An Encore for Chaos
An Encore for Chaos?
The embattled despot Daniel arap Moi,
of Kenya, has sought to preserve his regime by
exploiting ethnic
divisions. So why is
Kenya still intact?
By Bill Berkeley
BY the benighted standards of East Africa the spectacle
in this crowded, squalid refugee camp is all too grimly familiar: tents and
shacks, children in rags, adults hanging their heads in endless solemn
discussion. The talk is of ethnic cleansing, private militias, the
prospect of war. "We don't want any revenge," one of them is saying. "We
are not harboring any hatred. But as a human being, if you are pushed to
the wall, you can be provoked." The scene could be anywhere in a vast arc
of despair that has blighted this part of the world for a generation:
Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. But it takes place
in none of those exhausted battlegrounds. This is Kenya.
East Africa's richest country by far, familiar to safari lovers and Isak Dinesen
readers, Kenya is supposed to be an exception to the regional rule of
interminable wars and economic ruin. Its game parks lure nearly a million
tourists each year. Telephones work, electricity flows, children go to
school in shorts and knee socks. Kenya has long been a haven for other
countries' refugees. The sight of Kenyan refugees is cause for alarm.
It is a brilliant Saturday morning in the lush green hills of
the Rift Valley, Kenya's most fertile farming region. In the days of
British colonial rule these hills were called the White Highlands, and
formed a gorgeous and exotic backdrop for the khaki-clad protagonists of
Dinesen, Elspeth Huxley, and Beryl Markham. But the story unfolding today
is of a different kind.
"Twelve members of my family were displaced," a man I'll call James tells
me. He is forty-four years old, a bewildered-looking man with tired eyes
and a beard of white stubble. The interview is conducted furtively in a
shack--a friend minds the door, wary of informers. This is an officially
declared "security zone," barred to journalists.
James says that a band of perhaps 200 arsonists attacked his farm, wielding
bows and arrows. They looted and torched his house, and drove its panicked
occupants into the bush. "We don't return home because we fear we will be
beaten again," he explains. "The attackers are still there." He adds,
"They were organized." By whom? "We don't want to say, really."
What James won't say is by now well documented: the mob that attacked his
home was organized by agents of the Kenyan government. James is Kikuyu--a
member of one of Kenya's largest ethnic groups. The attackers were
Kalenjin--members of the small pastoral group to which Kenya's longtime
President, Daniel arap Moi, belongs. Since 1991 more than 1,500 Kenyans
have been killed--mostly Kikuyus like James, but also Luos and Luhyas--and
300,000 have been displaced in ethnic clashes, mostly with Kalenjin, that
have shaken Kenya's precarious unity.
President Moi and members of his ruling clique have sought to deflect
responsibility for the violence by blaming age-old hatreds--stirred up,
they claim, by the advent of multi-party democracy. But the evidence of
state complicity is strong, and it fits a pattern that has become striking
in post-Cold War Africa. Daniel arap Moi, who is seventy-one years old and
widely loathed, presided for years over a predatory single-party regime
that was made possible by the patronage of the West. No longer a Cold War
asset, and pressured to democratize, Moi has clung to power by playing
dirty. Skillfully manipulating the levers of coercion and bribery, he has
sabotaged Kenya's monetary system, emasculated the rule of law, and stoked
the destructive fires of ethnicity.
Is Kenya to become yet another African nightmare? Many fear so. The
miracle is that it has not already done so. For years Kenya has been
viewed as the proverbial powder keg. There were epochal assassinations in
the 1960s and 1970s. A failed coup in 1982 exposed sharp divisions of
group and class. Now the clashes have inflamed those divisions. Yet
somehow Kenya confounds perennial predictions of an imminent inferno.
Though tensions remain high, thousands remain homeless, and almost no one
has been held accountable, the Rift Valley clashes appear to have subsided
for now; the lust for revenge has been held in check. Kenyans who look at
their broken neighbors and ask, "Could it happen here?" now also ask, "Why
hasn't it happened here?"
