From as early as the campaign period preceding the hotly contested General Elections in Kenya last December, I, like many other Kenyans, could sense that something was not right, but could not put my finger on exactly what the problem was. Even as the violence broke out, I knew that political ineptitude and selfishness on both sides of the political divide did not sufficiently explain why Kenyans, who are profoundly religious, superstitious or both, would financially support or actually carry out the decapitations of men and massacres of women and children.
I knew that I did not experience this disorientation alone because in 2007, the number of prophecies about imminent catastrophes not only increased in number, but also in the attention they received from the upper economic classes and the media which traditionally scoffed at them. These prophecies included predictions of the tremors experienced by the country in July and that were interpreted as God’s judgment of our nation. Towards the end of the year, reports in the media emerged that witchdoctors from neighboring countries were experiencing thriving business in Kenya, especially from politicians, to the extent that some were considering relocation to the country.
The prophecies and the reports about witchdoctors troubled me. Not because I am rattled merely by rituals associated with witchcraft, but because I agree with researchers who explain that witchcraft thrives in situations where extreme injustice is experienced at profoundly intimate levels. According to this theory, situations such as slavery – where the enslaver and the enslaved interacted at intimate but extremely brutal levels – are conducive to the thriving of ritualistic practices that exclude logic and reason. By contrast, rituals such as rites of passage and the celebration of cycles of seasons and human activities generally intergrate the spiritual, rational, emotional and environmental worlds in a continuous fabric.
Therefore, in unjust situations, both the oppressor and the oppressed endear the less noble qualities of the spirit world to their side because they feel that what they desperately want is beyond human intellectual, physical and moral power. For the enslaver, the inhuman and irrational interactions with slaves must continue at all costs – even at the cost of their own humanity. This would explain why the formal end of slavery in the United States was followed by the most morbid of rituals to assert white supremacy. The system of racist oppression, which the Christian God was unable to maintain beyond the Civil Warthrough sober sermons at the Church pulpit, was therefore perpetuated during the Jim Crow era in the form of rituals in which the cross was desecrated and unfortunate black individuals were dismembered and incinerated as a sacrifice to appeal to the Christian God’s less flattering qualities.
For the enslaved, rituals became their only outlet or brief reprieve from injustice. After all, if the “good” Christian God who embodies patience, forgiveness without limits and love for one’s oppressor is the one in whose name they are oppressed, they understandably feel compelled to appeal to God’s less generous side. Hence Malcolm X’s famous distinction between the house and field negro – unlike the house negro who works at putting out the fire in the master’s house, the field negro makes no pretense at noble intentions and prays for God to send a stronger wind. Frantz Fanon describes a similar phenomenon in the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth: the colonized, who have internalized their oppression at the emotional level, engage in dances and rituals with heightened vigor.
In other words, witchcraft, curses, prayers for evil, savage killings and other unflattering spiritual exercises are usually a symptom of two things: desperation to get something at any cost, even at the cost of flirting with evil, and profound disempowerment in the face of injustice that has infiltrated the psyche and intimate relations. If this is the case, the reports about an increase in consultations with witchdoctors indicate that the Kenyan population is instinctively aware that its country is profoundly flawed, but feels powerless to identify the cause of the problem or feels that they are too intimately intertwined with the problem to obtain the distance necessary to examine or resolve it.
From this perspective, the power of negative ethnicity in disempowering and ensnaring the Kenya populace becomes clearer. Since 2002, politicians have been are increasingly exposed as a greedy, selfish, impotent and unimaginative class, and so they used the trump card which they knew would make Kenyans swear allegiance to them no matter how incompetent they are: the card of ethnicity. Under the present conditions, any thief or criminal who wears the ethnic garb is bound to be forgiven of all his present, past and future sins because ethnicity is a God-given quality that one cannot get rid of, no matter one’s political affiliations or economic class. The intimate and inalienable characteristic of ethnicity leads people to feel powerless to criticize politicians or isolate the problems that affect Kenyans across class or ethnic boundaries. They are afraid to criticize politicians from the same ethnic group fear being seen as a “traitor”, or criticize politicians from other ethnic groups for fear being accused of “tribalism” and of ignoring privileges enjoyed when one of their own was in a certain ministry or in the State House. Given this combination of intimacy and powerlessness with the economic injustice and social decadence, it is no wonder that the practice of and fears about the increase in witchcraft have emerged.
In response to this morbid and explosive situation, Christians in Kenya have come up with an alternative: casting out demons in the name of Jesus and visiting four major Kenyan towns to pray for reconciliation. But just like the prophecies of last year, this solution does not treat the disease of Kenya; it simply deals with the symptoms. For rather than identify the specific problems that produced the political crisis, or confront the conditions that have made Kenyans feel impotent and powerless, the Church leaders offer Christianity.
