Kenya
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The Republic of Kenya, or Kenya, is an East African Country. It is bordered by Ethiopia to the North, Somalia to the East, Tanzania to the South, Uganda to the West, and Sudan to the Northwest, with the Indian Ocean running down the Southeast Border.
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[edit] History
Fossils found in East Africa suggest that protohumans roamed the area more than 20 million years ago. Recent finds near Kenya's Lake Turkana indicate that hominids such as Homo habilis and Homo erectus lived in Kenya from 2.6 million years ago.
[edit] Colonial history
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to explore Kenya, with Vasco da Gama having visited Mombasa in 1498. There followed a period of Portuguese rule centered mainly on the coastal strip ranging from Malindi to Mombasa. However, most historians consider that the colonial history of Kenya dates from the establishment of a German protectorate over the Sultan of Zanzibar's coastal possessions in 1885, followed by the arrival of the Imperial British East Africa Company in 1888. Incipient imperial rivalry was forestalled when Germany handed its coastal holdings to Britain in 1890. This followed the building of the Kenya-Uganda railway passing through the country. Although this was also resisted by some tribes, notably the Nandi led by Orkoiyot Koitalel arap Samoei for ten years between 1895 to 1905, these did not stop the British building the railway. It is believed that the Nandi were the first tribe to be put in a native reserve to stop them from disrupting the building of the railway.
During the early part of the 20th century, the interior central highlands were settled by British and other European farmers, who became wealthy farming coffee. By the 1930's, approximately 30,000 settlers lived in the area and were offered undue political powers because of their effects on the economy. The area was already home to over a million members of the Kĩkũyũ tribe, most of whom had no land claims in European terms (but the land belonged to the ethnic group), and lived as itinerant farmers. To protect their interests, the settlers banned the growing of coffee, introduced a hut tax, and the landless were granted less and less land in exchange for their labour. A massive exodus to the cities ensued as their ability to provide a living from the land dwindled.
From October 1952 to December 1959, Kenya was under a state of emergency arising from the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule. The governor requested and obtained British and African troops, including the King's African Rifles. In January 1953, Major General Hinde was appointed as director of counter-insurgency operations. The situation did not improve for lack of intelligence, so General Sir George Erskine was appointed commander-in-chief of the colony's armed forces in May 1953, with the personal backing of Winston Churchill. The capture of Warǔhiǔ Itote (General China) on 15 January 1954 and the subsequent interrogation led to a better understanding of the Mau Mau command structure. Operation Anvil opened on 24 April 1954 after weeks of planning by the army with the approval of the War Council. The operation effectively placed Nairobi under military siege, and the occupants were screened and the Mau Mau supporters moved to detention camps. May 1953 also saw the Home Guard officially recognized as a branch of the Security Forces. The Home Guard formed the core of the government's anti-Mau Mau strategy as it was composed of loyalist Africans, not foreign forces like the British Army and King's African Rifles. By the end of the emergency the Home Guard had killed no fewer than 4,686 Mau Mau, amounting to 42% of the total insurgents. The capture of Dedan Kimathi on 21 October 1956 in Nyeri signified the ultimate defeat of the Mau Mau and essentially ended the military offensive.
[edit] Post-colonial history
The first direct elections for Africans to the Legislative Council took place in 1957. Despite British hopes of handing power to "moderate" African rivals, it was the Kenya African National Union (KANU) of Jomo Kenyatta, that formed a government shortly before Kenya became independent on 12th December 1963. A year later, Kenyatta became Kenya's first president. At Kenyatta's death in 1978, Daniel arap Moi became President. Daniel arap Moi retained the Presidency, being unopposed in elections held in 1979, 1983 (snap elections) and 1988, all of which were held under the single party constitution. The 1983 elections were held a year early, and were a direct result of an abortive military coup attempt on 01/08/1982. The abortive coup was masterminded by a lowly ranked Airforce serviceman, Senior Private Hezekiah Ochuka and was staged mainly by enlisted men in the Airforce. The attempt was quickly suppressed by Loyalist forces led by the Army, the General Service Unit (GSU) — paramilitary wing of the police — and later the regular police, but not without civilian casualties. This event led to the disbanding of the entire Airforce and a large number of its former members were either dismissed or court-martialled. The election held in 1988 saw the advent of the infamous mlolongo (queueing) system where voters were supposed to line up behind their favourite candidates instead of secret ballot. This was seen as the climax of a very undemocratic regime and it led to widespread agitation for constitutional reform. Several contentious clauses, including the one allowing only one political party were changed in the following years. In democratic but flawed multiparty elections in 1992 and 1997, Daniel arap Moi won re-election. In 2002, Moi was constitutionally barred from running, and Mwai Kǐbakǐ, running for the opposition coalition "National Rainbow Coalition" — NARC, was elected President. The elections, judged free and fair by local and international observers, marked a turning point in Kenya's democratic evolution.
