The Wretched of the Earth

The concept of hegemonic masculinity has had a profound impact on gender activism and has been taken up particularly in health interventions. The concept was part of a conceptual gendered vocabulary about men which opened up analytical space for research on masculinity and prompted a generation of gender interventions with men. Academic work focused primarily on relations between men, to the neglect of relations with women, while paradoxically acknowledging the power that men had over women. Interventions that drew on theories of masculinities focused on the content of hegemonic masculinity, identifying hegemony with oppressive attitudes and practices. Hegemonic masculinity was considered singular and universal, with little acknowledgment given to research-based work that argued for a model of multiple hegemonic masculinities. An unintended consequence of efforts to promote gender equity through a focus on men and hegemony has been a recent popular discursive backlash. In this, Jacob Zuma and Julius Malem...

Hegemonic Masculinity/Masculinities in South Africa Culture, Power, and Gender Politics

Using political economy analysis, this paper discusses three precipitating factors that were ignited by Kenya's 2007 election, which was too close to call beforehand and highly contested afterwards. These factors were: the gradual loss of the state's monopoly of legitimate force and the consequent diffusion of violence; the deliberate weakening of institutions outside the executive in favour of personalized presidential power, raising questions about the credibility of other institutions to resolve the election on the table rather than in the streets; and a lack of programmatic political parties which gave rise to a winner take all view of parties that were inherently clientist and ethnically driven, something that raised the stakes of winning and gave rise to violence. The paper discusses each of these factors in historical perspective. It explains how and why they arose and what made each so dangerous. It also aims to place what happened in Kenya into a wider framework of understanding by drawi...

The Political Economy of Kenya's Crisis

The growth and export trajectories of China and India are not unique. Their significance arises from their size and the distinctive nature of their economic and political actors. For this reason they are having an increasing impact on other economies including in the developing world. This paper provides a framework for assessing these impacts, distinguishing different vectors of interaction, complementary and competitive impacts and direct and indirect impacts. This sets the scene for the articles included in this Special Issue.

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The impact of asian drivers on the developing world

Introduction 1. The untold story: the globalization of private security 2. Late modernity and the rise of private security 3. Power and governance: global assemblages and the security field 4. Of oil and diamonds: global security assemblages in resource extraction 5. Safer cities or cities of walls? The politics of urban global security assemblages 6. Security, politics, and global assemblages.

