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Posted By Binyavanga Wainaina
January 28, 2008
Last week, eight of us from the
Concerned Writers Group went to visit
Eldoret, the town at the epicentre of
the clashes in Kenya. Having been born
and brought up in the Rift Valley, I
know this area well. We spoke to
groups of displaced people. We talked
with Archbishop Korir, who is
legendary for saving the lives of many
people who would have been killed in
the clashes of 1992 -- and now, of
2008.
We stayed in a hotel, Poa Place, with
excellent service and food. When we
arrived, on a Sunday, there were
families having a Sunday out --
children swimming, people eating goat
meat. In the bars and cafes, people
were cautious, and you could overhear
conversations about ordinary things:
school, work, love. Until we made a
mistake: in a bar, we started to talk
to each other about politics, and
people looked at us with that look.
The maintenance of normality was the
highest priority.
We met a young man, clean-faced and
earnest, who told us that when the
militias came to his home to collect
the boys to fight, he hid. When we
left Eldoret cathedral, I met a young
man who has five-month-old twins. He
stopped me and asked me to buy him one
packet of milk, just one, he said, to
feed his twins today.
In whispers in some places, we heard
about the rise of a nation and its
militia. That the many groups and
subgroups of the Kalenjin were
uniting, and invoking all the military
and war language they knew to make
sure that they had their way, and that
Kikuyus were removed from the area. We
heard that Kikuyus were being armed,
heard reports even that Mungiki, a
Kikuyu militia, had been sneaked into
various parts of the Rift Valley.
Reports from both sides diverged
substantially. Who started what, and
when? Unsurprisingly, everybody is
speculating, and there is a lot of
political propaganda being spread by
both sides.
There are many stories circulating
about the church just outside Eldoret
that was torched. There are those who
say that some Kikuyu men were using it
as a shield to attack Kalenjin
positions from. There are those who
say that it was an act of naked
desecration -- the deliberate killing
of Kikuyu women and children. The main
thing here is the lack of evidence
presented. Both sides use the church
as a kind of cheap campaign platform
to score points. One side screams
genocide. Another screams oppressed
peoples of Kenya.
The truth has no currency.
President Mwai Kibaki, who by now has
a reputation for hiding when he needs
to be seen -- such as when we have a
famine, or when Kenyans are in
hospital after events like this --
finally presented himself to the
refugees at the Eldoret cathedral. He
did not have any meetings with their
leaders. He simply spoke to them, and
told them the most impossible and
patronising things: that they would be
back home in two weeks, that the
government would make the area
peaceful. Nobody believed him.
There is a joke going around that
Kibaki is in bed, his head under a
pillow, as he asks his wife Lucy to
look out of the window and see it if
it all over.
As he spoke on national television, we
could see things burning in the
background. It seemed as though he was
living in another country.
The refugees in Eldoret had already
met and decided not to go back to
their homes.
“This is the third time in 10 years
that I have lost everything,” said
one. “We need a permanent solution.”
They were not even angry. They were
bewildered.
Meanwhile, the Orange Democratic
Movement leadership continues to ask
for mass action, a term that
translates into “kill, burn and loot”,
and they pretend that it is a noble
quest for a sort of lavender
revolution of the people.
On our last day, a woman with a Mohawk
haircut, very funky clothing and an
English private-school accent stumbled
to our table at Poa Place. She was
drunk and clearly very upset.
“You know what?” she said. “You know
what? I don’t care. I don’t care
anymore. People want to kill each
other. Let them …”
She and her sister had brought the
kids out to swim. She had seen her
neighbours butchered the day before.
As we drove back to Nairobi, the
tension started to get to me, and I
found myself thinking the unthinkable.
What would happen if Kenya stopped
holding it together?
In Nairobi, at a mini-market, I found
a man at the till, a Luo man telling
the Kikuyu lady at the till that he
spoke five languages. He spoke to her
in Kikuyu, and she giggled.
Binyavanga Wainaina, the founding
editor of Kwani, a leading Kenyan
literary magazine (www.kwani.org)
based in Nairobi, is a member of
Concerned Writers for Kenya, a
coalition of Kenyan writers for peace
and sanity. |
