed by this”. And with that, we can safely dismiss the whole sorry and sordid business as an inevitability in the land of White Mischief. Yet I didn’t read a single report on the US election discussing the tribal differences between the people of Florida and the people of Ohio. We heard no discussion about the Hispanic, Black, Asian, and White “tribes” of the USA and their different viewpoints. What we did hear about were “communities”. Of how the different communities in America voted, and what those communities wanted from a President.

So what’s the difference? I’d hope it’s obvious, but for the sake of clarity…we, like most Western nations, are a country with an imperial past (or, if you’re a septic, an imperial present). It is a past where the word “tribe” has developed negative connotations of savagery and barbarism (due mainly to European subjugation of Africa and Asia in the 18th and 19th centuries). When the media use that word to describe the basis of the divisions in Kenya now, I would contend that a lot of the white, middle class tribes of the UK conjure up a picture involving the film Zulu, Michael Caine, and the phrase “…’fousands of ‘em!”. Had the word “tribe” been used to describe the different communities in the USA, does anyone doubt that there would have been bewilderment at the use of the term at best, howls of outrage at worst?

I am loathe to characterise this as racism, if only because I find the tendency to overuse that label has devalued it. It’s perhaps more accurate to describe it as parochialism on our part. We use language that helps distance ourselves from what is happening in Kenya, and assure ourselves that we’re far more civilised. This also helps us to forget about the fact that exactly the same sort of thing has happened in the nation that boasts of its democracy (and tries to impose it on strategically unimportant countries). Or that we in the UK are no strangers to vote-rigging scandals (from the 1987 vote-buying allegations in Westminster to the rather more recent Olympic vote-buying storm), allegations of corruption (the Little London PFI scandal in Leeds in 2006) or politics and violence mixing queasily together (a Solihull counsellor was doused in petrol and set on fire back in the late 90’s).

What is happening right now in Kenya is abhorrent. But let’s not kid ourselves that it can be explained away by tossing in a few sentences about savagery and tribalism. And let’s never think, as a friend of mine in Kenya told me she did, that it could never happen here. It already is. It’s just we’re better at keeping our political catastrophes cosier.