Politics
Project Kenya: A Plantation Devoid of Canons
10 min read.The demise of Project Kenya could be attributed to Kenyans’ inability to reimagine their country as a nation-state with a common set of values that protect and promote the public good. This is largely because they have not created the canons that could provide them with the tools with which to critically examine their society.
The peril of our national education system is that it shapes students to believe in the regime’s preferred version of the country’s history to the exclusion of other alternative narratives. Students learn to order their lives within the faulty and often false frames of reality provided by the ruling regime with the intent of entrenching loyalty, deference, and sometimes subservience to the state.
A typical Kenyan schooled in the officially sanctioned social studies texts will refer to Kenya as a nation-state when in reality it is a plantation established circa 1885. This Kenyan will speak of independence gained in 1963 while remaining oblivious to the negotiated transfer of the colonial plantation from the white aristocracy—with the colonial logic remaining intact—into the hands of the black aristocracy.
The same citizen is then left wondering why this country does not behave as a country ought to, as it is ill-equipped to decipher the colonial pulse of this plantation whose logic and DNA are still extractive, corrupt, violent and tribal.
A typical Kenyan schooled in the officially sanctioned social studies texts will refer to Kenya as a nation-state when in reality it is a plantation established circa 1885.
From 387 BC when Plato set up the academy—deriving the name from Academus the Attic, a hero in Greek mythology—academia has come to represent the true crucible for sharpening the minds of men throughout civilisations. Academus was famed for his redemptive power, first on Helen, the underage bride of King Theseus, and then on the minds of men for hundreds of years thereafter.
But long before the Platonic academy was built, medieval centres of learning existed in pre-modern societies, sprawling from the sandy Sahelian castles of the University of Timbuktu, to Taxila in ancient India, Shang Xiang in China, the ancient University of Alexandria, which flourished 2,300 years ago, and the school of Sabeans in medieval Persia.
From these bootstrap conceptions of centres of knowledge arose the great academies of the world that were primarily anchored in the progressive growth of disciplines and the respective complex institutions that were exclusively dedicated to their study and to knowledge production.
It is from this strain that the Renaissance academies of 15th century Italy arose, built around neoplatonist education. Then came the 16th century literary-aesthetic academies, mainly patronised by the children of the elite, including such famous academies as Notti Vaticane, Intrepidi and Vignaiuoli.
Out of this progression of disciplines and academies arose the academies of the arts, academies of sciences, literary-philosophical academies, academies of history, linguistic academies and, eventually, academic societies.
Logic, theology, sociology of our education
Interestingly, this rise of knowledge also coincided with the expansion of capital into the global South through the conquistadors and the colonial enterprise.
By the late 1800s, when barely 60 per cent of the world’s states had been formed, capital (corporatocracy) began to supplant nation-states (democracy) as the most dominant form of organisation in society. This mainly began in 1896 when the industrial titans in the West realised that they would have to preserve their capitalistic interests by funding political stooges. That marked the shift of the centre of societal life from the home to the state, and finally to industry and the office.
This shift uniquely entrenched the problem all too familiar with our education system, which is that we now educate for the market instead of educating for society. The problem implicit in educating for the market is that it prioritises skills over non-monetisable knowledge in ways that fundamentally alter the value of education in the eyes of society and inadvertently exposes it to the ravages of market dynamics. Many of you out there are in careers that did not exist when you started school and most of your children will be in careers that have not been invented yet. Some students will find that the industry they are now training for will have been wiped out by the time they graduate. That is just one of the many follies of training for the market.
This shift uniquely entrenched the problem all too familiar with our education system, which is that we now educate for the market instead of educating for society.
The blowback from educating for the market rather than educating for the society is that the market requires signals, such as a degree or diploma certificate. These signals are domiciled in particular institutions—mainly those mandated by the state to provide education. Therefore, the average citizen learns to centralise classroom education, while alternative knowledge systems are ignored and fizzle out, atrophied by disuse and neglect.
On the other hand, educating for humanity means complementing classrooms with museums and local knowledge and libraries and creating reverence for knowledge for its own sake. It means fusing knowledge with skills, not denigrating knowledge especially when it does not fit into any immediate solutioneering need.
