For Money and Elders: Ritual, Sovereignty, and the Sacred in Kenya
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For Money and Elders: Ritual, Sovereignty, and the Sacred in Kenya
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Overview
In For Money and Elders, Robert W. Blunt addresses these questions by turning to the political, economic, and religious signs in circulation in Kenya today. He examines how Kenyans attempt to make sense of political instability caused by the uncertainty of authority behind everything from currency to title deeds. When the symbolic order of a society is up for grabs, he shows, violence may seem like an expedient way to enforce the authority of signs. Drawing on fertile concepts of sovereignty, elderhood, counterfeiting, acephaly, and more, Blunt explores phenomena as diverse as the destabilization of ritual “oaths,” public anxieties about Satanism with the advent of democratic reform, and mistrust of official signs. The result is a fascinating glimpse into Kenya’s past and present and a penetrating reflection on meanings of violence in African politics.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226655895 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 11/20/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 713 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
According to both international onlookers and many Kenyans, the election of Mwai Kibaki in 2003 was supposed to usher in a more stable and dependable government than that of his predecessor Daniel arap Moi (1978–2002). Kibaki united disparate parties under the banner of the National Alliance Rainbow Coalition (NARC), a clear distinction to the Kenya African National Union (KANU), the party that had been in power since independence. In what might be described as the least ethnic election in Kenya's short history of multiparty politics (Kenya was a one-party state until the early 1990s), Kibaki defeated his fellow Kikuyu, Uhuru Kenyatta, whom Moi had handpicked as his successor on the basis of presenting a "youth" candidate.
It would turn out, however, that Kibaki's coalition was glued together with fragile adhesives. Before his election, Kibaki had signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with his key coalition partners to decentralize executive power in the drafting of a new constitution. The MOU included a power-sharing agreement with Raila Odinga, the powerful head of the Liberal Democratic Party, NARC's most important coalition partner. Previous versions of the draft constitution had included legal provisions for both a president popularly elected by Kenyans and a prime minister elected by Kenya's parliament. However, when Kenya's attorney general, Amos Wako, presented the final version of the draft constitution to be voted on in the constitutional referendum of November 2005, it retained sweeping powers for the president. Kibaki's coalition soon fragmented, and Odinga, under the new banner of ODM (Orange Democratic Movement), led a successful revolt against what was supposed to be Kibaki's crowning achievement, a new constitution. The constitutional referendum was soundly defeated.
Although Kibaki failed to introduce a new constitution retaining exceptional executive powers of the past (on paper anyway), he nonetheless further ratified what was arguably the main fait accompli of Moi's government — the lifting of the state's imprimatur from its official signs and processes while nonetheless continuing to perform a model of elderhood from which this imprimatur was popularly and tacitly held to emanate. After independence in 1963, Kenya's first president, Jomo Kenyatta, had fashioned himself into the Mzee (the Kiswahili honorific for "old man"), both the generative father of the nation and the ultimate guarantor of Kenya's development-oriented modernity. Fast forward to the period beginning in the 1980s until the end of KANU rule in 2002. During this period, Kenya's second president, Daniel arap Moi, initiated a new era of ruse and dissimulation catalyzed by conditions of scarcity instigated by the rise of neoliberalism and Kenya's changing post–Cold War relationship to the United States and Britain. Under Moi, state performances of largesse certainly resembled the baroque rituals of Kenyatta's robust patrimonial state, but their spectacular nature masked an ongoing liquidation of the commons. In this same vein, Kibaki inherited what would come to be called the "Anglo-Leasing scandal" from Moi's KANU government.