[edit] Anarchist History
[edit] Mau Mau Uprising and Anarchism
Structure of Kikuyu Society
The Mau Mau Revolution was one of the greatest upheavals in African history. It was the expression of centuries of anarchism and resistance to authoritarianism among the Kikuyu people, the native inhabitants of Kenya. Except for parts of Uganda, which had a system of rule by hereditary despotic chiefs, all of the East African tribes lived in radically democratic societies prior to the coming of the white man. 1 Originally governed by a king, centuries ago the Kikuyu through popular rebellion literally abolished the State, substituting a voluntary society. According to Jomo Kenyatta, a founder of Mau Mau, the new system had such rules as:
"Socially and politically all circumcised men and women should be equally full members of the tribe, and thereby the status of a king or nobleman should be abolished. It consisted of a federation of councils, beginning with the members of the family (the basic economic unit of land ownership), extending to the village, then to the district, and ending on a national level. The right to recall representatives from the different councils was absolute; ". . . in fact, it was the voice of the people or public opinion that ruled the country."
The Kikuyu stateless society "continued to function favorably until it was smashed by the British government, which introduced a system of government very similar to the autocratic government which the Kikuyu people had discarded many centuries ago." The British imperialists appointed chiefs to overlord the people and set up a tyranny resting on centralization. Kenyatta helped form Mau Mau to destroy this, for: "In the eyes of the Kikuyu people, the submission to a despotic rule of any particular man or a group, white or black, is the greatest humiliation to mankind. 2
The Kikuyu anarchist tradition which culminated in the Mau Mau Revolution has been best described in the book by Donald L. Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within: An Analysis of Kenya's Peasant Revolt, 3 the latter author being a major participant; virtually all other works on the subject were written by white racist sycophants of British imperialism. Early in the work Darnett queries:
Were there, it might now be asked, any peculiar features of traditional Kikuyu society which help explain this people's independent response and, ultimately, revolutionary reaction to colonial rule and white dominance? The answer, I believe, is in the affirmative. It centers around two closely related aspects of Kikuyu society which were fundamentally incompatible with the imposed colonial system and conditioned an independent response to it. The first of these, a decentralized and democratic political system, fostered among the Kikuyu a deep-seated suspicion of the highly centralized, authoritarian system imposed by the British and a tendency to reject the legitimacy and resist the dictates of the latter. The second, an age-grade system wherein leadership emerged on the basis of demonstrated personal qualities such as skill, wisdom and ability, underlay the Kikuyu rejection of British-appointed 'chiefs' and their tendency to by-pass the latter and organize independent associations under popular leaders when the occasion arose to seek a redress of grievances.
Barnett goes on to explain in detail the Kikuyu stateless society. There was no "unitary or centralized political structure," and "within the Kikuyu sub-tribes political power was held by a number of fairly small and semi-autonomous geopolitical groupings." Disputes were settled and common affairs deliberated on by spontaneously formed councils. Each council elected a muthamaki, who had no personal power, unlike the life-term, salaried chiefs the British later imposed. "As the spokesman of a ridge councilor ad hoc bururi council, a muthamaki was not a chief' in either the conventional or anthropological sense. He was the chairman and representative of a body which reached decisions through discussion and consensus and owed its authority to lower-level councils." Barnett continues:
In brief, we have seen that the traditional Kikuyu political structure was decentralized and inherently democratic, with effective decision making and enforcement powers resting for the most part in numerous local hierarchies of councils within each sub-tribe. We have noted, with respect to this kiama or council system, that: (1) councils were convened as the occasion demanded and reached decisions on the principle of discussion until unanimity was achieved; (2) the particular council convened (sub-clan, village, neighborhood, etc.) was determined in each case by the scope and nature of the question or dispute at issue; (3) composition was based on the principle of Ôlower-level representation on higher-level councils,' with the latter owing their authority to the former; (4) the spokesman or muthamaki of a given council, whether that of the village or the ridge -- which represented the largest fixed administrative unit -- was responsible to and acted in the name and with the approval of the entire body; and (5) positions of leadership were achieved, within a system of age-grades or ranks, rather than ascribed and were limited in duration by the periodic accession to political authority of junior generation-sets. 4
British Imperialism
The British imperialists, great "civilizers" that they were, imposed upon the Kikuyu the opposite extreme of totalitarian statism and economic and political slavery. Centralized, dictatorial rule was instated, and such basic freedom as speech, press, assembly, and the like were suppressed. Economic freedom was a luxury for whites only. The Kikuyu's land was seized for the use of white settlers and the blacks forced to work as wage slaves; compulsory labor and taxation supplemented this, as the colonial administrators openly admitted, and provided as well, free construction and education funds for the privileged whites. Huge unused forest reserves were held out of production, from which the black masses were not even allowed to gather firewood. In 1936 the British ruled that squatters could have only one acre per wife, fifteen sheep or goats and no cattle, and there were all kinds of restrictions on the types of crops blacks could grow -- all of this because the inefficient whites could not bear the competition of the efficient blacks. Government restrictions of every kind were enforced against blacks, from license fees to severe restrictions on freedom of movement. Blacks could not enforce contracts against whites, and were not allowed the right of inheritance or enforceable land titles, the better to keep them subjected to the white exploiters.