The case for canons
In the absence of rigour and vibrancy in the nationalistic classroom-based education, Kenyan educators have to take upon themselves the difficult duty of developing canons as pointers to the critical extra-classroom texts for the society. A canon simply refers to a body of books, tracts, narratives and other texts judged to be the most critical, insightful, and influential of a particular time period, context or place.
Take the scriptures for example, the most famous of the canons, consisting of 66 books written in three different languages—Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic—by 40 authors from more than 23 different professions over a span of 1600 years, and with a 400-year gap between the Old Testament and the New Testament.
These books were written in five regions—Judea, Babylon, Asia Minor, Greece and Italy—with books on law, systematic thinking, history, culture, philosophy, and theology transcribed mainly from four major families of manuscripts.
These manuscripts were recovered from across three continents: the Alexandrian manuscripts were recovered in Egypt, the Byzantine manuscripts in modern-day Turkey, and the Western and Caesarean manuscripts in Libya. Out of these, the church established its core texts.
The canonisation of authors and books into popular usage is based not only on their quality, but also on their relevance to society’s moral, historical, social, and artistic context. The subjective desires of the canonisers, including their moral inclination, gender, geographical location, biases and motives, influence the list incredibly. That is why the question of what goes into a canon and what does not is always a never-ending topic of scrutiny and debate for scholars and readers across all academic disciplines.
Moreover, the creation of canons lends them subject to change and alteration to reflect the changing societal dynamics, as is the case with the increasing diversification of canons away from domination by Western white patriarchs like Homer and Shakespeare.
According to the scholar Paul Lauter, who historicised the American canon, the first American literature classes started in the mid-to-late 1890s, and the term “literary canon” came into use in 1929 at the same time as the first American literature textbooks were rolled out.
In recent decades, canons have diversified to include African canons, African-American canons, Asian canons, Latin American canons and feminist canons, which are complemented by discipline-specific ones such as canons of philosophy, linguistics, economics and a litany of other emerging disciplines.
Reimagining the nation
Curiously, canons are as much a political project as they are intellectual projects, laden with illuminating beliefs as to whose voices make it into the marketplace of ideas and get memorialised into pop culture.
It is in the very nature of certain books and writings to be deemed critical and reflective as well as beneficial to a nation’s soul based on their versatility, prestige, utility, power, and incisiveness and writing quality. Canons, therefore, within their historical-literary sense, equip the citizens with the ability to philosophise their nation-states.
A nation grounded in the culture of constantly evolving canonical creeds is able to articulate its existence, humanise its people and arm them with the tools necessary to see through the skilled lies of the neoliberal project with its insidious desire to quantify every aspect of human existence.
While referring to the state of Nigerian consciousness, the late Nigerian scholar, Prof. Pius Adensami opined:
Few Nigerians [or Kenyans] understand that our chaos, our urban rot and rural decay, our decrepit roads, hospitals, and Universities, our power failures and water shortages, and our fuel scarcity are collective consequences of our wanton embrace of the unthought and unreflected society.
Since we inherited this dilapidated contraption from the British, we have made not a single attempt to philosophise the Nigerian project through sustained critical thought. The price is always very heavy when a people develop a collective hostility to philosophy.
Dubai, London, Paris, and all the other destinations that Nigerians adore and desire are all outward manifestations of something called modernity. Democracy, law and order, urban planning and regulation are all features of modernity. Innovation and science and technology are equally features of modernity.
Adensami made an accurate indictment of the general public’s unwillingness to appreciate the philosophy that undergirds disciplines and the resultant mess often prevalent in societies that lack canonical creeds.
According to scriptural history, long before the church convened the Council of Nicaea in 325AD to decide on the 66 books that make the Bible, Moses, the Hebrew patriarch, went to Mt. Sinai to pick up two tablets that were, hopefully, the redemptive canons that would mitigate the chaotic evil brought about by the apple debacle in the Garden of Eden. As is typical of canons, the ten creeds contained in the two Sinaitic canons would expand to 632 laws contained in the Hebrew Torah and the Talmud before being boiled down to two by the Aramaic philosopher Jesus Christ. Interestingly, in the two precepts with which he summarised the entire Hebrew canon, Christ simply calls for one to love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul and mind and to love their neighbour as themselves. He was in essence asserting that in the sacred-social axis of a society’s existence, the social order of human civilisation has to be undergirded by the sacred order in one’s relation to their deity.
