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.
