Culture
Africa’s Two Publics and the Coloniality of Power
16 min read.To foster social accountability measures that address the plight of the people, civil society must transform itself into a site for radical rethinking of the global matrix of power.
The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 was a pivotal event in world history. The Wall, which until then had symbolized the ideological divisions of the communist East and the capitalist West, could no longer hold back the ideological change that had been spreading in Eastern Europe and across the world.
The political, social and economic changes that ensued seemed to confirm political theorist Francis Fukuyama’s pronouncement that history had ended. He opined that the “flow of events over the past decade [have] made it difficult to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history”, and that the ideological evolution of humanity was complete, with Western liberal democracy prevailing as the ultimate form of human government.
By Western liberal democracy, Fukuyama meant government in which people consent to their rulers, and rulers, in turn, are constitutionally constrained to respect the people’s rights. It emphasises the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and systematic checks and balances between branches of government. It provides a foundation for multi-party elections, political and human rights, free media, a market economy, and a robust civil society. Fukuyama proclaimed the triumph of this political paradigm at the moment it was primed to spread across the globe.
Many of the West’s allies embraced the liberal democratic form of governance. South Africa’s Apartheid system ended in 1994 and Nelson Mandela became the president of the newly formed “rainbow nation”. In Kenya, this wind of change triggered the process of political reform in 1991 with the repeal of section 2A of the constitution, returning Kenya to a multi-party state. The changes set in motion culminated in the promulgation of a new democratic constitution on 27 August 2010.
Argued to be one of the most progressive in the world, the Constitution of Kenya (2010) enshrines many values and principles that have the potential to transform Kenya into an equitable, just and fair society. However, a governance dividend facilitated by a constitutional framework only occurs in a society where citizens have high public trust because their leaders are accountable to their aspirations and desires. At the centre of democratic societies lies the idea of accountability whereby a social contract exists between a responsive and accountable state and responsible and active citizens, which also takes into account the interests of the marginalised, alienated, and dispossessed.
Social Accountability – A philosophical reflection
This form of civic initiative that fosters accountability through the organized collective action of citizens and other non-state actors to hold power to account for their responsibilities and obligations has been broadly defined as “social accountability”. Indeed, social accountability processes create different avenues for citizens and non-state actors to participate directly in political processes by providing them with leading roles in the process of constructing more inclusive and just democratic societies by catalysing their engagement with state actors in an informed, systematic and constructive way.
Social accountability initiatives, however, do not take place in a vacuum but within the public sphere that Nanjala Nyabola observes, is the “space in which all conversations with power across and between groups collide and some kind of national narrative is produced” through formal and informal social accountability mechanisms between the citizens and the state, resulting in the creation of a public opinion through an ongoing debate on what society should be like.
However, social transformation within a society can only be achieved when the structure of the public sphere reflects the historical development of the people, and the agreed social accountability mechanisms that facilitate interactions within the public sphere mirror the agency and the epistemic constituents of the people. It is in this light, therefore, that we can observe that despite African states implementing economic and public policy recommendations prescribed by Western nations and international organizations, they still exist in a state of perpetual underdevelopment.
Understanding Kenya’s public sphere
To explain this underdevelopment, in his paper Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A theoretical statement published in the 1975 issue of the journal of Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Nigerian scholar and political theorist Peter Ekeh argued that unlike in the Western political tradition, where politics comprises a public and a private realm, the colonial experience in Africa led to the emergence of a unique historical configuration in modern post-colonial Africa: the existence of two publics instead of one, as in the West. Many of Africa’s political problems are due to the dialectical relationship between the two publics.
Ekeh notes that in Western societies, the public and private spheres are governed by the same normative standards: “What is considered morally wrong in the private realm is also considered morally wrong in the public realm [and] what is considered morally right in the private realm is also considered morally right in the public realm.” However, because of the imposition of imperial rule, post-colonial African states have two public spheres: the “civic” or “state” sphere, and the “primordial” sphere.
Social transformation within a society can only be achieved when the structure of the public sphere reflects the historical development of the people.
This segmentation of the public sphere fundamentally distorts social accountability mechanisms in our society. Let me illustrate by way of example. Kenyans from all walks of life gather every day to plan their social calendars. Graduations, funerals, weddings and chamas form the tapestry of a Kenyan’s lived daily experiences. In these events, Kenyans form committees, pick chairpersons, appoint treasurers to keep financial records and plan their events. Within this processes and functions, social accountability measures—though not implicitly stated—are agreed upon to make sure an event happens according to plan and the monies allocated are used prudently. Once the event has taken place, the chairperson convenes a meeting to “break the committee”. The treasurer presents his or her report. If there is a surplus, it is reimbursed or disposed of through an agreed method. If there are debts, the committee deliberates on how to settle them. Indeed, rarely do we ever hear of reports of unscrupulous behaviour. This is the primordial public—scrupulously honest and conscientious. On the other hand, it is no surprise to find the same cadre of Kenyans—dependable, church-going and honest to a fault—engaging in massive fraud, corruption and other corrupt practices as civil servants, public officials and politicians when engaging in the civic sphere.
In his ground-breaking work, The Souls of Black Folk, the African-American philosopher WEB Dubois describes this phenomenon as “double consciousness”: an internal conflict experienced by subordinated or colonized groups in an oppressive society. In this kind of society, he further notes, an individual’s identity is divided into several parts, making it impossible to have one unified identity and behaviour. In a sense, therefore, because of the fragmentation of the African public sphere, and the norms and the social contract(s) that govern it, individuals live in a state of “psychic turbulence”, unable to reconcile their morals, norms, and beliefs, leading them to suffer from a kind of split personality disorder.
This inability to reconcile one’s own identity is a direct outcome of the colonial imposition of the state, located through the distortion not only of the public sphere, but more importantly, of the social contract—the social accountability measures that governed African public spheres. In The Invention of Africa, the Congolese philosopher V.Y. Mudimbe explains that “Colonialism and colonization basically mean “organization”, “arrangement”. The two words derive from the Latin word colere, meaning to cultivate or to design.” He goes on to point out that Western colonisers organised and transformed non-European areas into fundamentally European constructs. The methods for acquiring, allocating, and exploiting land in colonies; the practices for domesticating natives; and the methods for managing pre-existing organisations and implementing new modes of production can be used as three main keys to explain the modulations and methods typical of colonial organisation:
Thus, three complementary hypotheses and actions emerge: the domination of physical space, the reformation of natives’ minds, and the integration of local economic histories into the Western perspective. These complementary projects constitute what might be called the colonizing structure, which completely embraces the physical, human, and spiritual aspects of the colonizing experience.
Colonial matrix of power
The undergirding logic of the colonizing structure is an oppressive system of power which Peruvian philosopher Aníbal Quijano termed the “coloniality of power”—an expression coined to name the structures of power, control, and hegemony that emerged during the era of colonialism. In his article, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America, Quijano describes the colonial matrix of power as being glued together by four interrelated domains: control of the economy (land appropriation, exploitation of labour, control of natural resources, racial capitalism); control of leadership and authority (political institutions and the control of monopoly of violence—army, police, etc.); control of gender and sexuality (family and education) and control of knowledge and subjectivity (norms, ideas, values, the public sphere, etc.). These domains, he further adds, are glued together on racial and patriarchal foundations of knowledge. In other words, the matrix of power imposed a civic sphere that predicated ways of thinking, language, ways of life and of being that were determined by male-white European standards. And in turn, notes the Algerian psychiatrist and militant philosopher Franz Fanon, the matrix of power did not just impose its grammar and logic on the people it dominated; rather, by a turn of perverse logic, it turned to the past of the oppressed people and distorted it, disfigured it and destroyed it and through this created a context in which the matrix of power was legitimized.
This segmentation of the public sphere fundamentally distorts social accountability mechanisms in our society.
To support this system, the matrix of power, however, relies on actors and institutions. This enables it to conserve, expand, and change its structure to preserve itself through legitimation, the process of making something admissible to society. The legitimation of the colonial matrix of power in Kenya entailed presenting itself first through the rhetoric of euro-modernity as salvation. Salvation was focused on abolishing the Arab slave trade on the East African coast and saving African souls through their conversion to Western Christianity. The second stage was in the civilizing mission which was comprised of British settler occupation and, finally, the last stage, which continues to date, that began with the independence project in 1963 and is characterized by salvation through development and modernization.
The actor used in the legitimation of the latter phase is the African bourgeoisie while the development of the public sphere and its institutionalization within the European state were brought about by the European bourgeoisie who enshrined constitutional and democratic practices—freedom of speech and assembly, a free press, and the right to freely participate in political debate and decision-making, etc.—as a means of checking arbitrary forms of power and state domination. However, unlike their European counterpart, the African bourgeoisie emerged from a different socio-historical process.
The great transformation of the 15th century—that in the Atlantic destroyed civilisations, enslaved Africans, spurred European dominance, and from 1492 comprised the violent genocide in the Americas—was the emergence of a structure of dominance that was led by Europeans, both in the internal conflicts within Europe and in their colonization of lands and peoples outside of Europe.
Domination of the vested interests within the African slave conquest and internal struggles within Europe led to a process where imperial internal differences among European states created a particular historical trajectory. These socio-political conditions paved the way for the advent of the colonial matrix of power and racial categories within a new international order controlled from the Western hemisphere.
The establishment of the transatlantic trade curated within the colonial matrix of power created an economic class of African middlemen/women with a predatory posture. This kind of “African middleman/woman” came in three general groupings. The first were local self-appointed middlemen to foreign economic interests who transformed domestic slavery into a violent and weaponised trade. By the 19th century, an estimated nine to fourteen million people had been enslaved in the east coast of Africa over a period of one century. Most were shipped to the port of Luanda to be transported to the Americas through the sea port of Zanzibar, but smaller markets existed in Lamu, Malindi and Mombasa.
