Politics
Moi and the Simplification of the Kenyan Mind
13 min read.With the colonial ideology of order, but without a tribal elite to implement it, Daniel arap Moi maintained the exploitative state by crushing alternative spaces of imagination in the same way his predecessors had done, but with more cruelty. As the saying goes, every time history repeats itself, the price goes up.
I have always had a tortured relationship with Daniel arap Moi, the second president of Kenya. I was in primary school when I first became conscious of him – because of the milk that we drank in school, which was provided for free by his government. As I became a teenager, I was aware of the world my parents lived in, trying to forge a better Kenya, and Moi using the leadership of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA) to persecute them.
But there was still a sense in which I was distanced from the cause of my parents’ struggles. When I was in Form 2 or Form 3 (I can’t remember), Moi visited our school and I asked him for an autograph. He was gracious and wrote that he wished me a bright future. The next Monday, our headmistress blasted the entire school about our lack of respect for an elderly statesman.
With all the abuse and violence typical of schools, there was one thing I appreciated about school: meeting Kenyans from different ethnic groups, whom I might have never met (and anyone who knows PCEA knows what I’m talking about). I loved finding out about Kenya from different people, and singing folk songs from other communities. And I knew that was Moi’s work because I heard people complain that Moi had degraded education with the “quota system”. I used to repeat that argument, until one of our family friends who worked in the Ministry of Education explained to me the importance of addressing educational inequality. Now I’m the one who shouts myself hoarse about inequality in education.
Granted, I have since understood that Moi’s intentions for diversifying the education system were no based on egalitarianism. Rather, he wanted to create a Kalenjin elite built in the same model which the British used in the 1950s to mould Kikuyu loyalists into an elite. But I was a teenager; I wouldn’t have known that history then.
Moi was president for literally my entire educational life. My experience, especially of music education, for which I have fought for the last ten years, was influenced by his commissioning of music in praise of himself. It was his era that made me musically conscious, even though my fight now is for a more diverse Kenyan soundtrack.
Moi left office when I was a PhD student. I remember the euphoria as clearly as yesterday. It was beautiful. The day Mwai Kibaki was sworn in as the third president, a load was lifted off our shoulders. We smiled again. Kenya was a land of possibilities. We could do things differently. We could listen to Kalamashaka’s “Tafsiri hii,” laugh at Redikyulass imitating Moi, and read our own stories in Kwani? It felt like Kenya was going to soon be able to conquer her demons.
But now we’re back to Moi days. Kenya is toxic and stifling, just like it was in Moi’s time. What the police did to many intellectuals in the 80s and 90s, the bureaucrats now do to my generation with regulations.
Everything in Kenya is extremely regulated. In education, my professional field, the government has become so intrusive with its new vocational system, popularly known as CBC, in which it now dictates class activities teachers must use, including asking kids to jump and to carry out an analysis of their jumping. The Commission of University Education is now proposing that academics go through an extensive licensing process before they are allowed to collaborate with academics abroad. Acquiring licences for film making in Kenya has been turned into an obstacle race, with film makers being asked to translate scripts and being required to re-apply for licences if they so much as alter a sentence in the script. The clergy have been coopted in supporting this clampdown on artistic freedom by being promised that it will help the church entrench morality.
But now we’re back to Moi days. Kenya is toxic and stifling, just like it was in Moi’s time. What the police did to many intellectuals in the 80s and 90s, the bureaucrats now do to my generation with regulations.
It is clear that the one thing the current government will not allow us to do is to be intellectually and artistically creative. And to seal the deal, the politicians are now proposing in the Bridging Bridges Initiative (BBI) to write a “definitive history of Kenya”, to appoint an Official Historian under the Office of the President, and to rearrange the management of our national archives. It can only mean one thing: Kenyatta’s son Uhuru wants us to return our minds to era where they were kept on the straight and narrow.
The moulding of the Kenyan intellect
A brilliant work by Michael Kithinji demonstrates that the fundamental contradiction of the Moi era was the widening of educational opportunities to previously excluded communities (which was almost everybody except the GEMA communities), while at the same time crushing creative thought.
By the time Moi became president, Kenya had only one university because Jomo Kenyatta wanted it that way. In Kenyatta’s view, universities were for training bureaucrats for government. Since most bureaucrats were Kikuyu, then one university was enough because it catered for Kikuyu bureaucrats. And so through bureaucratic measures, Kenyatta stifled the growth of the University of Nairobi, and at his death, Kenya still had only one university.
