Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteIt comes as no surprise that Kenya's seemingly model democracy and economy have given way to fighting in the streets. Reuters reports 620 dead and 250,000 displaced so far [1].
Although the lion's share of brutality has come out of the opposition camps, government police have in this past day fired tear gas into protesting crowds as well as opened fire on looters. Opposition leader Raila Odinga claims seven dead from government arms.
"Raila was placed under house arrest for seven months after being suspected of collaborating with the plotters of a failed coup attempt against President Daniel Arap Moi in 1982. Raila was charged with treason and was detained without trial for six years." [2]
Wikipedia's short biography signals where violence gets its spark.
The Human Rights Watch report on Kenya around 1992 tells more about where it has gotten its fuel. [3]
However, the blog Proud Kikuyu Woman provides quite another point of view: the Kikuyu tribe, no less one may suppose than Jews, America and other convenient scapegoats are just not the problem.
While Kenya wrestles with "tribalism" and its politicians with their own and each other's huge egos, solutions to the political, practical, and social challenges of the country will be found elsewhere, and specifically, frankly, in the development of programs developed on the impartial and equal distribution both of common misery and helpful privilege.
Between President Roosevelt's "New Deal" and Reagan's "Devolution" (as I like to call it), America, and not alone among democracies, produced its share of "help out" and "get equal" programs, from the Civilian Conservation Corps, which produced jobs for young men, including my father, during the Great Depression to the still boppin' SBA 8(a) Small Disadvantaged Business fleet. Our politicians, however bloated their rhetoric, have often succeeded in essentially paying ahead of mob violence and violent revolution.
Of course, the U.S. has its own ground rules plus the extraordinary fortune of both having become a heterogeneous and mobile society, spreading both families and, one might say, less attached people of every inclination and origin across the continent, and then, with the affluence that comes of peace, of having also addressed its issues through multiple administrative, legal, and political processes.
We have some hideous problems--e.g., about 51,000 missing adults (but no indictment of the state in that) and 3 million homeless souls (for which state involvement should be better than it is)--but we seem also to have plenty to do in the way of endeavor than to explode (from which quarter?) into mob-drive mayhem, pillage, and rape.
Here's a toast: I raise my coffee cup to next generation of leadership in Kenya (Pakistan too) with hopes that those latent mid-40-somethings will see disease, hunger, education, housing, electric power, transportation, shipping, agriculture, natural resources conservation and preservation, and security as problems solvable by constituents bonded more by common good will than by parochial and personal vendetta.
1. Hull, C. Bryson, Nick Tattersall. "Police battle Kenyan protesters for second day." January 17, 2008.
2. "Raila Odinga." Wikipedia as experienced January 17, 2008.
3. "Kenya: Human Rights Development." Report. Human Rights Watch. 1992.
4. "It's That Time Again." Proud Kikuyu Woman. January 13, 2008.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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