Andy Rowell, 14 January 2008

As the once-peaceful African nation of Kenya has descended into an orgy of violence after its disputed election result, the reaction in the west has been one of outrage based largely on ignorance. Both politicians and the media have failed to fully understand the role of Kenya’s colonial past in the current crisis.

Late last month, the government of ruling President Mwai Kibati declared that he had won the country’s election. But all the indications are that the election was rigged in the closing stages, after his main challenger Raila Odinga had surged in the early exit polls.

With nearly half the vote counted Odinga had 57 percent of the vote compared with 39 percent for Kibaki. However, when the results were announced Kibaki had supposedly won by 46 per cent to 44 per cent.

Election observers were quick to point out that Kenya’s election commission ignored undeniable evidence of vote rigging. For example, in one district Kibaki’s total went from 50,145 votes after voting closed to 75,261 votes the next day. “The presidential elections were flawed,” said Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, the chief European observer.

Within fifteen minutes of the announcement, Kenya erupted into violence. The world has watched in horror as one of the most stable nations in Africa has plunged into anarchy and bloodletting.

Before the bloodshed started Kenya was in a position most African leaders would envy. Its stunning beaches, game parks and wildlife were the centre of a billion-dollar tourism industry. Its economy was growing at 7 percent. And compared to its warmongering neighbours - Somalia, Sudan and Congo – it was at peace.

Not any more. Up to a thousand people have been killed since the election, with hundreds of thousands made homeless. The reports coming from the country are horrifying – no more so than when up to fifty women and children were murdered in a church in western Kenya.

The people murdered in the church were Kikuyu, the biggest tribe in Kenya with about 22 percent of the population. The Kikuyu are also the tribe which historically has benefited the most since their country achieved Independence from Britain in 1963.

Kenya’s first president and elder statesman Jomo Kenyatta, was a Kikuyu as is the current President, Kibati. Both were seen as favouring their tribe over others, when it came to political appointments, money and access. In a country still rife with corruption and poverty, it helps to have a relative in a position of power.   

Kibaki’s critics point to the fact that many of the top officials in his government — including the ministers of defense, justice, finance and internal security — are Kikuyus. Over the last five years, resentment has grown against him and the Kikuyu in general.

Both the BBC and leading liberal newspaper in Britain, the Observer, were quick to argue that the political tensions in the country were sown a decade ago when Kibati’s predecessor as President, Daniel Arap Moi – who had ruled practically as a dictator - was forced to introduce multi-party politics.

Moi was not a Kikuyu, he was from another tribe called the Kalenjin, which makes up about twelve per cent of the Kenyan population. The Kalenjin, who are the dominant population in the beautiful Rift Valley that carves through Western Kenya, felt threatened by the move to democracy. Moi allowed the Kalenjin to undertake a killing frenzy against the Kikuyu in the area.

Although disputes between the Kalenjin and Kikuyu, as well as wider tribal tensions are undoubtedly part of the current problem, there are other issues at play. “You have to understand that these issues are much deeper than ethnic,” argues Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. “They are political,” he said, and “they go back to land.”

They also go back to the British. To understand the current crisis in Kenya you have to understand the devastating colonial legacy of the British and other colonial powers in Africa. Firstly, the country’s boundaries were drawn by the colonial powers with no regard for the ethnic breakdown on the ground.

As Richard Dowden, the director of the Royal African Society, has quite rightly pointed out: “Africans played no part in the creation of their nation states. Their boundaries were drawn on maps in Europe by Europeans who had never even been to Africa and with no regard for existing political systems and boundaries.”

So you could argue that the current outpouring of “tribalism” as it is being called in the Western media is the direct result of imposed colonial policies, stretching back decades. Although, as Dowden, points out, Kenyans now feel proud to be Kenyan, their tribal heritage is probably of more importance to them, than being Kenyan.

So in the Rift Valley, the anti-Kikuyu feeling does not just go back a decade to the times of Daniel Arap Moi, it goes back all the way to independence, when the British government bought out Britons who owned huge, picturesque farms that nestled in the valley on prime agricultural land.

Instead of redistributing that land to the people who had lived there for centuries, like the Kalenjin and semi-nomadic Masai, Jomo Kenyatta’s government gave much of the land to other Kikuyu’s. Even today many of the top farms in the Rift Valley are still owned by White settlers or their descendents.

Resentment over land has built up over the past four decades, as it has in other parts of Africa. The British could have prevented this by establishing a system of fair land redistribution when they left, but they did not.

For example, in 2004, the Kenyan government rejected demands by the Masai for the return of one million hectares of land leased to British settlers over 100 years before. Signed on Aug. 15, 1904, with the illiterate Masai using thumbprints, the document said the Masai leaders “of our own free will, decided that it is for our best interests to remove our people, flocks, and herds into definite reservations away from the railway line, and away from any land that may be thrown open to European settlement.”

Although the Masai had no idea what they were signing, they have failed in their attempt to get their land back. In 2004, the Masai tried to forcibly invade some of the farms, leading to over one hundred being arrested and at least one person shot dead by Kenyan police, who were protecting the farmers. When the Masai tried to march to the British High Commission in downtown Nairobi, they were fired upon with tear gas.

"We're now squatters on our own land," said Ratik Ole Kuyana, a Masai tour guide. "I'd rather spend my days in prison than see settlers spend their days enjoying my motherland.” The government could not be seen to give in to the Masai, as scores of other ethnic groups in Kenya also have historical grievances against the British or the Kikuyus.

Apart from land, Britain left behind a colonial machinery that invited corruption and the enhancement of the elite to the detriment of the poor. Caroline Elkins, associate professor of African studies at Harvard University and the author of "Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya” argues “Far from leaving behind democratic institutions and cultures, Britain bequeathed to its former colonies corrupted and corruptible governments. Added to this was a distinctly colonial view of the rule of law, which saw the British leave behind legal systems that facilitated tyranny, oppression and poverty rather than open, accountable government.”

It is the Kikuyus who have benefited the most from Britain’s legacy. Resentment against the Kikuyus is such that in Western Kenya it is the Kikuyus who have been forced to flee in heavily guarded buses from their homes and farms that have been burnt to the ground. As the International Herald Tribune reported “It is nothing short of a mass exodus. The tribe that has dominated business and politics in Kenya since independence in 1963 is now being chased off its land by machete-wielding mobs made up of members of other tribes furious about the Dec. 27 election.”

Kenya should feel let down by Britain in other ways too. In previous elections the UK has turned a blind eye to vote rigging and intimidation. To Britain’s credit it has poured aid money into the country, but has done nothing after watching millions being sliced off by Kenya’s ruling elite.

And in the current crisis it seems the UK was taken completely by surprise about a conflict which was essentially of its own making, and it should have seen coming. And instead of sending out a peace envoy as soon as possible, it was actually the Americans who did so first. Gordon Brown reacted to the crisis with the words “What I want to see is…” His words sounded eerily reminiscent of an old colonial master. It is a master that should shoulder some of the blame of a crisis that some now say constitutes genocide.