The second group were the local merchant classes, who had previously been traders in other goods, responding to the geo-politics of the time. Among the most disreputable African slavers in East Africa were the Nyamwezi. A close-knit community, the Nyamwezi started off as porters working on caravans, but graduated to slave trading because of its economic benefits. The Nyamwezi traded in slaves from the western part of Congo, modern day Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. As for the Yao, they had initially dealt in animal skins, hoes and tobacco, but moved into the bigger, more valuable ivory and slave trade, becoming the most notorious slavers of all indigenous East African peoples.
Salvation was focused on abolishing the Arab slave trade on the East African coast and saving African souls through their conversion to Western Christianity.
The third group were warlords disguised as local leaders to enable them to gain legitimacy to engage in the African slave trade. Of note was Hamad bin Muhammad, also known as Tippu Tip, a slave and ivory dealer who operated mainly between Zanzibar and Tabora. He was considered a gangster and a pirate of the most brutal kind. In May 1867, Tippu Tip seized the encampment of Chief Nsama of Tabwa between Lake Mweru and Lake Tanganyika, captured a large consignment of ivory and took possession of hundreds of slaves. The story goes that it was in Tabwa village that he acquired his name “Tip” because of the sound of guns. Tippu Tip’s mantra was simple: slaves cost nothing, they only require to be gathered.
The African slavers disappeared, leaving their descendants to become part of the colonised masses of Africans inhabiting a continent that had been ravaged by 400 years of slavery and resource extraction. Africa was left with the seeds of a nimble socio-economic class characterised by a culture of hubris, greed, venality, and intellectual and spiritual penury. The descendants of the African slavers later re-invented themselves under the British, who perceived that, for the colonial project to succeed in Kenya, they needed native collaborators who would give the newly created colonial order legitimacy. This arrangement irrevocably re-invented the collaborating class of Africans whose loyalty was to the newly established colonial government, a class produced en masse through the colonial institutions—Western church, civil service and the mission schools—that would later rise to political dominance in post-independent Kenya.
Acting as agents of the colonial matrix of power, this new social class fashioned postcolonial Kenya’s public sphere and the conditions that govern it—social accountability mechanisms—for their own self-interest. In this kind of public sphere, governance is “just a front activity” and social accountability mechanisms are repurposed so as to limit the political agency of citizens. Through its actors and institutions, the colonial matrix of power stifles the emergence of what Michael Johnston refers to as “deep democratization”:
[The] process whereby citizens become able to defend themselves and their interests by political means. It is “democratization”, not in the sense of establishing formal democratic institutions for their own sake, but rather in the sense of broadening the range of people and groups with some say about the ways power and wealth should—and should not—be pursued, used and exchanged.
In addition, moral language and social norms are appropriated and distorted so as to erode democracy’s emancipatory power and rob the public of the moral resources to hold power to account. In this kind of climate, social accountability takes a nihilistic and morally vacuous characteristic. It is why, for instance, a civil servant or politician will take money from a “deal” that might benefit his people and will also spread the benefits around to his relatives as an act of social accountability. This despite the greater costs to national development. It is also why every five years during the election cycle, the Kenyan electorate demands money and other “goodies” in exchange for their vote instead of demanding accountability in the use of public resources when a politician takes public office. In fact, the politician who does not dish out “goodies” is considered not to meet his end of the bargain viz. social accountability.
Despite the aberration caused by the colonial matrix of power through its actors and institutions, however, the innate desire of man for freedom is the history of human struggle. This struggle with the forces of nature and/or over the process of the allocation of natural resources and the resultant products when the former are mixed with human labour, is a struggle determined in the realm of politics. Thus the definition of politics as the process of determining who gets what, when and how.
Unlike their European counterpart, the African bourgeoisie emerged from a different socio-historical process.
Walter Mignolo elucidates that the colonial matrix of power survives because it is external to society, and is, therefore, above it. But it also works only because it is internal to society, and is, for that reason, within it. Through its agents and actors, it continually morphs as it is constructed and reconstructed and deconstructed, invented and reinvented, through its interaction—as a whole and of its parts—with others. As such, the matrix of power must be seen as a power structure transforming the public sphere and the rules—the social accountability mechanisms—that govern it, while, at the same time, also being transformed by society.
Reconstruction through a dialectical process in the Kenyan context
In this regard, not only have the colonial matrix of power and Kenyan society been acting upon each other but, simultaneously and crucially, the normative social accountability mechanisms that have been governing the Kenyan public sphere since its inception in 1895 have been transforming themselves through a dialectical process within Kenya’s life.
Kenya’s public sphere has transformed in five dialectical phases. In the first phase, circa 1888-1940, the dominant norms that governed social accountability were white minority rule and black subjugation through violence and raw material extraction. In this phase, the matrix of power, through the colonial state and British imperialists, passed laws and statutes to implement an imperial agenda of resource extraction from the newly formed colony. Black subjugation—and in some cases extermination—was necessary to carry out this feat, which was primarily by means of violence.
The second phase (1940-1963), characterised by white minority rule, black subjugation and mediation—which came through creating a collaborating class of Africans—became the normative framework that governed social accountability. During the interwar years, the colonial state was weakened by demands for resources and manpower to fight the war and as such, it transformed itself yet again into a white settler-dominated social formation, engaged in organizing production and marketing for capital. Violence toward the African was increasingly becoming difficult and, to pacify the natives, rapid agrarian change in the African reserves, through the twin processes of soil conservation and cash crop development, was employed to pacify forces of resistance. This phase ushered in agrarian reforms, significantly the Swynnerton Plan to create an African gentry to perpetuate the matrix of power. Military operations during the Mau Mau war put an end to this phase.
In the third phase (1963-1992), the norms that governed social accountability were black rule, big man politics and state oppression. These norms manifested themselves in our political life through the Africanisation of public life, governance through an imperial presidency and a vigilant venal security apparatus. Corruption and the tribe became the primary instruments used to sustain the social accountability norms in this phase.
In the fourth phase (1992-2010), the norms that governed social accountability were coalition-building, state-driven maendeleo and oppression. The return of multiparty politics to Kenya saw the emergence of coalition movements in active politics (NARC coalition, Inter-Parties Parliamentary Group [IPPG]), and in civil society. The ability to bring people together and demand change warranted state attention and responsiveness. The state apparatus became more development-centric. Top-down maendeleo-style growth filled the bureaucratic state’s ethos as a path towards proving the legitimacy of the political leadership. Reforms were brought to the civil service and professionalization and state ideology informed the policy posture of the government. State oppression, particularly of dissenting voices, and during electoral seasons, remained.
Moral language and social norms are appropriated and distorted so as to erode democracy’s emancipatory power and rob the public of the moral resources to hold power to account.
The last phase (2010 to the present), was characterized by coalition building, devolution of power and resources and the development of the material well-being of the people which first manifested itself with the passing of the 2010 constitution that made provisions for the devolution of power and resources. As in the previous phase, coalition building in the public sphere still characterizes this phase. Evident through political formations such as Jubilee, NASA, Kenya Kwanza, Azimio, and in civil society groups, social movements and formations, this is a key social accountability mechanism in Kenya’s public life.
The ability to mobilise people and demand change warrants state attention and responsiveness. The improvement of the material conditions of the people is perhaps the most compelling evolution of this mutually antagonistic and complimentary change within the public sphere. It is for this reason that we observe the shift in Kenya’s politics viz. the 2022 elections. And a policy posture to change the material wellbeing of Kenyans has become the mainstay of the Kenya Kwanza government, the contradictions of the players notwithstanding.
The reason for the latter dialectical process is in part due to the overbearing nature of the colonial matrix of power, one of the objectives of which is to transform society into a capitalistic state. But it is also in part because society is demanding agency to define its material conditions. Within this framework, the “livelihood question” will perhaps be the most important factor that will dictate social accountability mechanisms within the public sphere in this phase. Indeed, creating a governance infrastructure that will take into account the “livelihood question” will increasingly become the central debate in Kenya’s pubic sphere.
Yet, despite this evolution (which arguably has contributed to progress in the material and political conditions of the people), the colonial matrix of power still hinders deep democratization and progressive social accountability mechanisms to restructure the public sphere to be responsive to the aspirations of the people. Mignolo observes that for public spheres in formerly colonized societies to become more democratic, they have to detach from the overall structure of knowledge—the colonial matrix of power—in order to engage in an epistemic reconstitution. This detachment constitutes a delinking from ways of thinking, languages, ways of life and being in a world that the rhetoric of modernity disavowed and the logic of coloniality enforced. He notes further that:
Epistemic reconstitution is taking place in many places and in many forms. But this is not a task you can find in the state and inter-state relations. This is a task of what I would call the emerging global political society: people taking their/our destinies in their/our own hands.
Makueni case study
In Kenya, for instance, these emerging political societies have been observed among the people of Makueni County. In the 1970s, Kenya was ravaged by a severe drought that gravely affected the lower eastern part of Kenya, a semi-arid region of high temperatures and low rainfall. With little government and donor support, the community came together to build sand dams—popularly called Silangas—to renew the local water resource. Using locally available materials and employing the traditional system of mwethya—a mechanism of mutual community support and shared labour—a political society emerged that formed the backbone of food farming and water conservation using sand dams.
The overarching lesson from the emerging political society in Makueni is that by taking their destiny into their own hands and using indigenous knowledge systems and values, they inadvertently begun a delinking process from the matrix of power that has led to the emergence of a public sphere that reflects the historical development of the people, and agreed social accountability mechanisms that mirror the agency and the epistemic constituents of the people of Makueni.
Despite the aberration caused by the colonial matrix of power through its actors and institutions, however, the innate desire of man for freedom is the history of human struggle.
