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).

Kenya’s Ha-penis Is Erect

Bad news always comes at one in the morning, in a British accent. That is how I heard that Kenya had plunged into civil war in 2007/8; that Wangari Maathai had died; and now, that Kenya has invaded Somalia. I heard it all on BBC.

It is psychologically disturbing, especially to us former colonial subjects, to admit that we find British accents reassuring. That when there is a grave matter at hand, an issue that demands seriousness, we’d rather hear it in a British accent. And when we need to convey seriousness, we speak British. We enunciate. Properly. In Kenyan media the most important interviews are conducted by the most British sounding journalists.

But Kenyans aren’t alone in this malady. Even here in America the British accent is everywhere present, especially when sternness is needed. It’s ubiquitous in ads. It’s on Supernanny, excoriating Americans for being sloppy parents. It’s on CNN in the figure of Piers Morgan. And it’s Simon Cowell taunting America for her utter lack of talent and her inability to sing. (Here one cannot but notice that Americans are always the ones performing and the Brits the ones judging). For a nation that vanquished the Brits way before Kenya did, Americans are still haunted by the undead figure of the Brit — often in the guise of the proverbial parent unsatisfied with his child America.

But I digress too much.

By now you’ve heard that Kenya has invaded Somalia. That this clusterfuck is called operation linda nchi (operation protect the nation). You’ve seen political pundits on local newspapers pummeling the war drum. You’ve heard the pep talk Kenyans have been given: that you are either with us or against us; that this is a battle we have to fight to lose our war virginity; that certain ministries must expect budget cuts to support the war effort; that we can succeed in a country where Ethiopia, Uganda, the US and Russia have shot themselves in the foot trying to invade.

Operation linda nchi. From what? For whom, by whom?

There is a racist Frenchman (I can’t for the life of me remember his name) who defined a nation as a group of people who share common lies about their past, common hatred for their present neighbors, and common illusions about their future together.

Lies abound about our past: that our military has never been at war. This, of course, is bullshit at its purest. From 1963-67 we fought the Shifta War in this very region we’ve (re)deployed our military to recently. We even put Somalis and other North Easterners in concentration camps.

If our past is full of lies, our present is a nervous breakdown. A nervous breakdown is a mental condition arising from the inability to cope with reality. It often causes depression or anxiety. And surely these are depressingly anxious times in Kenya: the shilling isn’t worth jack; the new constitution is facing sabotage by the oligarchs; our trial at the ICC is increasingly becoming Kafkaesque; IDP’s remain largely unsettled.

But if you listen to our talk radios, if you read our newspapers, if you listen in on our conversations, you’ll unearth a supposedly greater problem presently than all these put together: the erosion of paternal authority. As fellow blogger Keguro writes:

We inhabit a moment of profound gender anxieties in Kenya: the 2/3 gender rule in the constitution has produced discomfitures; our Chief Justice sports an earring and has a record of supporting queer and trans activism; 6 leading Kenyan men representing such robust male institutions as the Ministry of Finance, the Kenya Police, the Civil Service, and Kenyan Politics as Male Spectacle in general have been rendered vulnerable by the ICC court; and daily our media is flooded with stories of Kenyan cougars and cheating wives and wives who beat their husbands.

Kenyan men are cowering.

But. Not. For. Long.

Enter WAR!

No wonder the war mongering has been replete with sexualized language. Phallic-speak. We are yearning for a (non-)time when men were men, before cougars started running amok. Before “our wives” (I put this in quotes because of the discourse of possession in “our” and subordination in “wives”) allegedly started cheating on us and at times even beating us.

Detour: And maybe here lies something akin to reflexive(?) sexism: the kind that actually attributes sexism to the Other/Woman. These tropes of Kenyan cougars, cheating or abusive wives are supposed to cast men as the victims of women.

It is in the spirit of remasculinization that Kenya is projecting not one but multiple phalluses (think: bombs) into Somalia. We are going to fuck Al Shabaab! Those pummeling the war drum keep telling us that the first fuck is one you just have to get done. It’s one you just want to be over with. Don’t think. It’s no use coming up with reasons. Just. Do. It.

À la Lacan, the phallus multiplied becomes a symbol of its own absence/castration, a(n) (in)security that seeks to doubly/triply/quadruply reinforce itself to signal its potency — which, in the end, is an empty pose. So these multiple phalluses we are projecting are testament to our castration. Kenya’s nightmarish present has produced in us a nervous breakdown, and our impotence at handling the quagmire within our borders has sent us packing heat/penis across the border in a quest to reclaim what never was.