I lived in Kenya for eight months recently, and traveled to all its
battered neighbors in turn. I came to appreciate why Kenya is not just
another African horror story:it has strengths that its neighbors never had.
The country is both tearing itself apart and struggling mightily to hold
itself together. Kenya is an all too typical study in the use of ethnicity
as an instrument of tyranny. But it may also demonstrate the limits of
ethnicity in the face of countervailing forces. The country is in the
midst of a powerful emancipation drama. The United States was once a key
player in that drama. No longer. Having spurred the movement toward
multi-party democracy, it has, as one Kenyan says, gone "under the
carpet."
"IT is a miracle that we have come this far without
disintegrating," says Gitobu Imanyara, a lawyer in Nairobi who has been at
the forefront of Kenya's fitful years-long struggle to break free of
corrupt and oppressive single-party rule. Like many others, Imanyara has
paid a price. The magazine he published, the Nairobi Law Monthly,
was repeatedly raided and ransacked, and harassed out of business for a
time. Imanyara has been detained four times, including once for two months
in a psychiatric ward after he accused President Moi of filling government
jobs according to ethnic affiliation rather than competence.
"We have a President who is determined to fulfill his prophesy that the
country is not cohesive enough for multi-party democracy," Imanyara says.
"His desire is to prove he was right, even if it means destroying Kenya as
a country." Kenya includes more than forty ethnic groups, Imanyara
explains. "The President has consistently pursued policies that encourage
the various ethnic groups to think of themselves as different, not as one
nation."
Imanyara's office overlooks Moi Avenue, the bustling main thoroughfare in
downtown Nairobi. The Kenyan capital boasts glass office towers, luxurious
safari hotels, art galleries, and first-class restaurants. But beyond this
cosmopolitan core is a teeming, crumbling Third World city. A handful of
Kenyan fat cats and tourists with their cameras and tony safari outfits are
stared at with palpable envy by the impoverished hordes of
"wananchi"--"the masses." Most wananchi live in huge, foul,
densely packed shantytowns where glue-sniffing street kids prowl for
garbage, and illegally distilled "chang'aa" is the primary source of
income.
Unemployment approaches 50 percent in Nairobi, and crime is rampant. The
Kenyan papers are filled with hair-raising tales of gangsterism, and of the
crude, largely futile police war to suppress it. While I was there, the
Nairobi police shot dead twenty criminal suspects in just ten days.
Meanwhile, after a gang armed with Uzis and AK-47 assault rifles robbed a
downtown bank in broad daylight, the fourth major bank robbery in a month,
a witness told the Daily Nation, "When you see seven armed policemen
running away, then things are hot."
Kenya's politics is every bit as volatile. During the time I was based in
Kenya, not only were thousands of clash victims living as "internally
displaced" refugees, but two journalists were arrested, beaten, and jailed
for months after questioning the independence of the judiciary; a prominent
former member of Parliament was put on trial for his life on charges widely
condemned as fraudulent; the nation's doctors and university lecturers went
on strike; opposition rallies were regularly banned; an opposition
candidate died in a mysterious automobile accident; an opposition MP was
attacked in his home with a petrol bomb; and the President's closest
political confidant--"total man" Nicholas Biwott, a former Minister of
Energy--remained a principal suspect in the 1990 murder of the Foreign
Minister.
FROM behind every counter and every desk in every store
and office the dour image of "His Excellency Daniel T. arap Moi, C.G.H.,
M.P., President of the Republic of Kenya and Commander-in-Chief of the
Armed Forces," stares impassively into the middle distance. The portrait
is a mandatory totem of loyalty. President Moi, who succeeded Kenya's
first President, Jomo Kenyatta, in 1978, personifies the rottenness of the
Kenyan state. Surrounded by parasites and sycophants, Moi long ago proved
himself a shrewd master of Big Man politics: tough enough to crack heads
when necessary, he more often adroitly manipulates the flow of cash as the
conduit of power.
