Hatemongers are just mindless sycophants who are drunk with power

At the height of the 2007/2008 post-election violence, I drove into one of Nairobi’s shopping malls.

As I was walking in, I bumped into an old friend, whom I had not seen for a while, walking to his car. What followed was an incident that I am unlikely to ever forget. He walked straight into my face, eyes bulging, mouth frothing, his finger jutted out. You, he hissed, how dare you support them? Then came a venomous diatribe against “them”. Up to this point “they” had not been named, and their identity became clear by inference when he informed me that Mungiki had been dispatched to circumcise every one of them.

I had said nothing up this point. I was contemplating the urbane, educated man—a Master of Business Administration and former bank chief executive—in front of me, his gleaming BMW in the background, transformed into my mental image of Interahamwe.

My bemusement was compounded by knowing that the man had been a key member of the presidential campaign of a non-Kikuyu presidential candidate.

When he was done, I posed a question: whether, when the Mungiki was done with “them”, he would take issue with their coming back to administer the same rite of passage to his daughters. That took a moment to sink. When it did, he stormed off towards his car.

My crimes included speaking out on TV against the ethnic mobilisation that was going on and publishing an analysis of the election results which pointed to manipulation of the results in favour of Mwai Kibaki. The crimes went on to earn me a spot on the Kikuyu traitors list, as well as threatening phone calls, some from personal friends.

This was not my first encounter with such bigotry. Shortly before the election, I had been duped to speak at a social gathering convened by respectable members of the Kikuyu elite.

I arrived a bit late and found another speaker explaining why letting go of power would be the end of the country. I did not stay long enough to speak. I left in the middle of a tour de force by a prominent academic of evil leaders in world history—no prizes for guessing where this was headed. I would not be surprised if oathing took place thereafter—there was certainly enough blood and entrails around to re-enact the Gatundu tea ceremonies.

The season of madness is upon us.

I recently got into a casual conversation with a friend, we were at a funeral, about the state of our politics which veered into the subject of lack of ideology in Kenyan politics.

He disagreed. There are two political ideologies in Kenya, he pontificated. We “agriculturalists” believe in eating the sweat of our brow, while the others believe in entitlement.

Pastoralists believe they are entitled to cattle, including other people’s. Fisherfolk are beyond the pale—they just get fish from the lake without knowing who put it there.

This particular bigot, an influential member of the President’s inner circle, saw no irony in the fact that the media was awash with stories of hardworking agriculturalists helping themselves to public money—the National Youth Service scandal was raging at the time.

PERSUADED ME

Some months ago, a young relative persuaded me to meet her friend who she said had a business proposal for me. The friend, who turned out to be a dashing young woman, was propositioning me to become a contributor to a new patriotic publishing venture, which by her own admission could do with the intellectual credibility I would bring to it.

With a bit of probing, I established was a government propaganda initiative.

My declining did not go down well, but the diatribe that followed took me by surprise. How could I as a Kikuyu not see the consequences of losing power? That we would be overrun by hostile envious tribes and who would run down the country and dispossess us of everything?

The incoherence was astounding. One moment we Kikuyus were the Jews of Kenya, resented for our business acumen, in the next we are the ubermensch whose manifest destiny it is to rule Kenya.

The remarkable thing is not what she said—I’ve heard it all before—but the righteous indignation and fervour with which she said it. This is a new breed of ethnic supremacist, a naive culturally dislocated young socialite, as elite as they come, international school, foreign university educated, who could not even speak Kikuyu—an oblivious fascist.

In 1961, American political theorist Hannah Arendt went to Israel to report the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker. Her dispatches, which she compiled into a book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, generated a high voltage intellectual debate that reshaped the thinking about perpetrators of mass atrocities.

Eichmann had been in charge of deporting Jews to the death camps. Ms Arendt, herself a Jewish emigre who had escaped Hitler’s gallows, expected Eichmann to be a psychotic monster. But the Eichmann who emerged during the trial was no such thing.

He came across as normal, if somewhat buffoonish, an observation confirmed by independent psychiatric evaluations conducted on him before the trial: “Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown”.

