Managing perilous politics of memories of past violence

This week, as I attended a conference on peace-building in Johannesburg, South Africa, I took time to read a beautiful book by the Belgian sociologist, Luc Huyse, expressively titled: All things pass, except the past (2009).

Published two years after Kenya’s 2007 disputed presidential election results that plunged the country into its worst orgy of violence, the tome describes how people from diverse theatres of war from post-Second World War Europe to Argentina, South Africa and Afghanistan have tried to come into terms with the painful memories of war, brutal repression and apartheid.

Clearly, the road to Kenya’s August 8, 2017 elections is mined with what Raul Hilberg, the Austrian-American pre-eminent scholar of the Holocaust, dubbed “The Politics of Memory” in his 1996 memoir by the same title.

As a concept, the politics of memory describes how political agents organise and manage collective memory to win or harness their power.

But complicating Kenya’s politics of memory is the post-truth politics where facts no longer matter, and out-right lies are cast as “alternative facts.”
Kenya is a paradox in two distinct ways.

Globally, the country is increasingly hoisted in policy and intellectual circles as a poster child of successful peace building, thrusting it to the centre-stage of the debate on innovations and models of moving post-conflict societies from war to sustainable peace.

In this context, Kenya, alongside Colombia, Nepal, Rwanda and South Africa, is a case study in a worldwide project on: “Innovations in Peace-Building,” jointly launched by the Centre for Study of Violence and Reconciliation (South Africa), University of Denver (USA) and the Christian Michelsen Institute (CMI) in Bergen, Norway, in South Africa from March 28-31, 2017.

VIOLENT CONFLICT

Speakers in the meeting highlighted how the geopolitics of the post-Cold War liberal order changed the character of war, transforming a simple election dispute into a deadly violent conflict.

However, framing responses to the dispute were cycles of ethnic violence as part of a “low-intensity civil war” that followed Kenya’s return to multiparty democracy in the early 1990s.

A close study of reports by human rights watchdogs and development agencies reveals that ethnic-based post-election violence between 1991 and 2008 cumulatively claimed no less than 4,000 innocent lives and displaced over 1.2 million people, including the 1,000-plus people killed and nearly 600,000 displaced after 2007.

Efforts to end Kenya’s “low-intensity civil war” reflected the historic “Convention for a Democratic South Africa” (Codesa) negotiations that fashioned the transition from apartheid to democracy.

Codesa’s legacy is a formulaic peace-building process that starts with a peace agreement followed by a care-taker government of national unity, a new constitution and ends with a democratic election that returns the country to normalcy.

ENTRENCHED GRIEVANCES

Although South Africa’s blueprint has been replicated across Africa from Cote d’Ivoire to Sudan, at home it failed to address the deep wounds of apartheid or to provide for wealth-sharing as a durable solution to entrenched grievances over social marginalisation, inequalities and poverty.

Twenty-five years on, South Africa has morphed into two nations: one Hobbesian (poor, violent and black), the other Lockean (wealthy, peaceful and white).

True to form, the post-apartheid miracle is unravelling, giving way to a sweltering grievance politics over land, service delivery, widening inequality gap, poverty and xenophobic violence.

In contrast, Kenya’s new devolved system of government has been hailed as an innovation in building durable peace through a fine mix of power-sharing and wealth-sharing to drain the swamps of social grievances, reduce poverty and narrow the inequality gap.

By April 9, 2013, when Uhuru Kenyatta was sworn in as Kenya’s fourth President, Kenya had successfully completed the Codesa roadmap and entered the phase of normalcy and development.

Internally, the resurgent politics of memory fuelled by the coming elections threatens to reverse the gains made in consolidating post-conflict peace.

To be sure, memory matters. Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. However, as Albert Einstein quipped: “Memory is deceptive because it is coloured by today’s events”. Elite campaign strategies are increasingly colouring the memory of Kenya’s violence a decade ago.

Kenya’s dilemma is that the 2008 conflict produced no victors. As the War-time British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once reputably said: “history is written by victors.”

CREATE NEW ORDER

Notably, the victories of the Allies in the Second World War, Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front after the 1994 genocide or Eduardo Dos Santos’ Angola after the battle-field death of Jonas Savimbi in 2002, created the requisite spaces for the victors to create a new order based on “victor’s justice” and to effectively manage the politics of memory of past wars by determining which events are remembered and recorded, or discarded and forgotten.

Without clear victors, Kenya’s political elite in government and opposition alike have no luxury of asserting the truth or writing the post-bellum history without stoking controversy.

This is the dilemma that President Uhuru Kenyatta confronted during his visit to Kisii Nyanza on March 22, 2017, when he declared that: “It is Raila who ignited the violence”.

Plausibly, Kenyatta may have been expressing a palpable sense of déjà vu now renting Kenya’s public sphere linked to the return of the toxic politics that set the stage for the 2007/08 violence. “He (Raila) has started it all over again … it is 40 against 2 (tribes) this time. What kind of politics is this?”

By the same token, Jubilee pundits have also alleged that the Opposition chief is planning to re-stage post-election chaos as part of a “civilian coup” plot. “Raila has laid a grand scheme to boycott the August 8 elections and create a constitutional crisis to execute a civilian coup,” wrote one pundit in a twitter post on March 29, 2017. Unsurprisingly, these remarks have elicited acrimonious responses. On his part, Raila has dismissed the claim.

Prof Peter Kagwanja is the Chief Executive of Africa Policy Institute and co-author of Kenya’s Uncertain Democracy (Routledge, 2010).