A nation grounded in the culture of constantly evolving canonical creeds is able to articulate its existence, humanise its people and arm them with the tools necessary to see through the skilled lies of the neoliberal project with its insidious desire to quantify every aspect of human existence.
Jesus simply demonstrated that the canon process therefore goes beyond the politics of memorialisation, the intellectualisation of social reality, and the philosophisation of its existence; it is a spiritual duty of helping a nation decide what defines its popular beliefs on critical human decisions, such as the meaning of life, existence, history, sexuality, community, and identity.
Back to the feisty Adensami:
Nigerians [or Kenyans] see the end product but they have absolute contempt for the road which led the advanced world to the glittering modernity that they desire. They do not know that modernity and its gloss exist today because a long line of thinkers in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe produced philosophies which became the bedrock of what we see and call modernity today.
They do not know that the cars they drive are products of philosophy before being products of science and technology. Because Nigerians are ignorant of these things, they frown on philosophy, intellectual labour, and critical thought. The slightest encounter with philosophy and critical thought in our lives is quickly dismissed as “dogon turenchi”.
Everywhere you look, our national life is a sordid and tragic display of the absence of philosophy in our conceptualisation of Nigerian society. When you declare war on philosophy, knowledge, and critical intellection, the consequence, simply put, is Nigeria as you and I know her today. Nigeria can therefore be defined as the absence of and hostility to philosophy [and canons].
Across the Atlantic Ocean it is said of the United States that it borrowed its philosophical categories from the Greek canons, its political categories from Ancient Roman canons, its theological categories from the law and the prophets of the Hebrew canon, and its social categories from British Victorian values. It is appropriately parenthetical to add that it borrowed its secularising power from the thoroughly desacralised French canons through the 1970s identity politics and Foucault-ian poststructuralist philosophies which, I might add, constitute a large part of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of American life today.
It is this tapping into the canonical existence of medieval societies through which we get the genius of the impressive Euro-American edifice. The United States, therefore, comes into existence as the apex of the 2000-year-old Greco-Roman-Hebrew canons which that were distilled into the American declaration of independence, stating that:
We hold these truths to be self-evident [logic], that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights [theology] that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness [philosophy]. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed [politics] . . .
Theory in everything
It takes the theorising and philosophising of one’s existence for an individual and his resident community to reimagine their society and to reimagine their existence. Let’s face it, food and shelter, water, schooling, and healthcare are all theory and the theory-practical divide is a false dichotomy. There is an entire theory as to why Nairobi has more schools than, say, Wajir or Kakamega; there is a whole theory behind the vibrant rural modernity in Meru; it is the theory that determines whether there is water in your neighbourhood or not. The theory could be racism, humanism, urban anthropology, historical accidents, ethnic profiling, social notions of wealth and development, political marginalisation—it is all theory.
There is a theory behind our obsession with concrete and soil. Yes, metal pipes bringing water to your house carry silent theories within them. The theory could be in the quality of materials used, the government idea of sustainable infrastructure, the social class of the neighbourhood or the work ethic of the engineers and the enforcement of quality controls in the system.
It takes the theorising and philosophising of one’s existence for an individual and his resident community to reimagine their society and to reimagine their existence.
Behind the silent width of the cemented Mbagathi Road or the glaring omission of footpaths on Jogoo Road or even poor markings on Waiyaki Way lie theories. Sometimes the theory is simply entrenched classism and the voicelessness of the poor. Every time you claim that that’s just theory, we want practice, that too is a theory; it is a theory that posits that theory is not important.
Darwinism, democracy, racism, pan-Africanism and all other -isms and -acies silently populate all the “practical” designs and outcomes out there. It’s no use mocking theories without giving people alternative metaphysical constructs and ideas. And when we deny ideology and paint theory as unnecessary, abstract, esoteric, pie-in-the-sky, we display a nation sorely in need of a canon.
Tragically, we don’t like theory so we think TVET and the Competency-based Curriculum will make our kids learn “practical skills”, forgetting that that too counts as theory.
These kids might never invent anything new because invention, innovation and improvement of existing systems and infrastructure requires an understanding of their theories of origin and development, but theory is not important, right? At best, they will adopt solutions from abroad without interrogating the anthropological, historical, demographic and social contexts within which those systems and infrastructure, policy or setups were invented and how those contexts influenced the designs and workability of those systems; yet it’s all in the theories domiciled in some form of a canon.