But the precedent of starving education in order to create an ethnic elite had already been set by the colonial government. When the Mau Mau struggle broke out, the British government accompanied its military counter-offensive with an economic one. It rewarded loyalists with land confiscated from the Mau Mau, and with government jobs, especially in the notorious provincial administration that controlled Kenyan rural life. The thinking was that a Kikuyu bourgeoisie would split the political loyalties of the peasantry and starve the Mau Mau of sympathy and supplies.
Education was therefore tied to ethnic-class division as a strategy for divide-and-rule. Children from families and communities thought to be sympathetic to the Mau Mau were denied access to education. The missionary educators, like Carey Francis at Alliance High School, actively discouraged his African students from developing nationalist ideas, and even from joining professional careers.
But before this policy was activated by Mau Mau revolt, the white settlers had been the driving force for preventing access to higher education for Africans. As Kithinji informs us, the settlers were successful in lobbying against education for Africans, so that when the conversation about a university for East Africa began, the colonial Kenya government sent the least financial support and the least number of students to the technical college that would later become Makerere.
That policy only changed with the Mau Mau war because the British metropole government switched its sympathies. It decided to throw the settlers under the bus and prop up a Kikuyu elite. And to do so, they needed to provide some Africans with higher education.
This entire approach to education as a system to sustain the state is illustrated in Mbiyu Koinange, one of Kenya’s first university graduates who would become a major pillar of the first Kenyatta government. Mbiyu was the son of a chief whose name is still carried by a girls’ high school. He went through the elite pipeline of Alliance High School in Kenya, Columbia University in the US and Cambridge University in the UK. His siblings also had access to an elite education that was rare among African Kenyans at the time.
But it was not only education which the colonial government sought to control; the colonialists engaged in active pursuit of any space in which nationalist ideas thrived. For example, it banned political parties in rural areas (or what they called reserves) and later denied registration to political parties unless they were explicitly tribal. During the emergency, and as the metropole government accepted that independence for Kenya was more profitable for the UK, the colonial administration also used arrests and detentions to weed nationalists out of the unions and political parties.
By the time politicians were going to negotiate independence in Lancaster House just before independence, the British had essentially created an echo chamber. And Moi was part of that chamber.
By the time Moi became president, he knew how the system worked. If he was to maintain control of the state, he had to create a Kalenjin elite, the way the British created the Kikuyu elite that maintained Jomo Kenyatta in power. So he had to open the corridors of the universities and schools to more Kenyans of more ethnic backgrounds.
But like the colonialists, and Kenyatta before him, Moi was to soon discover that education is a double-edged sword. As you provide it, you cannot control what people think. So with expanded education came expanded cruelty, in order to ensure that people with degrees thought only in the way he wanted them to think.
That is why Moi remains, and will remain, historically notorious for his fight against Kenyan intellectual and artistic life. When Moi became president, the humanities, especially philosophy, literature and political science, were shunned as irrelevant to development. Literature only mattered if it was studied under education. And later, several scholars in those fields – Micere Mugo, ES Atieno Odhiambo, Korwa Adar, Micere Mugo, Apollo Njonjo and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, just to name a few – were arrested, tortured, detained and exiled. University students were raped, shot dead, sent to prison (where some, like Tito Adungosi died) and exiled. Torture in the evil Nyayo House basement sounded like a page out of apartheid South Africa and Britain’s gulags during the Emergency: living for days in flooded cells, and cruel violence directed at the genitals of both men and women.
The attack on the academy was part of a larger one on intellectual spaces with the potential for mass mobilisation and imagination of alternative visions of Kenya. It included censorship of theatre arts, detention and imprisonment of journalists such as Wahome Mutahi, David Makali, Bedan Mbugua and Gitobu Imanyara, and the banning of newspapers and magazines. Music praising Moi enjoyed special privileges in terms of radio airplay. Any other Kenyan music had to compete with Congolese, South African and American pop music.
By the time Moi became president, he knew how the system worked. If he was to maintain control of the state, he had to create a Kalenjin elite, the way the British created the Kikuyu elite that maintained Jomo Kenyatta in power.
Kenyans were not allowed to meet without a permit from the police, which they would never get. Moi was so vicious in crushing ideas that his forces invaded churches where they beat clergy and entered mosques with their boots on.
Despite this cruelty, which words will never adequately capture, it would be misleading to divorce it from the larger logic of the colonial enterprise from 1895. The exploitative Kenyan state cannot exist without crushing the Kenyan imagination. Without a tribal elite handed over to him like the one handed over to Kenyatta, Moi crushed alternative spaces of imagination in the same way his predecessors had done, but with more cruelty. As the saying goes, every time history repeats itself, the price goes up.