Security Beyond the State: Private Security in International Politics

State of the nation: South Africa

Kenya’s return to pluralist politics in the early 1990s saw the eruption of political violence that has since laid siege to human rights and democracy. This article discusses the Mungiki movement which, like the Mau Mau movement that waged armed struggle against the British in the 1950s, has sprouted among the Kikuyu. It examines Mungiki within the broader theoretical context of competitive electoral politics and political violence in contemporary Kenya. In addition to tracing the movement’s religious and ideological roots, the article shows how ‘informal repression’ or quasilegitimization of sectarian violence for political ends by the state, has transformed a ‘moral ethnic’ movement into a ‘politically tribal’ one. As a contribution to the academic debate on Mungiki, the article draws on the rich public debate in Kenya and the author’s close study of the movement in 2001–2. POLITICAL VIOLENCE MARRED KENYA’S MULTIPARTY ELECTIONS IN 1992 and 1997, and has since mined the road to the 2002 elections and the decisive transition to a post-Moi era. Over a decade after ‘ethnic clashes’ erupted in 1991, Kenya has become a cesspool of all genres of political violence that have effectively confined its embryonic democracy to cold storage. Against the political backdrop of mounting domestic and international pressure for political pluralism, the beleaguered one-party elite warned that the introduction of a multiparty system would trigger cataclysmic tribal violence that would destroy the Kenyan nation. In the intervening period, politicians from President Moi’s own Kalenjin ethnic group publicly demanded the return of majimbo,1 a federal system based on the notion of ethnic purity 25 African Affairs (2003), 102, 25–49 © Royal African Society 2003 DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adg003 which required the expulsion of all other ethnic groups from land occupied by the Kalenjin and the Maasai before colonialism. Mysterious Kalenjin ‘warriors’ and Maasai ‘morans’ clad in traditional attire, their faces painted with red ochre, descended on non-Kalenjin populations in parts of the Rift Valley, Nyanza and Western Kenya. When researchers came face-to-face with this violence, they understood its logic as a new phenomenon of informal repression, a strategy by the ruling elite to employ violence covertly to undermine political opposition, counter multiparty democracy, and regain the political initiative.2 At the beginning of the decade, political scientists warned of an emerging trend in which African states, facing determined opposition, were resorting to recruiting surrogates and clients to organize violence against citizens. Mohamed Salih revealed how the state in the Sudan recruited tribal militias to terrorize and rob the civilian population, thus contributing to the ‘retribalization’ of politics.3 In the same vein, the dynamics of informal repression were aptly described by the notion of ‘marionette politics’ which underlined the pervasive use of ‘tribal authorities, institutions and militias in as diverse countries as Nigeria, Cameroon, Malawi, South Africa and Kenya to repress the opposition’.4 One way in which the African state generally carried out informal repression was to ‘play the communal card’ or cynically to exploit latent ethnic grievances and conflicts over resources and opportunities in the modern sector to split political opinion or divide-and-rule various ethnic groups.5 Violence was particularly masked as ‘communal’ or ‘criminal’ and attributed to traditional warrior bands, ethnic militias, vigilantes, bandits or simply gangs of thugs. In fact, the language used to describe this phenomenon has also tended to reinforce the image of primitive violence stoked by primordial sensibilities and clashing interand intra-ethnic claims to diminishing resources. Euphemistically described as ‘cattle rustling’, ‘ethnic’, ‘land’ or ‘border’ clashes, this violence was at once shorn of its underpinning political character and motives and naturalized as a localized and primitive version of Samuel Huntington’s global ‘clash of civilizations’.6 26 AFRICAN AFFAIRS 2. Linda Kirschke, ‘Informal repression: zero-sum politics and the later third wave transitions’, Journal of Modern African Studies 38, 3 (2000), pp. 383–405. 3. M. A. Mohamed Salih, ‘“New wine in old bottles”: tribal militias and the Sudanese state’, Review of African Political Economy 45/46 (1989), pp. 168–74. 4. Peter Mwangi Kagwanja, ‘Politics of marionettes: extra-legal violence and the 1997 elections in Kenya’, in Marcel Rutten, Alamin Mazrui and François Grignon (eds), Out for the Count: The 1997 general elections and prospects for democracy in Kenya (Fountain Publishers, Kampala, 2001); Article 19, Deadly Marionettes: State-sponsored violence in Africa (Article 19, London, October 1997). 