Everyone for themselves
There are those that think that canons are the elitist conceptions of egomaniac Kenyan scholars and thinkers laden with a well-concealed contempt for the hoi polloi’s capacity to pursue knowledge on their own. The central thesis of their argument rests upon the unnecessarily idealistic and manifestly illusory belief that everyone can and should pursue intellectual labour unencumbered by the patronising canon-building efforts of intellectual elites.
According to this school of thought, the process of building canons is filtered through gatekeeping and a god-like status that scholars purportedly grant themselves to decide what the society should read.
The truth is that, in the face of a nationalistic education that is often the vehicle for the regime’s official narrative, and the inability of many to decipher fact from fake news, the presence of a wide range of alternative canons will improve the scope of books and texts that one needs to help them figure out the society.
The humanities, therefore, owe the Kenyan masses a canon. So do the arts, the social sciences, the hard sciences, linguistics and pretty much every professional field and discipline. If this is not done, we might as well watch Project Kenya collapse and with it the hopes, dreams and aspirations of its people.
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Politics
Being Black in Argentina
What does Javier Milei’s presidential victory mean for Argentina’s black and indigenous minorities?
On November 19, Javier Milei secured the presidency of the Republic of Argentina with 56% of the vote. However, his victory is expected to significantly impact a specific segment of the country.
During my six-month exchange in Argentina’s Venado Tuerto (pop. 75,000) in 2016, I encountered someone of shared Black ethnicity on the street only once. A person whom many locals incidentally mistook for me—along with a Cuban Black girl, the only black person like me in the whole high school. As insignificant as a census of this small city’s population may seem, it effectively illustrates a sobering reality: the presence of Black people in Argentina is sparse, and their numbers have dwindled over time.
“Hay más por otros lados, acá no llegaron” (There are more of them elsewhere, they have not arrived here) is a rhetoric prevalent among many Argentines, but the reality is quite dissimilar. Contacts between Argentina and Black people, particularly of African descent, date back to the 16th century transatlantic slave trade, when West and Central Africa people were brought by Spanish and Portuguese settlers to the coastal city of Buenos Aires, only to be sold and moved mostly within the Río de la Plata, present-day Argentina and Uruguay. In “Hiding in Plain Sight, Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic,” Erika Denise Edwards reports that between 1587 and 1640 approximately 45,000 African slaves disembarked in Buenos Aires. By the end of the 18th century, one-third of Argentina’s population was Black.
What, then, became of the Black African population in Argentina? Some attribute their decline to historical factors such as their active involvement in conflicts including the War of Independence against Spanish colonists (1810-1819) and the war with Paraguay (1865-1870), in which Black men often found themselves on the front lines, enduring the brunt of the attacks, or even choosing to desert and flee the country. These factors intersect with a gradual process of miscegenation and interracial mixing, leading to a progressive whitening of the population—both in terms of physical attributes and ideology.
Adding to this complex mix, political rhetoric comes into play. Influential Argentine leaders, such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in the 19th century, idealized white Europe not only as a model for overcoming the country’s socio-economic challenges but also as a narrative that implied the absence of Black people in Argentina, thereby erasing an integral part of the nation’s history.
Doing so has shrewdly allowed a country to avoid reckoning with its past of slavery and navigate the complexities of its presence, using the escamotage that there are no race-related issues in the country because there are no Black people. This assertion is incorrect for several reasons beyond those mentioned above. First, despite being imperceptible to the naked eye, there is a small but existing population of Afro-descendants in Argentina. Nevertheless, in my second stay in Argentina, this time in Buenos Aires, it became more apparent to me how a certain nationalistic current, in the footsteps of Sarmiento, proudly makes itself of this consistent lack of Black heritage. Comparing itself favorably to neighboring countries, this current boasts a notion of white supremacy in Argentina, which celebrates the Italian immigration from the 19th and 20th centuries as the foundation of national identity, while largely overlooking the historical legacy of African bodies that predates it.
