Nairobi Diaries 2: How to Write about Ethnic Violence in Africa

Cut Off My Tongue

The title of this blog post is meant to allude to Binyavanga Wainaina’s well-known, satirical essay, “How to Write About Africa.” During my recent trip to Kenya (whose overall itinerary and agenda I blogged about here), I had the good fortune to visit my friend Doreen at the new Nairobi-based publishing house Storymoja, and she took me to a performance of one of its plays, Cut Off My Tongue, by Sitawa Namwalie — a play which is actually a series of linked poems that, among many other things, addresses Kenya’s post-election violence that devastated the country from December 2007 to April 2008. It was a beautiful performance, and I hope they can either come to the United States someday soon (as they did in London in May at the Hampstead Theatre) or find a way to put it on video.

A couple days later, the other members of my faculty development trip/delegation met with members of People for Peace in Africa as well as their friends in the literary community, including Monica Arac de Nyeko (winner of the Caine Prize for African writing), Muthoni Garland (founder of Storymoja, who is also an author and who also performed in the play that I saw), and their staunch ally Father Joseph Healey (scholar of Africa and theologian). One of the questions that we discussed that day was how to write about ethnic violence, and that is the question I want to think about in this blogpost — and for me, Cut Off My Tongue was an exemplary model.

In case you weren’t paying attention to the news last year, what happened is this. Thousands were killed, and hundreds of thousands fled their homes, as conflict among those who were ethnically Kikuyu, Luo, Kalenjin, and others burned through the country after the controversial election results gave Mwai Kibaki (ethnically Kikuyu) the victory over Raila Odinga (ethnically Luo). During my recent visit to Kenya, it seemed to me that the memory of the violence haunted everyone’s conversation, and nobody seemed to have much confidence in the coalition government created as a compromise to stop the killing. In fact, the very faculty development trip/delegation that I was on was supposed to happen last year, but was postponed to this year because of it.

So, how do we write about this event? Not the way wikipedia summarizes it [here] or the way Amnesty International’s video clip pathologizes it [here]… right? All of us sitting around the table agreed that mainstream journalism – even quality journalism — did little to explain the causes and did even less to lead to constructive solutions. It certainly did not understand what it needed to understand most: how people were feeling. Journalistic hype at its worst seemed to inflame the problem and at its best seemed to offer only sentimental platitudes. But as we discussed the issue, I found myself disagreeing with the members of People for Peace in Africa; one individual seemed to me to be suggesting that lengthy personal accounts of individual, subjective experience should be the form of writing we should promote, and another seemed to me to be suggesting that a more comprehensive, objective journalism was what was needed. A third person seemed not to see any contradiction between subjective accounts of experience and objective journalism since for him both were aimed at the truth, and the truth needed to be told before any reconciliation could be achieved.

me, Caine prize winner Monica Arac de Nyeko, author and Storymoja founder Muthoni Garland, an intern at People for Peace, and author, Storymoja editor, and friend, Doreen Baingana

While I agree that both subject and objective truth tellings are necessary and important, and I might even agree with a deconstruction of the subjective/objective binary, I don’t think they are enough. There is also a role for the literary and the symbolic. I suggested that beyond merely descriptive accounts, writers should work on something imaginative, perhaps even something utopian, which could turn despair into hope. During our conversation, I quoted Oscar Wilde — somewhat lamely, I now realize in retrospect — who once suggested that  the most important place on any map is utopia. In other words, to write about ethnic violence one has to write about what’s not there as well as what is: what’s on the margins of experience, the dreams and fears that shape that experience, and also the ordinary lives of people who above all seek to live their everyday lives despite the crisis that dominates the media. This is what Doreen Baingana’s short stories in Tropical Fish and Sitawa Namwalie’s poems in Cut Off My Tongue do so well. They not only give voice to the voiceless, but also carefully reconsider how those voices get framed by media and political parties rather than by the everyday aspirations of people who work, eat, travel, argue,  fall in love, dance, have sex, raise children, and grow old. Sometimes tragic, at other times sharply satirical, and above all, they tell their stories with both love and a playful sense of humor.

