Commentary (by Ali Mazrui) - Why the world looks at Kenya as the microcosm of Africa

Ref: http://www.eastandard.net/columnists/?id=1143984331&cid=190
Published on April 6, 2008, 12:00 am

By Ali Mazrui

After Kenya’s disastrous elections last year, the international community showed massive interest in having the crisis resolved.

But why was this so? Is Kenya unique in global context? What is special about Kenya in Africa? Is there something historically extraordinary about Kenya in the Black experience?

Kenya is part of the cradle of the human species. Human species originated in Eastern Africa; many fossils have been discovered in the Great Rift Valley. Since Kenya and Tanzania are probably where the human species originated, the two countries are probably also where many human institutions began to evolve.

About a thousand years ago, Kenya and Tanzania started developing what was destined to become Black Africa’s most successful indigenous language, Kiswahili. Within Africa’s own linguistic diversity, Kiswahili is the fastest growing language. Originating along the coast of Kenya and Tanzania, Kiswahili has now spread to Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique and Malawi — among other countries.

Kenya is also unique within Africa. It was the first Black African country to follow the American example of waging a war of independence against long-established British colonial rule. The Americans did it from 1776; Kenyans did it from 1952.

Paradoxically, Kenya’s ‘George Washington’, Jomo Kenyatta, waged the war from behind bars. The British locked him up at the very beginning of the rebellion after a sham trial. But an imprisoned Kenyatta was a more potent political force than Kenyatta at large.

Thanks to the Mau Mau, Kenya became the first British colony, with a large white settler community, to win Black majority rule. It was the first British settler colony in Africa to get away from white ‘settlerdom’.

The Mau Mau struggle was Black Africa’s first successful war of liberation. And Mau Mau fighters were the most self-reliant of all major guerrilla movements of Africa since the Second World War. They fought without Soviet missiles or Chinese guns. All that they had were basic traditional instruments of warfare. The Mau Mau may have been militarily defeated, but it was a classic victory of the vanquished. It broke Britain’s imperial will.

Kenyatta, set another far-reaching and intriguing precedent. He set the grand precedent of Africa’s short memory of hate. The British imprisoned Kenyatta as a ‘leader unto darkness and death’. But he lived to be the country’s founding-president and, ironically, Kenya’s leading Anglophile. He even published a book, Suffering Without Bitterness, setting in motion a new tradition of Africa’s short memory of hate.

Subsequently, history witnessed Ian Smith’s transition from the architect of Southern Rhodesia’s 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence, which unleashed a war that cost thousands of African lives. Yet, Smith remained a free man in Black-ruled Zimbabwe and even sat as a bona fide Member of Parliament.

Nelson Mandela followed. He spent 27 of his best years in prison having been convicted by white courts. In the end, Mandela embarked upon an unbridled mission of racial reconciliation in South Africa — another illustration of Africans’ short memory of hate.

Kenya is an Indian Ocean power, which for so long acted as if it was an Atlantic power. The twin Atlantic pulls were Britain and the US. Kenya subordinated her Indian Ocean loyalties to her Atlantic friends.

Kenyan students

American aid to Kenya

In 1960 Kenya awakened John F Kennedy (then US president) to America’s responsibilities in Africa. In 1960-61, Tom Mboya successfully negotiated with Kennedy for the airlift of Kenyan students who had succeeded in getting admission to US universities but could not afford air tickets.

"Soapy" Williams, Gerhard Mennen Williams, articulated for the Kennedy Administration the principle of ‘Africa is for the Africans’. He had been intrigued by the Kenyan white settlers’ objection to the slogan of ‘Africa for Africans,’ and helped to set a trend in US of supporting Black aspirations in Africa.

As a young graduate student at Columbia University, I met Martin Luther King in New York City in 1961. We discussed Kenya, including Kenya’s second most celebrated son at that time, Mboya. It later deeply pained me that assassins’ bullets killed both King and Mboya.

Years later, former US president Jimmy Carter included Kenya in his strategy of a Rapid Deployment Force in defence of the oil routes and the Arabian and Persian oil reserves. After September 11, 2001, US president George Bush enlisted Kenya in the US ‘war on terrorism’.

The beginning of a US military presence in Kenya has been in the making as a result. Kenya is not yet a US military base but US naval ships have been stopping at Mombasa almost regularly.

One of the most controversial pro-Western moves by the post-colonial Kenyan government was the support given to the Israeli raid on a neighbouring African country: The Israeli Entebbe raid of July 1976. Israeli air force commandos raided Entebbe to free Jewish hostages caught in a Palestinian hijack of an Air France flight.

Sacrifice

Kenya facilitated both the Israeli approach to Entebbe and its exit. In addition to being a refuelling stopover, Nairobi provided medical facilities for the injured, rescued Israeli hostages. Saving Israel’s lives probably cost at least one hundred Uganda lives.

Kenya paid a price for its pro-Israeli orientation; the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi was subsequently bombed in 1980 by a pro-Palestinian Arab. Many Arabs had concluded that Kenya was not really neutral in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Was Kenya supporting Israel or the US? We may never know for certain. But one measure of love is what one is willing to give up for it. If Kenya loved justice, and therefore facilitated the Entebbe raid, it was not cost-free. Lives of innocent Ugandan neighbours were sacrificed.

Kenya continues to be a regional focus in Eastern Africa. It is the largest economy in the sub-region. Until the last elections, it was the most stable state in the greater Horn of Africa. Until then, Kenya was also the closest East African country to genuine democratisation.

The misfortunes of the elections are probably the worst blow to Kenya since independence, but it stands a chance of healing. It may even recover its pre-eminence in pan-global affairs.