Kenya Burning

With the March elections quickly approaching, several friends and family members expressed concern over my traveling to Kenya this past November. Given the violence and chaos surrounding the 2007 elections (which left over 1,200 people dead and thousands more displaced), prospects leading up to this year’s elections were quite grim. Luckily (and much to my pleasant surprise) this year’s elections were relatively peaceful, giving me and many others lots of hope for the future of Kenya.

Downtown Nairobi

While in Nairobi, I had the opportunity to see “Kenya Burning”, a photographic exhibit of the 2007 electoral violence that was traveling the country. The exhibit’s creators, and various national and international sponsors (including USAID), hoped that by reminding all Kenyans of the atrocities of 2007, people would reflect on the dangers of highlighting ethnic divisions and act differently in the upcoming elections.

Kenya has approximately 44 million inhabitants, with four distinct ethnic groups making up approximately 60% of the population. Coming off two years in a country devastated by civil war and genocide, I know better than to pretend to understand the complicated relationships and tensions that divide ethnic groups in East Africa. An attempt to summarize the history of the conflicts, or interpret the grievances of Luo, Kukuyu, Kalejin, or any of the other seventy plus ethnic groups that live in Kenya, given my cursory readings and informal conversations on the issues, would probably do a disservice to all. For those interested, I highly recommend Michela Wrong’s It’s Our Turn to Eat, a fantastic and very accessible account of the corruption and events leading up to the 2007 elections.

The photos and video on display in "Kenya Burning" were graphic and gruesome. As I walked through the exhibit, I realized how much my experience in Rwanda fundamentally changed the way I think about conflict. Staring at images of dead corpses and severed limbs, my mind wandered and thought not about the photographed victims or their perpetrators, but about the families, who fifteen and twenty years from now will still live in the aftermath. Children who have not yet been born run the risk of years later, still be defined by conflicts they have no first hand recollection of. I felt sick to my stomach as I thought about the Rwandan government’s “Never Again” slogan. If the horrors of Rwanda’s 1994 ethnic genocide, which killed nearly one million people, serve as no warning to Kenya, only 300 miles away, what can?

The most disturbing images I saw in the exhibit were video images filmed in Nairobi’s largest slum, Kibera. A man, with blood and brains flowing from machete wounds to the head, stumbled down the street. His delirium was evident as you watched him fall to the ground and try to lift himself up. Each time he tried, young men appeared from the sides and kicked him back to the ground.

Most upsetting, for me, was not the poor, gory man, who was only hours (if not minutes) from his death; or the unemployed, poor, young men with knock-off sunglasses and second hand Western clothes, slugging machetes and sticks (no doubt provided, along with some petty cash, by an elite politician) at their helpless neighbor who happened to be from a different ethnic group.  What continues to haunt me today, as I think about the exhibit, are the images of the “innocent bystanders” in the video. The men and women within arm’s reach of the unfolding events; these people are what scare me the most. 

I am not arguing that each individual who witnessed violence is guilty by association. No doubt, a majority of these people were simply trying to save their own lives and those of their families by avoiding violence. I am sure many (or probably, most) did what they could behind the scenes to help others. And yet, failure to stand up to violence, to watch passively from the sidelines (be they five feet or five thousand miles away), is what allows violence like that of the 2007 Kenyan elections, and in its extreme form, the 1994 Rwandan genocide, to go on. After violent events like these occur, those who bore witness will be fundamentally changed forever.