Importantly, because of the internal self-organizing capacity of this political society, social accountability mechanisms are “codified” and institutionalized and, therefore, the moral language and social norms created within this context provide emancipatory power and arm the public with the moral resources to hold power to account. This can lead to what some scholars have termed “transversal”, “hybrid” or “diagonal” accountability.
Despite this success, much still needs to be done and, in this, the role of civil societies will be crucial. Since the 1990s when the era of good governance and democracy ushered in the age of political openness in Kenya, civil society organizations have been involved in state reform. That is, they have advocated for vertical accountability—the ability of a state’s population to hold its government accountable through electoral processes.
However, because of the overbearing of the colonial matrix of power on our governance structures, social accountability measures that address the plight of the people have not been forthcoming. To foster this, civil society must transform itself into a site of radical thinking of the global matrix of power, born out of the lived experiences of the Kenyan people. These experiences, Achille Mbembe argues, will open different pathways to what he calls “Afropolitanism”: a politics that uses the history and present of Africa to think about global emancipation.
Since the 1990s when the era of good governance and democracy ushered in the age of political openness in Kenya, civil society organizations have been involved in state reform.
For Mbembe, the colonial matrix of power did not just affect Africa but also global humanity. For this reason, the re-enchantment of politics is also a rejection of the violence that came with coloniality. This is to say, to radically redefine the “native being” and open it up to the possibility of becoming a human form of being rather than a thing. This possibility of becoming human requires, on the one hand, the affirmation of a different humanity, “the possibility of reconstituting the human after humanism’s complicity within the matrix of power. And on the other, it demands becoming one’s ‘own foundation’ in the creation of ‘forms of life that could genuinely be characterized as fully human’”.
This transformation will lie in the capacity of civil society to act as a catalyst where political societies can emerge and become robust, democratic, and resilient. This will entail social policy reform and creating avenues where—if important social policy is being considered—conducting independent public deliberations among a wide range of groups, and using informal and formal advocacy tools and policy instruments to provide emancipatory power to re-structure a public sphere that offers moral and epistemic agency, and reflects the aspirations and desires of the people, is undertaken.
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This publication was funded/co-funded by the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of The Elephant and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.
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Culture
The Illusion of the Kĩama kĩa Ma
Are Kĩama ceremonies religious in nature and therefore in conflict with Christianity as has been claimed by some Agĩkũyũ Christians?
The rate at which some Agĩkũyũ Christians have been reverting to their cultural practices, beginning with the Kĩama kĩa Athuri (Kĩama kĩa Ma, shortened to Kĩama), has prompted several studies in order to gain an in-depth understanding of the movement, and so inform the church’s response.
There are those Agĩkũyũ Christians that dismiss the Kĩama as having no place in the modern world. They refuse to accommodate the Kĩama in Christianity because of the risk of syncretism. In their study titled The Effects of the Mt. Kenya, Diocese of Mount Kenya South: 1960-2020, S.N. Ndung’u, E. Onyango, and S. Githuku find the main contention Christian theologians hold against the Kĩama is in its initiation rituals, the “aspects of sacrifices (blood), praying facing Kirinyaga and libations”. These Christians consider Kĩama rituals repulsive and this is why they reject the movement.
Given Kĩama’s significant role in Agĩkũyũ society both in the past and in the present, is there a compelling reason to refute the claim that the rituals are merely initiation rites? Are Christians not demonstrating prejudice when they categorize Kĩama initiation rituals as religious? Might the dangers represented by the Kĩama lie not in its rituals but elsewhere?
What is going on here?
Over the last 20 years, scholars have noted a revival of Agĩkũyũ cultural groups such as Thai, Kĩama kĩa Athuri, Gwata Ndaĩ, and Mũngiki, among others, that are calling for the restoration of the Agĩkũyũ cultural practices which they jettisoned in the post-colonial era. During the 1980s, as was the case in the colonial era, President Daniel arap Moi’s government outlawed tribal groupings, targeting in particular the Agĩkũyũ groups. Police often arrested the members “in the forest carrying out the initiation [and] locked them in a cell together with the meat they were roasting”. However, there was a resurgence in the formation of ethnic groups after 2002.
Following the 2008 post-election violence, there was an unprecedented cultural awakening in the country that can be attributed to a number of factors: the increased reach of vernacular media, which became a medium for messaging ethnic sentiment; political participation through the formation of ethnically-based political parties; the drive to preserve ethnic cultural practices; and the promulgation of the Constitution of Kenya 2010. The 2010 Constitution buttressed cultural heritages in law, allowing for their open practice, hence the registration of the Kikuyu Council of Elders Association Trust (KCEAT) in 2014 and the Agĩkũyũ Council of Elders (GCE) in 2018.
The term Kĩama kĩa Athuri a Ma (Kĩama) first appeared following the 2007/8 post-election violence when its leadership brokered peace with the elders of other ethnic groups in the Rift Valley. The violence had affected the political and economic lives of the Agĩkũyũ living in the Rift Valley and Agĩkũyũ elders sought protection from further eviction. Thus did the Kĩama distinguish itself from other cultural grouping such as Gwata Ndaĩ, Mũngiki, Thai and Kenda Mũiyũru.
Of late, Kĩama kĩa Athuri has been initiating Agĩkũyũ men in droves, including church leaders, who, following the resurgence of the Kĩama, have convinced new members that the association has a vital role to play in present-day society. In the study by Ndung’u et al., 60 per cent of respondents said that, as a governing council, the Kĩama was focused on the public governance issues of the day because the “Kĩama was in charge of the religious, economic, political and social order of the Agĩkũyũ people”, 35 per cent said it provides a mentorship framework for men in the society, while the same number found in the Kĩama a uniting factor that minimizes vices among men.
According to a 2018 report by the Diocese of Mount Kenya South (DMKS), the Kĩama draws its membership from all levels of society and has established cohorts throughout the country. Most Kĩama adherents are Christians; they attend church service in the morning, partake of the Holy Communion, and in the afternoon attend Kĩama and join in its rituals and ceremonies. Several are office-holders within local churches right up to the level of the DMKS Diocesan Synod, working and relating with the bishops and archbishops of the diocese.
Even though 15 per cent of the study respondents regarded the Kĩama as irrelevant, they did acknowledge that it raised issues of genuine concern for the government, with 20 per cent of the respondents considering the Kĩama as a partner of the government and the church in the fight against “drunkenness, immorality, sanctity of life and other abuses in the society such as female circumcision”.
The Kĩama draws its membership from all levels of society and has established cohorts throughout the country.
The study also found that 60 per cent of the respondents had prior knowledge of the Kĩama initiation rites. However, younger respondents (10 per cent of respondents) learnt of the rites during initiation and the subsequent teachings. Recruits are counselled in matters of family, morality, respect, and their responsibilities, regardless of their entrance level. Being the heads of their families, they are expected to live exemplary lives based on the members’ code of conduct. Guided by the Kikuyu Council of Elders, they discuss the ethnic and political challenges facing the Agĩkũyũ society. At the end of the initiation ceremony, a designated person leads the men in prayers facing Mount Kenya where they lift up their hands and invoke God saying, Thai thathaiya Ngai thai.
The study acknowledges that “Agĩkũyũ are divided on the relevance and importance of Kĩama in modern society”, and there are many Christian Agĩkũyũ today living in modernity and within the church who consider it to be irrelevant.
However, according to the study, Kĩama adherents have transformed its operations. They have “stopped advocatory for rites such of 2nd birth, circumcision, dances and elaborate ceremonies … but they keep praying facing Kirinyaga”. They do not advocate for female circumcision or the obscene and sexually-oriented dances during the circumcision rites of boys, and nor do they advocate for Gũthinga (warriorship), having modernised aspects of this tradition by exchanging the spear and the shield for the book and pen that are given to initiates, since the battlefield has changed. Instead of the elaborate ceremonies and dances that previously marked their new status, initiates receive certificates upon graduation. But while mũratina has been replaced with water and soda, meat must be roasted.
The origins of Kĩama
The Kĩama kĩa Athuri was the highest authority among the Agĩkũyũ, vested with legislative, executive, and judicial functions. They were the custodians of Agĩkũyũ ancestral land, governance, military, customs, and religious matters.
According to oral tradition, the Agĩkũyũ had been a matriarchal society where the ruling women oppressed their menfolk. The riika rĩa Iregi (the Iregi age group who were circumcised when the conflict to overturn matriarchy was at its height—Iregi means protester, dissenter) retreated to the forest to plot their freedom from tyranny. Their secret meetings bore the Kĩama. Since their meetings were long and they needed to eat, the men made it a habit to bring a goat, Mbũri ya kĩama, to be eaten during the Kĩama (meeting).
Legend credits the Iregi with executing the violent overthrow of the matriarchal regime. They impregnated their wives at the same time and engaged them in physical fights a month before the women were to deliver, when they were at their most vulnerable, and thus a patriarchy was established.
The new order required that men no longer obey women and that they live in their own separate huts (thingira) and stop sleeping in their wives’ houses (nyũmba). They would continue meeting in a “Kĩama” to review the new constitution and the progress of their emancipation. The men would also be meeting in their “thingira” to mentor their sons on manhood, honour, allegiance to the community, integrity and to uphold the new system of governance. They declared that animals, children, land and the women themselves were the property of men and that men had exclusive rights over them. Where it had previously been paid by women, the men would now pay dowry so that they could exercise full authority over women.
Legend credits the Iregi with executing the violent overthrow of the matriarchal regime.
Mothers, aunts and grandmothers were to give instruction concerning the new government to all female children in the nyũmba while fathers, uncles and grandfathers were to do the same in the thingira. All issues of morality, economy, social welfare, leadership, religion and justice would be adjudicated by the Kĩama.