Premised on the need to improve security and antifraud infrastructure, Anglo-Leasing Finance was a British company (along with several other similar firms), which had bid on these security-related tenders during the Moi era. New forensics labs, a brand-new passport verification system, and even naval ships were contracted for purchase by the Kenyan government. In the case of the passport system and forensic laboratories, a French company agreed to provide them for the sum of six million Euros. However, Anglo-Leasing Finance was awarded the contract for thirty million Euros even though they would eventually subcontract this work to the same French firm that had put in a bid of six million. Apart from ALF overcharging the Kenyan government by 500 percent, most of the infrastructure contracted for never materialized, and most of the companies involved in what was essentially a noncompetitive bidding process turned out to be a series of interlinked ghost companies connected to several key figures in Kibaki's government (including, most notably, internal security minister Chris Murungaru and vice president Moody Awori). The contours of the Anglo-Leasing scandal mirrored those of the Moi era. Powerful state actors falsified the state's imprimatur, effectively counterfeiting key official signs and processes at a cost to Kenyans of billions of shillings.
Critics of "corruption" and political scientists armed with rubrics for "fragile states" might look at the Kibaki regime and highlight a familiar litany of crimes: the use of public office for private gain, the attempt to maintain a constitutional structure lopsided toward the executive, and so on. Yet such efforts to list failures of governance and fiscal management themselves fail to explain what these putative crimes mean to ordinary Kenyans. Such taxonomic and reductionist tendencies fail to inquire into the vocabularies, genres, and forms though which Kenyans express their own political understandings, make sense of governance, and articulate what they expect from the sovereigns they often refer to as "the wazee" (Kiswahili for "the old men").
In It's Our Turn to Eat, Michela Wrong's account of Kibaki's former anticorruption czar John Githongo, she captures these continuities between the Moi and Kibaki eras through T. E. Lawrence's own disillusionment with the architects of British Empire after the Arab revolt in 1916. "Yet, when we achieved and the new world dawned the old man came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew … Youth could win but had not learned to keep: and was pitiably weak against age" (Wrong 2009, xi). Yet it bears asking: what exactly was this world that the "old man" in Kenya sought to "remake"? And what exactly distinguishes old men as such? The answer to both these questions, I argue, is more complex than anything that the category of "corruption" can convey. It requires a shift of analytical attention to the more mundane forms of everyday life Kenyans inhabit.
Throughout the Moi era until the end of Kibaki's rule, Kenyans certainly complained about a wide array of state and nonstate practices that they labeled "corruption." But I argue that they were worried more about the corruption of meaning and the potential fragility of the authorities that are supposed to ground a stable relationship between signs and their referents. This book addresses this problem in detail. But to start, consider one of Kenya's most visible and ubiquitous social institutions: the humble matatu. Matatus are commuter taxis — usually Nissan minivans — that ferry Kenyans and, importantly, their money, from home to work and from city to country (Mutongi 2017). As will become clearer below, its close association with money — as both a medium of exchange and a repository of social meaning — makes the matatu a prism through we can begin to view problems of meaning, value, and the gender of sovereignty in Kenya's patrimonial symbolic economy.
Mungiki
As the circulatory system of the nation, matatus have, not surprisingly, been a particularly dense site for rent-seeking activities from a variety of interested parties. In this regard, no group has been more famous in the unofficial taxation of matatu routes than the "Mungiki sect." Kibaki cracked down on the movement a few weeks into his presidency in early 2003 for their illegal "taxation" of matatu routes, but Mungiki made an uncanny return to the public eye just as the Anglo-Leasing scandal was breaking.
For example, a headline from the October 15, 2005, edition of The Nation queried, "Could This Be Mungiki's Secret Den?" After listing various "criminal activities" in and around Nairobi that Kenya's police boss King'ori Mwangi attributed to Mungiki — murders, robberies, extortion, recent strikes by matatu workers — the article proceeded to describe alleged Mungiki "literature and paraphernalia" confiscated by the police in a raid on a suspected Mungiki "headquarters." These items include "cameras, receipt books, and hymn books" and, counterintuitively for an organization known for its secrecy, "membership certificates." Items that seemed to the police slightly more sect-like were "cleansing oils" and, more suspiciously, "flags coloured white, yellow, green, red and black — hues associated with the sect." At the top of the article's list of suspect religious materials, however, were a few traditional Kikuyu houses in this case built right next to a modern house and organized around what the author describes as a "shrine." "Oathing is done in an open space near a shrine," Mr. Mwangi states matter-of-factly. One Mr. Ombati, an investigative officer at the site, supplies further confirmation of the missing occupants' suspect ritual activities, declaring that the home in question "looks like a shrine."