As a result, even in a cosmopolitan capital city such as Buenos Aires, a significant portion of the white Argentine population based its identity on my opposite—not knowing that as an Afro-Italian, my Italian citizenship actually made them closer to my blackness and African roots than they wanted. Asserting that there are no racial concerns in Argentina is misleading. It amounts to the invisibilization of racial discrimination in a country where those who deviate from the preferred prototype, including Indigenous communities such as Mapuche, Quechua, Wichi, and Guarani, experience limited access to education and social services, and are disproportionately prone to experience poverty than their white counterparts.
Even within everyday discourse in Argentina, the assertion is refuted: many are labeled Black despite not matching the physical appearance associated with the term. The expression “es un negro” might refer to everyone who has darker skin tones, grouping them into a specific social category. However, beyond a mere description of physical attributes, “es un negro” delineates a person situated at various margins and lower rungs of society, whether for economic or social reasons. The appellation is also ordinarily used in jest as a nickname for a person who, of “black phenotype,” has nothing. The label “morocho” seems to be the most appropriate appellation for dark-skinned people in the country.
Argentine white supremacist identity is often matched by a certain right-wing political ideology that is classist, macho and, to make no bones about it, xenophobic. In the 2023 elections, such a systemic structure takes on the face of Javier Milei. The Argentine’s Donald Trump claimed in 2022 at the presentation of his book that he did not want to apologize for “being a white, blonde [questionable element], blue-eyed man.” With false modesty, the demagogue took on the burden of what it means in the country to have his hallmarks: privilege, status, and power.
Milei’s need for apologies should not revolve around his connotations but rather the proposals presented during his election campaign and outlined in his political program, which include the dollarization of pesos and the removal of government subsidies. Besides assessing if these actions would really benefit the vulnerable economy of the country, it’s worth questioning why it’s the middle-class, often white population that stands to suffer the least from such policies. They can afford to transact in dollars, weather an initial depreciation of their income, and provide for their children’s education without relying on government subsidies. In essence, they can do without the limited benefits offered by the Argentine state, given their already privileged positions.
The election of this politician not only adversely affects Black minorities, but also targets apparent minorities whom this divisive ideology seeks to erase, including Indigenous populations and the poorest segment of society—the current Argentinian “blacks”—who significantly enrich the Argentine populace. In such a scenario, one can only hope that the world will strive for a more consistent record of their existence.
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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site every week.
Politics
Risks and Opportunities of Admitting Somalia Into the EAC
The process of integrating Somalia into the EAC should be undertaken with long-term success in mind rather than in the light of the situation currently prevailing in the country.
The East African Community (EAC), whose goal is to achieve economic and political federation, brings together three former British colonies – Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania – and newer members Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, and most recently the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Somalia first applied to join the EAC in 2012 but with fighting still ongoing on the outskirts of Mogadishu, joining the bloc was impossible at the time. Eleven years later, joining the bloc would consolidate the significant progress in governance and security and, therefore, Somalia should be admitted into the EAC without undue delay. This is for several reasons.
First, Somalia’s admission would be built on an existing foundation of goodwill that the current leadership of Somalia and EAC partner states have enjoyed in the recent past. It is on the basis of this friendship that EAC states continue to play host to Somali nationals who have been forced to leave their country due to the insecurity resulting from the prolonged conflict. In addition, not only does Somalia share a border with Kenya, but it also has strong historical, linguistic, economic and socio-cultural links with all the other EAC partner states in one way or another.
Dr Hassan Khannenje of the Horn Institute for Strategic Studies said: ”Somalia is a natural member of the EAC and should have been part of it long ago.”
A scrutiny of all the EAC member states will show that there is a thriving entrepreneurial Somali diaspora population in all their economies. If indeed the EAC is keen to realise its idea of the bloc being a people-centred community as opposed to being a club of elites, then a look at the spread of Somali diaspora investment in the region would be a start. With an immense entrepreneurial diaspora, Somalia’s admission will increase trading opportunities in the region.
Second, Somalia’s 3,000 km of coastline (the longest in Africa) will give the partner states access to the Indian Ocean corridor to the Gulf of Aden. The governments of the EAC partner states consider the Indian Ocean to be a key strategic and economic theatre for their regional economic interests. Therefore, a secure and stable Somali coastline is central to the region’s maritime trade opportunities.
Despite possessing such a vast maritime resource, the continued insecurity in Somalia has limited the benefits that could accrue from it. The problem of piracy is one example that shows that continued lawlessness along the Somali coast presents a huge risk for all the states that rely on it in the region.