The Iregi thus became the custodians of the Agĩkũyũ and, to ensure the continuity of its social function, the Iregi metamorphosed into the Kĩama kĩa Athuri. The Kĩama was further sub-divided into various stages of eldership whose members were assigned various functions. Henceforth, members had to make the payment of a goat to advance in eldership. Humphrey Waweru identifies the councils of elders that a man joined in stages as follows.
The first of these councils, Waweru holds, was Kĩama gia Kamatimũ (the Spear Council), also known as Kĩama kĩa Mbũri Imwe (the Council of the First Goat). This is because one gave a goat, Mbũri ya Kĩama (the council’s goat) in order to belong to this council. This council was comprised of recently married men whose children had not yet been circumcised. They were deemed too inexperienced to adjudicate cases in the society and were mentored by senior elders and assigned to gathering firewood, lighting the ceremonial fire, and roasting the Kĩama meat.
The second council was Kĩama kĩa Mataathi or Kĩama kĩa Mbũri Igĩrĩ (the Council of Two Goats). To rise to this council, a man had to give two goats and a lamb. In his unpublished PhD thesis, The Role of the Agĩkũyũ Religion and Culture in the Development of the Karing’a Religio-Political Movement K. Kang’ethe observes:
“The first goat, mbũri ya mwana, was given shortly before the circumcision of a member’s first child; the second goat, mbũri ya Kĩama, was given in order that they could officially accept the member as a member of this council; and the lamb, ndũrũme ya kũinũkania, was given to the council immediately they had circumcised his child in order to re-unite the child with the family and to bless the homestead.”
This council executed the legislative and judicial functions of the Agĩkũyũ nation, hence the esteem with which it was held.
The third council was called Kĩama kĩa Matũrangũrũ or Kĩama kĩa Ukũrũ (the Council of Old Age). To join this council, Waweru observes, members gave two extra goats. The Agĩkũyũ considered the elders of this council to be the wisest in the land and they were called athamaki. They wore brass earrings and carried ceremonial leaves of Matũrangũrũ as a symbol of authority, and decided “the dates of circumcision feasts and the holding of Itwĩka ceremony.”
Waweru identified Kĩama gĩa Gũthathaiya (religious council of elders) as the last stage. Its members were required to have had their children’s children circumcised and their wives sexually inactive and beyond childbearing age. They also officiated at public religious ceremonies at the designated Mũgumo tree (the fig tree) and were the custodians of Agĩkũyũ religion and culture. Few reached this most honoured stage.
Liturgical rites
Like other African societies, the Agĩkũyũ developed worship liturgies as they took part in prayers and making offerings and sacrifices. They did not always make the offerings to God; lesser spiritual beings such as “divinities, spirits and the departed” also received offerings. The Kĩama members prayed facing Mount Kenya, lifting their hands, and invoking God saying: Thai thathaiya Ngai thai. During the ceremonies, a designated person led this invocation. Kĩama elders were first responsible to God; it is in response to God that these men became dedicated to ensuring justice prevailed through the council to which they were inducted through a sacrifice.
Its members were required to have had their children’s children circumcised and their wives sexually inactive and beyond childbearing age.
Since in Gĩkũyũ traditional religion, priests, rulers, the living dead, and ritual elders were mediators between man and God, it is easy to assimilate the Gĩkũyũ eldership system to a mediatorial office. In traditional African religions, John S. Mbiti observed, “To reach God effectively, it may be useful to approach him by first approaching those who are lower than he is but higher than the ordinary person.” L.S.B. Leakey notes that in the Gĩkũyũ tradition, religious functions had to be conducted by a priest who was drawn from the head of the family or clan and assisted by other junior elders. Thus, according to K.M. Ndereba, Kĩama ritual elders played a mediatorial role within Gĩkũyũ culture, serving in the words of Mbiti as “conveyor belts” in approaching God.
However, the impetus of the present Kĩama appears to have two key motifs: cultural and political.
Cultural Motif
The resurgence of the Kĩama kĩa Athuri expresses a yearning to return to the Agĩkũyũ customs that were disrupted by colonialism and the coming of Christianity. While the colonialists endeavoured to maintain certain aspects of the Agĩkũyũ system such as the Agĩkũyũ initiation rites so as not to disorient them, missionaries on the other hand sought to replace the Agĩkũyũ religious and belief system with the Christian belief system, including the initiation rites. Such missionaries included C. Cagnolo, who asked Bishop Filippo Perlo (the initiator and organizer of the Consolata Fathers among the Agĩkũyũ), “How could morals be found among the people who in their age-long abandonment, have become so corrupt as to raise practices openly immoral to be a social institution?” Thus, missionaries associated the Agĩkũyũ religion and culture with the devil. For them to turn to God, the missionaries demanded of their converts that they break with their traditional religion and culture. The break was to be so complete that any accommodation of culture was deemed gũcokerera maũndũ ma ũgĩkũyũ, going back to things of the Agĩkũyũ.
Political motif
Proponents of the present (post-colonial) Kĩama, gather in the name of preserving culture and offering leadership to the community. The colonial government’s adoption of the Local Native Councils had made the administrative role of the Kĩama redundant and, by appointing chiefs to replace the traditional athamaki, the colonialists had shifted the centre of authority in the Agĩkũyũ society where, for example, in Southern Kĩambu, Kĩnyanjui wa Gathirimũ replaced Waiyaki in 1892. As Jomo Kenyatta laments, “Irũngũ or Maina generation whose turn it was to take over the government from the Mwangi generation, between 1925 and 1928 … was denied the birthright of perpetuating the national pride”. Thus, by 1925, the colonial political structure had virtually replaced the Agĩkũyũ political system and its administrative units, setting in motion a gradual disorganization of the Agĩkũyũ social structure.
Today’s Kĩama manifests a political motif, seeking to restore its diminished role under British colonial rule and the independence government. The Kĩama denies direct participation but indirectly takes part in politics. In March 2021, for instance, Kĩama leaders endorsed the then Speaker of the National Assembly, Hon. J.B. Muturi, as spokesperson for the Mt. Kenya region. The Kĩama also came out in support of certain political candidates in the 2022 general election.
Kĩama ceremonies as initiation rites
Kĩama ceremonies bear the features of initiation rites like those advanced by A. van Gennep in his celebrated work, Les rites de passage (The Rites of Passage). The Kĩama rites involving prayers, libation, isolation, rituals, and sacrifice of goats comport with van Gennep’s definition of “rites which accompany every change of place, state, social position and age”. He sees the performing of sacrifices as enabling an individual to make a meaningful change of status within the society.
According to Ndung’u et al., initiation was done in the forests and members were required to pay a goat to be promoted from one grade to another. The men were grouped according to their grades based on functions which had duties and rights.
Are Kĩama ceremonies acts of worship?
Victor Turner’s insights can help determine whether the sacrificing of goats at a Kĩama ceremony is religious worship or whether it constitutes a rite of passage as is purported. Turner applied the Van Gennep passage model and rituals in both tribal and modern industrial societies. What he found in rituals among the Ndembu of Zimbabwe compares favourably with those of modern society and among the Agĩkũyũ. These rituals involved symbolic manipulation and a reference to religion.
Mathieu Deflem discusses Turner’s approach to rituals, first, as part of an ongoing process of social drama. Here rituals play a significant role in a society’s conflictual equilibrium. Second, as dealing with symbols that make up the smallest units of ritual activity, symbols in themselves are carriers of meaning. Third, the meanings of symbols are multiple, giving unity to the morality of the social order and the emotional needs of the individual.
The resurgence of the Kĩama kĩa Athuri expresses a yearning to return to the Agĩkũyũ customs that were disrupted by colonialism and the coming of Christianity.
Rituals, according to Turner, are symbols showing crucial social and religious values by which information is revealed and regarded as authoritative, as dealing with the crucial values of the community. Since they embody beliefs and meaningful symbols, Turner claims, they can be objects, activities, words, relationships, events, gestures, or spatial units. In Turner’s definition, therefore, ritual refers to ritual performances involving manipulation of symbols that refer to religious beliefs. In the current practice of Kĩama, the goat is offered at the Kĩama eldership initiation rites for two main reasons: to atone for the sins of the elders and to initiate new elders into the council.
Ritual as symbols in perspective
Turner distinguished dominant and instrumental symbols. Dominant symbols appear in many ritual contexts, but their meaning possesses high autonomy and consistency throughout the total symbolic system. Kenyatta observes that sheep and goats were important in the religious and cultural life of the Agĩkũyũ for purification and sacrificial rites among the Agĩkũyũ. Agreeing with him, anthropologist L.S.B. Leakey pointed to the incomparable value the Agĩkũyũ placed on goats and sheep in their social organisation. Sacrificing goats was not just the preserve of the Kĩama but permeated Agĩkũyũ life; for example, in the indigenous ritual of Gũciarwo na Mbũri (birth by goat) ritual, a ceremony where a stranger is “born” into the community. Julius Gathongo observes that they slaughter a goat just like in the Mbũri cia Kĩama, but they do not perceive this as worship, although blood is shed, and they make sacrifices. He cites as an example the Gũciarwo na Mbũri ritual that the Embu medical missionary Dr Crawford performed in 1910:
“In 1910, for his entrance fee, he presented the elders with a bull and there was a great feast. This made the Embu elders recognise him as one of their own, and his ‘religion’ as part of theirs. In turn, they promised him ‘that they would now insist on all the people keeping God’s Day and attending [church] service, and that he was to be the leading elder (Muthamaki)’.”