However, John Njenga Karugia [1] has explained in a brilliant piece that Christianity does not sufficiently tackle the fundamental problems affecting Kenya. And the problem emanates from Christianity’s theological, cultural and historical roots. As Karugia points out, Christianity has no geographical affiliations with Kenya. He is impressively diplomatic about this when he says: “The problem is not Jesus Christ. No he is a nice guy, who lived in another time in another place and we have confirmed he is not suitable for our Kenyan politics and for our time.”
On the theological level, Karugia points out that the Jesus Kenyans are asked to pray to is a little too forgiving for comfort, at the expense of the exploited and the poor. He laments that Jesus “is quoted as having said to Peter that we should forgive seventy-seven times. So we should forgive 77 Goldenbergs and 77 Anglo Leasing corruption scandals. By the 78th time, our central bank will be empty.” He elaborates on Jesus’s apparently short memory: “Jesus Christ's dad promises Kenyan politicians they will burn in hell, but if they repent, they will go to heaven. So, Kenyan politicians rape Kenyans and their country. They come to church on Sunday. Pastor shakes their hands. We struggle to line up to shake their hands. We pray for them as they kneel in front of the whole church and under the calm watch of Jesus Christ's father. They are forgiven and they walk away and Sunday they visit another church, where even louder prayers are said with louder loud speakers and red carpets.”
Not surprisingly, Karugia mentions the problematic legacy of Christianity rooted in colonial rule: “Looking at the history of how missionaries first arrived and laid the groundwork for the colonial masters to govern one might conclude that indeed Church assists State to govern by keeping the masses cool. Cool they remain, because their minds are poisoned. The State engages in all kinds of excesses but Church says, let them be, they will burn in hell. The probability that the poor will burn in hell is so high that it is indispensable that politicians and poor people will meet in hell.” However, he ends up reaching the same end that I reached in January [1], which he expresses better as the hope that the Christian god might just sign a peace deal with the African deities and arrive at a “coalition of Kenyan gods."
It therefore emerges that Christianity, like ethnicity, and even like witchcraft, are the proposed antidotes which the observer who diagnoses Kenya’s problems must be willing to confront at the risk of alienation by believers, career ethnicists and well, the not-so-noble religious practitioners. But there is a fourth god responsible for the quagmire that Kenyans are now trying to transcend: Kenya’s balance sheet.
Rather than be a blessing, Kenya’s economic “prosperity” is a curse because it functions as a camouflage to hide contradictions that expose Kenya as a country that is morally, socially and spiritually decaying. One of these contradictions is the fact that since the signing of the peace deal that allowed the creation of a prime minister, there is an amazing admiration expressed for the “prime-minister designate’s” official motorcade by the same press that has lamented for the last two months the widening gap between the rich and the poor. The contrast between a convoy of politicians, and the Kibera slums which they visit amid shouts of the joy and ululations of the poor in whose name the economic injustice is deplored, is rather difficult to digest.
Another contradiction, which has been shyly pointed out by a few journalists, is the size of the government agreed on by the Kofi Anan deal. Kenya is already burdened with overpaid and idle ministers and Members of Parliament, but the government posts are now set to increase. And since there is no doubt that the salaries of the Prime-Minister and his deputies will be above those of ordinary MP’s, the Kenyan tax-payers are sure to be paying more than the billions they already pay their leaders. And so it would seem that the choice facing Kenyans after the elections was between being exploited in peace and exploited in war, and Kofi Anan helped us choose the lesser of two evils: which was to pay dearly for peace. In Kenya, peace now costs billions in shillings and cents. But it is better to dig deeper into our empty pockets and live another day, rather than die for nothing but bearing the identity that the good Lord gave us. It would be interesting to hear the response to such a statement from those who chant “better to die free than live as a slave.”
Worse still, the first visit of the now reconciled and officialized couple of Raila and Kibaki was to Karen Country Club where Kibaki is the patron. Hundreds of thousands of people are still living in camps, afraid to go home and waiting for a visit from the two leaders, but the first signs of unity the leaders display are symbolically – and literally – played out in a golf course at an international golf tournament. The event confirmed what I have said before: the elections, the deadly conflict and the rhetoric spewed from politicians and activists was a drama played to the Western gallery whom our decadent elite still consider the alpha and omega of democratic principles. As long as the American Ambassador can confirm to Kenya’s lawyers – who should have know better than to invite him to their dinner – that Kenya is an “example” to the region and even the whole continent, then Kenya’s elite care little about the cost that ordinary Kenyans are paying for the charade that they have been forced to act in.