The ritual activity ascribed to this "shrine," that of "oathing," is terrifying for many Kenyans, as it is believed to activate dangerous mystical energies that bind Mungiki members to one another in relationships of secrecy and obligation. Here it is notable that the mention of oathing appears right after a description of the military-style equipment of the special police unit, which had invaded the compound. As the reporter explains:
From a distance the paramilitary police unit, specially trained for insurgency, presents a setting of an action-packed Hollywood thriller. Each officer is armed with an automatic gun, with a pistol and a knife strapped on either side of the waist. Rounds of ammunition are secured across the chest, which is encrusted in a heavy bulletproof vest. Under the scorching sun, the officers wear steel helmets and face masks that only leave the nose and mouth visible. A senior police officer said they needed to be well armed when dealing with a group like Mungiki.
At work here, I argue, is an implicit comparison of differing technologies of lethal force. While it may be tempting to follow the author's implication that the potential use of lethal/legal force by police is secular and rational and that of Mungiki is magicoreligious (Gluckman 1972), I argue that the proliferation under Moi of new, heavily armed police units on the one hand, and social movements like Mungiki armed with technologies of the numinous, on the other, are two sides of the same problem. That is, at a moment when the state's imprimatur was rendered fugitive (the Anglo-Leasing scandal), supplementary violence appeared to be required to enforce the truth of words, whether that entailed the speech act of swearing oaths in a nominally "traditional" ritual context, or in acts of "modern" law enforcement.
When Mungiki emerged in the late 1990s, their activities both fascinated and terrified the Kenyan public. On the one hand, it was a neotraditional Kikuyu religious organization, and in that guise it advocated a return to what it imagined as Kikuyu "custom." But Mungiki was also a "counter-state" (Smith 1998) of sorts, at times controlling the circulation of a large share of the money and people in the informal economy of transportation, especially in Nairobi. As a self-consciously conceived "youth" movement, its members were initially quite critical of the types of spectacles of largesse that characterized state bureaucratic behavior, which was almost always understood as gerontocratic — power and privilege which, generally speaking, Kenyans understand to accrue to certain members of society due to their old age. Mungiki's lower echelons were composed of a class having the most peripheral status in terms of access to state patrimonial distribution, education, and mechanisms of upward mobility more generally. As these material and symbolic resources have historically been the very ground through which Kenyans have acted upon the world, their increasing instability — and, in some cases, their absence — led urban Kikuyu youth to question from where the power to stabilize the forms and flows of such resources should emanate. Moreover, the exact nature of that power — the power to back everything from the stability of monetary value to political promises of development — was also fundamentally up for grabs. By the end of the Moi era in 2002, the regime had resorted to counterfeiting everything from currency to title deeds.
Mungiki thus appeared in one sense to partake of the kind of maximizing instrumentality characteristic of the corporation: they quite literally seized the key symbol of the state — money — through unofficial taxation of taxis and protection racketeering in slums (Kagwanja 2005). At the same time, Mungiki's corporate unity, such as it was, was ultimately backed by ritual. The group self-consciously attempted to emulate Mau Mau guerillas of the 1950s by swearing loyalty and secrecy oaths allegedly backed by a lethal, mystical force. Given the complex role that oathing has played in the Kenyan historical and political imagination, it is hardly surprising that the aggressively "youth" oriented Mungiki looked to a seemingly traditional ritual form to bind themselves to one another and, initially, quarantine themselves from the corrupting power of the wazee. But for the wider Kikuyu and Kenyan public, as well as the state, Mungiki's use of oaths was a profound source of public anxiety.
