Muigwithania 2.0

The international community is presently engaged in a high-stakes game of poker with the government of Sudan. At stake is the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court, the permanent sitting tribunal whose purpose is to punish those that commit the worst crimes against humanity. Also hanging in the balance are the lives of 2.5 million Darfurian refugees who have been driven from their homes by a scorched earth counter-insurgency campaign launched by the Sudanese government in response to rebel attacks in the region in 2003.Both sides in this international stand-off have already demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice those lives for the sake of the principles they support. The Sudanese government has thrown out 13 international aid groups who provide the food and medicine necessary to sustain those refugees, under the pretext that they gathered evidence for the ICC against Sudan’s president, Omar al Bashir. The ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo went ahead with the indictment in full knowledge that this was the likely consequence. He claims to be acting in the interest of justice alone, without reference to the political or humanitarian situation – and no one disputes that by arming and abetting mounted Arab proxies (later dubbed “devils on horseback” in the press) to put down a rebellion with indiscriminate violence against civilians, al Bashir violated the spirit and letter of international law (as have many rulers before him). We have a struggle for primacy between the two principles – national sovereignty and international law – that seems likely to define global politics for the rest of this century.

Providing an accurate account of these principles, and the intricate politics in which they are embedded, involves wading through self-serving and overwrought claims from both sides while weighing two genuine and incommensurable claims to legitimacy. In his new book, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror, the distinguished Africa scholar Mahmood Mamdani does his readers the considerable service of laying waste to many of the dangerous and self-serving illusions of one side of this argument. But he erects a mirror edifice of illusions in its place; getting the story straight requires disentangling the true from the misleading in Mamdani’s account.On one side, there are the claims of universal justice that the ICC purports to represent. The ICC is the institutional face of a growing movement seeking to make real the promise of “Never Again” inscribed into the Convention on Genocide of 1948. The ICC indictment of al Bashir was the first against a sitting head of state, and it was hailed in editorial pages across America as a great progressive advance for global justice. Even those who worried about the consequences of the indictment still placed hope in its deterrent value. The goal was to worry the minds of subsequent heads of state tempted to use mass rape and murder as a counter-insurgency tactic.

Taken on its own terms, in narrow isolation, this is a worthy and unassailable mission. But nothing exists in narrow isolation, least of all moral purity and universal justice. Such claims exist in a real world of actual politics amid complicated histories, which many Darfur activists have made it their business to elide – portraying the conflict in Darfur as what Mamdani dubs “a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart”.On the other side are the rights of sovereign governments to govern themselves without outside interference, which the Sudanese government and the Arab nations that have rallied to its side purport to defend. Sovereignty has been, since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the currency of the international system, and, as Mamdani reminds us, a privilege hard-won by postcolonial states only recently.

In the wake of the American misadventure in Iraq, the weird confluence of moralistic rhetoric and bellicose policy that characterised Bush’s foreign policy, the complicity of so many ostensibly liberal hawks caught up in the Iraq War fervour, and a history of one-sided enforcement of humanitarian rules, it should surprise no one that the leaders and intellectuals of formerly colonised states are wary of the claims to universal justice emanating from what Mamdani dubs the “new humanitarian order”. At this week’s Arab Summit in Doha, Arab leaders, many of them signatories to the ICC, (which the United States has refused to sign) lined up in unanimous support of al Bashir.

The human rights lobby views this emphasis on sovereignty as the first and last resort of butchers who employ anti-colonialist rhetoric to defend their crimes. Weary of the grubby compromises of diplomats and corporations willing to do business with tyrants and criminals, one faction of the human rights community calls for armed western intervention to defend helpless victims of state violence everywhere. The Save Darfur movement, an aggressive and media-savvy coalition “whose scale recalls the anti-war movement of the late 1960s and 1970s”, rose up with the intention to turn Darfur into a test case for western action to halt what it called a genocide in progress.

