Amani Noma, A Hard Peace

January 22, 2008

Arrived in Kenya on the last Virgin Air flight into Nairobi, interestingly it was the same day Kofi Annan arrived to begin the peace negotiation process. Breezed through the visa line and walked out into the warm air with a journalist visa in about 10 minutes. Our worries about securing journalist visas seem trivial compared to what would happen next.

January 23, 2008

The violence in Stella's neighborhood had died down so we went to visit her. Stella lives in a place called Dandora, notorious for gang violence and crushing poverty. It is built on the edge of the city's sprawling garbage dump/ Still the energy and smiles on people's faces reassured up that at least for now people are truing to go about their lives as best they can. Stella and her mother live in a one small room inside a compound with shared bath and sink. When we arrived we heard Stella singing in the shower "Because he lives I can face tomorrow, because he lives all fear is gone..." Her mother read to her from the bible over a simple breakfast of bread and tea. This is a photo of Stella's mother at the balcony where they hang their clothes.

Later that day we attended a mass mourning rally for the victims of post election violence organized by ODM, the opposition party. Until that time kenyans had been kept from being able to peacefully march or protest so this was the first time they were permitted to come together in large numbers to try and make sense of it all (even a women's peace march was cancelled the previous day by police).

We followed a procession of coffins and people waving branches, a symbol of peace and mourning. Raila Odinga was in attendance along with other ODM and religious leaders. They read the names of all the dead and people passed by the coffins weeping.

About an hour into the ceremony, police surrounded the field, so some of the young people got upset and started throwing stones at them. Within minutes, all hell broke loose, Amie tripped over a plastic chair as Stella grabbed her, running from the tear gas. We kept filming as best we could as Raila and his crowd got into vehicles and began speeding around the field, looking for a way out. We saw babies and nuns being teargassed, and Amie got it right in the eye--not fun. It sorta feels like your eyeball is burning out the back of your head. And the sting doesn't go away for about an hour. Meanwhile, Swati was shooting all the people trying to flea with the coffins, the scene was horrific.

January 24-26

We traveled to Nakuru with out friend Joyce who Amie taught school with 20 years ago. We were taking Stella back to school in a place everyone thought was an island of peace in the Rift Valley which has seen some of the worst ethnic classes and where most of the displaced families are from. All was quiet on the 3 hour drive from Nairobi and we arrived at Joyce's beautiful home on the shores of Lake Nakuru, famous for its pink flamingos and white rhino. In fact just as we were arriving, a herd of zebra were grazing on the bluff just outside her veranda. This was the Kenya Amie remembered.

On the news that night we watched Kofi Annan's successful opening round of negotiations end in a handshake between the two entrenched leaders, Kibaki and Odinga. We all celebrated that night thinking this was the beginning of the end to the violence and peace would return to Kenya. We woke up to a very different reality.

The next morning as we were taking Stella to school, we heard that a gang of youths had blocked the road into town, so we drove her over unpaved roads the back way. We got her there safely, but we had to return a different route as there was another rumor of a roadblock..everything started to escalate. Back at Joyce's house we could see smoke billowing from a hill about a kilometer away, and heard rounds of gunshots as military planes started to fly over...Amie went out with the houseboy to get more phone cards (cellphones work off of sim cards where you buy credit as you go)...neighbors talked of already 12 dead, and entire areas of town on fire...since we lived on the outskirts we thought it might be safe, but as more shots were heard closer, we decided to move to the Rift Valley Sports Club to be with more people, in the event the house was surrounded...that place was bizarre--an old colonial relic with pictures of British Squash and cricket champions adorning the walls of the bar...

Residents, forced to leave their burnt out homes in Nakuru

Swati and Amie wanted to go and film some of the destruction, perhaps foolishly, but they had press badges and saw that there were other journalists about. we ended up in what we learned was the main battleground earlier that day...houses were still smoldering as people fled with mattresses strapped to their backs, the whole experience was surreal, like a movie in slow motion.


