The Violent Roots of Kenya’s Crisis: Part 1

This article was forwarded to me. It’s got a lot of historical information on the genesis of the land problem in Kenya, which I don’t think a lot of people know about. So, look at it as an opportunity to brush up on your knowledge of Kenya’s history.

On the night of 13 August 1997, a group of 20 Digo youths armed with bows and arrows attacked the Likoni Police Station in Mombasa. They killed five police officers, slitting the throats of three, freed the prisoners, ransacked and burnt the station to the ground, then made away with 43 G3 rifles, one revolver and 1,475 rounds of ammunition.They then commandeered the Likoni ferry and went on a rampage of looting and burning. By the end of the nigh,t they had destroyed 43 houses, 520 kiosks, 13 shops, 17 bars and restaurants, two churches and precipitated an orgy of violence that swept across Mombasa.

In the days following, Mombasa’s roads were clogged with mkokotenis, handcarts ferrying a fleeing populace and their worldly belongings – non-Coastals making a bee-line for the bus station and train station. The scale and swiftness of the violence shocked the country and paralysed coastal tourism for almost a decade, costing billions of shillings in lost revenues and at least 25,000 jobs.In subsequent interviews, it emerged that the attack had been driven by a deep-seated grudge between Mijikenda youth in the Likoni area and the police. Youth complained of unfair, arbitrary arrests and extortion at the hands of specific Likoni policemen, especially the ones from upcountry. But the objective of the attack was primarily ethnic cleansing.

A general election loomed in December. Coastal indigenes, the Mijikenda, were at that point strong supporters of the Kenya African National Union, the ruling party. Fearing that upcountry settlers – mostly Luo from Western Kenya, Kikuyu and Kamba from Central and Eastern provinces respectively – would vote for the opposition, they launched a pre-emptive strike. As well, Coastals harboured deep-seated land grievances against non-Coastals. Many Mijikenda were squatters on their own land. From the Kenyatta era, the Nairobi elite, mainly Kikuyu, had bought up swathes of valuable beachfront property while Mijikenda were unable to secure title deeds on their ancestral lands.

The Special Branch (now National Security Intelligence Services) had known of the attack for months. They suppressed the information. They also knew the leaders – some of whom would become members of parliament – and the locations of the militia training camps.In 1998, then President Daniel arap Moi instituted a commission to investigate the ethnic clashes that had rocked the country from the early 1990s. Many regarded it as a window-dressing exercise; judicial inquiries rarely went anywhere in Kenya. And it didn’t fool anyone that Moi’s warning in the early 1990s that multiparty democracy would divide the country along ethnic lines was quickly followed by a spate of ethnic clashes and evictions in his native Rift Valley.

Thousands of people, mainly Kikuyu settlers from Central Province, were killed and hundreds of thousands more evicted. Eyewitnesses fingered Rift Valley politicians – Kalenjin and Maasai – senior figures in the provincial administration and policemen. In other words, even if Moi was not himself directly involved, the evictions of madoadoa (non-indigenes), the clashes and evictions had been organised with the complicity of people close to him.

The Akiwumi Commission, the inquiry team, sat for a year and handed its final report to the President in mid-1999. The findings were not made public, despite loud appeals to do so. It would take a court order, six years later, for the report to see the light of day. The report makes for explosive reading, implicating senior ministers in the KANU government, provincial and district commissioners, senior police and intelligence officials, chiefs and village leaders – in other words, the entire structure of Kenya’s administration complicit in a project or projects of ethnic cleansing.

The report’s major finding was that multiparty politics had led to the formation of ethnic-based parties. Ergo, the ethnic clashes were routinely organised with the knowledge and participation of the KANU government and with the objective of ridding KANU strongholds of communities perceived to vote for the opposition.However, the phenomenon of ethnic clashes is far more complicated than this.

The origins of Kenya’s ethnic tensions go back, at least, to the politics of Kenya’s Independence. Afraid of the dominance of the Kikuyu and the Luo, the two largest and most politically savvy of Kenya’s 43 ethnic groups, Rift Valley and Coastal politicians, under the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), pushed for a federalist constitution that would guarantee the territorial integrity of their regions.The push for federalism – majimbo – was opposed by the more centrist KANU of Jomo Kenyatta and Jaramogi Odinga, who perceived it as inimical to nation-building. It also did not help that majimbo and KADU, led by Ronald Ngala and President Moi, were backed by a minority white settler coalition under Michael Blundell’s New Kenya Party. During the Lancaster House Independence negotiations, Whitehall backed KADU.

The majimbo constitution was instituted upon Independence in 1963. However, KANU swept the April 1963 elections and immediately began sabotaging the majimbo project. Regions were starved of resources from Nairobi and the new government went on a campaign to undermine majimbo. Unwieldy from the start, it required a wealth of personnel that the country simply did not possess at the time. A year later in 1964, at the promulagation of the republic, KADU finally collapsed, dissolving to merge with KANU.The dissolution of KADU left the ‘small tribes’ of the Coast, Rift Valley and Western Kenya vulnerable to the politics of the centre – to Kenyatta and his Kikuyu dilemma.

During colonialism, Kikuyu labour had migrated into the Rift Valley to work on European settler farms. As well, land pressure within Central Kenya – part of the motivation for the Mau Mau insurgency in the 1950s – had further created a cadre of landless Kikuyu. Kenyatta now under pressure from his Kikuyu community, found his answer in the expansive, sparsely-populated Rift Valley and the compliance of a weakened Daniel arap Moi. Over the next decade and a half, he encouraged landless Kikuyu to form land-buying companies. Able to secure loans through state-owned banks, they bought up lands vacated by departing settler farmers – the former White Highlands.

The trouble was that these lands were claimed historically by the Maasai and the Kalenjin and, moreover, bordered areas populated by these groups. While these land conflicts were suppressed during the Moi one-party era, the lingering resentment in the Rift Valley became easily manipulable at the onset of multipartyism. There is much talk today in media and political circles that ODM luminaries are behind the current spate of ethnic violence in the North Rift, where hundreds have been killed and maimed and thousands evicted – and that the violence that erupted after the Electoral Commission declared Mwai Kibaki president was premeditated.

However, all available evidence, including the distribution of hate leaflets just before the election and the deployment of Administration Police recruits to poll centres for work as agents, points to forces within the government.Still, it is very likely that the attacks were premeditated. What is unclear is whether they were sponsored by politicians with the specific objective of evicting Kikuyus. There is as yet no hard evidence of this. However, a culture of violence and private militias had been introduced into the language of political competition and elections in the 1990s. Bands of young men, the most notorious of which are the Kalenjin Warriors, had organised themselves as mercenaries in the service of politicians. The Akiwumi Commission’s report noted that the evictions in the Rift Valley were carried out by bands of traditional warriors, trained and financed by KANU politicians and chaperoned by the police and the General Service Unit.

Today, there are reports in the Eldoret area that attacks on Kikuyus were carried out by warriors. These, perhaps are the young guns for hire of the old ethnic clashes, unemployed youths hanging around towns and trading centres, able to self-mobilise at the prospect of a few shillings. Prepared for an ODM victory which promised them much, did they spontaneously vent their anger at a stolen election on unsuspecting Kibaki supporters?

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