5. According to the 1989 census, the latest to provide an ethnic breakdown of Kenya’s population, there are 42 ethnic groups in Kenya. Ethnic politics has revolved around the largest groups, including the Kikuyu (21 percent), Luhya (14 percent), Luo (13 percent) Kalenjin (11 percent), Kamba (11 percent), Kisii (8 percent), Meru (5 percent) and Miji Kenda (5 percent). 6. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1996). Even more ominous, violence associated with informal repression was depoliticized and excluded from the prevailing moral discourse on political violence.7 It neither corresponds to Frantz Fanon’s8 ‘humanizing native violence’ against an equally violent (colonial) state nor to Hannah Arendt’s9 ‘dehumanizing’ state violence against its citizens typified by the Nazi Holocaust or, more recently, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia under Slobodan Milosevic or the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Instead, it exculpated the state and its surrogates and clients from charges of human rights violations against citizens. Moreover, the informal character of this violence has allowed the state to claim the status of a victim caught between the smouldering rock of divisive pluralist democracy and the heavy hammer of ‘primordial’ or ‘criminal’ violence. The state has effectively crippled political opposition by mobilizing militias to disrupt its public meetings, and intimidate, displace, and disenfranchise ethnic populations suspected of being sympathetic to the opposition. During the 1992 and 1997 general elections, the Kenyan state came under heavy criticism for sponsoring violence to manipulate electoral outcomes, win the elections and sustain itself in power at the exorbitant cost of the ‘retribalization’ of politics and the erosion of civic nationhood.10 This strategy has not only undermined democracy, but also produced what Carol Sicherman rightly characterizes as the ‘window-dressing of multiparty democracy’.11 The ‘retribalization’ of the public sphere has sharpened the tension between civic or state citizenship and ethnic citizenship. While the former is based on liberal notions of civic citizenship and individual rights inscribed in the national constitution, the latter is predicated upon membership of an ethnic group or clan through which one accesses social and economic rights, especially the right to land.12 This tension has been aggravated by what experts have viewed as the tendency of globalization to reinforce parochial identities and sensibilities.13 Globalization enabled ethnic militias to acquire arms from expanding cross-border smuggling and illegal gunrunning and to use them in local conflicts. Nonetheless, theorists FACING MOUNT KENYA OR FACING MECCA? 27 7. Human Rights Watch, Playing the Communal Card: Communal violence and human rights (Human Rights Watch, New York, 1997), pp. viii–xi. 8. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Penguin Publishers, London, 1967). 9. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt Brace, New York, 1975). 10. David Throup and Charles Hornsby, Multi-Party Politics in Kenya:The Kenyatta and Moi states and the triumph of the system in the 1992 election (James Currey, Oxford; EAEP, Nairobi; Ohio University Press, Athens, OH, 1998). Peter Kagwanja, Killing the Vote: State-sponsored violence and the flawed elections in Kenya (Kenya Human Rights Commission, Nairobi, 1998). 11. Carol Sicherman, ‘Kenya: creativity and political repression: the confusion of fact and fiction’, Race & Class 37, 4 (1995/96), pp. 61–71. 12. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, nativism, and the genocide in Rwanda (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2001), pp. 28–31. 13. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Dead certainty: ethnic violence in the era of globalization’, Public Culture 10, 2 (1998), pp. 225–47. cautioned against the wholesale depiction of ethnic identity as a disruptive force. Ethnic identity, they averred, is ‘an ordinary aspect of selfhood and a basic social relation’ which has in the past provided a space of relative autonomy from the centralizing ambitions of the postcolonial African state, moral community for cultural citizenship, and the focal point of resistance against tyranny.14 The ‘emancipatory’ qualities that Dickson Eyoh identifies with ethnicity differ analytically from the disruptive potential of what John Lonsdale calls ‘political tribalism’.15 Indeed, some academics have celebrated this ‘moral ethnicity’16 not only as an antidote to political tribalism, but also as an anchor of the burgeoning social movement for social justice and human rights. By challenging the tyranny of the state and the orthodoxy of the international financial institutions and expanding the space of civic citizenship, this coalition has served as a veritable agent of globalization ‘from below’.17 However, David Anderson, who has carried out a close analysis of the Mungiki religio-political movement in Kenya, has recently raised doubts about the empirical basis of this optimism. Turning Terisa Turner and Leigh Brownhill’s view of Mungiki as a paragon of ‘moral ethnicity’ on its head, 

