Guilt, Accountability, and Agency

Tu quoque is the last refuge of every scoundrel. When everybody is guilty, no one really is. Or so the Kibaki junta wants you to believe. Even as evidence mounted of their theft, Kibaki’s PNU manufactured the meme that the ODM was as guilty of rigging. No matter that if this were the case then it supported the case for a recount. No matter that any rigging would prima facie be in favor of the incumbent who is in control of state machinery. No matter that this does not address the doctoring of results at ECK headquarters.

The PNU tu quoque frame is a manifest act of cynicism and bad faith. But it is just as important not to let pass another insidious tu quoque frame, this time being advanced by many well intentioned Kenyans and observers anxious for the violence to end. This is the claim that Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga are equally responsible for the violence that is currently tearing Kenya apart. Kenyan Pundit highlights as “Comment of the Day” the statement of an unnamed “foreigner” : ” Yes. It is extremely important for both Kibaki and Raila to place the citizens and the country before their own power-hungry egos. This is insane. The whole country is being destroyed. For what? Who cares who is president. As a foreigner who has no tribal association here I have absolutely no respect for either of these politicians. They are both the same, not worth a single lost life. Both men are bad for Kenya. You need a real leader with real ideas. These fools are not worth the violence.”

 WM condemns Kibaki and Raila: “Much worse, we have decided that the only two people who can save us are the precise two men whose overweening ambition and horror of unemployment have led us to this despicable pass.” WM then indicts the entire Kenyan polity: “Let us at least have the courage of our venality; let us look at ourselves squarely in the face and say “we screwed up big time, and we knew it all along, we did it knowingly and now we have to suck it up and deal with the results of our mistakes.”

To be sure, there’s some plausibility to the ”pox on both houses” stance. Perhaps the most charitable reading of it is that it is meant to focus attention on ending the violence first — other matters can be handled later. Less charitably, it may be an attempt by the speakers advancing such a frame to cast themselves as even-handed and neutral, a space clearing gesture for seizing the commanding heights of ”objectivity” or ”disinterest.”  

The problem, though, is that such a claim is not accurate. It is not true that Kibaki and Raila are to blame in equal measure for Kenya’s current predicament. It shouldn’t need saying that Kibaki stole the election; that the violence that erupted is a reaction to a coup.  Attempts to bracket Kibaki’s wrongdoing in the name of focusing on ending the violence simply echoes Kibaki’s own vacuous talking point that he will only engage in dialogue once there is peace. It just so happens, though, that the violence stems from a dispute which must be resolved in order to bring about peace. Moreover, Kibaki and Raila do not occupy symmetrical positions of power. Kibaki, having seized the presidency, has the entire military-police apparatus at his command. He has far more resources, albeit illegitimately expropriated, and far more direct command over his forces than Raila does over the crazed mobs carrying out the ethnic cleansing of Kikuyus. A case in point: Kibaki’s internal security minister, John “Rasputin” Michuki, has converted Kisumu into a human abbatoir.

To be sure, Raila Odinga is not himself blameless. He could have done more — and can still do more — to restrain those fighting in his name from the unconscionable ethnic cleansing of Kikuyus. But it is reductive to claim that he is causing the violence. Injustice — historical to be sure, but perpetuated by the Kibaki regime’s destruction of Kenyans democratic aspirations — lies at the heart of the Kenyan conflagration.

The upshot, it would appear, is neither to reduce the issue to Raila or Kibaki’s “egos” (as if these two men have no followers; or that the issue is purely psychological, not structural), nor to indiscriminately place blame on a collective Kenyan “we” (as if Kenya is monolithic; thus erasing agency and distributions of power in the Kenyan polity). Yes, indeed, none of us are innocent; yes indeed “we” all are to blame — but in different ways, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Some, like Kibaki, stole the election. Others, like Michuki, stole the elections then ordered the slaughter of a city in order to hold on to that stolen election. Others, in the Rift Valley, burned people alive in a Church. Some, like David Kobia of the Kenyan online discussion board, Mashada, fanned the flames of hate. 

 This is also about agency. And it is in recovering our agency (including recognizing the points of articulation of our guilt and responsibility) that we may yet imagine a peaceful, pluralistic, just Kenya.

Emmanuel Eze, African Philosopher

Via Leiter Reports, I have learned with great sorrow that Emmanuel Eze has passed away. Eze, despite his relative youth, was in my view one of the most powerful thinkers in African philosophy. I never got to meet him, but grew to know him through his consistently intelligent work. He shattered the conspiracy of silence about the racism of canonical thinkers in the Euro-American philosophical academy, demonstrating not only how their work attempted to construct Africans as inferior, but that this pernicious belief was one of the driving forces of their epistemological, moral, and political oeuvres (such as Hume’s theory of mind and epistemology; Kant on rationality and morality; and Hegel on history, morality, and politics). What Eze helped us see is that one cannot understand “Western” philosophy without an engagement with African philosophy; that our histories are intertwined.