In the precolonial and early colonial period, Kikuyu oaths were associated with a mysterious force called thahu, which constantly emanated from the natural world and stood as an ever-present source of disintegration for the social world. Oaths invoked the power of thahu, and with it the condition of bodily wasting (also called thahu) that ensued if one broke the statutes of the oath or its bonds of secrecy. Today, however, most Kenyans associate oaths with the Mau Mau rebellion, Kenya's anticolonial insurgency and Kikuyu civil war of the 1950s. The oathing rituals that Mau Mau used in their attempts to produce solidarity inside the movement came to be seen by many Kenyans of all ethnic backgrounds (but especially white settlers) as a reckless Kikuyu involvement with forces they did not really control: These oaths were understood not only to be backed by mystical violence, but to also be generative of physical violence.
For most, the oath lay somewhere between the obscenity of sheer violence and the promise of the rule of law, and it often vacillated between these two poles in the arena of public opinion. While those still sympathetic to the Mau Mau war to win back land from white settlers may have recognized the legitimacy of oathing during the 1950s, by the early 2000s, most were apprehensive about Mungiki's oathing practices. For contemporary Kikuyus especially, the oath was a form of power little understood in terms of its mechanics and efficacy beyond it being a "traditional" practice. For many, the oath really just gestured to violent excess, a violence that produced as much social division as Kikuyu unity in the 1950s. It is no wonder, then, that Mungiki's public reception as a self-proclaimed moral reform movement, rooted in the conservatizing ethos of "tradition," involved both celebration and censure. Slum residents in Nairobi, particularly before the 2002 elections, at times attributed a bureaucratic efficiency to Mungiki that they no longer found in the state (if they ever had in the first place). Mungiki organized garbage clean-ups in the slums, provided security, and even performed customary legal proceedings to settle conflicts between patrilineages over bridewealth debts. Mungiki's psychosocial texture was thus fundamentally uncanny. They felt like a threatening echo of Mau Mau and providers of modern services.
However, after a period of their relative acceptance in the Kenyan public sphere, Mungiki's standing changed drastically on March 2, 2002. That evening, some 300 alleged Mungiki members rampaged through Nairobi's Kariobangi slum, where they killed over twenty non-Kikuyu residents, many of whom were members of a rival Luo vigilante group known as Kamjesh. The eruptive nature of the attack and the likelihood that Mungiki were now working for slumlords against their competition suggests that some elements of Mungiki had strayed from their moral reform program and had become implicated in the messy game of privatized violence, a concomitant element of Kenya's more "official" politics (cf. Anderson 2002). Nevertheless, Kenyans continued to feel more ambivalent about Mungiki than they did about other majeshi ("armies"). These ethnically based militias were by no means foreign to Kenyan politics; they resembled ruling-party youth wings from earlier moments in Kenyan political history and were often called "majeshi ya wazee," or "armies of the old men." Mungiki, in contrast, was a similar youth army, but committed to backing youth candidates. Indeed, in a sudden change of political direction (one of many), Mungiki — who had been ardently anti-Moi — ended up supporting President Moi's candidate of choice to succeed him in the 2002 elections. This "youth candidate" was the current president of Kenya Uhuru Kenyatta. Just after Kibaki was voted into power in December 2002, Mungiki engaged in deadly battles with the police over the control of taxi routes in the Rift Valley town of Nakuru. Here, the movement's much commented-upon fearlessness transgressed the limits of acceptability in the eyes of much of the public.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
1 Introduction2 Kenyatta’s Lament: The Transformation of Ritual Ideologies in Colonial Kenya
3 Inflationary Rituals: The Mau Mau Rebellion
4 Old Age and Money: The General Numismatics of Independent Kenya
5 “Satan Is an Imitator”: Kenya’s Recent Cosmology of Corruption
6 Corruptus Interruptus: The Limits of Transactional Imaginaries of Moi’s Kenya
7 (Not) Seeing is Believing: Ethnicity, Trauma, and the Senses in Kenya’s 2007 Postelection Violence
Coda
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index