John DeMathew, a popular Kikuyu musician, opined that blood is indispensable for an Agĩkũyũ marriage to endure. In one of his renditions he states:
Atῦmia aitũ magῦrwo na rũru (The dowry be paid with a flock)
Thakame yacio ĩrῦmagie mohiki (The blood that is shed will sustain marriages)
Kĩrathimo kĩumage gatũrũme-inĩ karĩa mũhĩrĩga wao ukarũmia (Blessings flow out of the [slaughtered]) lamb of which the clan will partake)
Chorus:
Kanitha wa Ngai uuge ũndũire ũcokio (Let the Church of God encourage culture)
Na muma wa kĩrore ndikaugũkwo (And the oath of kĩrore, I shall not recant)
DeMathew affirms the age-old Agĩkũyũ belief that marriage lasts because goats are killed and blood shed during the dowry ceremony. He lists what makes an enduring marriage union to comprise shed animal blood, clan prayers and fellowship in the partaking of meat.
Rituals as instrumental symbols are the means of attaining the specific goals of each ritual performance. We can investigate instrumental symbols only in terms of the total system of symbols that make up a particular ritual, since we can reveal their meaning only in relation to other symbols. In Turner’s opinion, Deflem notes, using symbols in ritual empowers them to act upon the performer and cause change in the person. The Kĩama rituals resulted in the transformation of the initiate’s attitudes (status) and behaviour (responsibility). For Agĩkũyũ men, these eldership stages were important as a rite of passage since once initiated, men gained social authority, influence, and power. Their status affected their wives, whose social status, responsibilities, and duties also increased. Conversely, when husbands failed to ascend the social ladder, other women ridiculed their wives.
The association of rituals with supernatural powers
Most of the respondents in the study by Ndung’u et al. – African Christians – viewed the Kĩama initiations as religious, involving rituals and sacrifices, and as being demonic and against Christian norms. It is possible to characterize Kĩama activities as religious, just as S.G. Kibicho framed the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in 1952 as a religious conflict between African culture and westernization. They prayed (facing Mount Kenya) and sacrificed to Ngai (God) before launching their raids against the British government. They prayed: “Hoyai ma amu Ngai no ũrĩa wa tene…” (Continue praying to God (Ngai) comrades, the God of our ancestors). Kibicho’s claims concerning the Mau Mau members agree with Leakey’s allegations that the Mau Mau movement withstood the British not because of their war strategy but because they were an African religion. The Mau Mau were, asserts Leakey, “… a new religion, of which through oath ceremony formed only a small part that was the force which was turning thousands of peace-loving Kikuyu into murderous fanatics”.
Sacrificing goats was not just the preserve of the Kĩama but permeated Agĩkũyũ life.
Today’s Kĩama ceremony has adapted Kikuyu traditional oaths to bind its members, as did the Mau Mau freedom fighters. For the Kĩama ceremonies are not unique, since according to Van Gennep, the passage between groups requires a ceremony, or ritual, which is the rite of passage. In their initiation rites, groups in modern society practice customs traceable to their sacred past. Van Gennep hypothesises that such “social groups” are also grounded in their magico-religious foundations.
Turner argues that even though rituals in modern society occur in the secular domain of recreation, they are situated outside the confines of religious groups, and have some religious component. This is because, according to Turner, they have “something of the investigative, judgmental, and even punitive character of law-inaction, and something of the sacred, mythic, numinous, even ‘supernatural’ character of religious action”. All rituals are religious, Turner concludes, because they all “celebrate or commemorate transcendent powers”.
Rituals in modern society share characteristics, in Turner’s view, with the tribal rituals he studied in Ndembu society, where “all life is pervaded by invisible influences”. In this way, tribal societies are wholly religious, and ritual actions surrounding their religions are “nationwide”.
Rituals can be traced to religious belief and symbols and hence, Turner holds them to be related, forming the ground for his definition of ritual as “a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors’ goals and interests”. Hence, rituals must not be viewed in the sacred domain alone. Muchunu Gachuki, a member of the African Independent Pentecostal Church of Africa (AIPCA) who administered the Mau Mau oath says that it:
[c]onsists of vows and commandments. People who have no sacred vows cannot be said to be religious… Our ‘creeds’ in Mau Mau were organized in accordance with those of Kikuyu Central Association [political party formed in 1925] which existed before Mau Mau … based mainly on the traditional beliefs of the Kikuyu … that, ‘we are praying to the God of Gikuyu and Mumbi’ who gave to us this country – a country that was alienated by the Europeans.
Since the industrial revolution and because of secularization, modern religion, claims Turner, is decoupled from the rest of culture. Religion in modern societies is, writes Turner “regarded as something apart from our economic, political, domestic and recreational life. Religion is part of the division of social labor”. Turner, thus, regards rituals of modern, industrial religion as liminal (as are tribal rituals where religion and other cultural sectors are interwoven). This is because it is no longer, as its most distinct characteristic, a community affair but is individualized and covers a certain aspect of specific groups.
We can understand Kĩama rituals in this light, as not fully embracing the entire way of life but certain aspects of it. For instance, Karanja wa Mwangi, head of Agĩkũyũ Academy, who is committed to restoring Agĩkũyũ customs including Kĩama kĩa Mbũri, describes himself as a progressive advocate of culture. He accepts changes such as eradicating female genital mutilation and states: “All that we don’t subscribe to is colonialistic doctrines in the church but we can’t go back to wearing skins, the way our forefathers used to do. We have those of us [traditionalists] advocating for such uncivilised practices and this causes confusion.”
In modern societies institutions are disintegrated and independent of each other. As such, they deal with given needs and respond to certain questions faced by their members such as, law, politics, the economy, and religion. Rituals taking place within such domains may not carry religious connotations as they occur where supernatural matters are not dealt with.
In their initiation rites, groups in modern society practice customs traceable to their sacred past.
But, while being cognizant of Turner’s distinction between tribal and modern societies, S. Moore and B. Myerhoff question whether this distinction can be made between religious and secular ritual, since in tribal societies, as Turner argued, religion, economy, law, politics, and other cultural domains are interwoven. Tribal rituals, therefore, must have some religious component, since tribal religion in both mythology and ritual practices has not (yet) split off from other sectors of tribal culture. The sacrifices and prayers at Kĩama eldership should therefore be understood as a socio-cultural rite of passage and not a worship-religious event. Although these observers are quick to perceive the rite as spiritual worship, there is a need to distinguish Kĩama’s initiation rites from Agĩkũyũ acts of worship. This concurs with the conclusion reached by T. Kibara, B. Ngundo and P. Gichure that, “the church needs to recognize Mbũri cia Kĩama as one of the rites of passage within the Gikuyu culture so as to embrace the concept of Christianizing certain aspects of the traditional ritual.”
Today’s version of the Kĩama is much diluted. It is not the status symbol that shaped the Agĩkũyũ society in the precolonial days. Kĩama ceremonies remain initiation rites into eldership whose practitioners are bent on politicking. In effect, the turbulent political climate around ethnicities has given rise to the need for ethnic intervention and so, if the Agĩkũyũ are to survive politically and economically in the lands away from their ancestral homelands such as in the Rift Valley, Kĩama kĩa Athuri would be the vehicle for peace, reconciliation and political patronage.
However, while this approach can secure the interests of Agĩkũyũ society, identity politics is destructive for a country like Kenya. For when we make tribe the basis of our relationships, we lose the nation in the tribal mire. As I wrote in The Elephant:
We must move from the politics of “our tribe” to the politics of “Kenya”. Only then will we rediscover the counter-intuitive truth, as Sacks states, that a nation is strong when it cares for the weak, that it becomes invulnerable when it cares about the vulnerable.
The church stands to be destroyed not with the blood of the slaughtered goats of Kĩama ceremonies, but with the logic of tribal politics that conditions us to act on tribal self-interest without a commitment to the nation’s common good. When this logic creeps into the church, the body is dismembered, torn between loyalty to tribe and loyalty to Christ.
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This publication was funded/co-funded by the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of The Elephant and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.
Culture
The Boon and the Bane: Three Markers of Democratic Culture in Kenya
The triple helix of Harambee, hand-outs and handshakes weaves an intractable chokehold on democracy as the unimpeded participation of citizens in the design and execution of conditions to better their social and economic well-being.
It was Jomo Kenyatta who popularized the term Harambee. In the months leading up to independence in 1963, Jomo, who was tipped to be Prime Minister, begun to use the term to rally the nation to “pull together” resources for development. Some say Harambee replaced Uhuru, the Kiswahili word for freedom that had been the galvanizing motto in the struggle for independence. Is it possible then that in adopting Harambee, which was also known as self-help, we gave up freedom for collective burdens? One is tempted to think so, seeing that in the early years, those who rejected the Harambee clarion call ignored the customary response, “heee!” opting instead to shout, “Majimbo!” — regionalism. I will return to this story of Majimbo soon. For now, let me trace the journey of Harambee from the ethos of hard work to the dungeons of corruption.
The history of the term Harambee illustrates one of the most admirable aspects of Kenyan social life — our ability to borrow from across communities and weave into the tapestry of pre-existing cultural practices, including language. The word Harambee is a deft cojoining of two disparate words — Har and Ambe. These words became Kenyan on account of the 31,983 indentured workers that Britain, as colonizer, shipped from India to the East African Protectorate to build the so-called Uganda Railway. Construction started in Mombasa, in 1896, reached the shores of Lake Victoria in 1901 and didn’t reach Kampala until 1931.
Har Ambe was an empowering cry that bound the workers as they lifted loads in unison, like human cranes. There is something radical in Indian immigrant workers, known pejoratively as coolies, breaking into their own tongues to invoke a female deity as they were being ordered to lift heavy loads in the sweltering heat. Ambe is a goddess worshipped in many parts of India. She is associated with force and energy and is said to have divine power to destroy obstacles. Har, meaning everyone, comes from Hindi; a language whose origins lie in Sanskrit and one that has grown to do the work of a national language even though that status remains contested. In an alien land, the Hindi Har worked like glue, binding these labourers.
