These are the invisible victims of Kenya’s nasty poll politics

With three petitions filed against President Uhuru Kenyatta’s re-election in the October 26 repeat poll, Kenya has to wait for more days to know whether he will be sworn in.

The redo vote, boycotted by his main rival, Nasa’s Raila Odinga, followed the history-making September decision by the Supreme Court to overturn Uhuru’s win on August 8 — on a petition by Raila.

As the political uncertainty continues, and the opposition pushes its boycott of goods from various companies they believe committed anti-democratic sins, the peace caravans, and together concerts, have also ramped up.

DIVISIVE POLITICS

The campaigns for peace and calls for dialogue after Kenya’s usually divisive elections, are not always in vain.

In 2008, dialogue resulted in a national unity government that, though it was an unhappy political marriage, still saw the country through a period of economic boom and far-reaching constitutional reform.

My own sense watching how election wounds are inflicted, suggests that the country is able to fix “Big Kenya” in post-election healing initiatives.

It is the “Small Kenya” – the relations between individuals, the dynamics in small business and creative communities, that take the biggest hit. These are almost never healed by peace evangelism.

And it’s what happens in “Small Kenya” that does the most damage. Precisely because Mwai Kibaki’s win in 2002 was at the head of a big tent coalition, the National Rainbow Coalition (Narc), it brought so many divergent groups into “Small Kenya” that the country’s pent-up creative energies were unleashed.

COMEDY

When the post-election violence of 2008 happened, it created a sense of urgency that allowed positive dynamics built in those first five Kibaki years to fruit into things like the world-leading crisis-mapping platform Ushahidi.

The group behind it was very diverse. Today, there are hardly diverse creative groups like it.

Or consider the story of the pioneering comedy act, Redykyulass. Comedy serves a special role in Kenyan politics. It is the one safe place where it escapes to look at itself and laugh about it vices like tribalism, nepotism, and corruption without causing offence.

The jokes about ethnic groups made at comedy shows, and that get thunderous applause, will get you trolled to death on Twitter.

But yet even comedy has changed in one fundamental way. Where Redykyulass was a trio, the hottest acts today like the Churchill Show, Teacher Wanjiku, and others are mainly by an individual.

It’s not by accident. If you are Redykyulass, or a musical group of five Kenyans from different parts of the country, the nastiness of an election will probably tear you apart or disillusion you to extremes.

ARGUE

Since 2008, we have seen a retreat by creative people into spaces that they can work solo, and spare themselves the pain of having to sit in your small office facing your partner, who is a Jubilee supporter and you have to argue the merits of the Nasa boycott.

Thus we have had the rise of really great Kenyan fashion, photo, poetry, travel, and story blogs in recent years, which people can do alone, and hardly any collaborative efforts.

Music groups like Sauti Sol are virtually alone in being a creative collective that has survived across two elections, and even it was hammered quite ruthlessly recently for a tweet that the political combatants in the election deemed offensive.

In many ways this could be the reason Kenya is now seen as a two-trick pony that produced Ushahidi and M-Pesa, and for years has not wowed the world again with another innovation.

It could be that the creative juices that flow from working with a diverse group of people have dried up, frittered away by the bellicosity of election politics.

STRUGGLE

Up to about five years, on a typical weekend you would struggle to choose between three quirky and experimental plays to watch; maybe one at Phoenix, another at the National Theatre, and a third at Alliance Française.

Eric Wainaina swept the country with his bold Mo Faya musical, then took it internationally on the road, including a successful staging at the 2009 New York Musical Theatre Festival. There has been no successor to Mo Faya.

In recent times, Nairobi goes for weeks without a single decent theatre play.

The most corrosive effect of Kenya’s slash and burn politics, then, could be what it does to these creative communities, to the soul of the nation.

You have to dig to the bottom of the ocean to heal that.

The author is publisher of Africapedia.com and explainer site Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3