Mamdani devotes the first section of his book to assailing the credibility of Save Darfur. He accuses them of inflating the scale of the killing, obfuscating the reality of a “civil war” and “cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency” that it called genocide, bombarding viewers and readers with “a pornography of violence” that removed the conflict from its political context, sustaining an impression of ongoing genocide long after the claim was plausible, portraying the conflict in racialised terms as a genocide conducted by Arabs against Africans and ceaselessly advocating for hard-line policies more likely to harm than to the help the victims they intended to save. On each of these counts, Mamdani assembles a more or less devastating case. Save Darfur publicised a figure for the number of deaths – 400,000 – that was twice as high as reliable estimates (Mamdani cites a study commissioned by the US Government Accountablity Office to this effect) and escalated its rhetoric at precisely the moment – January 2005 – when the scale of killing fell dramatically. Save Darfur have continued to clamour for aggressive action despite a humanitarian crisis that was largely stabilised due to the cooperation of the Sudanese government with aid agencies that had reduced the mortality rate to between 100 and 200 month in Darfur – “below emergency levels”, according to World Health Organisation.

Most important for Mamdani’s purpose, though, is the Save Darfur Coalition’s emphasis on the race of the perpetrators and victims: “The central claim is that perpetrators and victims in Darfur belong to two different racial groups, Arab and African and that the Arab perpetrator is evil.” Mamdani is not content to say, as he does, that Save Darfur are committed to policies that will do harm. He intends to demonstrate that they are part of a more insidious agenda written into the War on Terror. To strip Darfur of its politics serves a political project of its own, and Mamdani makes it his mission to reveal its workings – what he sees as the foundation of a post-Cold War order in which American clients and proxies act with impunity while rogue states are subject to violent discipline at the hands of the international community, with America at its head. It is a politics notable for denying that it is a politics at all and, as Mamdani narrates it, one that portends a bleak future for the inhabitants of the developing world.

In the long historical section that makes up the centre of the book, Mamdani traces the centuries-long intermingling of Arab and African identities in Darfur, and their reciprocal permeability. He also shows how these identities were politicised under the “indirect” rule practised by British colonial administrators that pursued a policy of “re-tribalisation” of the various groups that shared Darfur by assigning homelands to certain groups and denying them to others.

This backdrop allows Mamdani, in his third and final section, to return to the question with which the book opens. Since Americans are inclined to regard Africa, to the extent that they regard it at all, as a site of “meaningless anarchy – in which men, sometimes women, and increasingly, children, fight without aim or memory,” why has there been “a global publicity boom around the carnage in Darfur”?

The worst conflict since the Second World War, with a death toll of 3.9 million between 1998 and 2004, raged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; the figure of “excess deaths” caused by the Iraq war likely outstrip the same numbers in Darfur. Yet only Darfur, a conflict in a remote and impoverished region without oil or other significant exportable resources has generated a lavishly funded advocacy organisation. For Mamdani, the answer is embedded in the definition of genocide itself. “Only when extreme violence targets for annihilation a civilian population that is marked off as different ‘on grounds of race, ethnicity, or religion’ is that violence termed genocide,” Mamdani observes:

“Given that colonialism shaped the very nature of modern ‘indirect rule’ and administrative power along ‘tribal’ (or ethnic) lines it is not surprising that both the exercise of power and responses to it tend to take ‘tribal’ forms in these newly independent states. From this point of view, there is little to distinguish mass violence unleashed against civilians in Congo, Northern Uganda, Mozambique, Angola, Darfur, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, and so on. Which one is named ‘genocide’ and which one is not? Most important, who decides?”
The new humanitarian order is, as Mamdani describes it, “a bifurcated system whereby state sovereignty obtains in large parts of the world but is suspended in more and more countries in Africa and the Middle East,” in which subjects exchange their political rights as citizens of sovereign states for the “human” rights possessed by “wards in an open-ended international rescue operation” in a humanitarian “system of trusteeship” administered by an international community that lacks either accountability or responsibility. The world he describes he looks a lot like the world as the Palestinians under the jurisdiction of UNRWA see it, and the vision Mamdani projects of an Africa delivered piecemeal to the good intentions of the international community is a stark one.