Pally Dhillon captures the distinction of one these labourers in the ground-breaking Kijabe: An African Historical Saga that is part memoir, part fiction. That worker was taller than his colleagues and therefore easily recognizable. Kala Singh, for that was his name, embraced the Har Ambe call, and lent his name to yet another improvisation — the colloquial term kalasinga that is used in Kenya to refer to any Sikh. Terms like these, used to honour rather than to deride, signal acceptance. In A Kenyan Journey the erudite lawyer, human rights activist, and creative writer, Pheroze Nowrojee shows how tenuous acceptance has been for Kenyan Indians to put down roots in a land that has intermittently questioned their loyalty to the economy and their stake in the heritage and the politics. (A Presidential Proclamation by former president Uhuru Kenyatta on 21 July 2017 recognized Kenyans of Asian Heritage as the country’s 44th tribe.) However, it is worth noting that President Jomo Kenyatta’s adoption of the term Harambee as a national motto that was quickly turned into popular song by Daudi Kabaka working with the empire-building British producer Charles Worrod before it was given further credence in the loyalty pledge, was a significant endorsement of the value bricolage in the work of forging nationhood. (See Issue #38 of the chronicle magazine, Old Africa, which features excerpts from And Master of None, Charles Worrod’s unpublished autobiography. Kabaka’s “Harambee, Harambee” is another fine example of borrowings and bricolage. The guitars that underpin Kabaka’s song came from demobilized World War Two soldiers, Worrod says he “used the melody of ‘John Brown’s Body’, and ‘Rule Britannia’ as inspirations”, never mind that it was a symbol of the colonizer, and the Equator Sounds Band that worked with Kabaka drew members from all over Eastern Africa.) No community was too small to lend a humanizing and working strategy, word, or practice to the project called Kenya.
It was in this spirit then that one of the first projects the citizens of an independent Kenya raised money for was the construction of the Senate Chambers. Prince Philip had laid the foundation stone on December 13, 1963. Soon after, the Speaker of the National Assembly, Humphrey Slade was appointed to head the Kenya National Fund which was established to receive contributions from the organizations, members of the public and other well-wishers for the completion of the Senate Chambers. It looked like government by the people and for the people was off to a good start; people were paying for the institutions they believed in.
In Jomo Kenyatta’s day, development was understood as physical infrastructure and his new motto urged communities to join hands in building schools, establishing a dispensary, a maternity ward, or providing staff housing. As Kilemi Mwiria observes, the colonial government had deliberately “limited educational opportunities for Africans”. In Central Kenya, this gave rise to the Independent Schools Movement whose driving force was Mbiyu Koinange. At independence, the president saw this approach of schools built by the community as the shortest route to expanding facilities and increasing enrolment and by extension literacy. Economists can tell us whether in 1963, foreign exchange earned from the sale of cash-crops was negligible, and if the tax-base from those in formal employment was likewise too small to sustain the annual budget. Whatever the case, Harambee evolved as the unofficial tax system.
From 1968 when Dr Julius Kiano was at the helm of the Education Ministry, the government gave communities additional incentives to build secondary schools with the promise that if the community built the classrooms, the government would provide them with teachers. Secondary schools were not the only target of Jomo’s Harambee movement. Numerous institutions that stand today as public institutions of higher learning had their origins in the Harambee spirit and were led by people in the private sector. For instance, Masinde Muliro University started as Western College of Arts and Applied Science (WECO) in 1972, spear-headed by Amos Wako and A.A.A. Ekirapa among others. Similarly, Dedan Kimathi University grew from Nyeri College of Science and Technology, mooted in 1971 by pioneer Nyeri technocrats like Duncan Ndegwa and built from the contributions of big cash-crop farmers and subsidiary farmers of the district. This idea for tertiary education was replicated in many parts of the country. Additionally, in seven out of the eight provinces, Harambee secondary schools out-numbered the government-aided ones. The government publication, Kenyatta Cabinets: Drama, Intrigue, Triumph states that by 2012 there were about 600 Harambee schools countrywide.
At independence, the president saw this approach of schools built by the community as the shortest route to expanding facilities and increasing enrolment and by extension literacy.
In those days before WhatsApp messaging, invitations to Harambees were printed cards, or letters from the person leading the initiative or from the nascent institutions. Once in receipt of the invitation, one was welcome to make a pledge which would be dutifully entered in the ledger on the back of the card, or on a continuation sheet attached to the letter. The community would raise funds, sometimes over a period, and on an appointed day the Chief Guest, usually the area Member of Parliament, would make his donation to boost the community’s efforts. If the school had a particularly high profile, either on account of its name, or its location, the Chief Guest would be a senior member of the Cabinet. There is a photograph in Moi Cabinets: The Nyayo Era, of Vice-President Daniel arap Moi laying the foundation stone for Ngina Kenyatta Harambee Primary School in Kinoo on 13 October 1967, accompanied by Mwai Kibaki, Minister for Commerce and Industry. Following his appointment as Vice-President, Moi needed to raise his profile at the grassroots. That was why he travelled to Kapsabet to officially open the Mosoriot Harambee Health Centre on 16 December 1969, as Nathaniel Kalya, the pioneer Senator for Nandi, and later area MP for Mosop and Assistant Minister for Culture and Social Services (1967-1969), explained to his biographers, Godfrey K. Sang and Wilson Kalya.
Occasionally, money was raised through Harambee for a child to go abroad for further education. The push for higher education became urgent at independence because the departure of the colonialists opened up a raft of jobs for Africans, especially in the civil service. Since education was historically linked to the new religious faiths, it wasn’t long after independence that Harambees to build churches spread like bushfire. Development, it seemed, would not be divorced from its original paths, even in this now independent country. Everywhere you turned in the 1970s there was a Harambee to build a church, a hospital, a school. In reality, some of these were about boosting the standing of current or prospective politicians.
In those days before WhatsApp messages, invitations to Harambees were printed cards, or letters from the person leading the initiative, or from the nascent institutions. Once in receipt of the invitation, one was welcome to make a pledge which would be dutifully entered in the ledger on the back of the card, or on a continuation sheet attached to the letter. The community would raise funds, sometimes over a period, and on an appointed day the Chief Guest, usually the area Member of Parliament, would make his donation to boost the community’s efforts. If the school had a particularly high profile, either on account of its name, or its location, the Chief Guest would be a senior member of the Cabinet. There is a photograph in Moi Cabinets: The Nyayo Era, of Vice-President Daniel arap Moi laying the foundation stone for Ngina Kenyatta Harambee Primary School in Kinoo on 13 October 1967, accompanied by Mwai Kibaki, Minister for Commerce and Industry. Following his appointment as Vice-President, Moi needed to raise his profile at the grassroots. That was why he travelled to Kapsabet to officially open the Mosoriot Harambee Health Centre on 16 December 1969, as Nathaniel Kalya, the pioneer Senator for Nandi, and later area MP for Mosop and Assistant Minister for Culture and Social Services (1967-1969), explained to his biographers, Godfrey K. Sang and Wilson Kalya.
Since education was historically linked to the new religious faiths, it wasn’t long after independence that Harambees to build churches spread like bushfire.
Reading the biography of Nathaniel Kalya one gets the impression that the budget in the Ministry of Culture and Social Services literally lay with the people. He spent countless hours on the road from Kaptumo, Mosoriot, Kabiyet, and Kaiboi in Nandi; Kandara and Kariti in the then Murang’a District; Githunguri in Kiambu, Kehancha in Kisii and many other locations in rural Kenya. The bulk of his work as an MP, and even as an Assistant Minister, seems to have been taken up by organizing and officiating at funds-drives for health centres, schools, staff houses, even the Armed Forces Memorial Hospital!
By the late 1990s, Harambee had become a loathed concept. District Officers used it to terrorize traders in towns, chiefs used it to punish villagers by confiscating their chicken, churches used it to judge their followers. Ordinary citizens were no longer being asked to give to projects they believed in, projects that would benefit an entire community; they were being bullied to fulfil the narrow agenda of an individual. Two anecdotes will illustrate the absurdities. Sometime in the mid-1990s, a senior academic registrar at a public university wrote invitations on the university’s letterhead for a Harambee to raise funds for his son who was due to take up a place at a university in the US. The letter was sent to academic staff under the registrar’s mandate, and to heads of institutions that traded with the university. Wow. No sense of irony in a man presiding over an education that was seemingly not good enough for his own child. No notion of conflict of interest in roping in merchants who could easily resort to inflating their invoices to meet this unworthy request. No compunction whatsoever, just brazen abuse of office, its stationery, and its social standing.
The second anecdote is about a senior magistrate in a provincial town. He invited his colleagues and practicing advocates in the region to a fundraiser at his newly built home where, as he said, he needed a little help to get an electricity connection. Again, no sense of conflict of interest; no dire plight like an insurmountable hospital bill, just greed in demanding what you want regardless of how it will affect the institution where you work, the very work that you do, and those that do it with you. By the end of the 1990s this self-serving use of the self-help culture had poisoned every social space from weddings to funerals with ridiculous budgets, and worse still, the government was not fulfilling its mandate of alleviating poverty. In this season of brazen abuse of the giving nature of Kenyans, the Harambee motto gradually went from a philosophy to better communities, built from two borrowed Indian words whose spirit resonated with the solidarity that is endemic amongst Africans, to a form of Black Tax in extended families and a tool of administrative tyranny that simultaneously allowed government to abdicate its primary work of providing pathways to secure livelihoods.
