Kenyan Election Years
January 29, 2013 § 3 Comments
From my inbox:
Election-year conversations and Kenyan political conversations tend to circle around endlessly, ending up in what feel like inevitable binaries. Certainly, if one reads the mainstream newspapers, we might as well be in 1974. I’m not sure I’ve read or seen anything that imagines anything genuinely new or interesting—this is why I worry when we say that x state formation does not work but there’s a traditional solution that worked. There’s something about this return to “what used to work” that ignores history. Or it feels that way. It’s as though we are prescribing drugs that worked before the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria. So how to inhabit the present as it’s configured?
Great thought Kweli! Yay, another question. Do you think all these elections are fair?
Greetings
Xandi,
I’m troubled by the way the big parties have blocked women candidates from nomination. I’m also troubled that we have people being tried at the ICC running for president—and even some of the other major candidates, though not up for trial at the ICC, have atrocious human rights and corruption records.
Can a country have a fair election when these are the candidates to pick from? There are no lesser evils here.
Yeah. Actually things like these make me angry, Sometimes we are like animals…
That’s really hard….