But the statements of People for Peace carry some weight, as their prescriptions seem to have been followed by one of Kenya’s new literary journals, Kwani?, whose founders include Binyavanga Wainaina. (Members of Kwani? were supposed to join our gathering, but for some reason they couldn’t make it.)  The latest issue of Kwani? focuses entirely on the violence, and unlike its earlier issues which tended towards the playful and the fictional, this issue contains mostly non-fictional first-person accounts and interviews. It interests me that Kwani? made this move towards the factual whereas the author of Cut Off My Tongue made the move toward the dramatic and the imaginative. I’m not sure what to make of that difference, but I suspect neither People for Peace nor Kwani? would consider beginning a blog post about ethnic violence with the image with which I began this one — an image of love – but maybe they should.

But of course non-fiction is also dramatic, even if its writers sometimes pretend that it isn’t, and as Muthoni reminded me, such interviews and accounts provide the raw materials for artists. One of my favorite pieces in the issue of Kwani?, “Benediction in Oyugis” is written by a Ugandan who is ethnically Luo, and as he narrates his journey through post-election Kenya and recounts his many conversations, he seems to put in question his own objectivity — he is in some ways a complete outsider (visiting from Uganda), but in some ways an insider (ethnically Luo). His essay contains a dramatic play of perspective as he vacillates between subjective and objective styles of narration and as he addresses his subject matter sideways instead of head on. This literary play of perspective is, I think, essential for any real “peace work,” and it is something that Sitawa Namwalie’s play/poems does/do so well, which is why I think I’d like to teach it next year in my class. As Doreen wrote [here] about the play, “it is politics that is personal” which will help “start a dialogue among Kenyans… and beyond.”

Nairobi Diaries 1: the itinerary

Foolishly, I didn’t actually keep a diary during this trip, and unlike my stay in Japan, this time around there wasn’t a computer downstairs for me to use. So, I’ve returned from two of the most intense weeks of my life, my head swimming with emotions, ideas, and information, and I hardly know where to begin.

Where to begin…. How about this? I’ll start off with a couple of random thoughts, and then sketch out the overview in this post — the itinerary — so that my subsequent postings can focus in on the particular nuggets of experience.

Random thought one — the smartest thing I did was get a cell phone my first day in Kenya, and I advise everyone travelling to Africa to do this. It cost me just $30 for the phone and roughly 200 minutes of domestic calling time. A phone is necessary, in my view, because the country seems to run on cell phones, even moreso than in the United States or Europe. People even lend money to their friend by transfering cash via their cell phones. Whether one is walking around the glitz of downtown Nairobi, the pristine halls of academia, an impoverished city ghetto, or among subsistance farmers in the country where many people are near starving, one will see cell phones everywhere. It seems to epitomize the paradox of globalization where poverty and wealth, traditional culture and modern technology, exist side-by-side.

And this leads me to random thought number two. The image of Kenya that most Americans have is the romantic Hollywood images of Tarzan,  Madagascar, Out of Africa , and The Green Hills of Africa — that is to say, an image of the safari into the untouched wilderness, a journey back in time to an Eden-like pre-modern world. And still today the Kenya government promotes this nostalgic image because of all the cash it generates; it is one of the largest sectors (if not the largest sector) of Kenya’s economy. Ironically, the main cell phone company is called Safaricom. But whether that image was ever really true (or just a convenient motif invented by British colonials to justify their pillaging of the land and violent removal of the indigenous farming communities), it certainly isn’t true today.

Today, except for the national parks and wildlife preserves maintained for tourists, Africa is crowded with people, not just in the cities but also in the countryside — more crowded, it felt to me, than the United States and Europe. Land scarcity is one of the primary causes of ethnic violence; in some areas, the percentage of the populations with HIV-AIDS is 30%; and deforestation and industrial farming has caused permanent environmental damage. Lakes, once pristine and clear, are now repositories of raw sewage, chemical fertilizers, and soil erosion. Whether all this is primarily the effects of neocolonial/neoliberal capitalism or of a corrupt government is still a matter of debate, but one has to acknowledge that the “nation” of Kenya began its history with a serious handicap. After a long fight for their independence, the terms of that indpendence in 1963 left their nation in debt to the very colonial powers that had ransacked it of its wealth for the previous century. It’s hard for a fledgling government to build infrastructure when the largest chunk of its budget goes not to police, education, roads, environmental regulation, or sanitation, but to servicing its debt.