In 2002, the government commissioned a British firm to assess anti-corruption initiatives. They zeroed in on Harambees as a driver of graft. Consequently, one of Mwai Kibaki’s first pronouncements as president in 2003 was to invoke the Public Officers Ethics Act to ban Cabinet Ministers from presiding over Harambees. But given the roots of Harambee, banning these fund-raisers entirely, or vetting them for approval as the National Assembly’s Constitutional Implementation Oversight Committee proposed in 2019 is unworkable. Harambee no longer works as a driver of government projects, but it remains robust, if a little wayward as a socio-cultural pillar. In recent years, it has been given new impetus by technology. From WhatsApp groups to rally people around a cause, to M-Changa and allied collection platforms, the Paybill is now a critical constituent of our socio-cultural rites. It frees many from physical attendance of fund-raisers and simultaneously allows them to show commitment to the cause. Which leads me to the other key term in our political culture.
Hand-outs
There is a close relationship between Harambee and hand-outs. You could almost argue that one birthed the other. In the early days, the people gave for their welfare, including building the Senate Chamber, which was later used by the National Assembly. And as stories from the colonial struggle show, they willingly raised money for the freedom of persecuted leaders. Two stories cement the argument.
Soon after their 1961 release from detention, the Kapenguria Six addressed several rallies around the country. At Ruring’u stadium in Nyeri, Paul Ngei was asked to say the closing prayer. He asked “the God of Africans to urge the God of Whites to leave to Kenyans the land they occupy and go back in Britain in peace. For this, Ngei was charged with incitement and charged KES 500. Enthusiastic crowds quickly raised the money, Harambee style, and stuffed the currency notes in his pockets while carrying him shoulder high”. (Moi Cabinets Vol 2: 124).
From WhatsApp groups to rally people around a cause, to M-Changa and allied collection platforms, the Paybill is now a critical constituent of our socio-cultural rites.
It seems 1961 was a special year for Kenyans opening their wallets for their would-be leaders. Another story is told of money raised to buy the newly released Jomo Kenyatta a car. It is not clear from these anecdotal stories who initiated this campaign, but those who participated in it tell it with great pride in their willingness to restore dignity to a detainee. When the car was purchased and issued with the registration KHA, the proud fundraisers immediately dubbed it “Kenyatta Home Again”.
How did we move from this point where the public raises money to aid persecuted leaders to where we are now with leaders, even wannabe ones gunning for office, buying support at campaign rallies in the name of the so-called standing allowance? All might not be lost if the story of the newly elected Mumias MP, Peter Silasyia, is anything to go buy. But the way the story of Silasyia’s supporters building him a house is told with the moniker “broke MP”, it is clear where the values of our society lie. Namely, in the same place where people cheered in 2017 as the newly elected 23-year-old MP for Igembe South, John Paul Mwirigi was given a brand new Prado by President Uhuru Kenyatta.
Handouts are not just a problem at the top. They are a retail item, available for everyone. Recently, an academic on Twitter reported difficulties in finding “manual labour” during the 2022 campaign season. “People would wake up and follow the campaign handouts. The handouts ranged from [KES] 100 to 200. Other contestants would give packet of maize flour.” The screenshot below captures the crisis of productivity spurred by this campaign market.
Rent-a-crowd was lucrative enough for some to abandon their usual (side-)hustles as was reported elsewhere. If this practice ran strictly as an election-related business, many would look away from its slippery moral basis and call it the market force of demand and supply. The real tragedy though is that this culture of hand-outs is now so rooted in daily life that drawing a line between it and corruption is a game of mental gymnastics.
Say you approach a crowded hospital parking, and the watchman allows you to park in a “No Entry” section by a door that he knows is never used. You have a parking ticket which you will validate via payment as you leave, so why do you, nonetheless, feel compelled to give that watchman 50 shillings? Is that gratitude? And if so, isn’t saying a warm “Hallo and thank you” enough to show your appreciation? How can it be corruption if the watchman did not ask for it, you say? You might argue he expected it. But what does that say about your own complicity — condoning the breaking of rules and accepting graft? Culture is truly that moment when we do things without stopping to ask the why or wherefore; we do them because they are always done, and done in that way.
The real tragedy though is that this culture of hand-outs is now so rooted in daily life that drawing a line between it and corruption is a game of mental gymnastics.
The dependency created by hand-outs in our society is both crippling and deliberate, sadly. Somewhere along the journey of Harambee, the giver became the recipient as our politicians found value in reversing the relationship. Rather than take from the people to structure what they need in terms of infrastructure and social services, now politicians give us handouts to keep our mouths silent about our needs and their failures. Hand-outs are an instrument of control, a loss of freedom for the people — the freedom to critique, the freedom to be gainful, the freedom to self-determining. Harambee for development became a burden on the people while hand-outs from their leaders have become blinds that lock out the vision of industry and social well-being. There is no compulsion on the part of politicians to expand opportunities and create real wealth for the majority. Meanwhile, at the top, politicians jostle for space at the trough from which they reap to bag enough for handouts for people, if they are generous. The other name for that jostling is elite consensus aka handshakes.
Handshakes
At a 25 November 1963 public rally in Kapsabet, the crowds shouted “Majimbo” in response to the “Harambee” call made by Tom Mboya and Achieng Oneko of the Kenya African National Union (KANU). The people were protesting in this manner to show their disappointment over a decision made by Jean Marie Seroney, William Murgor and Taita arap Towett to decamp from Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU) to join KANU. “Their defection was greeted with fury. [Nathaniel] Kalya was surprised that these individuals had not even bothered to consult anyone”. Two short months later, on January 23, 1964, Senator Kalya joined the bandwagon and walked out of KADU. He does not say whether he consulted anyone. He avers that “the move was the best way to serve the people he represented”. It is not lost on readers of his story that soon thereafter, “Kalya was appointed the Deputy Leader of Government Business [in the Senate]. He became the first person to move from being opposition chief to being Government business leader.” Ahem!
There is no compulsion on the part of politicians to expand opportunities and create real wealth for the majority.
Was it naivety, sheer negligence or outright greed that led these KADU leaders to believe that the Majimbo they had stood for in KADU would not be compromised by a KANU government since it was already in the Constitution? Seroney argued that, “the best way to preserve it was to be in Government”. Did these elected representatives underrate the wily intentions of the KANU men who lured them to cross the floor, as it was known then, or were they just greedy men who stood on zero principle? Their actions left Majimbo in jeopardy, an orphan with no concerned voices to fight for it following the slow death — more like murder — of KADU in 1964. That death was a long game orchestrated by Tom Mboya, the Minister for Justice and Legal Affairs, working on behalf of Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta to ensure that effective opposition would not thrive.
Flash-forward to 2022 and the times are upon us once again. Virtually all representatives elected on an Independent ticket at the 9 August 2022 general election crossed the floor to join the president’s winning coalition, Kenya Kwanza, within days of the declaration of Kenya Kwanza’s victory. Worse still, even those like Kiraitu Murungi and Professor Kivutha Kibwana, who made their bids on rival parties and lost, somehow found it in themselves to cross over and join those who formed the new government. The less I say at this point about Professor Kibwana, a decorated human rights activists and a stellar pioneer Governor for Makueni, the better.
In Kenya’s political history, co-option has had many diversionary names — crossing the floor; co-operation; nusu mkate aka Government of National Unity; handshake. The facts remain the same, no matter what we call it, or how we justify it. Raila Odinga, opposition doyen from the 1980s, famously told us in 1997 that his co-operation with KANU was intended to break it from within. While his goal might have been achieved in the long term, in the short-term it allowed President Moi to enjoy tranquillity in his last term.
This practice of joining the side forming the government, even when the legitimacy of its election is in doubt, raises critical issues about representation. How are the needs of the electorate to be served when the person they elected by virtue of their backbone turns out to have none? When we read this lack of principle as a feature of culture, it is even more overwhelming. It seems independence, the most important ingredient in forging a culture of democracy, is something that elite Kenyans do not want and something that they rob ordinary citizens of at the earliest moment. Sadly, along with abhorrence for independence, scores of public intellectuals have, since Youth for KANU ’92, supplied the carving knives with which the free will of the electorate is slaughtered.
How are the needs of the electorate to be served when the person they elected by virtue of their backbone turns out to have none?
You might, cynically, say there is free will for people to join whatever side they like at whatever time. But no, there is an obligation that leaders have, to those they purportedly represent. But if those who follow them do so on account of the handouts they have been given, then the free will of the electorate is a commodity that has a price. And that price has been put in place by governments that have failed to secure every individual’s dignity by eradicating want. There can be no democracy in a society where people are either bullied, impoverished, shamed, or shunned into following the crowd.
Conceding is not the same thing as being co-opted. This is where we have the politics of compromise all wrong. The stakes have been raised higher than they ever were by the Constitution of Kenya 2010. There are term limits for Governors and Senators and provisions that leave the runner-up in the presidential election with no seat in any of the houses of Parliament and barred from appointment to the Cabinet. The resultant lack of status, income, and influence is enough to tempt anyone accustomed to state largesse to cross over or shake hands.
Intractable chokehold
The triple helix of Harambee, hand-outs and handshakes weaves an intractable chokehold on democracy as the unimpeded participation of citizens in the design and execution of conditions to better their social and economic well-being. This chokehold is particularly deceptive because on the face of it, its three markers have the capacity to further free participation but, they have frustrated it: a classic case of a boon and a bane. Long before we had worked out that development is more than stone buildings, piped water, textbooks, syringes, pills, and the human resources to execute these to eradicate illiteracy and secure health, Harambee as a vehicle for the delivery of this development was in danger of being abused. That danger stemmed first from the narrow perception of development. That old understanding left out the growth of social relations such as gender equity, environmental sustainability, and equity between nations. Secondly, and perhaps more germane to the question of cultural engineering is the fact that while Harambee was born from the quotidian struggles of workers, its growth as a national movement was driven by politicians.