The Mau Mau Uprising
To a people so accustomed to complete freedom, such slavery was intolerable. Opposition was sporadic until the great peasant revolution of 1953-56, which set in motion the political forces which led to the lowering of that filthy Union Jack in Kenya in 1963. The anarchist heritage of the Kikuyu expressed itself not only in their willingness to bid for liberty or death, but also in the methods by which they carried out their tasks. As Barnett points out, there was "a considerable measure of continuity, at least as regards certain major patterns, between the traditional Kikuyu social system and the structure and organization of the underground movement and guerrilla forces which emerged within the colonial context. 5 The basic cells of Mau Mau were the local villages, in which everyone cooperated in common tasks. The old council system, organized from the bottom up through consensual election of representatives, was reinstated. Local cell councils pressured the lingering to join, mainly by the threat of ostracism. Popular support of Mau Mau is revealed in that up to 90 percent of the Kikuyu population took the Oath of Unity.
While there was a Central Committee at the top, it mainly coordinated action and expressed the policies the masses desired. In practice, action was initiated by the local cells. In the first months there was no clear-cut division of labor, hierarchy of roles, or differential privileges, and leaders (who had no formal ranks) were selected by informal consensus. Later the Ituma Trinity Council was formed to give central direction to the movement; but just as the power of the local leaders depended on the loyalty their warriors were willing to give them voluntarily, compliance with its recommendations depended on the decisions of the local groups. A similar institution was the Kenya Defense Council, which was comprised of the leaders of the forest guerrilla groups. Enforcement of this council's decision a, which were unanimously decided, depended on its members' individual persuasive abilities, and expressed a decentralization of power and authority.
These features of decentralization reflected the voluntary nature of both membership in and recognition of the Kenya Defense Council, as well as the prior distribution of effective power among groups whose members were bound together by strong leader-followers locality ties and loyalties ... (the relatively weak Council) was advantageous since without significantly altering the existing distributions of power amongst the various leaders, it allowed for a considerable degree of cooperation among the latter in the planning and coordination of policies, rules and tactics. Another advantage of this decentralization lay in its allowing for a very high degree of flexibility of maneuver and individual initiative among the many forest sections. 6
Needless to say, the goal of Mau Mau was a return to the free economic and political institutions which characterized the Kikuyu before the coming of the imperialists, and it was fitting that their slogan was simply "Land and Freedom!" True, the complete stateless society of former years has not yet been completely reinstated, but one must not expect miracles. Kenya has done away with the worst iniquities of the State, those imposed by the British; while continuing to head in the direction of the old libertarian traditions, KenyaÕs progress is impeded by the fact that several of the "educated" Kenyans were brainwashed by statist ideologies of the British and that neo-colonialism continues. The liberation of the whole African continent is an indispensable condition for the complete liberation of the masses from black elites and neo-colonialism.
Footnotes
- 1. Cf. Parmenas Githendu Mockerie, An African Speaks for His People, in WilfredCartey and Martin Kilson (eds.), The Africa Reader (N.Y, Random House, 1970), Vol. II, p. 102.
- 2. From Kenyatta's Facing Mount Kenya, in Cartey and Kilson, pp. 19-28.
- 3. (NY and London: Monthly Review Press, 1966).
- 4. Ibid., pp. 42-51.
- 5. Ibid., p. 51.
- 6. Ibid., pp. 302-03.
- This was taken from the article Anarchism and Revolution in Black Africa originally printed in The Journal of Contemporary Revolutions, Vol. IV, No. 1, Winter 1971-72
[edit] Further Reading
- "Military Dictatorship and the State in Africa" by Samuel Mbah and I.E. Igariwey
- Anarchist critique of the African military dictatorships.
- "Toward The African Revolution" by Frantz Fanon ISBN 0802130909
- A collection of essays.
- "African Anarchism: The History of a Movement" by Sam Mbah and I. E. Igariwey [1]
- Historical account.
[edit] Contemporary Resistance
[edit] Squatting Movement
Nairobi's slums are among the most dense, unsanitary and insecure in the world. The most common dwelling is one room accommodating an average of four-six people. Densities average 250 units per hectare. Urban services, if they are provided at all, are extremely basic, consisting of earth roads and paths, earth drains, communal water points and pit latrines, each shared by as many as 60 people.