I apologize if my random thoughts are negative and dreary, but I have my reasons. First, I want to disillusion you that this blog will engage in romantic portraits of gazelles leaping through the bushes, but more importantly, it sets the stage for the raison d’etre of our trip — which was to see the many ways in which the people of Kenya are trying to solve all its problems. My colleagues and I were deeply impressed by the Kenyans we met and the work we saw, and we have perhaps never met a group of people more deserving of the title “saint” than those we met on this trip.

So, to finish this blog post and prepare the way for the posts I plan to write over the next few days, I want to give an overview of the itinerary. But of course, before I do that, I have one more prefatory remark. (Come on, you must know me well enough by now to expect endless prefacing!!!) The trip was organized by another faculty member at my university, so the itinerary was his and his alone, though during our few “free” hours here and there, I could pursue my own agenda. Basically, for the most part, I was along for the ride (literally, since we spent quite a bit of the trip being driven here and there), but I am grateful for it — what an amazing ride it was!

However, the goal of the trip was a bit confusing at times. Although the trip was billed as a “faculty development” trip (which is why I went on it), it was in many ways really a “delegation” with two distinct, though related, agendas that I would describe as more “missionary” than “scholarly.” As you’ll see from the itinerary below, the first agenda was to build upon an already existing relationship with a Catholic university in Nairobi in hopes of engendering future student and faculty exchange, and the second was to represent the Catholic diocese local to my university here in midwestern U.S.A. and bolster its “solidarity” with a rural diocese near Lake Victoria in the southwestern part of Kenya. I put the word “solidarity” in quotes because I plan to discuss the complexities of this concept in more depth in a later post.  In addition to the two agendas, some time was set set aside for us to be tourists… you know… see the gazelles leaping through the bushes.

So, the trip combined many different goals, and you’ll see what I mean when you see the itinerary. To be honest, I did not expect this trip to have such a missionary focus, and as a non-Catholic, I was uncomfortable with this at times and unsure of my role on the “delegation” — but I’ll have more to say about that later. Here’s the itinerary:

Day One: we met with Catholic Relief Services in the morning, and in the afternoon toured the Bomas museum of traditional huts.

Day Two: we toured the Catholic University in Nairobi in the morning and in the afternoon visited with the Benedictine community close by.

Day three: visited the institute of Islamic Studies (which turned out not to exist, oops!) at the aforementioned Catholic university in the morning and then toured the Nairobi National Park in the afternoon.

Day four: visited with the Kenya Human Rights Commission in the morning; free time in the afternoon. I chose to spend my free time first meeting a friend of a friend who is working on behalf of the  Borana Oromo (and is himself a Borana Oromo) – a people indigenous to northern Kenya. After that, I visited an old friend from graduate school, Doreen Baingana, author of the terrific collection of short stories, Tropical Fish, and this fortuitously led to the two of us attending a wonderful play. More on that later.

Day five: visited the Cardinal Maurice Otunga Girl’s Empowerment Center in the morning and then in the afternoon visited the Christ the King church/school/library mission inside of Kibera, one of the largest and poorest slums in the world.

Day six: visited museums and downtown Nairobi (including the famous Masai market) in the morning and in the afternoon met with People for Peace in Africa and its friends in the literary community (which coincidentally included people who knew my friends in the literary community, which turned out to be very lucky for all sorts of reasons as I’ll explain later.)

Day seven (Sunday): in the morning Catholic mass (which I hear was way cool because of the combination of African and Catholic traditions but which I skipped not for any religious qualms, but because this was the only time I could meet with someone I desperately wanted to talk to — a friend of a friend who works on behalf of Oromo refugees from Ethiopia living in Kenya), and then in the afternoon we boarded a plane to Kishimu and there got in a minivan bound for the rural southwestern diocese that faces Lake Victoria.

Day eight: in the morning we met with Catholic Relief Services there, and in the afternoon visited a school way out in the countryside and a hospital.

Day nine: this was probably the most significant day of the whole trip. In the morning, we visited CRS “project sites”, which were the homes of impoverished farmers who had been impacted by the AIDS epidemic in one way or another and which CRS was helping get back on their feet. Talking with them and hearing their stories was an incredible experience. Then we visited a Day of the African Child celebration, and then a festival at a local parish. Lastly, we met with a group of men and women, all subsistance farmers struggling with poverty and HIV, who with the help of CRS had created a ”Savings and Internal Lending Community” or SILC.