Culture thrives when state actors give it space to define itself. When state actors hijack cultural tools, decay is imminent. We saw this when the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) hijacked the popular song “Unbwogable” as their campaign anthem for the 2002 General Election. It didn’t take too long before the new NARC government started interpreting “Unbwogable” as an exclusive ethos. Vice-President Michael Wamalwa was at a victory party held at Mulwanda Primary School in Butere/Mumias District, as it was then, when the MP for Emuhaya, Kenneth Marende, warned local teachers to tread carefully in their demands. “It is only MPs who are unbwogable. Teachers cannot also start claiming they are unbwogable in their demands for a pay-rise.”
While Harambee was born from the quotidian struggles of workers, its growth as a national movement was driven by politicians.
To reiterate, the fact that Harambee gave birth to the culture of hand-outs, to say nothing of the millions that have been looted in the name of government workers attending fundraisers, is a good illustration of how fast and putrid the decay of a people-driven ethos is in the hands of politicians. Handouts are no doubt the first cousins of handshakes, that unworthy practice of elite purchase of free will and independent thinking. With the rot where it now is salvation must come from our public intellectuals. How they safeguard their independence and rebuild sites and institutions where the reimaging of freedom can happen is the only real chance we have of revisioning the independence we like to say we earned on the night of December 12, 1963. May the day break.
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This publication was funded/co-funded by the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of The Elephant and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.
Culture
Evangelicals and Ruto: How Do We Make Sense of the Relationship Between Church and State in Kenya?
Critics need to be patient, learn to deal with the ambiguity of the current political moment, and let Kenyans figure out what Ruto’s religion means politically and theologically.
When William Ruto won the 2022 general elections to become Kenya’s fifth president, local and international media were awash with discussions of Ruto as an “evangelical president.” The excitement, however, was informed less by Kenyan religion or politics and more by right-wing evangelicals in the US and their war on homosexuality and abortion. Kenyan intellectuals, largely educated in Western liberal values and human rights discourse, also focused on concerns about secularism and for the rights of women and sexual minorities in Kenya.
Much of this analysis misses major nuances of religion and politics in Kenya, and comes from rigid adherence to the Eurocentric framework in which religion represents the conflict between traditional monarchical fascist conservatism on the one hand and liberal secularism and anti-religion left politics on the other.
For people of African descent, expressions of faith are not tied to monarchies and republics but to liberation. For the last four centuries, freedom has been the fundamental spiritual and religious preoccupation of Africans on the continent and in its diaspora. The spark of the Haitian revolution was the Boukman prayer, where the proclamation of freedom appealed to the God “who orders us to revenge our wrongs,” and against “the white man’s god who is so pitiless.” In Africa, Kimpa Vita, Simon Kibangu, Elijah Masinde and Lucas Pkech are some of the Africans who used contrapuntal readings of scripture in resisting colonialism.
The civil rights movement in the US followed the same tradition, for both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X grounded their struggles in faith. If anything, the modern articulation of right-wing, white evangelicalism is a reaction to the impact of the liberation theologies of the 1960s and 1970s in the US. Led by figures like Paul Weyrich, the right wing actively sought the collaboration of American evangelicals to fight against the gains of the civil rights movement without mentioning politics or race. To counter desegregation of schools, the new alliance offered homeschooling and faith schools. In the place of diversity and social welfare, it offered family values. Against the political gains of women, it turned abortion into a rallying cause.
But rather than confront the capture of theology, the acolytes of Enlightenment (i.e. liberals), offer reason, human rights and landmark court cases, hinting that religion automatically makes one a conservative, and implying that peoples of the Global South who want to harness religion have failed to decolonize their minds. The silence that they impose on emancipatory readings of religion has allowed space for right-wing, anti-political and hateful theology to gain momentum, which has culminated in the capture of the US Supreme Court. Instead of learning their lesson and removing the Eurocentric walls around religion, these intellectuals now try to force African politics and religion into restrictive Eurocentric boxes of constitutionalism and human rights activism.
This hubris is oblivious to the fact that any interpretation of religion is fundamentally political, because interpretation informs and is informed by decisions we make in society. And this reality is not affected by secularism, for as the Kenyan historian Ali Mazrui once wrote, the separation between the church and the state does not necessarily translate into a separation between religion and politics. Blocking discussions of religion is political as well, but its effect is to depoliticize people by imposing moral conversations (the goodness of individuals) where there should be political ones (what people should do about power).
A large part of this oversimplification of religion emanates from the Euro-American liberal discomfort with knowledge outside of the rational. Religion and spirituality allow more space for ambiguity, fluidity, contradiction, and intersection, which is inconvenient for forms of power and knowledge that rely on the letter of the law, precision, and empirical proof. Add to that racism, which is notoriously impatient with appreciating Africans as complex human beings, and you have a potent mix that misreads African political theology.
Ruto’s Christianity
Ruto’s faith and political career illustrate the fluidities of Christianity in Kenya. In the run-up to the 2010 constitutional referendum, Ruto was the most prominent politician in the “No” camp against the constitution, but his interest was largely driven by what appears to be his concerns about his own political future. Ruto campaigned on a platform that the constitution did not respect the capitalist principle of limitless land ownership, and that the proposed devolved governance did not assign enough resources to the counties. The evangelical churches were opposed to the recognition of Kadhi courts and the clause on abortion allowing doctors to determine the threat to life. The Kenyan pastors who waged war against the constitution voiced their concerns as moral, but in reality, they were daring the state to a supremacy contest, hoping to wield their supposed Christian majority as a power bloc to vote against the government.
During the referendum campaign, therefore, Ruto and the clergy were largely partners of convenience. Mark Kariuki, who would pray fifteen years later at Ruto’s swearing-in as president, even clarified, “No yao si no yetu” (Their “no” is not our “no”), meaning that Ruto and the clergy may have been on the same side though not for the same reasons.
The moral posturing of the clergy still did not persuade Kenyan Christians to abandon the legal and political agendas that had brought Kenya to this new constitutional moment. Contrary to the clergy’s expectations, Kenyans ratified the constitution. Many elite adherents of evangelical Christianity, including professionals, carry that rejection as a trauma to date.
The greater manifestation of Ruto’s faith is not in his view of sexual identities but in his economic thinking. Four years ago, Kenyan journalist Christine Mungai wrote a brilliant analysis of Ruto’s “gangster theology,” arguing that Ruto’s camaraderie with evangelical churches was a tactical strategy in propping himself up as a “hustler.” To distinguish himself from his former boss, Uhuru Kenyatta, as a dynasty, Ruto had to portray himself as a person who had pulled himself up by the bootstraps to become a politician of national prominence. (Kenyatta, like Ruto’s main rival for the presidency, Raila Odinga, is a member of Kenya’s political dynasties, which has ruled for much of the post-independence period or controlled access to wealth.) Ruto’s religion, therefore, needed to reflect the image of “Kenyan ordinariness.” He had to align himself with pastors who had begun their churches in abandoned buildings with a few congregants before they became wealthy heads of mega-churches.
Despite rooting for hustlers, Ruto supports the neoliberal ideology of individualism. He hates the arts and believes that science, technology and finance, not social change, are the solution to Kenya’s economic challenges. As such, his answer to crippling economic inequality has been to avail cheap micro-credit to the poor, otherwise dubbed as the “Hustler fund,” and to promise very little in terms of social support. If the evangelical God blesses individuals for the work of their hands, then that theology perfectly aligns itself with micro-credit as a route out of poverty. It is up to the poor to “work hard” using the loans they receive, albeit at high-interest rates, in the same way that Ruto rose from a chicken seller to become president, and in the same way pastors became owners of mega-churches.
To focus on Ruto’s stereotypical answers on women and sexual minorities is therefore to miss the gist of Ruto’s politics. That is not to say that the human rights of these groups are not important, or to minimize the spectacular violence that they suffer. It is to point to the socio-economic and political dimensions of this violence, which are the crippling inequality, the narrow public sphere and the cruelty of daily life under neoliberal policies. These dynamics are often obscured by critics who engage in moralistic, human rights-centric discourses and who, even worse, lock out the possibility of alliances with other groups who may or not be religious.
Ruto’s politics chose evangelical religion more than evangelical religion chose his politics. Ruto’s evangelicalism is an integral part of his neoliberal economic policy, which he believes will address the plight of the people at the bottom.
For the same reason, he and his deputy president, Rigathi Gachagua, have appealed to African spirituality as the spirituality of the non-elite, in addition to evangelical faith. Ruto sought the blessings of the Talai clan, who suffered brutality during the early years of colonial rule, because the colonial administration considered them to be the kernel of the impermeable Kalenjin anti-colonial resistance. Meanwhile, Kikuyu politicians led by Rigathi prayed facing Mount Kenya, to emulate the Mau Mau who fought for land justice.
The question is therefore not the relationship of religion to the Kenyan state, rather which theology we will use to interpret Ruto’s faith, assuming that theology is necessarily political. We can interpret Ruto’s religious expression based on the tradition of African spiritualities of liberation, or based on the European theology that pitted of the constitutional monarchy and the capitalist republic. If we choose the former tradition, we will find that Ruto’s evangelicalism falls in the latter one.
In my view, the new prominence of religion in the public sphere is a good development because, as the African experience shows, religion is a knowledge resource that can bring together people of diverse backgrounds, especially the oppressed who are denied access to institutions. Since 2010, political discourse from the public sphere has been dominated by constitutionalism, which generally hands over politics to lawyers. Religion, on the other hand, allows ordinary people access to political conversations. Rather than close that door because Ruto has taken advantage of that space, we need to open the door even wider for ordinary Kenyans to bring the riches of their knowledge to politics. Religion is one space where humanity can accommodate diverse knowledge. At least that’s what Africans have used it for.
Therefore, critics need to be patient, learn to deal with the ambiguity of the current political moment, and let Kenyans figure out what Ruto’s religion means politically and theologically. This situation is new for us and we need to figure it out as well. Forcing Ruto’s neoliberal wine into old liberal wineskins depoliticizes, rather than empowers us.
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