Politics in Kenya has always been a means of securing "access to the
meat." Rampant corruption has sapped the economy and widened the gap between
a rapacious few and the sullen wananchi. Companies with links to
Moi have skimmed monumental sums off government contracts in wheat, oil,
and land, and particularly off foreign aid. Budget allocations are sold to
the highest bidder. One series of scams in the early 1990s cost Kenya the
equivalent of 10 percent of its annual gross domestic product.
In the 1992 election campaign Moi's cronies established a network of
"political banks" that siphoned money out of the Central Bank and pumped it
into the ruling party's campaign. This brazen abuse of the monetary system
to finance the bribes and blandishments of an election campaign almost
doubled the money supply in six months, creating 100 percent inflation.
The idea of the state as a cash cow did not originate with Moi. The
British milked Kenya for the benefit of their empire and a handful of white
settlers. The British also perfected in Kenya the administrative apparatus
of "indirect rule," whereby a network of appointed tribal chiefs exercised
unaccountable power on behalf of an unelected sovereign. The system
survived independence in 1963 and remains the basis for virtually unlimited
executive power at the local level to declare emergencies, arrest and
punish, and issue licenses. Elected members of Parliament cannot even
address their constituents without the permission of chiefs who are
accountable only to the President.
Jomo Kenyatta and members of his family amassed a huge fortune in land,
precious stones, ivory, and casinos during his fifteen-year rule after
independence. Kenyatta's crimes were small compared with the systematic
looting of Moi's gang, but they sowed the seeds of the current malaise.
Kenyatta also established the Kenyan tradition of ethnic chauvinism,
bestowing the fruits of power primarily on his own people, the Kikuyu, who
enjoyed privileged access to land, jobs, and education.
To no one's surprise, the Kikuyu emerged as leading opponents of Moi's
regime, and they predominate in the movement toward multi-party democracy.
Moi and his ruling party were returned to power in 1992 with barely a third
of the total vote, their victory owing largely to ethnic and personal
divisions among the opposition parties. There was also substantial
evidence of fraud and intimidation, not least in the Rift Valley, where
elaborate gerrymandering left a hugely disproportionate number of
parliamentary seats in a province from which nearly all non-Kalenjins had
been violently expelled.
THE clashes have roots in genuine competition over
land--always a sensitive issue in a largely rural country with one of the
highest population-growth rates in the world. The Rift Valley was
traditionally the home of pastoral groups, including the Kalenjin and the
Masai. During the colonial period white settlers expropriated this fertile
land. They staked out vast farms and recruited native cultivators, notably
Kikuyus, Luos, and Luhyas, to work their fields. After independence, in
1963, British settlers began to sell off their lands. President Kenyatta
ensured that his own people, the Kikuyu, were the primary beneficiaries.
So there has long been a reservoir of resentment and mistrust of the
Kikuyu. The challenge for a beleaguered despot like Moi is to exploit that
resentment--stoke it, harness it, even arm it, in order to destabilize
opponents and discredit multi-partyism.
Moi and his associates have repeatedly portrayed calls for political
pluralism as anti-Kalenjin. Officials refer to the Kikuyu as "aliens" and
"foreigners," and to the Kalenjin and other pastoral groups as "natives"
and "original inhabitants." At rallies and on the state radio they warn
that the opposition is arming itself to eliminate indigenous residents from
the Rift Valley.
Moi's government sought to bolster these accusations at a
nineteen-month-long show trial in which a former MP, Koigi wa Wamwere, a
militant Kikuyu, was convicted of raiding a police station to acquire arms.
The state's case was repeatedly discredited in court, and trial observers
unanimously decried what Amnesty International
called the "abusive use of the law" in Koigi's trial. Clearly, the
government's aim was to cultivate a fear that Kikuyus were arming
themselves. Koigi was sentenced to four years in prison and six lashes
with a cane.
The Rift Valley violence coincided with calls from officials in Moi's inner
circle for "majimboism," a federal system based on ethnicity.
Proponents of majimboism have urged the routing of all other ethnic
groups from lands occupied before the colonial era by the Kalenjin and
other pastoral groups. They use the term "madoadoa"--"black spots,"
a chilling echo of South African terminology in the era of forced
removals--to refer to land occupied by non-Kalenjins. Many Kenyans regard
majimboism as nothing less than ethnic cleansing.