A problem with this claim, however, is that the record of American policy in Sudan challenges it. Indeed, proponents of humanitarian intervention in Darfur make a diametrically opposite charge against the American government – that it has subordinated its interest in the cause of human rights to its desire to maintain relations with Sudanese intelligence to aid the War on Terror. Mamdani’s argument also passes over the American response to Sudan’s much longer, more brutal and more complex civil war, a two-decade conflict pitting Christians and animists from the south of the country against the Arab Islamist cabal to the north that controlled the state and the military.It was here that al Bashir pioneered the technique of using proxy war conducted by mounted Arab warriors. And it was this conflict that first aroused activist concern among the evangelical Christian movement at the base of George W Bush’s electoral coalition.

Islamists in Sudan were waging a brutal war against the Christian coreligionists of the single most belligerent electoral constituency in American politics. If the goal of American policy was, as Mamdani alleges, to “slice Africa by demonising one group of Africans, African Arabs”, then surely the Sudanese Civil War was the perfect opportunity to carry out this agenda. But the Bush administration instead expended considerable diplomatic resources cajoling the North and the South to make peace in a negotiated settlement that Mamdani himself acknowledges as Bush’s only foreign policy accomplishment.While there were plenty of hardline advocates for the fantasy of regime change in Sudan, the United States remained effectively committed to the stability of the Bashir regime, as the only guarantor of the peace deal it had signed, through the end of the Bush Administration.And so, when Mamdani describes the “the responsibility to protect” as “a slogan that masks a big power agenda to recolonise Africa”, he is mistaking the fantasies of American activists for the policies of their government. He is also asserting the existence of a hidden nefarious agenda where none exists, and providing a false clarity that is the merely the obverse of the good-and-evil dichotomy of the War on Terror and the humanitarian order that he assails.

This overreaching damages the credibility of Mamdani’s powerful and incisive criticism of the international justice movement. So much of what Mamdani argues is true, and so much of it cuts against the grain of the usual coverage of Darfur in ways that are essential for the broader public to understand. And neither he, nor the rest of us, can afford to squander the opportunity to set the record straight

* A response to Maina Kiai and Paul Muite Opinion – “Ethnic ‘entitlement’ does not bode well for Kenya and its communities ” Published by the Daily Nation

Maina Kiai A Hater

Did you ever notice that there are no Kalenjin going around the world saying, or writing about, how awful Kalenjins have been? Given that the Kalenjin have unleashed three tribal wars and perfected patented industrialized genocide against the Kikuyu, why has there been no Kalenjin Maina Kiai ?Are there any Luos writing books about the absence of Luo soul-searching or expressions of sorrow over their torture and murder of Kikuyus in Kibera ? Has anyone ever encountered any Luo or Kalenjin remorse ?The answer, of course, is no. In fact, among all the world’s peoples, only Kikuyus produce individuals who have greater sympathy for those who hate their people than for those who love it. Some in this small urban kikuyu community loathe everything Kikuyu (they love their own agenda and their own vision of what Kenya could be over their own people ) and have contempt for the average Kikuyu. That is why most of them have such admiration for William Ruto and ODM

There are no comparable self-haters in any other country, This newly minted young Kikuyu Intellectuals (sic) are often the leaders in anti-Kikuyu kamukunji(s) ,demonstrations and movements. The Kiai’s and Binyavanga’s devote much of their lives to trying to harm our community and expressing deep hatred of Gikuyu traditions.This self-loathing on their part is all the more remarkable when you consider that those who support and fund them strongly affirm their own cultural and ethnic identities. For example, while Kiai and Muite ceaselessly attack their own community ,ODM ceaselessly defends its own communities even in the face of serious catastrophic environmental negligence as shown by the issue of the Mau.

How, then, to explain this anomaly of new Kikuyu self-loathing? I offer one explanation.Many of the haters are political rejects,political wanna be’s driven by anger and selfish ambition .Anger that is similar to adolescent anger at a parent who claims very high ideals and turns out to be slightly flawed. Many of the haters are angry at Kikuyu’s for being ‘imperfect’ in accepting their values (ODM Values)and therefore disappointing them.There may be other explanations. But what is certain is that Kikuyu self-hatred is a unique phenomena that plays a particularly destructive role as designed by those who fund it .It gives fodder to those who are for the destruction of our community.What better way to promote anti Kikuyu propaganda than to have one of them spew it in the guise of speaking the truth .