Informal settlements are often not recognized as inhabited areas by the authorities, with the result that they can be alienated at any time. Because the land on which the squatters and slum dwellers live is potentially valuable real estate, "land grabbing" (irregular allocation or sale of public land to individuals or organizations that have proved their loyalty to the state apparatus) is extremely common.
Slum dwellers and squatters, however, have been fighting back. In the mid-1990s, slum dwellers in Nairobi and Mombasa, Kenya's second largest city, organized themselves into a federation to present a unified voice against forced evictions and land grabbing. In July 2000, the Federation of Slum Dwellers, or Muungano wa Wanavijiji, launched an urban land rights campaign that demands, among other things, secure and permanent tenure for residents of informal settlements.
These communities have exhibited many anarchist tendencies. In addition to fighting the housing crisis through squatting, the illegal communities which the residents establish are based off of values such as mutual aid and voluntary agreements between people. Robert Neuwirth writes in his book, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World how "“many women…developed communal self-help networks” and “churches are a growth industry”; it sometimes seemed that “everyone in Kibera belongs to one church or another.” Business negotiations based “on trust” worked almost as well as those based on legal contracts. There was even one Kibera resident who became a multimillionaire businessman but decided to remain there because he liked the friendly and unpretentious people so much.
Sources
by Rasna Warah from Africa Recovery, Vol.15 #1-2, page 35.
- Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World, by Robert Neuwirth, New York: Routledge,
[edit] Anarchist/Radical Groups
[edit] Geography
Kenya covers an area of 582,646 km². From the coast on the Indian Ocean the Low plains rise to central highlands. The highlands are bisected by Great Rift Valley; fertile plateau in west. The Kenyan Highlands comprise one of the most successful agricultural production regions in Africa. The highlands are the site of the highest point in Kenya: Mount Kenya], which reaches 5,199 m and is also the site of glaciers. Climate varies from tropical along the coast to arid in interior.
[edit] Economy
Kenya's main economic strengths include tourism and agriculture. The economy is only now beginning to show some growth after years of stagnation. Some argue that this slow economic growth is because of poor management and uneven commitment to reform; others insist that it is due to falling commodity prices and poor access to Western markets.
In 1993, the government of Kenya implemented a program of economic liberalization and reform that included the removal of import licensing, price controls, and foreign exchange controls. With the support of the World Bank, IMF, and other donors, the reforms led to a brief turnaround in economic performance following a period of negative growth in the early 1990s. One of the unintended consequence of freeing foreign exchange control was that it allowed a gold-and-diamond export scam in which the Kenyan government lost over 600 million U.S. dollars. This resulted in a weak currency which hindered economic improvement.
Kenya's GDP grew 5% in 1995 and 4% in 1996, and inflation remained under control. Growth slowed in 1997–1999 however. Political violence—namely the bombing of the U.S. Embassy by Al Qaeda in 1998—damaged the tourist industry, and Kenya's Enhanced Structural Adjustment Program lapsed. A new economic team was put in place in 1999 to revitalize the reform effort, strengthen the civil service, and curb corruption, but wary donors continue to question the government's commitment to western establishment ideas of sound economic policy.
Considered by some to be long-term barriers to development are: electricity shortages, the government's continued and allegedly inefficient dominance of key sectors, corruption, the foreign debt burden, unstable international commodity prices, poor communication infrastructure and the effects of HIV/AIDS, which is having its effect on the most productive group of the population. The effects of HIV/AIDS has largely offset the previous high population growth which was caused by a high birth rate and reduced infant mortality due to better health care.
Chief among Kenya's exports are: flowers (horticulture), fruits and vegetables, tea, and coffee. Another key foreign exchange earner is tourism. Tourism has grown tremendously since 2003. The number of foreigners coming to Kenya has increased as attested to by the airlines operating in Kenya. Source http://www.kenyaspace.com
[edit] Demographics
Kenya is a country of great ethnic diversity. Tension between the various groups accounts for many of Kenya's problems. During the early 1990s, clashes killed thousands and left tens of thousands homeless. Ethnically split opposition groups allowed the regime of Daniel arap Moi, in power from 1978 until 2002, to be re-elected for four terms, with the election in 1997 being marred by violence and fraud.
Ethnic groups: Kĩkũyũ 22%, Luhya 14%, Luo (Kenya) 13%, Kalenjin 15%, Kamba 11%, Kisii 6%, Ameru 6%, other African 12%, non-African (Asian/Desi, European, and Arab) 1%
Religious affiliation: Various Protestant 38%, Roman Catholic 28%, Muslim 6%, Traditional Religions 22%. Others include Hinduism, Jainism & the Bahá'í Faith.
[edit] External links
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