A third contradiction: the day before the Anan deal was signed, the Daily Nation and its sister media NTV sounded a panic alert about the preparation of militias in different parts of the country in case the talks between PNU and ODM collapsed. In the NTV documentary was an interesting phenomenon – a European national expressed interest at the “gap between the rich and the poor” (how I hate the cliché) who live in Muthaiga and Mathare respectively. The thing is, many of the Muthaiga inhabitants are Western diplomats and European nationals, and so one wonders which “rich” people the interviewee was talking about.
The fourth contradiction: much noise has been made and much analysis carried out of the unfair distribution of land, particularly in Rift Valley province and particularly to the members of the Gikuyu community. However, it is interesting that the land occupied by the total of those who died and have been displaced is still a fraction of the land owned by well-known politicians from the Gikuyu and other communities. It defies reason that the politicians and the youths on their pay roll who claimed they were fighting for justice did not have the guts to mention the individual politicians by name. Therefore, the small landowners who died or were chased away were the scapegoat of our fear as Kenyans to fight the people whom we know to be at the root of our problems. Over a thousand people have died because the self-appointed crusaders of justice – myself included – are too scared to name specific individuals, but are bravely shouting our anger at ethnic groups and un-named politicians at the top of our lungs. But the bravery is not surprising since, as the adage goes, there is safety in numbers, and so deriding an ethnic group is easier and requires less courage than pointing at a specific leader.
There are a host of other contradictions in the Kenyan landscape which religion and ethnicity allow us to escape addressing. These include the obliteration of 24 years of Kenya’s history from our public discourse and the accompanying disrespect for Mzee Daniel arap Moi, a phenomenon that should shame anyone who considers themselves in tune with African sensibilities. There is also the fact that a country with so many universities, schools and educated people has failed to produce a noticeable number of thinking intellectuals who could have provided a voice of reason during the 2-month period when we abandoned our sanity, and the fact that tourism and Europeans’ comfort on our beaches continue to be projected by the Kenyan political and media elite as the sign of Kenya’s good health.
But the worst contradiction of all is that with these vices infecting our beloved nation, many of our elites continue to boast that Kenya is doing better than other African nations, and the sole basis of their arrogant and myopic assessment is the country’s balance sheet. As one who firmly believes that human beings are more than what they have or don’t have, I find this unacceptable and unadmirable. I pray that Africans in other countries are not considering holding Kenya as a model but as a milestone in the vision to achieving something better, which is dignity, self-respect, pride and a decent standard of living for all.
I also find it disgusting for Kenyans to use the failures of other African countries as our yardstick, rather than observing the accomplishments of other Africans to press ourselves to do better. Thomas Sankara, the Bourkinabé revolutionary who expressed his concern for the poor in word, in concrete financial sacrifices from his country’s elite and in vocalizing his distaste for injustice abroad, would be a good role model for our revolutionary wanna-be’s who lament about the poor in the press based on scanty and flawed historical analyses of African countries outside Kenya.
There is something profoundly flawed in glorifying our country by using the misfortunes of others, especially through the tired cliché of Kenya as an island of peace in a sea of turmoil. It is by God’s grace and the mercy of the ancestors, not by our self-righteousness, that we had no Idi Amin to feed us to crocodiles in the Nile, no Interahamwe to slaughter us physically with pangas or spiritually with hatred and lies, and no Sudanese government to fight us and commit genocide against us. There is nothing that Ugandans, Rwandans or Southern Sudanese did to deserve their tragedies; they are as human as Kenyans. And even if they were not, our reputation as peaceful country does not stand up to scrutiny in the face of the people who were killed at Wagalla or Molo over the last few decades and whom we have not yet had the courtesy to nationally mourn.
In the face of these pervasive vices and contradictions, it is no wonder that witchcraft and its Christian counter-attack have become a source of comfort to Kenya. They are a temporary and consoling substitute to calling the evil politicians by name, to pointing out the specific vices that the poverty-speak of the Mercy Industrial Complex cannot solve, and confessing the unspoken shame of our African identity in the Kenyans who define their country’s glory in terms of the misfortune of their brothers and of the comfort of tourists.
Frankly, these maladies seem so large and profound that they are intellectually and emotionally overwhelming. That is why, despite my reservations, I will be attending church this Sunday to join fellow Christians in sending the Devil and his witchdoctors to the bottomless pit, the pit from which our spiritual foes will have miraculously escaped since last Sunday when we condemned them to go there yet again.