After ICC experience, Kenya is on the way to political heaven – via hell

The arguments over the politicians, government officials, and a journalist who have been fingered by the International Criminal Court at The Hague (the so-called “Ocampo Six”) for their suspected role in the 2008 post-election violence has become very hot.

Sometimes, you think Kenya is going to descend to civil war over the issue. That would still be a “good” war. Why? In many ways, Kenya’s curse is its blessing.

Last year, the referendum campaigns were quite nasty too, but unlike the post-election violence (PEV) of early 2008, it was not fought strictly along tribal lines. The issues were mainly abortion, kadhi courts, and land.

In Africa, when a country gets to have a noisy national disagreement over real issues other than tribe, then it is making progress. Now, eight months later, Kenya is in the midst of another row — this time over the impending trial of the Ocampo Six.

Again, though there are some tribal contours to the framing of the issue, the ICC is largely a trans-tribal issue. Now if machetes are brought out over this, it is probably better than being burnt in your house because your ancestor comes from the foot of Mt Kenya.

However, the more interesting issue is how persecution leads to the evolution of new identities. Take Israel. Apart from a few religious shrines (the Wailing Wall), its most enduring national symbols are built mostly around the World War II genocide in which about 6 million Jews perished.

That experience defines Israel and the global Jewish movement. A Jewish dissident can be anti-Zionist, denounce Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as criminal, but there is one thing he cannot do – deny the genocide.

We see the same thing with the Tutsi of Rwanda, and the Diaspora. The genocide of 1994 in which one million people, mostly Tutsi, were killed, defines nearly all aspects of being a Tutsi – and a Rwandan – today.

Which brings me to the story of a friend from the heartland of Central Kenya. In the mid-1930s, his great-grandparents moved to the Rift Valley. They worked as marginal labourers on a white settler farm. His grandfather did much better.

The settlers gave him a few acres on the edge of their plantation. He worked it into a small successful farm, and built a decent house for the family. He lived happily on his farm until 1992 when in the throes of elections that year, the first ethnic cleansing of the Kikuyu took place in the area.

His grandfather was chased away from his farm, and moved with his family to Eldoret town. The old man fell into a deep depression, lost his mind, and died two years later. His father and uncles struggled to rebuild a life in Eldoret, and were about to succeed when the second wave of attacks came in 1997.

Most of the family, including his father, left the Rift Valley and settled back in Central Kenya. The few relatives who remained in the Rift Valley, he tells me in a voice filled with emotion, didn’t make it out in the PEV of 2008.

When I ask him what the feeling in the family is about the state of politics in the country, he tells me: “When we gather, lock the doors in the evening, and sit around the dinner table, you Charles would not like to hear the conversation that goes on”.

There is now a generation of Kenyans that has suffered and been massacred because of the ethnic group they come from. I think that experience is shaping who they are, and how they will vote – and no one can be sure which way they will go.

There is just one big mistake I see most politicians making. Clearly politicians who are PEV-deniers might not get this group’s vote. However, talking to them, I sense that it is not enough to support the ICC process to win their support.

To them, if you did nothing to stop the PEV when you could have, you are as bad as their tormentors and PEV-deniers. I can smell that the months ahead will be full of surprises and many heart-broken politicians.

cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com