"Until the antelopes have their own historians," counsels one sage, "History will always glorify hunting." There is succinct truth in this expression as revealed in the reportage of the Kenyan crisis over the past month.
The local press saw the events within the jaundiced prism of "post-election violence", parroting political reductionism that cushioned nefarious politicians from exposure, and punishment.
International journalists, with very few exceptions, fared a lot worse; to them this was a self-fulfilling prophecy, quoting Joseph Conrad's 19th century haunting travelogue across Africa, Heart of Darkness, as evidence.
The two narratives have been simplistic and misleading, if not outright fraudulent. But both have succeeded in throwing us off the spoor.
But there is no doubt that Kenya is one of the most unequal societies in the world, a land of "ten millionaires and ten million beggars," as populist politician Josiah Mwangi Kariuki put it, before he was brutally murdered in March 1975.
Several diagnoses have been suggested on what ails Kenya; namely, the failure of Westminster democracy and its "winner takes all" mould (hence Gordon Brown and others' prescription of power sharing); colonialism and its superficial borders (as though there is a state in the world with "natural boundaries"); tribalism - whatever that means - and the domination of the national economy by one community.
These prognoses are persuasive but defective. While it is true the imposition of western models of government ignored any home-grown structures of governance, as Basil Davidson elaborates in The Black Man's Burden, the actual birth pains for most of Africa, as manifest in the countless coups that destabilised the continent through the 1960s to the 1980s, were largely instigated by the west.
Tribalism and the domination of the economy are political expressions. Uganda's Idi Amin dreamt about the latter and subsequently expelled 80,000 Asians from his country in 1972. Jomo Kenyatta did it piecemeal from 1968 through a raft of oppressive, discriminatory legal instruments. Now someone thinks the Gikuyu are the problem. Next it will be someone else.
The ongoing mediation team, as with other past initiatives, have managed to skirt around the core issue, albeit shyly scratching its surface: land.
Land is what Me Katilili wa Meza and the Giriama people at the Kenyan coast, Waiyaki wa Hinga and the Gikuyu people in central Kenya, and the Nandi's Koitalel arap Samoei in Kenya's Rift Valley invoked over 100 years ago in their resistance against the British. As the Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o observes in Writers in Politics, among others, land wasn't just a means to a livelihood but the very basis of the people's social existence.
At the height of the British rule in Kenya, less than 1,000 white farmers held more than eight million acres of the nation's best land - virtually all the available arable land - acquired through brute force or shrewd conning.
The Maasai, for instance, who were the original inhabitants of the Rift Valley, lost their land through dubious "treaties" that allowed their forcible removal from their homelands to pave way for white settlers. The land in question covers the vast Laikipia plateau stretching across two million acres of mountain, savannah and forest, from Mount Kenya in the east to the Rift valley in the west.
The uprooting of the Kikuyu from their farmlands in Central Kenya triggered the Mau Mau armed insurgency that lasted one decade, one of the bloodiest periods in Kenya's history.
Kenya's founding president Jomo Kenyatta, mistakenly jailed as the leader of Mau Mau, emerged from incarceration preaching "suffering without bitterness," specifically urging the white settlers to "stay on and farm the land". And stay on and farm they did - but for the 780 white settlers who sold their land under the Settlement Transfer Fund Scheme.
Under this project, the British and West German governments and the World Bank contributed £20m towards land buy-out for redistribution. Only 1.2 million acres of the eight million acres held by settlers had been distributed by the end of 1971 when the scheme was wound up. To date, up to six million acres of land is estimated to be in settler hands, as happened 60 years ago.
Other lords of poverty include Kenya's political elite. According to the Kenya Land Alliance, a consortium of local NGOs pushing for social and land reform, more than a half of the arable land in Kenya is in the hands of just 20% of the 33 million Kenyans. Sixty-seven per cent of the population are squashed in less than an acre per person. A whopping 13% of the population is landless.
To demonstrate the obscenity of Kenya's political elite, two influential families hold between them land the size of one of Kenya's eight provinces. A former legislator owned an entire constituency, so the people he represented in parliament were not his constituents but subjects.
There are historical parallels between what's happening now and then. After the Mau Mau armed resistance, a political settlement was sought through the Lancaster House Conferences between 1960, 1962 and 1963 that among others, upheld the sanctity of the title deed, thereby legitimising the theft of the people's land.
Today, Kenyans are facing a forced political settlement going by the pronouncements from the Big Brothers. The US Congressional Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health concluded last week that what's happening in Kenya is a "political conflict with ethnic overtones", while European Union Development Commissioner Louis Michel warned that "those who push Kofi Annan to fail will pay for the consequences".
In the meantime, the settlers who took the people's land before independence still hold it. They use the fertile red volcanic soils to grow tea, coffee and horticulture while the expansive savannahs have been converted into eco-tourism sites where they draw the rich tourists. In 2004, for instance, the combined earnings from tea, coffee, tourism and horticulture grossed about £1 billion, nearly half of Kenya's annual national budget. Yet only 31% ended up in national coffers as tax and real earnings to Kenyans.
The rest went to largely British individuals and multinationals, validating Walter Rodney's treatise in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa that political independence in Africa did not mean economic liberation for the people and that the blood-sucking vampire, I mean, Empire is still intact.
Douglas Alexander, the British International Development Secretary, made a pitch for Kenyan roses this Valentine, saying their purchase would help an economy under a huge strain. That's very well, only that he didn't say 83% of the sector's total income goes to British firms like Homegrown and Sulmac.
If the British are not visible at the ongoing mediation, it does not mean they are not being heard. They learnt long ago, I suppose, one does not speak with his mouth full.
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