Amie filmed while Swati took stills, we felt safe, because everyone wanted their story told...they came up to us, pleading we tell their leaders and the world that they are innocent victims and have nothing to do with the elections. We spoke to both Kikuyu and Kalenjin young men who had taken part in the battle--sometimes with little more than bows and poisonous arrows (they do kill). Each person's story was different..they started it. The police instigated it. While subsequent international press reports suggested post-election violence was due to a Kikuyu-Luo rift, this now was something else.


It seems that the Rift Valley has been a cauldron of hatred for generations...all based on who has the right to the land. I kept thinking about the Middle East as I listened to the story. We heard many stories about what land in general and ancestral homeland in particular means to Kikuyus, Kalenjin, and Luos. 

The book Britian's Gulag by Caroline Elkins helped us understand Britian's historical role in the land quarrels being played out today. The story goes back at least as far as colonization. When the British came to Kenya they siezed land in many regions including not only land belonging to Kikuyus in the central provence near Nairobi but also and Kalenjin and Luos in the Rift Valley. The British intended to set up farms on their vast estates and grow for export to england and other colonies. When their attempts at farming fell short, they set up a system of sharecropping whereby Kikuyus were forced/brought from their ancestral homeland into the Rift Valley to work on the estates. When the British finally left at the time of independence, they sold their land in the Rift Valley to the Kikuyus who they had brought there as workers so many years ago. 

Today, many Kalenjin and Luos percieve the Kikuyus who reside in the Rift Valley to be violating the law and logic of the land. Because the Kalenjin believe that land cannot be commodified and sold on the market, only inherited, they see uninvited outsiders as violating their most basic connection to the land of their ancestors from which they draw their livelihood.

This has brought deep divisions over the years, especially since Kikuyus have been in political power and enjoyed most of the economic gains the country has seen since Independence. What was really hard for us to stomach was the hatred that was coming out of the mouths of youth--what did they have to do with their parents' and grandparents' age-old grievances? I sensed that either they were paid or pushed into this from higher up...otherwise, the lack of education and job opportunities had all boiled over into blood thirst--we saw kids young as 10 years old with this hatred in their eyes.

But at Stella's school it was another story altogether. The girls there are from all the tribes in Kenya, even some from Somalia and Sudan. We spent a few hours talking to them. They broke down in tears, talking of not knowing if their parents were still alive back home, that they sleep with their school certificates, so that if they need to run in the night they will have the one thing of value. One girl spoke of seeing a baby "slaughtered" (her words) in front of her home gate. Another witnessed her neighbor, a boy, being dragged off and forcefully circumcised (the Luos do not practice circumcision as other tribes do in Kenya).

So Raila and Kibaki shook hands. Was it agit-prop theater, a press charade? Since the infamous palms pressing, Kenya has descended into the worst violence yet, and we were right smack in the middle of it. The death toll is topping 500 now...Because Joyce is Kalenjin, and in an area where they were targeting Kalenjins, we knew we had to leave, but weren't sure how--there were roadblocks. We befriended a local policeman, a true angel, who gave us his cellphone and kept us up to date on the situation. I will never forget sitting in her house eating oranges and chapati as we heard gunshots...a man and his entire family came into the compound, saying his house with all his possessions were burned to the ground. Finally, we got the call to leave, and taping a huge sign that said INTERNATIONAL PRESS on a sheet of paper, taping it to the windshield of her car. She sat in the back and Amie drove as Swati held her camera. We hid her ID's thinking that in case we were stopped we could say she was working for us....it worked. We were never stopped, and waved through all the police blocks...3 hours later we were in Nairobi.

That night, Swati collapsed in bed, and Amie went out for dinner with a friend at a fancy French restaurant, not sure what to order. The waiter apologized that they didn't have any fish because of the "situation." So we're back. Safe. For now.

Images of all those people, mostly poor, carrying their furniture on their backs, like the weight of history...bearing down. A steady stream of refugees within their own country, held hostage by mostly kids, its something you want to analyze, understand, hopefully come to terms with, but as the death toll keeps rising, there just isn't anything left to say.