To be sure, some opposition parties are identified with ethnic groups, and
they, too, engage in exclusivity. The difference is that Moi suffocates
and divides his countrymen using the institutions of the state: the police,
the courts, the powers of arrest and detention.
A Luhya farmer I'll call Charles, sixty-four, whose family was driven off
their land by a marauding gang of Kalenjin warriors, expresses little doubt
about who is responsible for his predicament. Huddled with a half dozen
other embittered Luhyas in a refugee settlement near the Uganda border,
Charles snorts "Bubeyi!" --"Lies!"--when I float Moi's argument that
multi-partyism leads to tribalism. "The Kalenjin who pierce their
ears--these are the people who did this to us. But it's their leaders who
began this violence. If it were just a question of tribes fighting each
other, then the government would have intervened."
The Kenyan government has hardly intervened. For the most part it has
turned a blind eye on the attackers and has shown outright hostility toward
those who have sought to investigate incidents or help the victims. The
government declared clash areas "security zones" and barred journalists
from entering them. Kenya's Attorney General, Amos Wako, told me that
murder charges had been brought only seventeen times in connection with the
clashes (roughly one charge for every 100 murders) and had resulted in only
eight convictions. "The problem is evidence," he said.
More likely, the problem is the steady erosion of the rule of law which has
been one of Moi's most destructive--and ominous--legacies. Kenya has never
been a full-fledged police state, but Moi has systematically eviscerated
the system of law and accountability.
ONE of the most prominent political bruisers in Moi's
"Rift Valley mafia" is William ole Ntimama, a flamboyant demagogue who, as
Minister of Local Government, is the country's most outspoken advocate of
majimboism. Ntimama is renowned for his fiery speeches. At the
height of the clashes he warned Kikuyus that they would be "cut down to
size like the Ibo" of Nigeria, who perished by the hundreds of thousands in
the disastrous Biafran war. Ntimama is widely accused of inciting members
of his own tiny pastoral group, the Masai, who have formed an alliance with
the Kalenjin to drive thousands of Kikuyus off their land.
Ntimama, sixty-five, is a gregarious man with an affable laugh and a huge
gap-toothed smile. He greeted me warmly in his gigantic office at the
Ministry of Local Government. "The British have messed up our people," he
declared. "They have actually made us part of a zoo, part of the animal
kingdom. So there is a lot of bitterness."
The Masai were, in fact, marginalized by British and Kikuyu alike. They
are one of Africa's last truly traditional groups, the subject of countless
Western picture books that romanticize these tall, thin, nomadic cattle
herders in their distinctive red blankets and bead necklaces, their
earlobes pierced and stretched and their hair caked with ocher. Anyone who
has been on safari in Kenya will have seen vans full of gawking tourists
aiming their cameras at the Masai as if they were creatures from the
wild.
"For all the marginalized people, when there is a flare or some uprising,
or certain ethnic differences, it is very easy to write it off and say it
is ethnic cleansing, or stirring ethnic conflict," Ntimama told me. Fair
enough. But of course Ntimama is not himself among Kenya's marginalized.
During three decades in politics he has proved to be a shrewd and ruthless
operator. Mostly self-educated, he was born and raised in the town of
Narok, on the majestic savanna that runs across much of southern Kenya. In
1974 Ntimama became the chairman of the Narok County Council, responsible
for managing the Masai Mara, Kenya's most famous--and lucrative--game
reserve. Thousands of tourists bearing huge quantities of hard currency
visit the Mara each year to observe its breathtaking array of wildlife.
Ntimama and his fellow council members have skimmed off the bulk of the
Mara's gate receipts. They have granted concessions to safari-lodge
builders in exchange for generous kickbacks. Ntimama has a substantial
stake in Governor's Camp, one of the most expensive lodges in the
reserve.