The ideology of order
The word “order” should send shivers down everybody’s spine. Order was the motto of the colonial government, and it made the administrators violent. As Bruce Berman tells us in his extensive study of the colonial civil service, the colonial administrators were mainly Oxbridge elites fed on a steady dose of imperial ideology, but with very limited exposure to the cultures of the African people they were going to rule over. Humanistic knowledge, the British government said, was “theory” and was irrelevant. The best learning was from experience on the ground. The point was not to serve, but to “protect” the natives and to ensure that they remained orderly enough to facilitate the exploitation of their own land and labour.
This was an intensely bureaucratic arrangement, managed by the infiltration of the colonial administration in the daily lives of Africans in the reserves. The network would then evolve into the provincial administration during the first two presidents and remain the County Commissioners after the 2010 constitution. The tribal police who helped crush the Mau Mau remain in place as the Administration Police.
But reliance on bureaucracy necessarily means ignoring problems until they can no longer be ignored by bluffing one’s way through crises, and by employing extreme violence against people who make the administrators nervous. The colonial government employed the Punjabi principle which, Berman says, held that “a shot in time saves nine”, indicating that any idea with the potential to grow into a political space must be crushed while it is still budding.
That was the ideology that was passed on to African civil servants during the highly engineered transition between British and African rule in Kenya. The government had contempt for knowledge. Education was only for training civil servants.
Kenya had to be kept orderly at any cost, even if it meant assassinations, massacres, torture, exile and a cowed down people who had to look around when they so much as coughed. Moi used violence to affirm what Atieno-Odhiambo famously called the “ideology of order” where the state manages the tension between people’s freedom and the ruling elites’ need for the state to maintain power and amass wealth.
In the first years of independence, politicians such as Martin Shikuku, Jean-Marie Seroney and J K Mulwa repeatedly observed that the civil servants of Kenyatta I’s government exercised immense power using the provincial administration, a colonial arm of government which KADU had unsuccessfully tried to dismantle. Was the Government of Kenya not a political organ subject to the will of the people, or was it run by bureaucrats? they persistently asked. In 1966, it was Moi who defended the Kenyatta I regime by stating that “even if it’s a political Government, it is an orderly Government, it is not a Government of disorder.”
The economy of order
This is why the most chilling aspect of the revisionism of Moi’s history is the playing down of the atrocities Kenyans suffered during the 24 years during which Moi ruled. However, what is more dangerous than diminishing the human suffering is the argument that Moi had to maintain order. In the past few days, many of the on-the-fence observers or the outright supporters of Moi have said that Kenya is a special country with too many competing ideas or opinions, and the only way to run the Kenyan state is by enforcing order.
And the reason Kenyans are not pushing back on this narrative is because we believe it. And we believe it because the Moi regime did not allow intellectuals enough time to sufficiently tease out the fundamental problems of the Kenyan state. At the height of my public engagement in the new education system, most people who wanted to shut me up basically expressed fatigue with the noise. “Why can’t we just accept and correct later?” they would ask. They are asking the same question about BBI.
This is why the most chilling aspect of the revisionism of Moi’s history is the playing down of the atrocities Kenyans suffered during the 24 years during which Moi ruled. However, what is more dangerous than diminishing the human suffering is the argument that Moi had to maintain order.
Freedom in Kenya is work, and work is what Kenyans do not want to do. We have been well trained by a century of brutality. Getting out of line means violence. So when children die in school, when women are killed, even in broad daylight, when young men are shot dead by police, when elections are rigged, the narrative that follows the line of order is: “Let’s keep peace. Let’s protect lives and property. When are we going to continue with business? Let’s forgive and forget. If someone asked for forgiveness, it means we should forget.”
Kenya has become so toxic that we cannot even give innocent compliments. Instead of saying “you look nice,” we ask “kwani where are you going today?” If we want people to carry out a certain function, we manipulate them into doing it. We who want the action don’t have to think it through because, after all, thinking is theory and theory is not practical. So we don’t rationalise policy or plans, or explain them to people. Instead, we pretend that the decision is not cast in stone, and then present people with a fait accompli that they are forced to manage by working backwards.
A Kenyan humorously explained this phenomenon on twitter:
-They ask why you haven’t done what they were “suggesting” previously. Everyone’s doing it, so why not you?
-You explain yourself. “Si it was voluntary? I’m not interested.”
-They attack, using the compliant ones as their examples, and as their enforcers.— Kiko Enjani (@KikoEnjani) January 25, 2020
However, Kenyans believe the ideology of order because the intellectuals were crushed before they could refine their ideas, and explain or teach them to the next generation in order to further refine them. Atieno-Odhiambo, whose insight into Kenyan history was simply brilliant, also had to go into exile after persecution from Moi.