Perhaps we could honor Eze’s legacy by articulating better philosophies — and histories — among our peoples.

Why Now

A quick link on why Kenya is where it is:

Charles Onyango Obbo on the cocktail of poverty and expectations.

The Invention of Kenya

Do not read The New York Times if you want to understand what is going on in Kenya. Here’s Jeffrey Gettleman misleading Americans — and, far worse, slandering Kenyans — when he writes :

“With the president, Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu and Mr. Odinga a Luo, the election seems to have tapped into an atavistic vein of tribal tension that always lay beneath the surface in Kenya but until now had not provoked widespread mayhem.” (Jeffrey Gettleman, The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2007).

Instead, you could do worse than starting with my dissertation. I wrote:

“The notion of “tribe,” that is, “social formations held together by primordial ties,” emerged as a “racist concept deployed by colonial anthropology to manage and control dissident populations.” It is not just that the concept of “tribe” was posited as the most primitive form of social organization (ostensibly with “nation” as the highest form). It was also a means of social control. Africans in pre-colonial societies often defined themselves as belonging to a variety of loose associations – subject to chiefs at moments, to cults at others, and at other times to professional guilds – and never simply considered themselves as part of a single “tribal” identity – much less the forms that emerged during colonialism. And whereas various customs had certainly been valued in these communities, colonialism led to the construction and freezing of the ones that proved particularly congenial to the new rulers.”

That does not mean that Kenyans do not perceive themselves as belonging to certain ethnic groups. Indeed, by claiming that they belong to particular “tribes,” Kenyans  continue to demonstrate how shackled they are to their British colonizers (and American neocolonizers). But there is nothing “atavistic” about such claims to identity. Indeed, they are modern inventions, as Vijay Prashad (cited in the above excerpt) and Terence Ranger have shown.

Lacanian Face; Marxist Skin

Kibaki has always ruled through absence. In a sense, he got power through his absence. In 2002, he was chosen as the compromise candidate because he seemed to lack the presence of the other candidates — appeared to lack the charisma, the fierce ambition, and perhaps most importantly, the implacable enemies that the other candidates had. He was literally absent for that 2002 campaign, just having barely survived a road accident, and it was left to Raila Odinga to campaign for him.

Through his first term, Kibaki was notable for his absence: through the looting of Kenya’s treasury, through the shadowy terror of the Armenian thugs, and through the dashing of Constitutional Reform hopes.

 But of course, where there is absence, there is also presence. After all, somebody must have been behind the corruption, and siccing of international thugs on the media, and shortcircuiting of Constitutional reforms. Rule through absence allowed Kibaki to survive through his first term. Even at his worst, his opponents held out the hope that he was the well-intentioned Czar sorrounded by venal Cossacks.  

The 2007 elections should have put these illusions to rest. Kibaki made his presence felt in two major ways: on the campaign trail to hand out districts, and in stealing the election.

Now, once again in power, he has retreated to absence as the country burns.

The Buffoonish Style in African Politics

Of all the villains in Kenya’s deadly descent into post-election anarchy, perhaps only the Chairman of the Electoral Commission of Kenya, Samuel Kivuitu, would give Mwai Kibaki, the stealer of the election, a run on sheer venality. At the first conference that he held, just as it began to dawn on Kenyans that Kibaki was stealing the election right before their eyes, Kivuitu’s behavior was an inexplicable mix of adolescent class clown and sociopath. The impression one got as he spoke was that, above everything else, he was desperate that be seen to be funny.

This surreal performance would be repeated when Kibaki convened a kangaroo swearing-in ceremony. Sure enough, there was Kivuitu, once again belching billow after black billow of terrible jokes.

 At first, I thought this rhetorical style bespoke a tragic naivete, much like Marie Antoinette’s apocryphal “Let-them-Eat-Cake” attitude spoke to a fundamental misrecognition of what was at stake. I still think Kibaki, Kivuitu, and the Kenyan power elite made a miscalculation on how Kenyans would react. But the explanation for Kivuitu’s weird behavior follows, as well, a long discursive style of political rhetoric. That is the tradition of the King as Buffoon, as Court Jester in his own court, a tradition which in Kenya was embodied by the likes of Dickson Kihika Kimani and George Nyanja, in Africa was exemplified by Idi Amin and Emperor Bokassa, and on the international stage has been most visible in Nikita Khrushchev and George W. Bush.

African Rhetoric

My Epistemology: Critique, Articulation, and Imagination

My Goal: To explore the possibilities of African utopias