Yes, we may agree with parts of your opinion that the older generation of Kikuyu leadership has failed.Failed to deal with poverty that is destroying us.Even worse is that they failed to protect the defenseless in the Rift Valley and in IDP camps , but the solution Mr Kiai is not to side with those our leaders have failed to protect us from by promoting their propaganda and agenda.

We can move on as younger Kikuyus without having to bow down to these forces or their stale ideas.

Joe Ndungu

Gitau Njuguna, Paul Muite

At least 24 people have been stoned or hacked to death in central Kenya during overnight fighting between vigilante groups and an outlawed criminal sect.The clashes in Karatina began when the vigilante groups armed with machetes, axes and clubs set upon members of the feared Mungiki gang, which extorts money from homeowners, taxi operators and businesspeople in many Kenyan towns. Gang members later regrouped and fought back but most of the dead were alleged Mungiki members.

“So far, investigators have confirmed that 24 people have been killed and three people have been injured,” police said.Thirty-seven people were arrestesd during the violence, which follows more than a week of vigilante action in the area, about 100 miles north of the capital, Nairobi. More than a dozen Mungiki members were reported to have been lynched by the public before last night’s fighting.The clashes are indicative of a growing sense of lawlessness in Kenya, with police seemingly unable to protect the public and deal effectively with criminal threats.

“Live by the sword, die by the sword” 

Henry Muoria (1914-1997).

Muoria was an active journalist, a friend and press secretary of Kenya’s future president Jomo Kenyatta and, from 1945 to 1952, the editor of a nationalist newspaper Mumenyereri, written in Gikuyu, one of Kenya’s major languages. In October 1952, when the British declared the Emergency in Kenya in order to quell the Mau Mau rebellion, Muoria was visiting London. He stayed there for the rest of his life, but continued pursuing his writing career. He finished more than ten full-length autobiographical, philosophical and political manuscripts, but not one was published. East African Educational Publishers in Nairobi brought out his I, the Gikuyu and the White Fury in 1994. This book and his unpublished autobiography from 1982, The British and My Kikuyu Tribe, are used in discussing Muoria’s debt to his ethnic community, the Gikuyu, his successful attempts to contribute to the creation of a nationalist public sphere in colonial Kenya, and his authorship in exile. The declaration of the Emergency put a stop to Muoria’s hopes for the recognition of his work, based as it was on a desired continuum between self, community and nation.

For several years during Britain’s late colonialism, from 1946 onwards, administrators in Kenya were in a panic over how to control the African press of the colony. African and Asian businessmen, politicians, editors and journalists had managed to create a public realm in which members of the various colonised communities debated pressing problems of everyday life, as well as the larger political questions of colonialism, racism, self-determination and independence. Colonial information officers asked advice from their colleagues in other British territories in East and West Africa on what measures might be taken to regulate and suppress the local press, and urged on the Colonial Office in London the need for sharper instruments than those already available. Samples of ‘near-seditious’ newspaper pieces, translated into English from the various Kenyan languages, were sent to London.

This activity was an acceleration of ongoing endeavours within Kenya. The non-European press had been under surveillance for as long as it had existed. Officials had kept a worried eye on Muigwithania, the organ of the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) from its inception in 1926. It was edited for a period by Kenya’s future president, Jomo Kenyatta. In a letter, the Governor, Sir Edward Grigg, warned the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London that the political tone of the newspaper gave grounds for worry. In particular laments over the injustices the Kenyan people had suffered under colonialism, couched in Old Testament idiom, might have serious consequences: “There is a danger that this emotional and semi-religious propaganda may spread very rapidly among excitable and ignorant natives, and it is clearly desirable that means should be devised to protect the natives themselves … from such an insidious menace” (Grigg 1926).