The importance of the maritime domain and the Indian Ocean has seen Kenya and Somalia square it out at the International Court of Justice over a maritime border dispute.
Omar Mahmood of the International Crisis Group said that ”Somalia joining the EAC then might present an opportunity to discuss deeper cooperation frameworks within the bloc, including around the Kenya-Somalia maritime dispute. The environment was not as conducive to collaboration before, and perhaps it explains why the ICJ came in. Integrating into the EAC potentially offers an opportunity to de-escalate any remaining tensions and in turn, focus on developing mechanisms that can be beneficial for the region.”
Nasong’o Muliro, a foreign policy and security specialist in the region, said: “The East African states along the East African coast are looking for opportunities to play a greater role in the maritime security to the Gulf of Aden. Therefore, Somalia joining the EAC bloc will allow them to have a greater say.”
Third, Somalia’s membership of the Arab League means that there is a strong geopolitical interest from Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. However, Somalia stands to gain more in the long-term by joining the EAC rather than being under the control of the Gulf states and, to a large extent, Turkey. This is because, historically, competing interests among the Gulf states have contributed to the further balkanisation of Somalia by some members supporting breakaway regions.
On the other hand, the EAC offers a safer option that will respect Somalia’s territorial integrity. Furthermore, EAC partner states have stood in solidarity with Somalia during the difficult times of the civil conflict, unlike the Gulf states. The majority of the troop-contributing countries for the African Union Mission to Somalia came from the EAC partner states of Uganda, Kenya and Burundi. Despite having a strategic interest in Somalia, none of the Gulf states contributed troops to the mission. Therefore, with the expected drawdown of the ATMIS force in Somalia, the burden could fall on the EAC to fill in the vacuum. Building on the experience of deploying in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, it is highly likely that it could be called upon to do the same in Somalia when ATMIS exits by 2024.
The presence of the Al Shabaab group in Somalia is an albatross around its neck such that the country cannot be admitted into the EAC without factoring in the risks posed by the group.
According to a report by the International Crisis Group, the government of Somalia must move to consolidate these gains – especially in central Somalia – as it continues with its offensive in other regions. However, Somalia may not prevail over the Al Shabaab on its own; it may require a regional effort and perhaps this is the rationale some policymakers within the EAC have envisioned. If the EAC can offer assurances to Somalia’s fledgling security situation, then a collective security strategy from the bloc might be of significance.
Somalia’s admission comes with risks too. Kenya and Uganda have in the past experienced attacks perpetrated by Al Shabaab and, therefore, opening up their borders to Somalia is seen as a huge risk for these countries. The spillover effect of the group’s activities creates a lot of discomfort among EAC citizens, in particular those who believe that the region remains vulnerable to Al Shabaab attacks.
If the EAC can offer assurances to Somalia’s fledgling security situation, then a collective security strategy from the bloc might be of significance.
The EAC Treaty criteria under which a new member state may be admitted into the community include – but are not limited to – observance and practice of the principles of good governance, democracy and the rule of law. Critics believe that Somalia fulfils only one key requirement to be admitted to the bloc – sharing a border with an EAC partner state, namely, Kenya. On paper, it seems to be the least prepared when it comes to fulfilling the other requirements. The security situation remains fragile and the economy cannot support the annual payment obligations to the community.
According to the Fragility State Index, Somalia is ranked as one of the poorest among the 179 countries assessed. Among the key pending issues is the continued insecurity situation caused by decades of civil war and violent extremism. Furthermore, Human Rights Watch ranks Somalia low on human rights and justice – a breakdown of government institutions has rendered them ineffective in upholding the human rights of its citizens.
Somalia’s citizens have faced various forms of discrimination due to activities beyond their control back in their country. This has led to increasingly negative and suspicious attitudes towards Somalis and social media reactions to the possibility of Somalia joining the EAC have seen a spike in hostility towards citizens of Somalia. The country’s admission into the bloc could be met with hostility from the citizens of other partner states.
Dr Nicodemus Minde, an academic on peace and security, agrees that indeed citizens’ perceptions and attitudes will shape their behaviour towards Somalia’s integration. He argues that ”the admission of Somalia is a rushed process because it does not address the continued suspicion and negative perception among the EAC citizens towards the Somali people. Many citizens cite the admission of fragile states like South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo as a gateway of instability to an already unstable region”.
