Writers in search of a nation

Post-election violence, a hurried, interim label coined in those desperate January days as the country slid towards civil war is what, unfortunately, has stuck one year after the signing of the February 28 peace accord.

It is the catch-all phrase we now use to abbreviate the single most horrific period in Kenya’s history.

Not the charge of genocide that overheated politicos were flinging about — as much to seize the moral high ground after the stealing of elections as in reaction to the burning of the church in Kiambaa — and a stop short of civil war, it is a description that in typical Kenyan fashion reduces the mayhem to the sum of its parts and therefore accords decorum to insanity. The Kenyan public psyche runs on euphemisms.

The effect of post-election violence is that it fixes the two months of horror into a particular time and frame, an immediately identifiable context that allows us to talk about it as an aberration.

In a state of national denial, the PEV — an abbreviation of the abbreviation, constructed as soon as we could put a safe distance between now and then — makes it unreasonable to discuss the violence as systemic; as that part of Kenyan political culture and history that remains invisible because it is not named.

As such, the bullet-pointed flurry with which we have now resolved to workshop our enduring national crises becomes possible.

With the signing of the National Accord, life was able to resume where it had left off before the PEV — the pursuit of Amos Kimunya’s 7 per cent growth, and the celebration of yet another year of spectacular bank profits.

The Safaricom IPO was the first order of business, and with Kofi Annan back in Geneva, the Serena Group saw little reason to meet and instead gathered under the Safaricom tent at the KICC.

As the Ugandan writer Kalundi Serumaga acerbically remarked, peace came when Nakumatt reopened and the middle classes could begin shopping again.

Everybody and everything were back in their places, more or less, even if there was the little problem of half a million people living in tents and invisible millions, mostly young, mostly unemployed, who could still be rapidly deployed as militias, gangs and warriors.

In regarding our chronic national crisis as the PEV then, we can ignore its systemic roots, instead shed a tear when the slo-mo news clips remind us of the brief, terrible period when Kenya was burning on CNN.

And yet, something fundamental was fractured by the PEV — the rough-hewn sense of Kenyan-ness splintered into a series of sharp ethnicities. And really, it can be said that what now remains is the intact shell of an abandoned idea.

We have geography and we have parliament and the circus of politics (coming to you live!), and sometimes we are united by indignation, by shameless scandal. But the shell is empty and you can’t televise that.

“What texts can we turn to for an explanation of the first few weeks of 2008?” asks Billy Kahora in his editorial, “After the Vote” in the first of two volumes of Kwani? dedicated to the post-election violence. “What will be our defining texts in the light of what happened during those 100 days of 2008?”

The first is a puzzling question. It can only really be appreciated if one were examining the narrative of the PEV and not its meaning or its historical roots.