The authorities closed down Muigwithania in 1940, along with the KCA. Four years later the self-taught journalist and intellectual Henry Muoria launched its successor, Mumenyereri (The Guardian). He addressed it to the same community that had constituted Muigwithania’s readership–a community that was being created by access to reading matter in their own language, among other influences (Lonsdale 1996). The first issue of the paper was in Gikuyu and English, but those following were restricted to Gikuyu in order to use all the available space for the enlightenment of the Gikuyu community who did not have a great deal of writing available in their own language (Muoria 1982:17).

Henry Muoria was born in 1914 in Kiambu in Kenya’s Central Province (Berman & Lonsdale 1992:414-416, Pugliese 2003, Frederiksen 2006). His parents were land-owning peasants and did not know how to read and write. The young Henry managed to get himself into an infant and primary school run by the Church Mission Society. His formal schooling lasted for seven years altogether. He taught himself enough English to be able to enter the Railway Training School of East African Railways, and became employed as a railway guard and later an assistant stationmaster. As a trainee he experienced the discrimination and brakes put on the development of business and enterprise for the African population that was characteristic of the policies of the colonial regime. Being African, he was paid less than his European and Asian colleagues both as a trainee and later as an employee. This experience contributed to his disgust with colonialism and racism and prompted him to join the existing African political organisations. As a young man he was a member of Kikuyu Central Association–an oppositional nationalist organisation based on the community that was most affected by British colonialism, the Gikuyu. The organisation was banned in 1940.

In his life and works Henry Muoria brought together many worlds–sometimes in ways that were paradoxical. He was born into a Kikuyu traditionalist family and made use of Christianity. He grew up in the countryside, but chose the city as his place of work. He invested in both urban and rural property and cultivated a large plot of land in his home area with the assistance of his wives. He was a wealthy man who came to know poverty in London. He loved his country, detested racism and was cosmopolitan in his outlook and knowledge of the world but was sometimes accused of being a Gikuyu chauvinist. He fought for independence, but independence did not need him after it had been consolidated.

The declaration of the Emergency in 1952 by the British constituted the caesura in Muoria’s personal life and in the social and political fortunes of Gikuyus and Africans in Kenya. The event disrupted the continuity between self, community and nation that Muoria devoted his working life to uphold. After October 1952, the colonial government sought to isolate the Gikuyu from the rest of African nationalist opposition by undermining the credibility of their leaders and spokesmen, and cancelling their access to public debate. Large numbers found themselves in protected villages and detention camps. All his life Muoria fought for a democratic space to be kept open to all communities in Kenya. He insisted by his example that Africans in Kenya should be partners in debate on self-determination and the end of colonialism. For a while he was successful.

In exile he kept writing. When he tried to keep up his claim and his efforts to educate a new public by the combined moves of turning inwards and documenting his own life, and turning outwards and documenting the shifting political debates and events in Kenya, he was not heard. He had great hopes following the publication in 1994 of his autobiography and a selection of his political essays from the 1940s and 1950s in I, the Gikuyu and the White Fury. The volume attracted some attention in Kenya where Muoria was by now recognised as an important figure in the nation’s history, but little internationally. His writings deserve to be better known.

by Bodil Folke Frederiksen published in Current Wrting, October 2006, Vol. 18 no 2.

Happy Easter

Dealing with widespread colonial human rights violations raises large practical difficulties. A country’s political balance may be delicate, and governments may be unwilling to pursue wide-ranging initiatives-or may be unable to do so without putting its own stability at risk.The many problems that flow from past abuses are often too complex to be solved by any one action. Judicial measures, including trials, are unlikely to suffice: If there are thousands or hundreds of thousands of victims and perpetrators, how can they all be dealt with fairly through the courts-especially in cases where those courts are weak ,corrupt and controlled by former colonial masters ?Even if courts were adequate to the task of prosecuting everyone who might deserve it, in order to reconstruct a damaged social fabric, other initiatives would be required.After two decades of practice, experience suggests that to be effective transitional justice should include several measures that complement one another. For no single measure is as effective on its own as when combined with the others

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