Indeed, the biggest challenge facing the EAC has been how to involve the citizens in their activities and agenda. To address this challenge, Dr Minde says that ’’the EAC needs to conduct a lot of sensitisation around the importance of integration because to a large extent many EAC citizens have no clue on what regional integration is all about”. The idea of the EAC being a people-centred organisation as envisioned in the Treaty has not been actualised. The integration process remains very elitist as it is the heads of state that determine and set the agenda.
The country’s admission into the bloc could be met with hostility from the citizens of other partner states.
Dr Khannenje offers a counter-narrative, arguing that public perception is not a major point of divergence since “as the economies integrate deeper, some of these issues will become easy to solve”. There are also those who believe that the reality within the EAC is that every member state has issues with one or the other partner state and, therefore, Somalia will be in perfect company.
A report by the Economic Policy Research Centre outlines the various avenues through which both the EAC and Somalia can benefit from the integration process and observes that there is therefore a need to fast-track the process because the benefits far outweigh the risks.
EAC integration is built around the spirit of good neighbourliness. It is against this backdrop that President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has extended the goodwill to join the EAC and therefore, it should not be vilified and condemned, but rather embraced. As Onyango Obbo has observed, Somalia is not joining the EAC – Somalia is already part of the EAC and does not need any formal welcoming.
Many critics have argued that the EAC has not learnt from the previous rush to admit conflict-plagued South Sudan and the DRC. However, the reality is that Somalia will not be in conflict forever; at some point, there will be tranquillity and peace. Furthermore, a keen look at the history of the EAC member states shows that a number of them have experienced cycles of conflict in the past.
Somalia is, therefore, not unique. Internal contradictions and conflict are some of the key features that Somalia shares with most of the EAC member states. The process of integrating Somalia into the EAC should, therefore, be undertaken with long-term success in mind rather than in the light of the situation currently prevailing in the country.
Politics
The Repression of Palestine Solidarity in Kenya
Kenya is one of Israel’s closest allies in Africa. But the Ruto-led government isn’t alone in silencing pro-Palestinian speech.
Israel has been committing genocide against the people of Occupied Palestine for 75 years and this has intensified over the last 30 days with the merciless carpet bombing of Gaza, along with raids and state-sanctioned settler violence in the West Bank. In the last month of this intensified genocide, the Kenyan government has pledged its solidarity to Israel, even as the African Union released a statement in support of Palestinian liberation. While peaceful marches have been successfully held in Kisumu and Mombasa, in Nairobi, Palestine solidarity organizers were forced to cancel a peaceful march that was to be held at the US Embassy on October 22. Police threatened that if they saw groups of more than two people outside the Embassy, they would arrest them. The march was moved to a private compound, Cheche Bookshop, where police still illegally arrested three people, one for draping the Palestinian flag around his shoulders. Signs held by children were snatched by these same officers.
When Boniface Mwangi took to Twitter denouncing the arrest, the response by Kenyans spoke of the success of years of propaganda by Israel through Kenyan churches. To the Kenyan populous, Palestine and Palestinians are synonymous with terrorism and Israel’s occupation of Palestine is its right. However, this Islamophobia and xenophobia from Kenyans did not spring from the eternal waters of nowhere. They are part of the larger US/Israel sponsored and greedy politician-backed campaign to ensure Kenyans do not start connecting the dots on Israel’s occupation of Palestine with the extra-judicial killings by Kenyan police, the current occupation of indigenous people’s land by the British, the cost-of-living crisis and the IMF debts citizens are paying to fund politician’s lavish lifestyles.
Kenya’s repression of Palestine organizing reflects Kenya’s long-standing allyship with Israel. The Kenyan Government has been one of Israel’s A-star pupils of repression and is considered to be Israel’s “gateway” to Africa. Kenya has received military funding and training from Israel since the 60s, and our illegal military occupation of Somalia has been funded and fueled by Israel along with Britain and the US. Repression, like violence, is not one dimensional; repression does not just destabilize and scatter organizers, it aims to break the spirit and replace it instead with apathy, or worse, a deep-seated belief in the rightness of oppression. In Israel’s architecture of oppression through repression, the Apartheid state has created agents of repression across many facets of Kenyan life, enacting propaganda, violence, race, and religion as tools of repression of Palestine solidarity organizing.