Was there really a time when women and men were strictly monogamous? A time when there was no domestic violence? Was there a time when men were men? Or a time when paternal authority wasn’t an empty pose? Nostalgia is not remembering things as they were, but rather as they should have been.

There is a kind of remembering that is forgetting.

And because we can’t really remember our past, we’re building a future full of illusions — the first of which is that this war is going to increase our security. We are a nation indeed.

Pakistan and the US on the Verge of Nervous Breakdowns?

 

In Nation on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Fatima Bhutto addresses the more than complicated relationship between Pakistan and the United States; the US drone war in Pakistan; the assassination of Osama bin Laden; and the political situation in Pakistan.

President Moi, My Dad And I

I thought it was my old man’s birthday yesterday. I called him and he was elated to hear from me — I haven’t called in over a month — but it wasn’t his birthday. It was my mum’s.

The same woman who breached spaces that women were kept out of; did things women weren’t supposed to do; made more money than dad when women still weren’t allowed to.

I didn’t talk to my dad yesterday. And I should have, because these moments when he’s elated are few and far between these days. Most times there is just looming silence over the phone. Silence reminiscent of the many years we never shared a word because I was raging at him and I didn’t fully understand what it was to be a man under the Moi regime, to have spent time in prison through no fault of your own and come out to find your assets seized and your house under repossession.

I didn’t know what happened to him inside those prison walls. I still don’t know. And I don’t know that I’d want to know.

So when I called him yesterday and found out it was Mama’s birthday, I asked that he hand her the phone. I knew all too well what he wanted to talk about and I didn’t have it in me to engage him.

I haven’t had it in me for a while now. There were years I pushed him to bare his pain before he was ready. I was young and I thought I could handle it. And the more I pushed, the more silent he became. Until now. I finally have what I wanted all those years — he wants to talk to me. Sometimes you get what you want but it’s not what you want. Or it’s not how or when you want it.

Now is a hard time for me to talk to him because I’m in my own pain, my own failure. Like my dad I have become silent. And in my mind’s eye I see how my time here in America has been like pulling rabbits out of hats. Only there’s not enough rabbits, so I start pulling hats out of hats and then rabbits out of those hats. But still it’s not enough and it’s becoming clear that coming here was a big mistake.

I came here to get away from my past. And that’s exactly what my old man needs to talk to me about: the past. Because as Faulkner said, the past is not dead. It is not even past.

But we are stuck in the past, my dad and I. We are relics from the bygone Moi era when the coordinates of existence were very clear, back when you were either with Baba or against him, back when you either followed Nyayo or you followed Nyayo. The choice was yours.

We are old men, my dad and I: he because of age and I because of mileage. We never really moved into the Kibaki-decade with its talk of democracy, which has fallen on our deaf ears, and its new roads, old wealth and fiber optics internet, all of which are victims of our blinding sight.

Like every man seeking to escape his past, I set my sight elsewhere — America. My dad’s sight, on the other hand, turned inward. Eyes that peer out every now and then, only to return to some inner dark place. This is how he was when I left to come here years ago.

I thought I’d put Moi behind me for sure till a couple of weeks ago when I was on the phone with a friend who told me that Moi used to rape school girls. That he’d visit a girls boarding school and handpick his victim who’d later be whisked to State House. That he also did this to Headmistresses. Of course I’ve heard this story before. We’ve all heard this story before, stories about dictators and their insatiable appetite for deflowering innocent girls and women. It is this story that brought Moi back into my mind.

I wondered why we’d concocted these stories — wasn’t the horror of the man per se sufficient? It is as if we ignored the torture, arrest, and disappearance of our neighbors and family members. We ignored the special branch policemen who were everywhere present and listening in on every conversation, including our very thoughts. We ignored those red eyed CID who used to drive around neighborhoods with their hands perpetually inside their jacket pockets — holding guns.

We’ve ignored and forgotten all these real horrors and instead cooked up pedophiliac stories that are like stunt-doubles. It’s as if the real thing just doesn’t cut it. The truth of those years is still stranger than the fictions we’ve made up, but we’ve lived our fictions for so long the truth is starting to fray on the edges. If Moi raped anything, it was our minds. Even in our minds we are raped.

And this truth, this real horror, is where I fear talking to my dad is going to lead me. And though I’m glad to have him return from his silence, I’m not sure I’m strong enough to weather the past we must reckon with. But maybe there’s no way out of this. Maybe the only way out is through.