A scene from the Kenyan city of Kisumu, where gangs of mostly young men have caused havoc and driven members of different tribes to leave what was once a thriving multicultural environment. Yet many observers caution that tribal tensions alone can't adequately explain Kenya's outburst of violence. (Ben Curtis/Associated Press)
It all seems grimly familiar: another African country, this time Kenya, in flames as ancient fault lines fester. An election goes wrong, sparking a tribal firestorm and innocent people are butchered in the hundreds.
The headlines wonder whether "another Rwanda" is in the making. The images of anger and panic, bloodshed and faces suffused with ethnic hatred blot television screens. International mediators call for calm, for negotiations. But the violence follows a grisly dynamic of its own.
Or does it? A growing number of Africa watchers abroad, and Africans themselves, are wondering if there aren't far more complex and contemporary explanations for Kenya's current agony — not to mention a plethora of other African conflicts in recent years. They begin by dismissing the comparison with Rwanda.
"There is no genocide here [in Kenya]: there never will be," said Prof. David Anderson of Oxford University, who has studied the politics of Kenya for years. "Any comparison with Rwanda just doesn't stand up, however horrific things are."
The violence erupted after Mwai Kibaki declared he had retained the presidency in the Dec. 27 general election. His chief rival, opposition leader Raila Odinga, said the vote was rigged, while international and local observers said there were significant problems with the polling. In the month that followed alone, more than 800 people were killed.
However, Anderson points out that — far from the stark Hutu-Tutsi hostilities that had been building for generations in Rwanda — Kenya is a patchwork quilt of more than 40 different tribes and ethnic groups, with intermarriage, urbanization and other time-honoured ways to blur tribal lines.
"What's happening in Kenya is nothing simple, nothing obvious," he said. "Ethnicity may describe what drives some of the current violence, but it doesn't explain it, not at all."
Multiple factors behind strife
Economics, overpopulation, hunger for land and, above all, the political cynicism of Kenyan governments lie behind the current situation, according to Anderson.
The country's vibrant economic growth of recent years has not benefited everyone equally. Many of the participants in the post-election violence are young men who come from the country's growing class of unemployed and underemployed.
Anderson's work in Kenya has uncovered what he calls "an economy of violence" spawned by political leaders who hire thugs and informal militias to campaign and settle points of contention with opponents. Quite often, those gangs that sell their violent services to the highest bidder are from a single tribe or ethnic group, aligned not out of hatred but because of the modern demographics of Kenya.
Macharia Munene of the United States International University in Nairobi has described what's happening in his country as a legacy of "ethnically engineered civil commotion" by past governments.
But ethnicity in contemporary Kenya is fluid, Munene comments in a column in the Kenyan newspaper, Business Daily Africa, as the country's economy draws more people into cities and away from tribal lands.
Some blame local politics
That's a phenomenon that Anderson notes as well: ethnic and tribal lines that blur and re-form by turns, often based on local conditions and realties. In Kenya, he says, the American aphorism "all politics is local" is hugely relevant.
"Kenyan political parties are organized by not being organized," he said. "What's going on in the countryside and outside the capital … is local; it's being organized by political lowlife for local purposes, not national reasons."
Anderson contends that the political "thugs" armed with machetes who are running amok in Kisumu, Naivasha and the slums of Nairobi double as criminal gangs outside of election time, running protection and extortion rackets.
Others say national leaders to blame
Others say national leaders bear much of the blame for the current conflict.
Journalist and author Peter Kimani, writing for the British website opendemocracy.org, argues that Kenyan leaders have long encouraged ethnic tensions to maximize their power.
Daniel Arap Moi, who was president from 1978 until 2002, has been blamed by some for the rise in ethnic politics in Kenya. (Sayyid Azim/Associated Press)
Jomo Kenyatta, the man who led Kenya to independence in 1963, wasn't above such an approach, Kimani says, nor was his long-serving successor, Daniel Arap Moi, who lost power in 2002 to an opposition movement that included both the current rivals, Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga.
Now those two men are holding their own country to ransom and refusing to settle their differences over the contested election, Kimani writes. He cites a Kenyan proverb that when two elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.
"But if all the grass is destroyed," Kimani concludes, "there will be [nothing] left for the elephants to feed on."
Hopes for change
International attempts to mediate in Kenya are intensifying. An African Union summit in Addis Ababa on Jan. 31 will be dominated by concerns over the human and economic effects of the post-election violence. The United Nations is pondering a role in brokering peace.
Whatever the outcome of such efforts, it's clear that what was one of Africa's most economically vibrant democracies faces years of rebuilding and recovery. But maybe, just maybe, there's a glimmer of hope, argues Christopher Cramer of the School of Oriental and African Studies in Britain.
Cramer, the author of Civil War is not a Stupid Thing: Accounting for violence in developing countries, says strife in places like Kenya arises for complex reasons and often has mixed outcomes — a few positive developments to offset the horrors of war.
"We are seeing in Kenya that a professional class, a middle class, made up of people who want to live boring lives, is disgusted, fed up with politics," Cramer said. "It's possible that in the long run, however ghastly things are now, these people could be a real force for progressive change in Kenyan political life.
"For now, it's hellish and could stay that way for some time."