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Facing Mount Kenya or Facing Mecca? The Mungiki, Ethnic Violence and the Politics of the Moi Succession in Kenya, 1987-2002

Faced with the challenge of a new, multi-ethnic political coalition, President Daniel arap Moi shifted the axis of the 2002 electoral contest from ethnicity to the politics of generational conflict. The strategy backfired, ripping his party wide open and resulting in its humiliating defeat in the December 2002 general elections. Nevertheless, the discourse of a generational change of guard as a blueprint for a more accountable system of governance won the support of some youth movements like Mungiki. This article examines how the movement's leadership exploited the generational discourse in an effort to capture power. Examining the manipulation of generational and ethnic identities in patrimonial politics, the article argues that the instrumentalization of ethnicity in African politics has its corollary in the concomitant instrumentalization of other identities race, class, gender, clan, age and religion. As THE HISTORIC 27 DECEMBER 2002 ELECTIONS got under way, it became evident that Kenya was poised for 'one of the most significant political changes since independence'.' The electoral victory of the ethnically based parties coalesced around the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) ended Daniel arap Moi's 24-year patrimonial rule, which many Kenyans blamed for their economic miseries and for the erosion of accountability of state power and of respect for citizenship rights and the ideals of nationhood, reduced by corruption, greed and the cynical manipulation of ethnicity. NARC's victory signified the triumph of ethnic pluralism and national rejuvenation. However, Kenya's return to the multi-ethnic foundations of its nationhood in late 2002 occurred in the shadow of widening inter-generational discord and tension.2 Dr. Peter Mwangi Kagwanja is the Director, International Crisis Group (Southern Africa) and Research Associate, Center for International Political Studies, University of Pretoria, South Africa. 1. Anders Ndirma, 'Elections in Kenya', Review of African Political Economy 30, 96 (2003), pp. 343-50; see also Lionel Cliffe, 'Kenya post-election prospects', Review of African Political Economy 30, 96 (2003), pp. 341-3. 2. See 'Children in the spotlight: a place in the African security debate', editorial, African Security Review 11, 3 (2002), p. 1.

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‘Power to Uhuru’: Youth Identity and Generational Politics in Kenya’s 2002 Elections

The post-election crisis of January 2008 brought Kenya close to collapse and the status of a failed state. Following the abrupt proclamation of Mwai Kibaki, the incumbent president, as victor in a highly contentious presidential election, peace was disrupted by severe ethnic violence between supporters of the opposition Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) and the Party of National Unity (PNU). This saw up to 2,000 people killed and as many as 300,000 displaced from their homes. This analysis locates the origin of the crisis in, variously, a background of population growth and extensive poverty; and ethnic disputes relating to land going back to colonial times (notably between Kalenjin and Kikuyu in the Rift Valley). More immediately, what stoked the conflict is the construction of political coalitions around Kenya's 42 ethnic groups, although the 2007 election campaign was critically shaped by ODM's rhetoric of ‘41 against one’ (the Kikuyu); and not least, this survey records the diffusion of violen...

Introduction: Kenya – A democracy in retreat?

Kenya was already on the precipice long before the disputed 27 December 2007 election, which sparked the cataclysmic post-election violence that brought one of Africa's most promising democracies to the brink of state failure. This contribution traces the 2008 crisis back to the deeply ingrained legacy of instrumentalisation of ethnicity and informalisation of violence in the intra-elite struggle for state power in multiparty Kenya. The country's fragmented power elite in the post-Moi era not only failed to agree on how to address poverty, inequality, corruption and the need for constitutional and institutional reforms, but also failed to eradicate the legacy of extra-state violence. The elite laid the seedbed for the post-election crisis in the run up to the 2007 election when it turned to populism and resurgent ethno-nationalism in a deadly battle to win Kenya's most closely contested election. The contribution examines the mutation and diffusion of violence involving militias, criminal gangs a...

PM Kagwanja

Papers

State of the nation: South Africa

Facing Mount Kenya or Facing Mecca? The Mungiki, Ethnic Violence and the Politics of the Moi Succession in Kenya, 1987-2002

‘Power to Uhuru’: Youth Identity and Generational Politics in Kenya’s 2002 Elections

Introduction: Kenya – A democracy in retreat?

Courting genocide: Populism, ethno-nationalism and the informalisation of violence in Kenya's 2008 post-election crisis