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Business Daily (Nairobi)

Kenya: What Political Elite Learnt From Nairobi University

Simon Gikandi

30 April 2008

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opinion

The debate about the sharing of the "National Cake," an obsession of the Kenyan political class, and the disagreements that it generates, is about how to distribute the material objects of modernisation in the face of their scarcity.

In effect, we have been victims of our success. Development had raised our expectations about modernity and with those expectations come the frustrated desires that increasingly make violence the only language we have in common. How do we balance the great expectations of modernity with the realities of diminished resources, malaise, and moral decay?

In Modern Social Imaginaries, the Canadian political philosopher, Charles Taylor, has reminded us that the discourse on modernity and the project of modernisation is premised on contradictory movements and desires.

From one perspective, modernity implies the development of new social institutions and practices in fields such as science, technology, industrialisation, and urbanization. The idea of modernity is thus predicated on the modernisation of pre-existing, so-called traditional, institutions.

From another perspective, however, modernity involves a second process, which might be at odds with the first. As Taylor aptly notes, to be modern is to conceive new ways of living, to have a powerful sense of individualism, a secular outlook on life, and to adopt a measure of rationality in the conduct of social life. In short, modernity also presupposes a transformation in peoples' attitudes in relation to each other and the situations in which they find themselves.

Among classical social theorists, there has always been the assumption that this second sense of modernity - the transformation in our attitudes toward each other - will be able to balance or mediate the problems that emerge when modernisation meets its limits.

Thus, if the crisis in Kenya has been triggered by a powerful sense of feeling among certain groups, such as youths, women, regions, or classes, that they have been left out of the first category of modernity, one would assume these grievances would be mediated and be moderated through a rational process. After all, grievances that emerge out of the limits of modernity demand modern, rational solutions, not mayhem.

And yet, the kind of violence that was witnessed in Kenya at the beginning of the year, one that continues to be held over the head of the polity like the sword of Damocles, seems to suggest that post-colonial modernity has not produced modern subjects or citizens and that it does not look kindly to rational conversations. Indeed, observers of violence in Kenya, as elsewhere in Africa, have been startled by two facts that seem to point to the failure of modernity to produce rational subjects.

First, it is notable that the subjects who are products of modern institutions seem to be the first to negate instrumental reason. If the profiles and reports in the international media are accurate, then it is clear that many of the actors in the most outrageous acts of violence during the crisis in Kenya, from the burning of the Church in Eldoret to the mayhem in Naivasha were drawn from the educated classes.

From the collection of images broadcast by local and international media, the "tribal" warriors that roamed the streets of Nairobi in the months of January and February were the young, the bold and the beautiful, not the great unwashed.

The language of hate that circulated on blogs came not from peasants but highly educated Kenyans. Some of the brains behind the grand ideologies of state theft and ethnic cleansing that we have witnessed in Kenya for the last twenty five years are products of my beloved alma mater, the University of Nairobi.

Second, it is curious that almost without exception, the agents of violence tend to justify their actions through a resort to modes of cultural behaviour that are discernibly unmodern.

In fact, one notable aspect of all postmodern militia groups in Africa, is their attachment to premodern paraphernalia and behaviour, from the use of charms to deadly rituals of blood.

Now, it is true that these groups are adept at using modern technology. They cannot, function, for example, without cellular phones, modern weapons of war, and advanced technologies in text messaging and computer graphics. Still, the modes of thought that informs the actions of these groups and the ideologies they espouse are informed, not by instrumental reason, but radical irrationality.

Except for the remnants of the old nationalist movement (Polisario in Western Sahara, for example) it is hard to think of an insurgent movement in Africa that has a rational ideological programme.

For a generation that is no longer interested in total revolution, and one for which immediate gratification is an essential calculus, modern "witch doctors" and Pentecostalists seem to have greater legitimacy than Karl Marx or Frantz Fanon. Previous generations went to the Lumunba Institute in Moscow for indoctrination; now all roads lead to Bagamoyo and its famous medicine men.

Those of us interested in the politics of knowledge about Africa have seemed unable to account for the co-existence of modernity, as a project of development, with the attraction of the premodern.

Why are members of Mungiki, key players in the regional capitalist economy, attracted to retrogressive ritual practices? Is there a contradiction between the idea of modernity or rather the notion of development and the radical scepticism toward the rationalisation of social life that feeds the new political cults?

On first sight, it doesn't make sense for members of postcolonial cults such as Mungiki to adopt and celebrate modern technology and crave for the irrational and archaic. A closer examination shows the actors in what we consider to be irrational acts perceive a contradiction between technology and cultural atavism. The invocation of the premodern provides a detour around an infrastructure controlled by postcolonial elites.

Groups like Mungiki provide the ambitious sons of the poor with a mode of social mobility, a point of entry into the citadels of power and privilege now, in a land that no longer values meritocracy, colonised by the children of the elite.

Hannah Arendt, one of the most distinguished political philosophers of our time, once said that violence emerges and thrives where political institutions are corrupted and compromised. In Kenya, it is hard to identify an institution that has escaped corruption or compromise.

Gikandi is a Professor of English, Princeton University

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