Day ten: after a morning boat tour of Lake Victoria, we had lunch with the local Catholic Bishop, and then returned to Nairobi.

Day eleven: our last day was left for last minute shopping, but instead I took two of my colleagues to an Oromo Christian Fellowship meeting in the middle of the Githurai slum so that we could talk with Oromo refugees and so that I could give a brief presentation on Ogina: Oromo Arts in Diaspora. This was set up for me by the person I met on Sunday.

Then we came back to the United States, and I promptly fell asleep.

So… please stay tuned for more Nairobi Diaries….

Tokyo Diaries 7: Who is, whose right?

I’m afraid I’m going to be dashing off this last blog post about Japan rather quickly and carelessly because I’m leaving for Kenya in just a few days, and I have at least a million things to do between now and then. But I wanted to get this last post out before I left, and hopefully I will be able to blog from Kenya a “Nairobi Diary.”

Sorry for that apologetic preface, but here goes what may prove to be my most convoluted, rambling blog post ever…

I want to talk a little bit about the experience my students and I had at the United Nations University, when we attended the Africa Day Symposium (thanks to the gracious efforts of our host university), but since we experienced this event in the context of a study-abroad in Japan, I want to relate the United Nations University experience to two other things: Japanese culture more broadly understood and — you may be surprised about this one — the work I do with the Oromo, whom I’ve blogged about several times previously [here], [here], and [here]. Yes, yes, of course it all connects, yes, yes, of course it does — why else would I be blogging about it? — and of course the connections are also full of disconnects, as I aim to make clear once I finally stop with the prefatory remarks and get on with the story.

So, that’s the topic, but instead of just saying what I’m saying, I’m going to make my usual sideways, theory-dork kind of move –  in other words, a bit more of my obnoxious prefacing. So, preface number two: those who know me know that nothing irritates me more than statements such as “Muslims all think in such and such a way,” or “In order to understand why Japan was successful in the 1980s, you have to understand the Japanese mind.” Two things bother me about these kinds of claims. First, they are culturally deterministic in really simplistic ways, as if one’s very mind were a product of “culture” the same way a piece of pottery, poem, or pop song were a product of culture. Second, they posit a bizarre unity to a culture, as if all people belonging to a nation, ethnic group, or family think and act the same. When I consider how different I am from everyone I grew up with in Orange County, California (including my own family members), such statements intuitively make no sense to me.

So, just to point out something curious about Japan. The same country that has the Hiroshima Museum and Monument to World Peace (which I blogged about a week ago here) and hosts the United Nations University also has the Yasukuni Shrine, a shrine which insists on controversially defending and celebrating war criminals [see here]. Next to the shrine is a War Museum, which includes things like vintage machine guns and the famous Mitsubishi Zero fighter plane. Ironically, the name “yasukuni” literally means “peaceful country.”

I took my students to the Yasukuni shrine because I felt they would get a skewed image of Japan if we only visited the monument to peace and the UN University. And my point here is rather obvious: it’s stupid to make claims about a national culture when cultures have so much diversity and contradicitory sensibilities within them. For example, as I mentioned before in my blog about Hiroshima, my students and I read the poetry of Sadako Kurihara, who was writing poetry against the war as early as 1943 and was protesting Japanese imperialism well before that. Certainly she was a minority view in Japan in the 1930s and 40s, but her view eventually became closer to the majority view by the 1970s.

And of course, I’ve already been blogging repeatedly about the “old” and “new” forms of culture in Japan. I personally find it amusing to take a group of American students who know hardly anything about American history to a history museum in Japan with a group of Japanese students who know hardly anything about Japanese history. One might expect bringing the Japanese students along would be useful because they could help my American students understand what they are looking at, but no, not really. As one of my colleagues recently pointed out to me (and as my students noticed while they were there), Japanese television tends to be dominated by happy, cheerful programs about delicious food at quaintly designed restaurants. And of course, likewise, I doubt my American students would be able to offer much help to any Japense tourists visiting an American history musum. In other words, culture means what?

