An early warning came one week ago, as clashes between police and opposition-party protesters resulted in several deaths. These protests occur regularly on Mondays, although the opposition, the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy, has suspended them for now. [ Opposition rallies on June 1, Kenya’s national Madaraka Day holiday, were peaceful.]
Calls for overcoming Kenya’s tribal political divisions have come from varied corners. On Friday, leaders of a variety of Christian, Hindu and Islamic churches in Kenya issued a joint statement, posted by the Vatican, calling “political grandstanding” by Kenya’s main parties “a threat to national peace, cohesion and unity of Kenyans.”
Earlier last week, the heads of a dozen diplomatic missions, including the American ambassador to Kenya, Robert F. Godec, posted a joint statement asking “Kenyans to come together to de-escalate the situation and to resolve their differences.”
But the most powerful statement I’ve heard came from Shanize Njeri Wanjiku, a 10-year-old budding poet I met last week in Mathare, one of Nairobi’s enormous slums, while watching a solar-powered soccer match.
The match had been organized by the United Nations Environment Program and Philips Lighting, which has set up more than 100 “community light centers” around Africa. The field in Mathare is illuminated by solar-powered LED fixtures. I met Shanize around the converted shipping containers housing the batteries, an internet cafe and a barber shop set up by an industrious 20-year-old entrepreneur.
I just spent a week in and around Nairobi, alternating between discussions of sustainable development at U.N.E.P headquarters* and explorations of social and environmental issues in Mathare and another huge slum, Kibera. (I also made an excursion to the urban/wildlife interface where the city has sprawled around Nairobi National Park.) I’ll be doing a string of posts related to what I learned.
Africa’s progress in this century will largely be propelled, or impeded, by the ability of its cities to sustain social progress for the tens of millions of people moving from rural to urban lives. From congestion and pollution to intertribal suspicion, the hurdles are many. But so are the opportunities for change.
One thing is clear. Without political stability, it will be hard to achieve progress on any other goals.
Here’s what Shanize had to say about polarization and violence:
I’ve appended a transcript below. Her capacity to create has been powerfully abetted by access to electricity and light and all that comes with these resources, which are still scant in Mathare.
The potential for you and others to hear her is a function of access to education, both formal and informal, and rapidly spreading communication networks. You can get the idea by exploring Facebook posts by one of Shanize’s mentors, Joseph “Sejo” Mwangi, a young Mathare resident who works with slum children on everything from soccer skills to rap compositions.
Before you read on, though, I wanted to convey that, particularly in Nairobi’s slums, there’s nothing abstract about the threat from election-related violence. I learned this from James Ekwam, a talented young photographer from Mathare (trained through a fantastic home-grown photography program created by Julius Mwelu, a Mathare native who is a photographer for the United Nations Human Settlements Program). Explore Ekwam’s images on 500px.com.
Ekwam was my guide on a second visit to Mathare, which is a vast assemblage of tin and mud houses fringed by far more prosperous neighborhoods and sloping toward a sewage-fouled river.
As we approached the settlement, Ekwam said he’ll be moving out of his home ahead of the elections.
“I live on one side of the slums dominated by the Luo tribe but most of the time I am mistaken to be coming from the Kikuyu because of my complexion,” he explained. “I am not that dark like the Luos. Now that we are approaching the election period and everyone is anticipating some kind of conflict like the one that happened in 2007, I have to move to a place where I will be a little more safe — away from people who might attack me thinking I was from the rival community.”
He’s neither Luo nor Kikuyu, by the way. Ekwam is from Kenya’s Turkana tribe.
Welcome to Kenya’s complexities.
Here’s Shanize’s poem of unity:
It is very sad what’s happening to our country.
Imagine.
A nation that is known to be safe – no violence – now turned into a nation living in fear.
No security.
Why does it have to come down to this?
Religions. You have grown up together.
The Kikuyu, M’Kamba, Luo, Abalughya and others.
Why do you want to fight each other?
As Kenyans, youth – Christian and Muslim –
we should stand up as one and say no to violence, no to terrorism, no to instability and live as one.Let no one convince you to pick up a panga, a gun, grenades, bombs, and harm one another.
No one has the right to take anyone’s life.
Stand up. Get up. Show up.
And say no to violence, no to terrorism, no to instability, and live as one.
Needless to say, this call to look beyond tribal identities in trying to forge human progress has salience far from Nairobi. I hope you’ll share it.
By the way, Shanize is hardly the only eloquent young spokesperson for change in Kenya. Last year, Eunice Akoth, then 12, traveled from Nairobi’s Kibera settlement to New York City to press the case for girls’ education and safety:
Footnote * | I was in Nairobi, in my Pace University role, to participate in panel discussions around the second meeting of the United Nations Environment Assembly. This body was created by the world’s nations in 2012 to elevate deliberations around global environmental goals to a level similar to those on poverty, health, security, trade and the like. Formal negotiations ended late on Friday, producing 25 resolutions, all of which, of course, are essentially aspirational. Click here to read a U.N. summary. There’ll be more detail there and in the Earth Negotiations Bulletin this week.