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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Letters From |
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Kenya |
Unhappy Valley
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| The unhealed wounds of tribal politics and election violence |
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ROBBIE COREY-BOULET FOR THE CARAVAN |
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| Mary Nyokabi, and her 3-year-old daughter, Ann Wanjiru, tidy the grave of Nyokabi's mother who died in a church fire in Kiambaa.
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| J |
OSEPH KAIRURI, a 54-year-old maize farmer
in Kenya’s Rift Valley, remembers that the attackers
wore T-shirts and bandannas, and that
they came armed with blades and stones and
arrows. He remembers that some of them had
concealed their faces with white clay, but that
the young man who ultimately cut him down—slicing him
so deep across
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his right forearm that Kairuri lost use of his hand—had not.
It was mid-morning on New Year’s Day 2008, two days
after a hard-fought presidential election had been called in
favour of the ethnic Kikuyu incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, spurring
fulminant violence throughout much of the valley—Kenya’s
western “breadbasket” of maize fields and vertiginous
escarpments. Along with the other men of Kiambaa village—a pocket of Kikuyu families surrounded by the Kalenjin,
who had backed the opposition—Kairuri had staged an
ill-starred last stand outside the Kenya Assemblies of God
church, where more than 100 women and children sought
refuge in the hours before the charge.
Overcome by the mob and writhing in pain on the ground,
Kairuri could only watch as the women inside the church—which had been doused in petrol and set alight—made what
would be, for many, a final decision: stay inside and burn
to death, or run out and face their assailants. He said he
was not surprised so many chose the former: “Once you see
an arrow pointing at you, you go back inside and take your
chances with the flames.”
That morning, more than 30 people were killed in an attack
that lasted barely half an hour. More than three years
later, the plot where the church once stood has a decidedly
unfinished aspect: plans for a memorial remain unrealised,
and nothing but grass lies behind a lone rock wall. There
are 36 graves farther back, just before the land gives way
to bush, but instead of proper headstones they are marked
with wooden stakes, some of which no longer stand upright.
Survivors identified 13 of the bodies, but the stakes for the
remaining graves read simply: “RIP Unknown.”
Between 30 December 2007, when the poll results were
announced, and 28 February 2008, when Kibaki and his opponent, Raila Odinga, agreed to a power-sharing deal, more
than 1,000 Kenyans lost their lives and hundreds of thousands
were displaced.
Attempts to establish a local tribunal to prosecute perpetrators
of the violence foundered in parliament. Last December,
International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Luis
Moreno-Ocampo identified six alleged organisers of the
unrest and accused them of crimes against humanity. But
the Kibaki wing of the coalition government has launched a
campaign to refer the cases to local courts, and the suspects
themselves have taken to painting The Hague process as an
imperialist violation of Kenyan sovereignty.
In broad strokes, this state of affairs—in which the passage of
time is tasked with bringing about a reconciliation that would
ideally be effected by accountability and reform—is nothing
new, particularly for residents of the Rift Valley. Although
the violence in 2008 was initially described as an aberration,
a blemish on the record of a country generally seen as stable,
campaigns and chaos have been inextricably linked here since
the reintroduction of multiparty politics in 1991. Indeed, to
refer merely to “the post-election violence” in Kenya is to be
insufficiently specific: three of the past four presidential elections
have led to widespread fighting along tribal lines.
And the valley has been at the centre of these conflicts. It
was here—as well as in neighbouring provinces—that British
colonialists expropriated land from Kenyan farmers after arriving
around the turn of the 20th century. At independence in 1963, Prime Minister (and soon to be President) Jomo
Kenyatta redistributed newly recovered plots to members
of his own Kikuyu tribe. In areas where the Kalenjin had
been established prior to colonialism, this policy created a
volatile fault line along which new arrivals abutted families
that had been displaced.
For 15 years, from 1992 to 2007, Tabitha Nyambura, a 42-
year-old Kikuyu, witnessed the resulting turbulence from
her two-acre plot near Koibatek district, which lies directly
on the fault line. The district was part of the power base of
Daniel arap Moi, who succeeded Kenyatta as president in
1978 and shared his predecessor’s penchant for using land
to shore up tribal support: In the 1992 election, the first multiparty
vote since independence, he tried to expel from the
valley members of tribes that were unlikely to vote for him,
fuelling violence that killed 1,500 and displaced 300,000.
Unfortunately for Nyambura, Moi, who ruled until 2002,
is a Kalenjin, meaning that for 10 long years she was on the
losing end of the valley’s tribal politics. In that first election,
as rioting Kalenjin mobs approached her home, she and
her family took cover in a nearby shopping centre. They returned
to wreckage once the violence subsided. “Everything was looted in the house—mattresses, clothes, even the utensils
in the kitchen,” she recalled recently.
Five years later, during an election that was similarly marred
by violence, Nyambura and her family decided to remain on
their land even as homes nearby burned to the ground. They
survived unscathed, but in the years that followed they refrained
from investing in their property. “We were thinking
that every five years our homes would be looted.”
The election of Kibaki in 2002, however, brought Nyambura
a sense of security she hadn’t felt in years, and a series
of upgrades followed: a two-bedroom stone house replaced
the original structure of wattle and daub; cows and goats
and chickens were purchased; a timber granary was constructed
and filled with maize during harvest time.
When the next vote came in 2007, at the end of a campaign
in which candidates again attempted to use tribal division to
their advantage, Nyambura went to the polls hoping the valley
would remain calm. The first indication that this hope
would be dashed came when she saw young Kalenjin men
gathering in groups that afternoon, and heard rumours that
they intended to drive the Kikuyu all the way east to Central
Province. That night, the first of the houses was set afire.
Defeated, Nyambura and her family, which included
11 children at the time, headed for the home of a Kalenjin
neighbour willing to shelter them. Their new house and
granary burned. Many of the chickens were also lost in the
fire. The cows and goats were stolen by the mobs.
The family eventually landed at Mawingu, an IDP camp
on the border between Rift Valley and the Central Province.
Nyambura has lived here with her husband and children—who now number 13—for the past three years, their assets
reduced to the piles of clothing and cooking utensils that fit
inside two tents of 10 feet by 10 feet.
Although the two abandoned acres remain in the family’s
possession, she said she had every intention of remaining at
Mawingu through the next election, expected in late 2012.
Asked why she had not been tempted to return, she said,
“If we plant on that land, by the time the crops are ripe the
Kalenjin will take them from us.”
Nyambura is not alone in her sense that violence next year
is inevitable; she could very well be in the majority. To be
sure, there are those who disagree, who think the last crisis
was so ruinous that no one would think of inciting a repeat.
In recent interviews, however, even those residents of the
Rift Valley who tried to convey optimism conceded that
there had been no substantive effort to stay the forces underlying
the fighting.
Joseph Kairuri, for instance, said he had come to terms
with the fact that those who carried out the burning of the
church in Kiambaa were unlikely to be charged anytime
soon. He knew the man who had slashed his forearm—because
the assailant had not disguised his face, Kairuri recognised
him instantly as a local livestock trader—and said
he did not mind that the man continued to live freely. “If
he comes and apologises, I will be ready to forgive him,”
Kairuri said.
But when asked if he thought an apology was forthcoming,
Kairuri, standing on ground where the church once
stood, surrounded by the stakes marking 36 graves, smiled,
shook his head and said no.
Robbie Corey-Boulet is a journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya. He has covered international justice issues in Cambodia and East Africa.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Josie
16 June 2011
10:51 AM
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Wow! That's a raelly neat answer!
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