As Godwin Murunga and Shadrack Nasongo said in a preface that is a blues for the Kenyan academy and Kenyan intellectual thought, the upcoming generations of Kenyans were left orphaned with no one to mentor them. This heritage made us unable to really dissect and understand the ideas for which the intellectuals were persecuted. The proponents were not in Kenyan classrooms or academic forums where we students could ask them questions that would help the proponents refine the ideas. The intellectuals were cut off from the geographical and cultural setting that birthed the ideas. And with such suffering, it was difficult for us upcoming students to point out the blind spots of their ideas because we did not want to appear disrespectful of their suffering.
And that is why some of the ideas for which Kenyan intellectuals were persecuted have failed to withstand the test of time. It is also why we see some of the intellectuals who were persecuted during Moi’s reign throw their weight behind Kibaki and even Kenyatta II. Some who enter government sometimes support policy which Kenyans did not expect those politicians to support.
But if our heroes of yesterday do not seem to see the continuity of the struggle in today’s Kenya, we cannot blame them. The problem is structural, and it predates Moi to 1895 when Kenya was created as a market whose natural resources and labour of diverse peoples who did not know they had been included in Kenya could be exploited.
The simplistic Kenyan mind
The Kenyan mind is spectacularly unable to deal with contradiction or complexity. Pointing out that Moi’s violence was systemic, or that the ideas that attracted the wrath of the state have still not nailed the core problem we are faced with, or that some of those who ended up as victims of assassinations and detentions were part of the privileged and wealthy elite, elicits violent and moralistic questions.
We are asked: “Who are you to question those who suffered?” “Are you saying the people who suffered were wrong?” “Are you blaming them for their own suffering? Are you sanitising the government’s atrocities?”
The Kenyan mind is spectacularly unable to deal with contradiction or complexity. Pointing out that Moi’s violence was systemic, or that the ideas that attracted the wrath of the state have still not nailed the core problem we are faced with…elicits violent and moralistic questions.
The questions go both ways. From the pro-government side, we are asked “Are you saying Moi was all bad and did nothing good? Who are you to judge? Have you never done anything wrong?”
But this moralising goes beyond discussions of Moi. We are told that discussing history is blaming colonialists and refusing to take responsibility for our own actions. That discussing ethnic privilege and patronage is attacking every single member of that ethnic group. That discussing patriarchy is blaming men. That explaining systemic causes of problems is explaining away or excusing those problems. Every public conversation in Kenya is a war against complex thinking.
We have reached the point where Kenyan public conversations are pervaded by this system of intellectual simplification.
| Area | Symptoms of intellectual simplification |
| Language | Inability to read symbolic language and constant rebuttals on literary interpretations of words. The most infamous is the reading the mention of groups as a comment on every single individual member of that group (hence a constant complaint about the “not all brigade”). |
| Morality | The belief that everything in the world is about right and wrong, rather than about justice. Inability to deal with contradictions in people’s personal choices. |
| World | The inability to see people as existing in a universe with complex individual, social and cosmic dimensions, hence every human action is judged on the basis of fault rather than on the process of making decisions or environmental and systemic factors influencing that decision. |
| Responsibility and Freedom | Obsession with anonymity and group think, evading making decisions or exercising discretion, refusal to ascribe responsibility for fear of “judging” others. |
| Logic | Linearity, every event that precedes another is necessarily a cause; there’s no room for contextualisation or competing forces,Conversation is characterized by obsession with avoiding or assigning responsibility |
| Materiality | Ideas are useless if they are not directly linked to implementable tangibles. There is therefore always pressure to act, even when the proposed action is flawed and is predictably harmful. |
Apart from our inability to think in complex ways, the ideology of order has also made us averse to reading, especially if there is no material benefit to it. So for those who have persevered reading to this point, this is the point I am making: Kenya’s dictatorships are part of a continuum of the ideology of order. Violence and autocracy are essential pillars of the Kenyan state in the current arrangement.
And that ideology is what makes BBI dangerous. Unlike Moi, who used physical violence to enforce “order,” BBI is using public spectacle such as rallies and documents to entrench the same intellectual control. We must mourn and cry out about the atrocities of the state and insist on public memorialisation of the victims through the implementation of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC)’s report.
We must also break the ideology of order in the same way Samson put his hands on the pillars of the temple and brought the temple down. Because if we don’t, history will repeat itself, and will do so at a higher price than we have already paid with the Kenyatta-Ruto government.
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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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