Eichmann was not even a virulent anti-semite, yet he had sent millions of Jews to their deaths. Why would a normal person participate in the genocide of people he did not particularly hate? Eichmann was an underachiever who was obsessed with belonging to something important. He was in mortal fear of obscurity—so much so that he undermined his defence by claiming credit for things he did not do so as to not appear unimportant. He joined the SS after he was rejected by a prestigious fraternity known as the Schlarraffia. Nazism fulfilled this psychological need and he in turn gave it his all.

Eichmann’s profile is one that is easy for us to recognise. He was a mindless sycophant mesmerised by proximity to power, willing to advance his career by any means and at any cost.

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.” This is what Ms Arendt termed the banality of evil, eliciting both fear and rage. Dehumanising evil, that is, casting perpetrators as monsters helps us to dis-associate ourselves with it—it is a coping mechanism. By humanising it, Ms Arendt forces us to process it.

PSYCHIATRIC EVALUATION

It has been suggested that the politicians who have been spewing ethnic bile be subjected to psychiatric evaluation. This suggestion, is our cope out. These people are not insane. Their madness is saying publicly what we think and say in private, and increasingly, publicly hiding under the anonymity of social media. But this is not insanity. It is lack of inhibitions, which is easily explained. Like Eichmann, they are mindless sycophants intoxicated by proximity to power—terribly and terrifyingly normal.

Ms Arendt’s thesis is echoed in Christopher Browning’s 1996 book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. The book is an account of unspeakable atrocities committed by a German police unit in Poland. Unlike Eichmann who was actually an SS officer and senior in the Nazi hierarchy, the members of Unit101 were not diehard Nazis, but ordinary, mostly middle-aged men who had been drafted but found ineligible for military service. The remarkable thing is that they were not even coerced to commit the atrocities. Those who felt that they did not have the stomach for killing were offered re-assignment at the outset. Out of 500 men, only 12 opted out. The unit murdered 80,000 people. They did it to belong, esprit de corps.

But nowhere else in the world has evil been as humanised as right next door in Rwanda. The Holocaust killers were men in uniform in war. Ordinary Rwandans killed their kith and kin with pangas. In Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, veteran war correspondent and chronicler of the genocide, Jean Hatzfeld, gives the podium to the killers.

Fulgence: “In a war, you kill someone who fights you or promises you harm. In killings of this kind, you kill the Tutsi woman you used to listen to the radio with, or the kind lady who put medicinal plants on your wounds, or your sister who was married to a Tutsi. Or even, for some unlucky devils, your own Tutsi wife and your children, by general demand”.

Adalbert remembered the feasting. “We roasted thick meat in the morning, and we roasted more meat in the evening. Anybody who once had eaten meat only at weddings, he found himself stuffed with it day after day. Before, when we came home from the fields, we’d find almost nothing in the cooking pot, only our usual beans or sometimes just cassava gruel. When we got back from the marshes, in the cabarets of Kibungo we snapped up roast chickens, haunches of cow, and drinks to remedy our fatigue. We found women or children everywhere offering them to us for reasonable prices. And brochettes of goat meat, and cigarettes for those who wanted to try them. We overflowed with life for this new job.” Feasting and fatigue feature a lot in the accounts. Banal.

What to make of Pio’s account?: “Farming is simpler, because it is our lifelong occupation. The hunts were more unpredictable. It was even more tiring on days of large-scale operations, patrolling so many kilometres behind the interahamwe, through the papyrus and mosquitoes. But we can‘t say we missed the fields. We were more at ease in this hunting work, because we had only to bend down to harvest food, sheet metal, and loot. Killing was a demanding but more gratifying activity”. Is there a Pio in all of us?

In Joseph Desire’s account we encounter the collective suspension of thinking and moral reasoning that is the essence of Ms Arendt’s thesis as to how ordinary people become mass murderers: “It was a madness that took on a life of its own. You got on board or got out of the way, but you followed the crowd. If you had a machete in your hand, you didn’t listen to anything. You forgot everything, starting with your intellect. This repeated programme freed us from thinking about what we were doing. We went out and came back, without a thought in our heads. We hunted because that was our daily routine until everything was over. Our arms drove our minds, or in any event our minds never spoke up”.

Walter Reich, in a New York Times review of Browning’s book summed it up as “a penetrating searchlight on the human capacity for utmost evil (which) leaves us staring at his subject matter with the shock of knowledge and the lurking fear of self-recognition”.

Lurking fear of self-recognition. Good people, génocidaires are not psychos. They are ordinary unthinking haters like you and I.

[email protected]