Utumishi Kwa Wote: Kenya Slips Into Paranoia

A couple of months ago I ran into this video of Abdulahi Ahmed, a third generation Kenyan Somali, speaking about being denied an identification card. This video was shot by Kuweni Serious after the Kenyan government restricted the issuance of identification cards and passports to ethnically Somali individuals — be they from Somalia or Kenyan-born:

 

Somalis have been our part of no-part. That part we can’t fully integrate into the Kenyan body politic not because of anything they’ve done to earn this distrust, but because of the constitutive noncoincidence of our identity to itself. When it comes to Somalis, Kenyan identity is a lot like auto-immune disease: the body mistakes some part of itself to be foreign matter and then attacks it.

Malkiat Singh, that government chosen historian who miseducated a whole generation of Kenyans, tried to simplify our identity for us. Kenya, he wrote in books used from primary through high school, has 42 tribes. Somalis were always listed somewhere close to the end: 36, or 38, or 41. Singh, himself a Kenyan Asian, didn’t list Asians as a Kenyan tribe. Maybe he knew what the Brits meant by “tribe”.

It is against this age-old racism against Somalis that Kenyan identity is consolidating itself. Egged on by the need to protect the nation (operation linda nchi), the 42 tribes are congealing into one. Due to fear of retaliation from Al Shabaab, the government has called on citizens to be more vigilant and report suspicious activities. We have become a unified, protective gaze. We’re now involved in “the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere“. That is, unless we are Kenyan Somalis, who must be conscious of being watched. Surveilled. They are the ones who watch themselves being watched.

Detour: This unifying vision reminds me of a friend’s utter disgust after we watched a Hollywood romantic comedy. My friend said she hated the way the movie invited her to view the world only through a male gaze, so that it forced her to consider only the main female character (and not the male) as eye-candy, as the target of desire. The point to watch. To what extent do women traverse the world watching themselves being watched? And how disturbing is it to be invited to view yourself solely through another’s desire for you? How does it feel to have your gaze turned searchingly on yourself?

In a Sunday Nation Op/Ed, Rasna Warah invited us all to become part of this unified, protective vision/gaze that Kenya has become:

Dadaab presents a huge threat to Kenyan security. Like Goma, the refugee camp is probably crawling with militia. What better way for al Shabaab to penetrate Kenya’s borders than to become refugees within our borders? […]

If Kenya is to win the war against the militias, it must remove al Shabaab from the camp. And it should be looking for al Shabaab agents living in our midst undetected in various towns. […]

Moreover, there is the question of identifying al Shabaab. Do police at the Kenya-Somali border have names, faces and identities of known members of the terrorist group? What distinguishes a terrorist from a genuine refugee?

Warah forces us to become part of a visual parallax, to see Daabab no longer as a refugee camp but as a terrorist recruitment and operating zone. Mentioning markedly Somali spaces like Eastleigh and Garissa, Warah warns us that terrorists have infiltrated and blended into Kenyan society. She urges us all to look closely so we can spot that imperceptible X (to borrow from Žižek) that transforms your ordinary Somali into a terrorist. That thing that is in them more them than they are.

In a separate article, Daniel Wesangula projects our vision into Eastleigh, that markedly Somali neighborhood in Nairobi. He writes voyeuristically about increasing police and military presence in the neighborhood:

For Eastleigh residents, however, this day has been a long time coming.

“We wake up prepared for a day and a time like this. When world events will shape the daily livelihoods of the hundreds of thousands living in this little corner of Nairobi,” said Jamal Sheikh, who describes himself as a Kenyan and shuns any association with Somalia.

Jamal sips his coffee. His left cheek has a bulge. His eyes are widening. The stimulant from the miraa is getting into his system and fuelling his rant.

“The problem is the people who carry out these operations cannot tell the difference between us and the aliens.

“We know them. We know where they live. We know what they do. If the security forces involved us, such operations would be less acrimonious and would leave both the State and us, Kenyans, satisfied,” he says. […]

A few minutes later, a two-man police patrol unit on foot passes by, asks around for identification cards then proceeds.

It is toward Eastleigh, that neighborhood also known as Little Mogadishu, that our unified vision is being harnessed, consolidated and directed. It is this vision we’re directing that forces Jamal Sheikh to describe himself solely as Kenyan and shun any association with Somalia, to try and blend in, to become a part of Kenya. But as Rasna Warah warns us in her Op/Ed, it is this very blending in that we should look out for. The more you try to blend in, the more suspicious you become.

The paranoia has set in.

I can’t help but think of the Kenya Police force motto: utumishi kwa wote. (Service to all). Who’s being served here? What does it mean to fight terror with the Kenya Police and the Ministry of Defense, the two institutions declared first and second most corrupt in the 2011 National Bribery Index?

How could it be that these local newspapers at the forefront of directing our vision utterly missed news reports that the Kenyan government had been recruiting and training young Somalis (both Kenyan-born and those from Daadab refugee camp) to fight Al Shabaab way before our military got involved?

It is after reading these newspapers this morning that the image of Mariam coursed through my mind. (Mariam in Dholuo means Mary mother of Jesus). Mariam was the name given to this gigantic, navy blue, trapezium-shaped lorry police officers patrolled poor neighborhoods in at night (back in the early 90s when I was a child) and randomly arrested anyone outside for loitering — the loitering law was a leftover from the Brits, as probably was Mariam.

Mariam was somewhat of a legend, a phantasm, if you will. We were told there was enough standing-room in her to swallow a whole town; that she didn’t run on petrol, she didn’t run on anything at all — she just ran; that you could disappear inside her never to be found even by the police officers that tossed you in her; that she could drive over spikes and not puncture, drive through walls and not dent.

Today I imagined Mariam coursing through the veins of Eastleigh neighborhood. She was running not on petrol but on hatred. She swallowed a whole neighborhood of Somali men, women and children and came out of Eastleigh bulging, heaving, the bulk of her belly hung in a full jowl and the police force logo and utumishi kwa wote painted on her side distended, stretched.

And the people inside her were thinking navumilia kuwa Mkenya (I persevere being Kenyan); najihurumia kuwa Mkenya (I pity myself for being Kenyan); nalia kuwa Mkenya (I am crying because I’m Kenyan); natoroka kuwa Mkenya (I am running away from being Kenyan).