I asked Ntimama about the rule of law in the Rift Valley. If
the Masai have a just cause, is there no legal remedy? "The law applied is
a discriminatory law," he replied. Should the Masai then just take the law
into their own hands? "I have never told anybody to fight," Ntimama
protested. Laughing, he added, "We never really cleansed anywhere other
than Enoosupukia"--a village from which 10,000 Kikuyus were displaced. So,
then, they did cleanse in Enoosupukia? Ntimama roared with laughter. "I
deny ethnic cleansing," he declared. Did he have any idea what would
happen to the refugees from Enoosupukia? "I can't say," he replied,
shrugging. "Maybe the United Nations is trying to find a solution."
Later I asked Attorney General Wako why he didn't arrest Ntimama for
incitement. "If you arrest Ntimama, there would be riots," Wako replied.
So much for the rule of law.
WHY, then, has Kenya not disintegrated? What
happened in Rwanda scared Kenya. The fact that civil war has not already
occurred is an indication of how dreaded the prospect of war is. Kenyans
are no strangers to war. They fought the Mau Mau insurgency against the
British in the 1950s. More than 11,000 guerrillas were killed in that war,
and thousands more were detained and tortured, or displaced to horrific
concentration camps, where many died. (The Mau Mau, for their part, killed
only ninety-five whites, including thirty-two civilians.) Nearly all those
involved in the Mau Mau struggle were Kikuyu, and Kikuyu elders have been
counseling restraint.
"The memories of Mau Mau are still with us," says a man I'll call Peter,
fifty-eight, another embittered Kikuyu who was driven from his farm by
Kalenjin warriors. In 1953, when Peter was sixteen, his family was
displaced from the Equator Ranch of the settler leader Lord Delamere.
Three of his cousins, suspected Mau Mau guerrillas, were killed by Kikuyu
"home guards"--natives employed by the British. "We do not favor any war
or conflict, because they only bring misery," Peter says. "The most
important thing we want is peace."
Kenyans generally are much better educated and better informed than their
neighbors. A generation of Kenyans has grown up with the benefits of
relative stability, which have resulted in a substantial middle class.
Elsewhere in Africa the vertical ties of ethnicity represent both the only
source of identity and the only channel for economic and political power.
Kenya's middle class cuts horizontally across ethnic lines. Urban Kenyans
have as much in common with other urbanites as with the rural members of
their groups. And the Kenyans who have been most provoked by the
clashes--the Kikuyu and the Luo --are also among the best educated.
Gibson Kamau Kuria, a Kikuyu lawyer who is the dean of Kenya's human-rights
movement, and who once spent ten months in prison for his advocacy,
puts it this way:"The Kikuyus and the Luos are most involved in the market
economy, and they were in the forefront of the struggle for independence,
as well as in the move toward democracy. They understand that the problem
is one of bad government and corrupt economics, not bad tribes. Once you
conceptualize the problem as dealing with bad governance, then you know the
solution lies in good government, human rights, and sound economic
management, not tribal warfare."
Rural Kenyans tend to follow the lead of their better-educated brethren.
Even among the Kalenjin, many recognize that their interests don't
necessarily coincide with those of Moi's tiny clique. "The Kalenjin are
not a united front," says Bethwell Kipligat, a diplomat from the Nandi clan
of the Kalenjin. "The Nandi leadership was aggrieved by the clashes and
helped the victims. And they spoke out. This is a sign of hope."
Kenya has developed a vigorous civil society that likewise cuts across
ethnic lines. This is an essential point. The Catholic and Protestant
churches, the Law Society, human-rights groups, the independent press--all
have proved remarkably resilient despite years of harassment. After the
Cold War the institutions of civil society blossomed with newfound support
from Western donor countries. They have been prodigiously exposing,
documenting, analyzing, protesting, mediating--and reducing the capacity of
the state to manipulate truth. "Before, the West had supported the
regime," Kipligat says. "Now the West was echoing what the civil society
was saying. The civil society became stronger than the regime. There was
no choice but for the President to change course."