When I meet with Naomi Barasa, the Chair of the Kenya Palestine Solidarity Movement, she begins by placing Kenya’s repression of Palestine solidarity organizing in the context of Kenya as a capitalist state. “Imperialism is surrounded and buffered by capitalistic interest,” she states, then lists on her fingers the economic connections Israel has created with Kenya in the name of “technical cooperation.” These are in agriculture, security, business, and health; the list is alarming. It reminds me of my first memory of Israel (after the nonsense of the promised land that is)—about how Israel was a leader in agricultural and irrigation technologies. A dessert that flowed with milk and honey.
Here we see how propaganda represses, even before the idea of descent is born: Kenyans born in the 1990s grew up with an image of a benign, prosperous, and generous Christian Israel that just so happened to be unfortunate enough to be surrounded by Muslim states. Israel’s PR machine has spent 60 years convincing Kenyan Christians of the legitimacy of the nation-state of Israel, drawing false equivalences between Christianity and Zionism. This Janus-faced ideology was expounded upon by Israel’s ambassador to Kenya, Michel Lotem, when he said “Religiously, Kenyans are attached to Israel … Israel is the holy land and they feel close to Israel.” The cog dizzy of it all is that Kenyan Christians, fresh from colonialism, are now Africa’s foremost supporters of colonialism and Apartheid in Israel. Never mind the irony that in 1902, Kenya was the first territory the British floated as a potential site for the resettlement of Jewish people fleeing the pogroms in Europe. This fact has retreated from public memory and public knowledge. Today, churches in Kenya facilitate pilgrimages to the holy land and wield Islamophobia as a weapon against any Christian who questions the inhumanity of Israel’s 75-year Occupation and ongoing genocide.
Another instrument of repression of pro-Palestine organizing in Kenya is the pressure put on Western government-funded event spaces to decline hosting pro-Palestine events. Zahid Rajan, a cultural practitioner and organizer, tells me of his experiences trying to find spaces to host events dedicated to educating Kenyans on the Palestinian liberation struggle. He recalls the first event he organized at Alliance Français, Nairobi in 2011. Alliance Français is one of Nairobi’s cultural hubs and regularly hosts art and cultural events at the space. When Zahid first approached Alliance to host a film festival for Palestinian films, they told him that they could not host this event as they already had (to this day) an Israeli film week. Eventually, they agreed to host the event with many restrictions on what could be discussed and showcased. Unsurprisingly they refused to host the event again. The Goethe Institute, another cultural hub in Kenya that offers its large hall for free for cultural events, has refused to host the Palestinian film festival or any other pro-Palestine event. Both Alliance and Goethe are funded by their parent countries, France and Germany respectively (which both have pro-Israel governments). There are other spaces and businesses that Zahid has reached out to host pro-Palestine education events that have, in the end, backtracked on their agreement to do so. Here, we see the evolution of state-sponsored repression to the private sphere—a public-private partnership on repression, if you will.
Kenya’s members of parliament took to heckling and mocking as a tool of repression when MP Farah Maalim wore an “Arafat” to Parliament on October 25. The Speaker asked him to take it off stating that it depicted “the colors of a particular country.” When Maalim stood to speak he asked: “Tell me which republic,” and an MP in the background could be heard shouting “Hamas” and heckling Maalim, such that he was unable to speak on the current genocide in Gaza. This event, seen in the context of Ambassador Michael Lotem’s charm offensive at the county and constituency level, is chilling. His most recent documented visit was to the MP of Kiharu, Ndindi Nyoro, on November 2. The Israeli propaganda machine has understood the importance of County Governors and MPs in consolidating power in Kenya.
Yet, in the face of this repression, we have seen what Naomi Barasa describes as “many pockets of ad hoc solidarity,” as well as organized solidarity with the Palestinian cause. We have seen Muslim communities gather for many years to march for Palestine, we have seen student movements such as the Nairobi University Student Caucus release statements for Palestine, and we have seen social justice centers such as Mathare Social Justice Centre host education and screening events on Palestinian liberation. Even as state repression of Palestine solidarity organizing has intensified in line with the deepening of state relations with Apartheid Israel, more Kenyans are beginning to connect the dots and see the reality that, as Mandela told us all those years ago, “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of Palestinians.”
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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site every week.
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