Now back to the United Nations University experience. What was immediately cool about this is that we got to sit at these desks and put on those earpieces and get the simulcast translation. We all felt a little cooler than we actually are at that moment, as my student pointed out in his blog [here]. Some of the people speaking were some major, major dudes such as a former Prime Minister of Japan, Yoshiro Mori. However, there was a creepy consistency to the all of the speeches. First, the non-creepy consistancy was that all of them pointed out that the current economic crisis has already begun to affect Africa and will cause more problems there than it is causing elsewhere in the world. This was the theme of the conference. Second, Japan is one of the only countries to actually increase its aid in response to the problem and actually delivers the aid that it promises. (A side note,  in contrast, the United States under George Bush notoriously promised a lot of aid to Africa but delivered little — a fact all of the speakers were too polite to mention, but which I am not too polite to mention.) A lot of my students were bothered by the amount of self praise the Japanese were doing, as well as the seemingly obsequious praise the African speakers were heaping on Japan, but I wonder if my students would be similarly bothered if they heard Americans bragging about American aid to Africa on American television. But the third thing — and one of the most troubling things — was how consistently all of the panelists believed that market intergration was a solution to Africa’s problems. My students were struck by the lack of diversity of viewpoints represented, and were also struck that nobody mentioned how the world market is affected by disparities in power except for the representative of UNICEF’s children’s fund (whose presentation was by far the best for all sorts of reasons.) Let me repeat, only the person representing children mentioned the rather obvious and important fact that the economy is political.

Now, don’t mistake me. I’m not some protectionist against market integration. Market integration certainly gave Africa’s economy a boost this past decade, but the past twenty years of integration is partly resonsible for how easily the contagions of America’s housing flu could contaminate the economies of Africa. In other words, being for or against market integration is like being for or against trade in general, which is like being for or against breathing. It makes no sense. Rather, the real issue is how one goes about doing it — what regulations, rules, social safety nets, and protections need to be in place to ensure that market integration doesn’t lead to mass starvation and violent cultural upheaval. In order to ensure that the wide variety of rights are protected — rights that are economic, human, cultural, and environmental.

So, what’s the point of all this? You can probably tell that I’m struggling to tie together all the threads of this blog, but let’s return to the question, how do we understand this Africa Day Symposium in terms of the broader experience of Japanese culture? Is it even possible? Clearly, as I’ve just discussed, the symposium was dominated by the neoliberal logic of market integration and free trade. There’s certainly nothing Japanese about that; rather, this fact simply underscores the ways in which culture needs to be understood in the context of a very, very political economy. Japan and America’s interest in defining Africa’s troubles in terms of market-based solutions may have something to do with Japan and America’s powerful position in the world market rather than with Japan and America’s cultural traditions.

Now, at the beginning of this blog I promised to talk about my work with the Oromo. While in Japan, I visited an NGO, whose name I won’t mention here, as a representative of Sandscribe Communications, in hopes to raise money for a media school in Ethiopia. There was a genuine interest on the part of the people I talked with in the work Sandscribe wants to do. Also while in Japan, I gave a lecture at our host university on how American literature has, historically, represented Ethiopia since the 17th century to the present. I want to present a rather self-congratulatory contrast here. While the UN University emphasized the overview perspective of large governments, international institutions, and multinational corporations, my work represents the grassroots efforts, the view from below – and please notice that both overview and underview include cross-cultural communication as well as the transnational transfers of knowledge and capital.

So, back to my question… culture means what?

And instead of answering that oh-so-difficult-to-answer question, let’s go back to the Yasukuni shrine, which has more to do with the United Nations than you might think. After the war, various Japanese generals and higher-ups were convicted of war crimes by the international community. Now, at the Yasukuni Shrine is a statue of the International Military Tribunal’s dissenting judge (from India, incidentally), who protested that convicting these people of war crimes was unfair, considering the nature of war. And he has a point. Nobody was prosecuting Europeans or Americans for the horrible things they did to Native American, African, South Asian, and South-East Asian populations for centuries. Nobody was prosecuting the United States for dropping an atomic bomb. What counts as a war crime here? Who is right here, and whose rights are we talking about when we talk about the protection of rights, liberties, and… well… life?… All of which is the whole point of the United Nations, the point of my work with the Oromo (many of whom are not all peace-and-love types, but see violence as an acceptable tool in their struggle for political liberation), and… ultimately… and I’m afraid I’m going to get a bit sappy here… the point of study-abroad programs in the first place.