Finally, President Moi is a shrewd survivor. He seems to realize that he
cannot simply crack heads on a huge scale without paying a price. He
harasses but does not crush. "Moi makes tactical retreats when he thinks
he is pushing people too far," explains Kiruri Kamau, the managing editor
of the embattled independent weekly The People. "Moi is very
cunning. He is calculating." When asked why the clashes haven't escalated,
Kamau replies, "Moi realized these things had gone too far. If there is a
war, Moi would stand to lose so much."
DURING the Cold War the United States poured billions
of dollars into Kenya, helping to sustain Moi's patronage-based government
and enrich his clique. In 1990, however, the United States suspended its
aid and played a key role in inducing Moi to lift his ten-year ban on
opposition parties. The U.S. ambassador at the time was Smith Hempstone,
a flamboyant, outspoken right-wing newspaperman who had been appointed to
this diplomatic post, his first, by his friend George Bush. Hempstone was
a vociferous critic of Moi's regime. He denounced the arrests of
dissidents and the shutting down of newspapers, assailed election
irregularities, and went out of his way to be seen with opposition leaders.
Hempstone was embraced as a hero by Kenya's fledgling democracy movement.
That a major world power shared the goals of this small circle of idealists
altered the psychology of all the players.
Hempstone returned home in 1993 and was replaced by Aurelia Brazeal, a
career diplomat who, in contrast, projects an image of studied ambiguity.
"Quiet diplomacy" is the term favored by those who believe that the
differences between Brazeal and Hempstone are more of style than of
substance. Kenyans call Brazeal's approach "appeasement," and they make no
secret of their disappointment. Brazeal, for her part, has evidently grown
tired of being compared with her predecessor. She granted me an
off-the-record interview on the condition that there be no questions about
Hempstone.
Brazeal has been particularly elusive on the core issue of the rule of law.
At a time when the President is deploying state power to harass and
intimidate opposition voices almost daily, the U.S. response has been
notably muted. Publicly, at least, Brazeal has espoused a "pox on all your
houses" view. In a speech she made while I was there, which was covered as
the lead story in the Sunday Nation, she bemoaned what she called a
"lack of understanding" between government and opposition. "There are not
many people seeking to build a middle ground," Brazeal said. "Kenya's
political atmosphere sometimes resembles the siege of a medieval European
castle, with the government refusing the opposition entry and the
opposition armies catapulting missiles over the walls. What Kenya needs is
the flag of truce, a ceasefire in this incessant conflict."
A nice metaphor, but in fact there is no organized violent resistance to
Moi. Opposition figures, however, have been clubbed, firebombed, jailed,
and tortured, and nearly all have repeatedly been barred from addressing
their constituencies. In such an atmosphere the ambassador's evenhanded
appeal for a "middle ground" understandably grates on Kenyan ears.
It may just be that Ambassador Brazeal lacks political intuition. The
United States has pressed for economic reforms the purpose of which is to
close off conduits for corruption. Evidently pleased with the results,
Western donors last January pledged $800 million in renewed assistance to
Kenya. They thereby sent a signal that economic reforms need not be
matched by political reforms--and repression has escalated ever since.
The question is not just whether Kenya will self-destruct but whether it
will be blocked from achieving its enormous potential. Like South Africa,
Kenya could be an economic locomotive for its long-suffering region--and a
much-needed symbol of success. Its emancipation process needs support. An
election looms in 1997. The West need not take sides in the struggle for
political power, but Kenyans deserve a clear stand in favor of the
institutions without which their country cannot hope to be genuinely
stable: a free press, free assembly, above all the rule of law. The United
States has too often operated in Africa on the assumption that lawlessness
and ethnic turmoil simply go with the territory. But Africans themselves
have always objected strenuously to this view.
"In Kenya we have internal refugees," says Martha Karua, a bright young
lawyer in Nairobi and an opposition MP. "Just because they are small
numbers compared with Rwanda or Somalia or Sudan--if you compare us with
those countries, of course we are better. The international community is
judging us as an African country. They look around us and say, `Kenya is a
shining light'--and that is where they are wrong." Her advice to the West:
"Hold us up to the same standard, not an African standard."
